> If you take optimizing transportation options as a holistic problem, rather than focusing on any individual user who needs to travel those 50-500 km distances, more trains is a far more straightforward and efficient investment than flying cars, no?
maybe. But people are still tied to the trains schedule and don't have the "get in a go" freedom that they do with a car. I don't know the details of what it actually takes to build a train network but my intuition is telling that it's fundamentally more investment because of the land requirements.
> You need to build an entirely different traffic control system for that
probably true. but I think it'll take some time to get there and that gives us the opportunity to invest in that. The more modernized airplanes we have, the more opportunity we have to start creating a more automated ATC system that uses digital communication between the airplane and ATC, rather than the voice system we use today.
> But it is a problem that increases with the number of vehicles in the air.
We (as an industry) have gotten pretty good at knowing how to build an airplane so that parts don't fall off (this is a facetious example, I'm really referring to general system reliability) that revolves around rigorous production standard, and those we definitely must continue to follow.
> Building good passenger rail (no need for actual HSR) is a solved problem with proven solutions
True, but even those solutions are starting to become outdated. Rail also has a very high safety bar because of the consequence of failure, so developing a new rail network is really hard too.
> How many decades will it take to actually develop a "production-ready"...
We expect that we will 10x the number of vehicles flying over the next 10 years, so N is ~10k, and M is 500km. In the US, we already have that infrastructure, and I suspect (based on not much but my own intuition) is that it'll take another 10 years to get that infrastructure updated to support every 3x (sqrt(10)) increase in N
I don't feel tied to train schedules when they go between cities every 15 minutes and between countries every two hours or so. That's the situation near me currently and that's sufficient to not look at a schedule for short trips but just show up, and for the holiday-distanced trips you need to plan it anyway and leaving an hour later is not going to make any difference
maybe. But people are still tied to the trains schedule and don't have the "get in a go" freedom that they do with a car. I don't know the details of what it actually takes to build a train network but my intuition is telling that it's fundamentally more investment because of the land requirements.
> You need to build an entirely different traffic control system for that
probably true. but I think it'll take some time to get there and that gives us the opportunity to invest in that. The more modernized airplanes we have, the more opportunity we have to start creating a more automated ATC system that uses digital communication between the airplane and ATC, rather than the voice system we use today.
> But it is a problem that increases with the number of vehicles in the air.
We (as an industry) have gotten pretty good at knowing how to build an airplane so that parts don't fall off (this is a facetious example, I'm really referring to general system reliability) that revolves around rigorous production standard, and those we definitely must continue to follow.
> Building good passenger rail (no need for actual HSR) is a solved problem with proven solutions
True, but even those solutions are starting to become outdated. Rail also has a very high safety bar because of the consequence of failure, so developing a new rail network is really hard too.
> How many decades will it take to actually develop a "production-ready"...
We expect that we will 10x the number of vehicles flying over the next 10 years, so N is ~10k, and M is 500km. In the US, we already have that infrastructure, and I suspect (based on not much but my own intuition) is that it'll take another 10 years to get that infrastructure updated to support every 3x (sqrt(10)) increase in N