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“I have no doubt the technology will be there,” said “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner and engineering consultant. “But again I come back to the very basic point, these ideas are not necessarily for the public good. It’s going to be good for a certain class of people, the ones that are in their limousines stuck in traffic behind a thousand Ubers and Lyfts.”
By his own account, Elon Musk comes up with his best ideas while stuck in Los Angeles’ infamous traffic jams. In 2012, he hatched the idea for the hyperloop — levitating capsules traveling at near supersonic speeds through airless tubes — when he was trapped in a particularly frustrating choke point. And more recently, another LA snarl-up (the city has a lot of them) caused him to cook up his latest crackpot scheme: a futuristic network of superhighways built underneath the nation’s congested urban centers.
The Boring Company, as he calls it, aims to revolutionize the laborious, expensive act of digging tunnels. And most importantly, Musk says he’s working on tunnel-boring machines than can simultaneously dig up and reinforce tunnels, which could go a long way toward solving a big engineering challenge.
A few days before Musk sent his army of fanboys into a tizzy with a CGI video of Teslas careening on high-speed electric sleds through underground tunnels, Uber was tickling our utopian fancies with a different vision. At a conference in Dallas in late April, the embattled ride-sharing company unveiled its plan to launch an “on-demand aviation” service using small, electric-powered aircraft that can take off and land vertically. Two cities — Dallas-Forth Worth and Dubai — would play host to the first-of-its-kind service. And a handful of aircraft manufacturers and real estate developers would serve as Uber’s advance team in its early explorations of a flying taxi service. Yep, Uber is working on “flying cars” (and I use that term with extreme skepticism).
