Has anyone effectively dealt with the noise problem? Vehicles this size would be unacceptable almost anywhere people are present for the noise alone.
I'm curmudgeony, I say the future is powered bicycles.
I must say I'm not that bullish (on bikes and electric bikes). Shopping, hills, rain, children all combine to mean they can't really do 100% of journeys. And human nature will ensure that that big expensive chunk of metal gets used as much as possible to make it worth the cost.
Of course our car powered present doesn't involve 100% car transport so you could still be right, and it's still worth aiming for.
Ps, if that counts as curmudgeonly I certainly have no hope, now get of my lawn.
Kind of proves your point. Bikes in general are awesome. But they're not entirely useful. Cool. But not practical for the masses. But you wont see builders, painters, electricians or plumbers give up their work vans to haul stuff on bikes. No matter how much they would want to. Or people with kids.
I suppose what you're imagining is somewhere between a bike and a car, one step below a Kei car type concept. Yes it does have advantages, you are starting to lose advantages that a bike has, and introduce disadvantages that a car has, so it isn't a free lunch. I had the idea for a speed limited car (30mph ish) some time ago, you could radically reduce weight etc, but the problem is the car crashing into you isn't going to be speed or weight limited, you also do nothing to address the issues of space that cars take up.
Presumably from the ground, it’d be hard to hear one of these taking off on the 30th floor.
And even in cities with skyscrapers, they tend to be clustered in one or two districts, so you can only travel within a very small part of the city.
My feeling about the current push for flying cars and autonomous transport, is that when our grandchildren ask us about it, it will be in the same way as children today ask why they were still playing violins when the Titanic went down.
Lots of parts of London have at least one building that high,and several has buildings quite a bit taller.
Not all of town would be covered, but even just the ability to get to/from a handful of central points that are on the train and tube network would be valuable even if that will prevent them from being as useful as they otherwise could.
Sure,if you only allow that, then it will be a quite severely limiting factor, but places less densely populated are also more likely to have at least some suitable spots where allowing landings on lower buildings will be ok.
And it doesn't need to work everywhere to be worthwhile.
I can hear drones that fly over, but it's not a horrible noise. Much car noise these days seems to come from friction on the road as engines have gotten much quieter. So with that in mind, perhaps in all they'd be quieter, but I can't see an easy way to environmentally muffle the sound, could you invert the sound?
There is a flyover down the valley and sound flies off that. You only recognise silence in the event of road closure. Then momentary bliss is attained through someone elses misery.
Today most western cities have helipads tucked out the way - on the river in London and NYC for instance - for safety. Every time a helicopter falls out the sky and lands on an unfortunate pedestrian, the rules tighten. That's not going to change with drones.
[1]: https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/may-16-1977-he...
You may barely hear the street at the 30th floor, but a helicopter flying 300 feet above the ground is going to be incredibly loud.