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IPFS News Link • Transportation

The Only Good Future of Commuting Is No More Commuting

• http://motherboard.vice.com

"Last year, the average San Francisco resident spent 230 hours commuting between work and home," says a post from Uber's Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden. People who live in LA and Sydney, meanwhile, spend "seven whole working weeks each year commuting," two of those hanging out in gridlock. Mumbai residents' average commute is 90 minutes, producing a huge drain on time with family, productivity, and even our health, Holden explains.

Riding a personal aircraft to work admittedly doesn't sound too bad. But instead of finding different ways to make the same trip from point A to B—a bit faster and more efficiently, maybe, but still—we need to do away with commuting entirely. In the future, we'll be using VR, AR, and an array of other technologies to transport ourselves virtually from place to place, and commuting should become mostly obsolete.

Commuting is already expensive. Personal helicopters might be a good solution for those who are wealthy enough to afford them. (Holden doesn't peg a number on what this service would cost users, but suggests that growing ridership will bring costs down.) Even Uber's services today, though, are financially out of reach for a lot of people.

It's enough to make you envision a bleak future where the rich can zip around in 'copters overhead, while the poor are stuck on the ground in gridlock.


www.universityofreason.com/a/29887/KWADzukm