Comment on FAA launches flying taxi pilot program spanning 26 states
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 days ago
Anything to avoid building reliable clean and functional public transit.
Seriously we already have a futuristic form of transportation that can move you from one end of the city to the other in a reliable way, that does not involve traffic or anything on the surface. It’s called the Subway. You build it once and it’s pretty much good forever.
I have seen so many techbros try to “solve transportation”, and every idea always fails in comparison to building a train line.
Go ahead, you can go use the “futuristic” hyperloop in Vegas right now. You wait 20 minutes to get into a car which takes 20 minutes to get about 6 blocks ahead.
What’s funny is, we literally already have helicopters that rich people seem to use to get places.
These flying taxis are the exact same thing.
It’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, which is why it pretty much never takes off (no pun intended).
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 days ago
When I was a student in Germany, I lived in a Dorf of some 700 people, 10km from the school in the “big” city – Hameln. If the weather was good, I’d bike to school. If it was bad, the Stadtkreis (regional government, but not state level; roughly akin to a county) had regular bus service to get into town.
Once in Hameln, wheels were rare. All of downtown was a pedestrian zone, and where that ended was about a five-minute walk from the train station. At which point I could take a regional train to Hannover, and from there, an ICE (not the bad one, the Intercity Express) that could get me to France or Switzerland in only a few hours, without any customs or airport bullshit. And the trains were, or course, all electric, and ran on time (leave it to the Germans!).
This was 30 years ago, and we’re still trying to figure out basic transport here that has been in use for decades.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 days ago
Having traveled there myself, I’m so freaking jealous. It’s absolute insanity that us American’s have the gall to say we’re the “best country on earth” but can’t even move our citizens around efficiently. I’ve heard all of the excuses. It’s too expensive, we’re not close together, we’re too big, americans don’t like taking the train. All horseshit. Other larger countries have done it, others have changed their culture, it’s absolutely stupid that we haven’t done it.
It all boils down to one singular fact in my years of advocacy. Car/oil companies do not want Americans discovering that they are wasting their lives and money behind the wheel of cars, because they have never been as profitable as they are now.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 days ago
Car culture has somehow been subsumed into the “rugged individualism” umbrella. I recall one instance where I had to call my host family for a ride, but otherwise, we were all able to get around on transit.
You get to a bigger city, and now you have trams. This is my favourite way to travel in town. They’re quiet, reliable, and don’t hinder vehicle traffic. Even better is they get priority lights so that they aren’t dealing with turning vehicles at each signaled intersection.