World Public Pod Transit System

Transportation is a key barrier to cultural awareness and to trade. Many people have an incorrect view of a particular culture's lifestyle because they have not and often cannot go there. For example, I have a stereotyped view of the aboriginal culture and it is not economically viable for me to arrange transportation to australia to find out what it's really like. Small companies are forced to pay monopolistic world- shipping corporations to extend their businesses overseas. And every day hundreds die in car accidents. Enter the worldwide monorail pod public transportation system, which replaces trains, cars, and planes.

Basically there is a nested infrastructure of local and long distance monorail tunnels at which small pods travel at high speeds. In urban areas there would be "pod entrances" every two blocks or so, with the pods operating underground. There would be a "call" button on the street corner and within seconds of pressing it an empty pod would ride a track up onto the street and the doors would open. Pods would hold up to four people comfortably. Once inside the pod you would dictate or type in your destination, and the pod's computer would automatically determine the best route and you would merge with the main tunnel (running under each avenue) and within a few minutes would emerge at your destination. Or perhaps if you were in the middle of New York city and wanted to go to london, the pod would take you first to the nearest international pod hub, where you would wait in line to enter an airlock to a vacuum tunnel which passes under the atlantic ocean. Because there would be no air resistance, you would be able to acheive high speeds of up to 2000mph, enabling travel to london from new york in 1.5 hours. In fact, you could travel halfway around the world in five hours. Cutoms at the arrival station would take place as they do now, and upon entering the country you would enter a new local pod which would allow you to travel anywhere within the united kingdom. There would be several stopping points at pertinent locations in the vacuum tunnels to reduce the failure rate of the entire tunnel, and to allow you to make a stop in hawaii between chicago and Japan to uh, rest your feet.

There would be protocols in place for police and rescue pods which would have priority over civilian travel pods. Each tunnel, whether it is local or long distance, has two rails, one for full speed and one for accelleration/ deceleration. This is to prevent congestion so that a pod only need to slow down if it need to exit a tunnel. This would eliminate the need for commercial aircraft, eliminate the need for cars in urban or suburban areas, and eliminate the need for trains because well, these are trains of a sort. Freight companies would have their own pod entrances and their own specialy pods which would be larger and designed for transportation of non-living materials, but they could travel on the same tracks without issue. And the term "long distance relationship" would be all but abated.

Also, the streets of cities would no longer be used for cars and would instead be replaced with open lawns and marketplaces where people could lie in the sun and play frisbee or paint. Because it's all-electric it solves dependence of fossil fuels as the rails could be powered by any energy source including wind, solar, hyrdo, and wave power, which eliminates the need for superconduceters as all energy could be produced on-site and would charge backup cells in the event that power generation fails or becomes intermittent. It also therefore eliminates the need for dependence on foreign energy sources, and each country would power it's own system of tracks, although they would all be interoperable and run on the same software.

This also helps the economy because it creates jobs as the tracks will need to be maintained, repaired, built, upgraded, tested, etc. It also encourages international business and trade between nations, and empowers small businesses to take their products to a global level. As part of a global initiative, this system would be free to all and paid for by taxes (the same ones that we pay currently for roads and highways here in the US) and supplemented by advertising and media services within the pod (that is to say, if you want to watch a movie you will see advertisements and then swipe your card and pay a few bucks for a flick or to watch tv or to access the net, but you have to option of having the multimedia center turned off).

Issues are that it's hard to not imagine having a car, but once the system becomes established at the public level, then it may be possible to own your own pod and to have a track extension coming directy to your own home. It's also conceivable that people can adjust to it with gradual implementation, and the next generation will have no quips about it having not grown up under the expectation that they are supposed to drive, much less knowing what a car is. See the attached graphic for a macro- level visualisation of the high speed long distance tunnels. Imagine more and more branches at the local levels coming off of these main lines.

To address cost, do consider that this is a WORLDWIDE initiative for the betterhood of mankind, not a business idea or simple fix that is overthought. It is designed to completely change the world, and as such yes, there will be a rather sizeable startup cost. But when you consider this cost will be shared by the countries of the world, over a long period of time (as this will be a continuously evolving system), it should be able to be jumpstarted by a nominal investment and sustained by taxes we currently pay for roads and highways. As more and more roads, tracks, and freeways became obsolete, more of the tax dollars would be diverted. And try to think forward here. This is a solution to save the world, not just to improve it.