What Is the Future of Transportation Looking Like?

When you read about any nation’s history of developments, you’ll find that at one time, the transportation sector was an area of interactive focus. 

The emergence of technological advancements has seen developments such as high-speed rails that can travel at 320 km per hour. People can now travel between cities connected by high-speed rail infrastructure. Imagine traveling from Barcelona to Paris in a matter of 6 hours! Incredible, Isn’t it? Ships can carry goods of up to 25,000 tons, and cars are much faster like never before. 

From self-driving cars to entirely new means of transportation like the Hyperloop or even the autonomous drone taxis launched earlier this year in Dubai, our tools of navigation and movement as we know them are preparing to undergo more changes than we can imagine.

In the next 30 years, though, we are likely to encounter more transportation technology changes than we’ve seen in the last 100 years. Let’s look at some of the projects that will shape the transportation sector in the next decade. 

You’ll be able to ride on Hyperloops by 2030.

Traveling via Hyperloop will be here before we know it. A few start-ups aim to break ground on the Hyperloop, a futuristic tubular system that shoots pod-like capsules between destinations at speeds of more than 500 miles per hour. 

Hyperloop infrastructure is already being tested in France by the California based startup owned by the Business mogul Elon Musk. By 2040, Hyperloops will be a pretty standard form of transportation. The downside of the Hyperloop is how infrastructure-heavy that they entail. It requires long, expensive tubes to be built, often underground, to very high engineering standards.

                                                            Hyperloop (via Zeleros Hyperloop)

People will be driven around by driverless cars by 2025.

Self-driving cars (or Autonomous Vehicles – AVs for short) are already one of the big buzz-phrases of the 21st century. But, AV’s impact on the future could be remarkable or a complete disaster. It will all depend on the quality of artificial intelligence and augmentative reality. 

Shared transport will become the norm in major cities.

One of the big transport technologies for tomorrow isn’t technology, but it’s still empowered by it. Shared transport covers everything from car share, public transportation, taxis, bike share, and carpooling. Shared transport helps lower our dependence on private cars and lower our consumption as a society. The more people share their modes of transportation, the fewer vehicles we’ll need in the first place.

Air taxis 

How often have you wished you could fly over traffic after a hectic day? Flying taxis will become a reality by 2030, where people could travel from their jobs back home flying over traffic. The taxis will be piloted autonomously, which means that pretty much anyone could fly in it without training. 

One such taxi is Cora, from the Kitty Hawk Corporation based in California and funded by Google co-founder Larry Page. Cora will use twelve lift fans to get off the ground vertically before it flies like an aircraft using a single propeller at the rear. It perfectly fits in parking spaces and can lift off building tops. 

Final thoughts

A hundred years ago, horses and carts were still common. Even 30 years ago, predictions of the future were quite far off the mark. We can never know what will happen, but these projects are heavily invested in and have the highest percentage of becoming a reality.