New answers tagged transportation
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Most of the time, the best way to get to a new place will be to find someone whose been there and pay them to bring you. After they've done this once, you won't need them anymore. In early days, cities will have transportation markets where well-traveled people put up stalls. In the modern era, this is managed over the internet.
You'll have small boats ...
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Self-driving mid-capacity buses
I'm going to go with a less futuristic answer than others, though still of a near-future type.
The most efficient transport within a city are likely going to be self-driving vans or small buses that respond to an Uber-like app. This will allow doorstop-to-destination functionality for a cost quite similar to current bus fare.
...
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Gravity Folding
I think that the obvious solution here is to use gravity to fold space to make two points one. Public stations would be available which would consist of a series of sending and receiving booths so you could dial your destination, hit a button and you would be instantly there as space itself is folded over.
This removes the messy conundrum of &...
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Parabolic tunnels
One proposed future transportation method I've heard of is making underground tunnels in the shape of a parabola. Vacuum out the air out and put in maglev or whatnot (all of suggestions in @Trioxidane's hyperloop answer still apply), but the advantage of the parabolic tunnel is that you could essentially just drop a train car on one end, ...
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If you want to get the chance for something "futuristic" but unique, take a look at the trend.
Cellphones got smaller and far more powerful. Say you contract your hover cars until they are fancy boots.
There is nothing more dignified than wearing your ride.
Knee-high repulsors. Everyone with a driving license uses the Fly-Assist. Hack the network ...
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The only thing I really have to add that wasn't in the previous sections is that in minecraft skyways are more common. this is because not having to terraform the ground saves time (and creating structures that would otherwise be ludicrously unstable are not due to the rarity of block gravity) making it so building in such a way spends less time, which is ...
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You might want to check out "The Roads Must Roll", a short story by Robert Heinlein. The Roads Must Roll
He describes a transportation network based on moving walkways, but walkways moving at speeds up to 100mph.
A variant on @Graham's idea would be individual air transport, where rush hour traffic is guided by swarm intelligence and forms, well, a ...
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Adaptive cruise, road trains and "platooning"
Adaptive cruise control allows your car to follow the car in front and adjust your speed to maintain a safe distance. This was conceived in the 1980s or earlier as an obvious application of radar principles, but the technology to apply this in mass-market cars did not catch up until the 2000s.
After ...
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Hyperloop
The hyperloop system are transport pods to transport trains in tubes. One of the most energy consuming parts of travel is resistance from the air. To remove this as much as possible, the tubes are sucked to practically a vacuum. This allows for incredible speeds of travel. Although currently speeds between 1000 and 1300 km/h (about 700 to 800 mph) ...
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Hive mind drones.
Drones are finding more and more applications while still depending, in most of the cases, on a human operator, and if they are given sufficient computing power to autonomously manage their flight and flight plan with respect to their surrounding, they would start behaving like a swarm or a flock.
Now you can imagine what would happen if ...
answered Jun 11 at 4:07
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Downloading
It is impossible for humans to travel at lightspeed. No matter how much we try, doing so would cost more energy than exists in the universe and we would go slower than light speed. However, if we digitize the human consciousness then we can instead download into new bodies at the speed of light.
There can only be one
To ensure there is no ...
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Microscopic Pollutants:
These could be chemical, biological, nuclear or rogue nanotech floating around the atmosphere and commuters might want to keep their exposure to these agents as reduced as possible
Info Safety:
Perhaps the scenario is a post-apocalyptic, post-war or cyberpunk type of environment where there is a strong preference from a land faction ...
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A real world example: A former employer of mine was headquartered in a warm locale that rarely ever saw snow/ice. Their campus had a dozen different buildings, all 4-16 stories tall and connected by skyways. The skyways made a massive difference and made life significantly easier.
The obvious benefit is that they provided protection against rain. Some less-...
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There is a very simple answer to this that I didn't see mentioned anywhere else, so I thought I'd add it even though an answer has already been accepted. The city I live in (Cincinnati, Ohio) used to have a very extensive Skywalk or Skyway. From the 1960's through the 1980's indoor shopping malls became very popular all over the United States. Traditional ...
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Security
It's a niche application, but you will often find skyways linking courthouses to the county jail (not prison).
Reduces risk of prisoners escaping while being moved to/from court appearances since there is no external ground transport involved-- it's a literal pipeline.
Climate is not a factor; both Seattle and Atlanta's courthouses have skyways, as ...
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Hundreds of years ago, your city was founded in the northern prairie. The gateway to the northwest, it thrived - but in the winter, temperatures rarely rose above freezing, often falling between -15C and -5C. To deal with these cold temperatures, the city built many skyways between its downtown buildings, allowing its citizens to cross between them in safety ...
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Tall skyscrapers are just a thing in your world. Be it residential, offices, educational, and so on, and so on; everything is a skyscraper!
Naturally, the rich wants to be in the highest positions available. They can see the view (though perhaps I imagine it's only natural background overlaid with views of spikes of concrete tops on the lower half field of ...
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Mosquitos, perhaps carrying something unpleasant. Skyways allow people to get around without getting bitten.
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Could be justified in any area with a lot of tall buildings, where a lot of people want to get from one building to another without having to travel all the way to the ground and all the way up the other side.
But as an alternative answer, a powerful Skyway developer happened to have politicians in his pocket or powerful lobbyists and managed to convince the ...
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Scale
Many of the buildings of your city are so tall, it is considerably time consuming to travel down to ground level, then back up to the appropriate level in the new building. So relatively high-level skyways link many of the buildings, and of course skyway floors are where shops, bars etc congregate.
You could even add some kind of class stratification ...
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Acid rains
Your city has a warm nice climate... Too bad that the local ecology is basically nonexistent since it's in a quite industrialized area combined with bad local geographical features amplifying the problems. You REALLY don't want to get soaked in local rain, and some smog variations crop up from time to time as well. Skyways help reduce your ...
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History: Your skywalk wasn't always a skywalk
Most cities tend to see a substantial change in ground level over time.
Usually, this tends to raise ground level. For example, when we repave roads (for example), we just layer the new pavement on top.1
But it can run the opposite way too: when we extract wellwater to drink, the ground (without water underneath ...
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Tax Purposes
In the UK many university buildings are joined by this sort of walkway. The reason is that, for a while, joining two or more buildings this way allowed them to be counted as a single building for tax purposes.
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Choosing an answer from the real world: because you have a lot of pedestrians, and without the elevated walkways they would effectively block all motor traffic.
This is the main reason for Tokyo's many elevated walkways. And Tokyo, despite having a "warm" climate and little snow, has a lot of them -- between buildings, paralleling streets, ...
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Many reasons, but the most important one is :
Because architecture is not all about pure practicality
It's a very subjective reason, yet, it's true enough. Not all architecture is about being absolutely practical, even though contrary to pure art they have to be to some extent. For instance, why would you need a so high roof in the entrance of many ever-so ...
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Reasons:
Skyways can be airconditioned and so cooler
Skyways can be sheltered from rain and so more pleasant
Skyways are safer than walking on the streets, where the cars are; separation of cars and pedestrians means fewer collisions.
Cold-city emulation: doing without a skyway makes your city look poor. Possibly quaint as well. All the prosperous modern ...
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Safety
It may be unsafe, unpractical or unpleasant for pedestrians to travel outside on foot. Some possible reasons:
The city is a sort of Venice, with canals instead of roads. Sidewalks may be too narrow, or absent, of perhaps the city doesn't have enough bridges so that skywalks are preferred.
Too much car traffic, making it dangerous to cross streets.
...
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Airco combined with shorter travel
Assuming a hot city maybe people want to walk in nice air-conditioned skyways. Also it would probably be better from an energy conservation view than constantly having to open the door and let the heat in.
Besides, it might just be shorter and reduces traffic congestion. As your picture nicely shows you can easily walk ...
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Off the top of my head, I can think of 2 reasons:
Keep foot/pedestrian traffic off the street, therefore increasing pedestrian safety
As someone who lives in a hot, humid climate, don't underestimate a nice air-conditioned tunnel. I have personally driven further to go to an indoor shopping centre than an outdoor just for the air-conditioning.
Additional ...
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they can teleport with them 5 times their weight (they choose what they bring)
The question ignores the quite common reality that someone might want to transport more than 5x their body weight.
Thus, while roads won't be developed directly for people, they'll be developed for our stuff:
grain to the mill
flour from the mill
stone
wood
copper and tin ores
...
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My idea is that every building would be equipped with a teleport console. This would be for places you had never been to. You would type in a place name, and it would show you a picture of the place and give you 10 seconds to memorize it. You now know what it looks like, so you can teleport there. The picture would probably be live-updating (i.e. a camera on ...
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There are philosophical and physical challenges to this whole scenario which are difficult to resolve without changing the fundamental techniques involved.
1. Infrastructure
Teleportation has to happen from and to uniquely identifiable space coordinates in the universe. This itself requires certain infrastructure in place.
a. There is a dynamic registry ...
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I would look at this through an economic lens. When everyone can teleport, what is the demand to offer a service around it? Or what is needed/in-demand? Then:
How long does one teleportation take?
How fast can you teleport again given your last teleportation?
Can you only teleport a certain number of times?
How does volume relate to weight?
Can you teleport ...
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A Philosophical Counter
I know this isn't what the OP wants, and I'm no luddite, but...
There would be a movement promoting walking, swiming, riding bikes, driving cars -setting aside the extra time required. That is because the metaphor for the 'journey' being more important than the 'destination' is more than cliche. When you participate directly in ...
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You might want to consider reading The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination In that novel, the self teleportation is called "jaunting" and he goes into a number of concepts such as protecting yourself from assassins and the idea of always taking a vehicle instead of jaunting as a status ...
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Transporting goods
Five times your own weight is not that much in way of goods, particularly bulk ones. A well-organized system where porters teleport to and from places with exactly five times their own weight in goods (or less, if one region has a more concentrated good) might work, but involves a lot of complications, such as ensuring the porters know ...
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While personal transport would be different, any other transport will be different.
A lumberjack can get his equipment into the forest, but teleporting an entire tree is not in their power (I assume). This means that any large scale transportation still requires "normal" transportation. Horse and carriage, cars, trucks, aircraft etc are still ...
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Here's a few things...
As for forgetting where you've been:
Teleporting should be a trainable ability the same way driving is. How will that help?
Anyone can just get behind the wheel of a car without any training or a license and use the vehicle. But they won't do it correctly, at least not at first. So you get training. There are driving classes at high ...
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Almost Identical Teleport Stations
Other users have suggested Teleport stations, places designed to be easy to teleport to and not change with time, so old memories are always valid. I imagine they work like this:
Each station has a large Lobby. The architecture is very simple and easy to remember. For example plain white walls. Any two stations are ...
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Roads as usual
Not sure that transporting pipes for gas pipe line is such a pleasant activity, or cargo containers, or 40t of gravel/cement/wood/sand/fish/toilet paper/whatever
So leave it to robots, autopilots and cargo transport(in the future)
To adress memory issues and natural changes of places or their dissapearances - special tranporting hubs, a room ...
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You have hit the wall of this system, congratulations!
if anyone forgets a place they've been they can not go there.
Places change and memories change. If the memory and the place create a link, any change to either of the side will break that link.
For example, there is a lake I remember to have visited as a kid, and I remember it is a fantastic place. I ...
answered May 29 at 4:22
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