On Monday, transportation startup Joby Aviation conducted a demo flight of its six-prop electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in New York City. The exhibition was...
New York intends to have electric air taxis by 2025::undefined
Rail infrastructure costs money to maintain. So do roads, for that matter. If this is the first step towards ubiquitous pollution-free air taxis, we should be cheering, not grousing.
This is going to be really high cost though. If only there was a way to move people en masse around a city, with a reliable and frequent service, funded by tax payer dollars so the cost for an individual is extremely low and affordable..
Well just think about it. You're talking about some underground network of tunnels that can shuttle hundreds of thousands of people per day from place to place, probably noisy and dirty, probably full of homeless people, and you'd have to have constant signs and announcements telling people where to go.
That's just madness, and no sane person would stand for it.
That sounds filthy and dangerous. Am I supposed to be physically near the plebs? Share my air with them? Sit in a seat someone else has already sat in? My god, the abomination!
NYC has mass transit. Better than most American cities anyway.
This article or whatever is likely just an internet fever dream that will never amount to anything. However it is interesting to imagine a large scale transit system that is entirely point-to-point for everyone. No stations you need to migrate to in order to experience mass transit. No areas it doesn’t go to. No crowded train cars. Mass transit does come with a lot of compromises.
Flying taxis sound dumb to me in practice but in theory it’s the ideal form of mass transit, at least from the perspective of riders’ time and convenience. Maybe someday we’ll have the technology to enable something like this. It won’t be lithium ion powered propeller drones in 2025, though.
Imagine all the problems with cars today.
They're noisy, use a lot of energy, waste a lot of space, and are prone to fatal accidents.
Now make the car fly. You have just made all of those problems exponentially worse.
I for one would be furious if there were mini-helicopters constantly swooping by my bedroom window in the middle of the night.
I feel like you could teach classes in urban planning and city management built entirely around sharing Eric Adams campaign promises and then explaining why they're the opposite of what anyone should be doing if you want to spend city money to maximize the health/security/prosperity of your citizens.