Flying Cars Expand the Area of Daily Life Quadratically with Speed

https://www.tsungxu.com/p/expanding-the-radius-of-daily-life

by tsungxu • 1 month ago

4 6 1 month ago

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tsungxu3• 1 month ago

Walking made 2-mile villages feel local.

Cars made 20-mile cities feel local.

Flying cars will make 200-mile regions feel local.

allears• 1 month ago

Until the price of a flying car isn't much more than an automobile, it will only be a toy for the wealthy. If it costs as much as a Rolls-Royce, few will be able to afford it.

tsungxu3• 1 month ago

The two first order reasons (certification overhead on engineering and low volumes) as to why personal aircraft are so expensive can finally be addressed. https://www.tsungxu.com/i/202017969/the-small-aircraft-cost-...

eesmith2• 1 month ago

dramatically quieter than helicopters

Cars are already contribute far too much noise to urban living. There is no way a flying car will be quieter than cars, so will be rejected from most urban places, just like how jake brake use is often prohibited.

There is nothing in the article about handicap accessibility, strollers, or carrying groceries and children, much less the ability to carry more bulky loads, bikes/ski racks, and trailer loads. The 2-seat Mosaic/personal aircraft won't work for most families.

A second property, a trailhead, winery, golf course, or resort become potential destinations.

I don't know about you, but with a two-seater where one needs to be a designated pilot, then only one person is drinking. I prefer winery visits with 4 in the car - 3 drinking and 1 DD.

And for that golf course or resort, how much can the Mosaic carry? Several large suitcases and a set of golf clubs?

Once an aircraft is in the air, the environment is more structured and less cluttered.

Implicit in that statement is the belief flying cars will always be rare. If 1% of the population has a flying car which they use daily for 1 hour then that's a very cluttered sky.

In the future, cities will be dotted with vertiports

Assuming this is true, how long will it take on average to get to a vertiport? New York Airways flew out of the heliport on the old Pan Am (now MetLife) Building, which required an express elevator to get to the 57th floor. This is slower and can handle far fewer people than getting down to a subway line, and that elevator shaft takes away from commercial space.

Every minute of getting to the vertiport removes 5 miles from the radius, assuming a top-speed of 300 mph and holding to Marchetti’s Constant. And of course in real life it takes time to accelerate to top speed.

Ground robots or automated tugs will move aircraft between landing pads, charging bays, maintenance areas, and dense storage slots, the same way automated parking systems already move cars through compact garages.

How much space will all that additional infrastructure require? Car infrastructure, including parking spaces, already maims cities.

There’s no limitation from traffic or roads that have to follow the contours of the land.

OTOH there are limits from other factors, like entering restricted airspace near airports or military bases.

the land inside the larger circles becomes a compelling real estate play (not investment advice). Packy was one of the first people I spoke to who understood how this expands the local frontier,

One of the first in perhaps some technical sense, but this is precisely why big box stores exist.

Before cars and highways, suburbia was not a thing.

What? No! The first major suburbs were in the 1800s due to train travel. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb .

Mountain or island homes that were too disconnected to be practical will become normal places to live, work, and build.

So this vision excludes more families with kids. Unless the local school system is operating flights as well?

There's also the downsides of suburban sprawl, only expanded. Forgot to buy some salsa for tonight's meal? You ain't just walking to the bodega or driving to the Albertson's. Just how much more will that flight or drone delivery cost you?

What weather conditions will ground you?

And if the flying car breaks down at your remote island home, what do you do? How do you get a tow?

All those fly-in communities primarily depend on cars, not their planes, or for North Captiva Island, a regular ferry service with a barging service to take materials to and return garbage from the island.

tsungxu3• 1 month ago

I do agree that trains and then streetcars created suburban corridors, but suburbia as we know it today became possible with highways and mainstream car adoption post WW2, at least in the US.

Ultimately the early generations of flying cars are not capable enough to replace all car use. The Tesla Roadster or even the Nissan Leaf did not replace a first or second car but was an additional vehicle for most buyers.

eesmith2• 1 month ago

Saying that modern car-centered suburbia did not occur until the post-war highway construction and mainstream car adoption is rather tautological. By that time suburbs had been around for over 70 years.

Here's an American writing in 1898 about the world-wide suburbanization movement, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25119003.pdf :

"The really remarkable growth in London is found in the outer ring, or the suburbs. And this is the important fact to be emphasized - the recent rise of the suburbs in all the countries of the Western world ... The decentralizing movement has also extended to the suburbs, especially in those cities like Boston where the electric trolley has been so highly exploited. Even in the case of New York, whose suburban railway system is very poor, there has been a growth of the suburban towns and cities far in advance of New York's growth. ... In Victoria and South Australia, more than two-fifths of the entire population dwell in the capital cities ... the large agglomerations in Australia are ... scattered over a large area... in Sydney it is the ambition of every workingman to own his own cottage.

It is pretty safe to say that in the next century, the other city populations of the civilized world will be following in the foot steps of the Australian cities. The bicycle and the trolley car will be of essential aid to the middle-sized cities, but alone are incapable of relieving the congestion of the great cities. More rapid transit is urgently needed for metropolitan populations and is the only solution of their problem that in the long run will prove efficacious. The fact is recognized in England, where in 1883 Parliament passed the Cheap Trains Act, subsidizing the rail ways by about $2,000,000 annually, in the shape of a remission of passenger taxes, in order to provide workingmen's trains between London and the suburbs. The subject demands attention in all great cities."

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Adelaide_suburbs and see that a lot of the Adelaide suburbs were founded in the 1800s.

My other comments concern noise (which will likely cause cities to restrict where flying cars can operate), the distance to vertiports (which eats up time from Marchetti’s Constant), the ability to carry luggage (eg, to a golfing resort) and children, restrictions of airspace (including by having more flying cars) and the need for repairs (will you need two flying cars for a remote island life?).

Those have nothing to do with the idea that flying cars can replace all car use, but rather to raise some objections that seem relevant to the market story presented.

There are three public heliports in Manhattan. In 20 years, when flying cars are more mature, how many people in Manhattan do you expect will be using them daily, for what purposes, and how many vertiports do you expect will be needed?

Flying Cars Expand the Area of Daily Life Quadratically with Speed

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