Urban traffic moves in mid-air and in ultra-fast tunnels

The increasingly congested traffic is looking for hi-tech solutions to make life in big cities more sustainable. Before the forced stop of the pandemic, traffic jams “cost” Europe 100 billion euros a year, in the United States the price of lost productivity due to traffic stood at 88 billion dollars in 2019. We have seen scooters pop up everywhere, rental bikes and scooters, bookable via the app and activated with a QR code to reduce the number of cars on the road. Or there are those who have proposed traffic lights based on artificial intelligence and machine learning such as those of the Austrian TrafficCom, which, thanks to connected vehicles and sensors on the road, adjust the flow of vehicles in real time in order to reduce the risk of traffic jams – already in experimentation route in Buenos Aires, Madrid and Mumbai. Even surface public transport is not a viable solution, since it only marginally reduces car traffic and in the absence of a complete network of preferential lanes they are subject to traffic jams in the same way. Building underground transportation is often time-consuming and problematic and always extremely expensive (around $ 150 million per subway kilometer on average, but in complex cities like New York and Los Angeles it can increase exponentially). experimenting with a new vehicle which is proposed as the solution of the future, and which will travel suspended in midair. These are capsules (“Sky pods”) that hook onto a network of suspended steel rails, but which unlike a funicular are self-driving, independent of each other: different cabins travel at different speeds, both for passenger transport and as cargo for freight. Mini electric vehicles equipped with every comfort, with luxurious four-seater interiors, which will be able, according to the manufacturers, to travel up to 150 km / h. USky has inaugurated a 400-meter-long test line in Sharjah, which with 1.3 million inhabitants is the third most populous city in the United Arab Emirates. By the end of the year, uSky Transport plans to build another longer network, 2.4 kilometers, to begin testing its true potential, in which the capsules could run slightly faster than the test track. The company has also received approval to build a line around the coastal town of Khor Fakkan. They also promise competitive costs, around 10 million dollars per kilometer, with less use of materials and greater respect for the environment. Meanwhile, work is progressing, albeit slowly, by the Boring Company, the Elon Musk company that builds high-speed tunnel to divert traffic underground. The presentation of the new Las Vegas thoroughfare did not convince in its first presentation, with vehicles much slower than expected and not self-driving as promised but with a driver. Musk, however, has in the meantime collected the first green light from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to connect the city to the beach in a fast and ecological way. Two and a half miles (about 4 kilometers) with a cost between 30 and 60 million dollars. If all goes well, the cost will be borne by the company while waiting for the city to raise the necessary funds, so as not to be slowed down. The specialists who analyzed the cost statement were struck by the cost-effectiveness of a project of this magnitude. Musk himself, unveiling the first pilot tunnel in 2018, admitted that the biggest problem for large-scale deployment was the cost of excavation. If the promises made in Fort Lauderdale are kept, it will mean that Musk has managed to find a way around this obstacle as well.