Comment by ordinarySeeker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ordinarySeeker | Hacker News Reader

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If we approach the problem from a perspective of "How to make flying a viable commute option?" we can come up with atleast a few scenarios

1) Cities near water bodies like SFO, NYC, Miami or even Chicago can benefit from over water flying cars. This provides some safety while making more areas livable within a short commute to downtown.

2) Places like Mumbai, Bangalore where car ownership has outpaced the governments ability to create roads causing massive traffic jams can be served by a vertical stacking approach you mentioned and leap frog the western worlds freeway model. By creating pre-defined paths in the air and having only autonomous flying cars, the governments can save money on building roads, parking etc and also provide a level of safety against rogue drivers and airspace violation

> Cities near water bodies like SFO, NYC, Miami or even Chicago can benefit from over water flying cars"

I don't agree. While there may be less impediments to putting that traffic over the waterways the challenges are still significant.

Just using NYC as an example:

A high density of bridges.

A High volume of existing commercial and passenger boat traffic.

A number of busy heliports are located along the waterways.

And although the rivers could help you navigate you up or downtown they provide no efficient means of going across town further limiting this as a viable option.

The original Hyperloop design relied on an air cushion, but nobody claimed that it was flying. A seaplane is similarly not considered a flying car, and is unlikely to be efficient. Nor is a hydroplane.

As for cities with traffic jams, expecting governments that don't get enough in taxes to improve infrastructure to solve that by expecting the citizens to pay tremendous amounts for flying cars is unreasonable.

Yes, I think one of the first places where personal electric VTOL aircraft (PEVA) will take off are places where the rich use helicopters now - Sao Paolo, Jakarta, etc., basically geographically compact places with terrible traffic and massive income inequality.

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