The starting point is where we are, an expanse of unsustainability.
How does the future change by traveling in the same direction? Any change to transportation requires technology research in a different direction.
It’s been stated many times throughout this website, the mode of train technology is 200 years old, the mode of automobile technology is 125 years old, and the mode of airplane technology is 100 years old.
A new mode of transportation technology requires research with a fresh perspective for something different, something new. With the primary source of Western Society transportation based upon the automobile, replacing the automobile requires a source of transportation that is more convenient, faster, less expensive, safer, and more efficient. This list of requirements is listed in order of importance.
For anyone in an automobile centric land-use design area, there is a serious question: is train travel more convenient than a car? How close is a train station and what is its arrival and departure schedule? To anyone that would in the slightest bit suggest that trains could ever replace the automobile as a practical application for transportation has no merit in the conversation.
What’s faster than an automobile? One hundred miles per hour, even with existing speed limits. The first automobile to exceed 100 mph was in 1905.
Current train type technology for long distance travel is in an air evacuated tube. There are several companies pursuing this hyperloop technology. One company surpasses all hyperloop trains with a smaller vehicle size, yet increases passenger per hour carrying capacity: ET3. Its computer simulated speed is Mach 6. Its cost per mile to build is ¼ the cost to build a four lane freeway per mile.
What transportation technology is more convenient, faster, less expensive, safer, and more efficient than a car? Hollywood has created a few but, other than The Jetsons, reality hasn’t provided a replica yet.
The one thing commonality for current technology transportation methods, actually two things: unsustainable and propulsion driven.
All propulsion causes thermodynamic loss. Engineers consider limitation as a starting point. The needed perspective for advances in transportation: search to eliminate thermodynamic loss. This is a task for theoretical physics more than the field of aeronautics engineering. Perspective to this type of discovery is considered an impossibility for engineers who follow predetermined limits of regulatory allowances and conditional laws based on the teachings of procedure.
Science Fiction writers were first to create rockets. Cartoon artists were the first to draw designs of rockets landing on the moon. Imagination is unlimited in perception of how to build a new mode of transportation using gravity as its source for motion.