10/29/2022 0 Comments The hover car![]() Otherwise, according to Uber, flying cars risks becoming “a cottage industry for the wealthy not unlike Lamborghinis.” 4 To bring flight costs down, the annual production of flying cars needs to reach a level sufficient to trigger significant economies of scale. The commercial vision is to offer flights at a price point that generates regular demand. However, the target demographic for short regional flights is actually highly paid professionals. ![]() When discussing elites and flying cars, it may be tempting to think of the people who regularly land on Forbes’ billionaires list. In short, the high-speed transportation service that flying cars provide will help elites achieve a dual demand for hyperseclusion and hyperaccess. For the wealthy, the magnetic attraction to flying cars derives from their ability to connect in a few minutes the walled garden of home to the rich cultural amenities and economic opportunities of metropolitan life. By reducing the friction of distance, highways acted as a centrifugal force on cities, undermining through sprawl the racial integration that political movements and courts had sought to implement.įlying cars threaten to magnify the corrosive effects-both sociopolitical and environmental-of sprawl and segregation by eliminating distance altogether. The combination of expanding automobile ownership and supportive infrastructure allowed developers to tap into vast stretches of land around center cities. ![]() In the 20th century, interstate highways served as the conduit for racial, ethnic, and income segregation. ![]() The desire for transportation-induced isolation is not new. Additionally, removing distance as a constraint in metropolitan development and land use will have profoundly negative consequences for the environment. The inevitable reality is that flying cars will confer advantages on direct users while exacerbating the geographic isolation of elites-a spatial manifestation of deepening inequality that undermines the shared experiences that are necessary to sustain democracy. Proponents offer a utopian vision of seamless convenience and efficiency that delivers broad-based societal benefits. Unfortunately, flying cars represent the technological apotheosis of sprawl and an attempt to eradicate distance as a fact of life for elites who are wealthy enough to routinely let slip the bonds of gravity. ![]()
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