Transportation of the Future (1992)
8th December 2007
Read it. I’ve always been a sucker for artist’s renderings of vehicles that have no chance of seeing actual production.
I especially like this bit: “Road vehicles offer personal freedom and door-to-door travel; yet they cause unacceptable congestion and pollution.” Unacceptable to whom? Not unacceptable to the people who use them, or they wouldn’t use them. Unacceptable to the People of the Crust, perhaps. Unremarked here is that the congestion is the fault of governments who control the roads yet won’t expand them so as to eliminate congestion. Also unremarked is that breathing modern car exhaust is safer than breathing the air in places like Los Angeles fifty years ago; reducing congestion, for example, would decrease the amount of time cars spend traveling at inefficient low speeds on the highways, and nuclear power would reduce the amount of coal and oil burned for “clean” electric power. We have the technology to solve these problems, it’s just that the People of the Crust are too busy pursuing their political agenda to get with the program and use what we know to fix what we can fix.