NY to SF in 10 Minutes

Imagine a world where you can travel from New York to San Fransisco in 10 minutes, for $5 USD. Where would you choose to live? How would it change who you spend your time with? Where would you go on a daily basis?

Here’s what a journal of a day might look like in that world:

“Woke up in LA, then went and had breakfast with mom in Phoenix. She came by my apartment in NY so I could show her some plants I bought. A few friends from Toronto and London came down for lunch and we hung out n the park. When they got here we decided it was a bit cold in the city, so we all hopped a ride down to Rio where we spent the rest of the day at the beach, and then all went back to London to crash there.”

Sounds like a good day.

My mom’s an aerospace engineer. I recently sent her an essay I enjoyed about Virtual Reality and its human & social benefits. She read it and told me she was ‘not on board’ with VR, and that instead of focusing our efforts on simulating presence with VR, we’d be better off improving the speed, quality and cost of transportation to minimize distance. Why simulate presence, when we can provide genuine presence?

Closing the Distance

Aristotle once said:

“Distance does not break a friendship but impedes its exercise. For real friendship, however, living near each is important.”

— Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics, Book 8, Section 6)

My mom lives in Phoenix, I live in New York, and my sister lives in Boston (soon moving to Denmark). As a geographically scattered family the issue of distance is close to our hearts. I think my mom’s got a salient point: fast, cheap, easy transportation would have a profound impact on how we organize our lives and societies. Given the current rate of innovation and investment that is happening across other sectors, it is a bit disheartening how little progress it feels we’ve made in transportation. Our current economic system may be allocating insufficient investment to the types of transformative technologies that would enable frictionless travel & presence.

In what ways would rapid, cheap transportation change the way we live?

For starters, ultra-fast, cheap transportation minimize the importance of home as a geographical construct. It would become a lot less important where you actually live, because getting wherever you wanted to get would be a non-issue.

Many of the major choices in our lives are contingent on geography. We find ourselves deciding between love & career demands that would carry us to different locations: “I want to stay with her here, but there’s this amazing job for me in Europe that I should take”. “I moved back home to be close to my parents, and had to leave my friends behind”. Possibly the biggest choice you make in your life is where to live. We model our romantic and career choices based on where we think it’s most suitable for us to situate ourselves. People gather together in cities to be surrounded by other people, interesting work opportunities & experiences. I live in New York, but I often consider moving to SF because it’s probably still the best place to be if you’re interested in technology startups. The winters are milder there, but I love New York, despite the winter. What if I didn’t have to choose between one or the other? What if these geographical considerations became moot?

Hyper-rapid, cheap, comfortable, safe, transportation would make the choice of where to live substantially less significant.

True Globalization

The ability to travel like this would also substantially increase our understanding of cultures around the world. It would be the true globalization. I’ve never been to China, but if it cost 20$ to go to China, and I could get there in under an hour, I’d take the trip right now for a few hours and then come home late in the evening. I’d come away from that trip with a much richer understanding of Chinese culture and people. The possibility of affordable global day trips would increase cultural exchange and international understanding in profound ways. It would also challenge economic principles around sites of work and manufacture— I could work in Tokyo, but live in NY. I could order food from a hot new restaurant in LA and it would be affordable enough to get it to me in New York in under an hour. 3D Printers and at home manufacturing will similarly challenge our notions around where to situate sites of production.

I believe the ability to travel that quickly and cheaply from one country to another would put considerable pressure on nations to optimize their travel policies, and dramatically shift the way we think about nation states. The worst part of flying right now is the airport experience. Going through border security and waiting at the airport is often worse than the flight itself. I’ll often take a train instead of flying just to skip the airport experience. As we can travel faster, it will feel increasingly strange to spend hours at an airport for a 15 minute flight .To improve the airport experience, we need to design for high security, and customer happiness at the same time. I don’t believe the two are incompatible.

The result of cheaper, faster, frequent global travel will be increasing pressure on the concept of citizenship & nation states in general, as people become increasingly nomadic and demand convenient international travel policies. Beyond innovations in the technology of flight, we will need innovations in how we board our planes and how we are verified for travel.

The State of Travel Today

There are a few big developments in transportation that I’m aware of, though I’d be really interested to hear if anyone has others :

1. Self-Driving Cars
2. Supersonic, Affordable Aerospace & Personal Flying Craft
3. Hyperloop

Self-Driving Cars

Autonomous vehicles are still likely a decade or so away from wide-spread adoption. The possibility of safe, self-driving cars, changes the design possibilities for what cars can become. To date, major design considerations when building cars have been safety of passengers during crashes, and appropriate positioning of the driver to improve safety. With these considerations shifted in part to software solutions (i.e. cars so good at driving themselves they never crash), we can re-imagine what ground transportation might look like. It may be that the cars of the next 30 years look more like houses or offices on wheels. This article about Apple Car’s design process suggests they may be thinking along these lines as they approach the redesign of the automobile without some of the old constraints:

Self-driving cars will be a transformative technology because they will free up huge-swathes of human time: think about how many people spend 1–2 hours driving each day. All of a sudden those people can be relaxing or doing productive work during their commute. If the average person has an 8 hour work day, and we just freed up 1 hour/day on their commute, we’ve possibly added 10–15% of productive/free time to a person’s work day.

Beyond the workday commute, as self-driving cars become more comfortable travel experiences, they may become hotels on wheels. People traveling regionally (e.g. NY to Boston) will increasingly opt for car transportation over air-travel.

Supersonic & Affordable Aerospace

Innovation in aerospace takes a long time due to the massive investment required in building a new plane, and the safety concerns that need to be addressed before a new model can be put into operational flight. A company like Boeing seems to be on a cycle of releasing a new passenger plane model roughly once every 10–20 years. There’s been progress over the last 50 years in aerospace, but from a passenger’s perspective air travel today probably looks a lot like it did in 1970. The main differences are that the airport experience is likely worse as concerns around flight safety have increased.

Take a look at the diagram below: passenger airliners have improved in terms of flying speed and range in passenger capacity and range, but again, not much since the 1970s. Speed has stayed roughly the same for long haul airliners.

From the 1970s till the early 2000s, there was one attempt at much faster international travel, which was the supersonic Concorde passenger jet. For that period that was the hallmark of fast consumer transit, letting you fly from NY to London in around 3 hours. For a variety of reasons, primarily commercial viability, they retired that effort:

But there are developments today that will impact both the speed & cost of air travel over the next decades.

Speed of Air Travel

Over the last few years, there’s started to be a few developments focused on accelerating airline travel speeds. Just the other week, YC-funded aerospace startup Boom announced interest from Virgin in their supersonic jet travel. Their goal is enabling flying NY — SF in 3.5 hours, SF — Tokyo in 4.5 hours.

Airbus is also pursuing renewed interest in supersonic travel, with the Concorde 2 — a plane that would travel 3,425 miles per hour! (44 Minutes NY to SF — so that would be progress).

Space exploration & travel efforts by companies such as Virgin, Space X & Blue Origin will surely also fuel innovation in the realm of ultra-rapid air travel.

Cost of Air Travel

While the speed of air travel is an important dimension in terms of how it impacts our daily lives & social organization, cost of air travel is likely the more important dimension. To make us truly global, it should become relatively affordable to get from any place in the world to any other place in a small amount of time. I’m thinking prices comparable to using the subway or other public transportation. Here, we’ve made the most progress over the last 30 years, as this piece in The Atlantic suggests that flight prices have dropped 50% in the last 30 years:

Indeed, if you look at the evolution of airplanes over time, you can see that one thing we’ve been doing is making planes bigger, so that they can fit more passengers, and thereby reduce flying costs:

To consider how the cost of air travel might drop moving forward, it’s useful to consider the breakdown of expenses. A WSJ article suggests that the cost breakdown for a flight looks something like this:

1. Fuel Cost
2. Salaries
3. Ownership Cost (Making & Keeping the Plan?
4. Taxes
5. Maintenance

Developments in energy, materials engineering, robotics and software will collectively help to lower cost of air travel substantially. Ultra-affordable fuel sources, improved battery technology and renewable energy sources will over time help bring down the cost and replace conventional jet fuel. Some are considering the use of hydrogen based fuels to improve cost and safety of hypersonic flight. It may be that there’s upcoming innovations in energy creation that could lead to step-function type progress.

New ultra-light, super-strong, cheap manufacturing materials will help to lower the weight & cost of the aircraft. Materials engineering will also help address the problems of sonic booms and increased temperature capabilities required for hypersonic flights. If you projected out the rate at which plane weight is expected to drop due to improvements in materials engineering, and the improvement in alternative energy sources, you could likely extrapolate how these trends will intersect over time to reduce the cost of travel.

On the maintenance cost side, sensors & improved robotics will help automate repair & maintenance. My belief is that some clever design solutions will also improve our experience of airports.

Despite these probable advances, we’ll have to wait and see how quickly these innovations actually make their way into large aircraft production given the aerospace industry’s historical 10–20 year cycle for launching new plane models. The big question may be how can the aerospace industry actually iterate more quickly to incorporate accelerating technology improvements in a way that still maintains safety.

Drones and small personal flying craft will also shift how we think about transportation of goods and people. As this WSJ article suggests we may be making progress towards the futurist dream of personal flying cars. Their costs will drop over time, and autonomous flight technology will be built into these planes making them relatively safe alternatives.

Skipping the airport, and being able to fly anywhere cheaply, safely, and quickly, would fundamentally restructure our daily lives, and the entirety of the way we organize our society. Futurists of the past thought we’d have flying cars already, maybe this time we actually are just 30 to 40 years away from personal flying cars.

Hyperloop

For those not familiar with the Hyperloop, it’s a transportation concept proposed by Elon Musk, that leverages partial-vacuum tubes to let pods travel quickly, and energy-efficiently on top of an air cushion. In theory, this would enable travel speeds of 600 miles/h (900km/h) on average.

I mention the Hyperloop as one of the ways transportation might be transformed, not because it’s necessarily likely to work, but because it’s one of the more radical re-imaginings of high-speed travel that companies are actually exploring. It gets us thinking about what the alternative transportation futures might look like. The Wikipedia article on Hyperloop is a good read to get a grasp on what some of the main political, technical, and design considerations are:

Final Thoughts

The idea of building hyperloops may seem like a strange concept, but, as I write about the future of transportation I feel compelled to recall Henry Ford’s remark that “If I asked has asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. It may be that our imagination may be missing the mark entirely on what the future of transportation holds.

Transportation is such a fundamental aspect of human life, and is so closely bound up with our economy and societal norms. A world where we can travel cheaply and comfortably, at much faster speeds, will lead to a different form of societal organization than the one we experience today. We may end up all becoming nomads.

Our current human tendency employs technology to shrink our experience of space and time, and that in turn changes how humans organize. Innovation in travel will improve our presence, connect us more deeply to people around the world, while simultaneously challenging our notions of home. By the time we get to these innovations though, I may be writing a post titled “Earth to Mars in 15 Minutes” — or if things play out differently, like the futurists of the past, we could still be waiting for our flying cars.

Onwards,

Nicolae

Keep In Touch

Follow me on Twitter @nicolaerusan for more thoughts on future tech, product design, product management & entrepreneurship.