A company called SkyTran is making maglev passenger “cars”
Background on skyTran is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SkyTran" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SkyTran</a>, and on the general field of personal-rapid-transit systems in general at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skytran.com&#x2F;prt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skytran.com&#x2F;prt&#x2F;</a>.<p>Something like skyTran is going to be super important for future cities.  A regular gasoline-engine car can go 150 km&#x2F;h, but in our cities they spend half of their time stopped, and so it&#x27;s common to get 15 km&#x2F;h in real life.  And then you have to find a place to park it!  Traditional massive subways and elevated trains are better, but building them is too expensive to space them closely — so unless you&#x27;re lucky, you have to spend 20 minutes or more walking to and from them.  And then they still have to stop every 400 meters or so, because you&#x27;re sharing the car with other people.  So you still end up averaging something like 15 km&#x2F;h.<p>A personal rapid transit system like skyTran can have lines spaced very closely — as closely as streets, or more closely — and can <i>actually deliver</i> close to its peak speed of 100 km&#x2F;h.  You could get from any place in San Francisco to any other place in under ten minutes, instead of the hour-plus it often takes at present.<p>How important is that?  The entire benefit of a city is that you&#x27;re close to many people doing many things.  It&#x27;s being close to people that makes us put up with the pollution, noise, and undesired social interaction that come with cities.  But with our current city transport systems, you&#x27;re within 20 minutes of only about 80 square kilometers, about half a million people.  A system like skyTran effectively brings you much closer: you would have 3500 square kilometers within that same distance, about 25 million people, if density didn&#x27;t change.<p>That is, with skyTran or similar personal rapid transit systems, you could live in a place that looks like San Mateo or Redwood City, except without the cars — but enjoy <i>even more convenient access to</i> city amenities like good jobs, artisanal toast, live music, and offbeat special interest groups like Postgres, than you can get today by living in the heart of San Francisco.<p>There&#x27;s a critical mass needed to get benefits like this, and I suspect it&#x27;s close to the half-million people I mentioned above: on the order of a couple hundred kilometers of transport line, densely covering an area of several tens of square kilometers: an up-front investment on the order of a billion dollars.  But maybe skyTran&#x27;s Tel Aviv project will surprise me and transform Tel Aviv more than I expect.<p>In <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9788092" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9788092</a> I did the calculations to show that you could get substantial benefits by replacing even the elevators in a single skyscraper with a skyTran-like system.  The numbers only get better as the system gets bigger.  Scaling, far from being a problem, is the solution.  Eventually you will run into bisection bandwidth problems, but only at scales far, far larger than our current cities.  A SkyTran track transports pairs of people at about 3Hz; 200 parallel SkyTran tracks across the width of San Francisco could transport SF&#x27;s entire population from one side of the city to the other in 22 minutes (plus the transit time of 6 minutes), or 11 minutes if they shared cars.