Have a croissant for breakfast in Paris and eat a hamburger some hours later in midtown Manhattan. it's hard to believe that we are talking about the past and not the future, but that was the promise of the Concorde, the supersonic plane that for 34 years connected London and Paris with ny and Washington D.C. in half the time of a standard aircraft. in only three and a half hours, it covered the route between Paris and the financial heart of North America.
His disappearance in 2003 caused the planet to start moving a little more slowly. we've not noticed it because the speed of communications has grown dramatically in recent years. Today we will establish a videoconference with anyone in the world in a matter of seconds and from practically any point on the globe, and therefore the flow of information between individuals and companies is constant, but if we would like to move from point A to point B, things have changed little or no compared to the 1980s and 1990s.
The good news is that various advances in artificial intelligence and the physics of materials, including the rise of the so-called sharing economy, promise to soon transform the world of transportation. Not only the speed at which we move, which can increase considerably if the newest ideas end up being implemented, but also the comfort, price, and security with which we roll in the hay. it's a necessary revolution because the human population continues to grow and tends to concentrate in megalopolises where traffic is becoming a hellish problem. In Mexico City, for instance, 66% of the 21 million inhabitants of the city's area of influence suffer a holdup every day. the identical is true of more than 60% of the nearly 10 million people who live in Bangkok, Thailand. The fact that there are more people in the cities forces them to expand through increasingly distant suburbs, which aren't easy or cheap to connect with public transport.
In the air, the issues are similar. In many cities, airport capacity has reached saturation. Terminals are often expanded and runways added, but there's a maximum number of planes a control tower can land and take off safely. The industry's response has been to extend aircraft capacity, with models just like the giant Airbus 380, capable of carrying up to 853 passengers per flight. Also its autonomy, in order that the number of scales can be reduced. In March 2018, for instance, the primary direct flight from Australia landed in London after seventeen uninterrupted hours in the air. they're effective but temporary patches. they're going to not solve the problem in the long run. increase these dilemmas a transport industry that is excessively dependent on fossil fuels and we have the perfect recipe for a global crisis if we do not react in time.
Fortunately, we are witnessing the primary steps of the vehicles that we will use in the future, the methods of displacement which will put an end to many of the problems that we face: capsules capable of transporting us between cities at a speed of 1,000 km/h. h, passenger drones to travel from one building to another avoiding the asphalt, driverless cars during which we can take advantage of the travel time to chat, read or play, or electric bicycles with which to cleanly travel through the mega-cities of the 21st century. Its implementation won't be easy, not necessarily thanks to technical obstacles. Many of those transportation systems require social and urban design changes that will take decades to realize.
Take, for instance, the self-driving car, one of the most promising developments in recent years, already being tested in several US cities. In 2018, two fatal accidents clouded the prospects for its deployment. the primary was an accident in Temple, Arizona, caused by an autonomous car from Uber (the international transportation company) that was driving on a dimly lit road. the driving force who was supposed to take the lead in an emergency was not attentive enough and she did not see a person who crossed far from a pedestrian crossing that the vehicle's sensors could not detect in time.
In the second case, the person involved was a Tesla Model X whose driver was driving with the autopilot set near Mountain View, Google's headquarters in California. it's not the first time that it happens, but the authorities investigating the event don't explain how it could have happened. The car hit the barrier that separates the 2 directions of the highway at high speed, despite the very fact that it was well signposted. These two tragedies materialize the concerns of the many drivers regarding this technology. Although we all know that computers can decide faster than us, we tend to distrust their ability to drive. Analyzing traffic conditions requires constant attention which will be supplemented by many sensors, but also some intuition about how humans tend to react to unexpected situations or recognize images which will be confusing to current artificial intelligence systems.
A survey administered in the United Kingdom by the insurer LÃnea Directa pointed to a strong social rejection of this type of autonomous car. Almost one in three interviewees considered that this vehicle will not be safer than current cars, and a minimum of two-thirds would prefer to be in control of the vehicle at all times, despite the fact that half consider that driving is not a pleasant experience.
Solving these problems and doubts will be necessary to develop a market, that of personal transport, which is estimated to reach 15 billion dollars in 2025, and which, beyond money, will transform the way we live. Below we review seven of the vehicles that can start in that change.
