Culture
Imagining a Traffic-Free Future By Sending Driverless Cars Underground
A radical proposal to solve congestion might be too beautiful for this world.
In the same week that I’ve written about several promising ideas for the future of transportation and one that’s doomed, yet another proposal has been catching headlines for its audacity. This one, called CarTube, envisions a network of underground tubes that would shepherd driverless cars to their destinations, leaving surface streets free for pedestrians, bikers, and probably any of those ancient cars still driven by measly humans.
It’s a bold idea, more remarkable for how desperately it wants to solve traffic congestion than for its chances of actually happening. But such a monumental problem demands dreaming big, even if it’s too big.