People all over the Multiverse, under red and green suns, those with five opposable thumbs,and those with none all drive on the right hand side of the road with internal combustion engines.
Or not.
1. The most obvious, so obvious that its painful, tailgates this sentence. Drive on the left side of the road.
2. Speed limits. We don't need no steenking speed limits! Ja's gut! Interestingly the German Autobahn has about the same accident rate as American interstates. There is something to be said for driving fast enough to force yourself to pay attention (I did this once...falling asleep, and had to get somewhere so I was driving a Honda Civic at a hundred mph down night roads. Sheer terror is good for wakefulness.)
3. Bridges, good roads, and some chokepoints are tolled. Sure, you can go around, if you can find a by-road, but that road will be potholed and inconvenient.
Some universes have gates, others call them 'paybars', and 'tollstops', and 'taxman's touch'. Other universes use cameras and mail you the bill.
4. Another use of cameras is Stop-light Cameras. They are touted in the prime universe as a means to increase safety, but studies clearly show that reducing the length of yellow lights reduces safety. However, reducing the lengths of yellow lights increases revenue. The lengths of yellow lights is getting reduced. Whatever could be happening here?
The idea of a government that sneaks and peeks on you, but with the primary goal of finding occasions to fine its citizens instead of making them safe has a certain cynic's pleasure to it. Already a lot of us suspect that the primary purpose of police in small towns is to generate traffic tickets for the city council.
5. Or you could do away with stop lights altogether, and have uniformed men in towers directing traffic. Yes, its not as 'efficient', but its probably safer as these traffic wardens would serve as 'the cop on every street corner' which would reduce crime and encourage general politeness, and also, in a world where data analyis powers of a high degree given only to a few of us are useful, it might be a good idea to invent jobs where those with less than genius IQ's and the ability to program in Binary can be of benefit to society and themselves.
6. Asphalt, concrete, or some form of resin composite? What about greenways for hovercraft? Or what if someone invented grass tough enough to stand up to vehicular traffic?
7. There is a legend that says the car makers found out to their dismay that people were buying cars, and not buying another one. The market was filling up. So they invented Planned Obsolescence.
Whether this is true or not, it is certainly true that for major parts of the Cold War, air force crew flew B-52 bombers that were older than they were. Its also true that fashion, and fashion shows were invented to convince fashionistas that their perfectly servicable and attractive clothing was outdated. And its true that some Volvo owners have had their vehicles for over 500,000 miles.
Imagine a world where cars are sold with seven digits on the mile gauge. Sure, the car is a bit more expensive, but not as expensive as buying new cars every few years. You buy a car, and then keep driving it for twenty or thirty years.
8. Autopilot. Once a common place in SF stories, but not so much nowadays. You type in the destination, or speak it, and the car does the rest.
9. The Green Sled is what my brother and I called our first car. It was an enormous 70's era car which could fit four in the front seat, and five in the back easily enough. It hit eighty miles per hour and hummed. It also maneuvered like a sled on ice, but you can't have everything.
Such a vehicle presupposes cheap fuel, however. Energy getting cheaper is the natural state of affairs. Some of you reading this may disagree. You may start hauling out Malthusian prophecies of doom, or simply point out the high cost of gas which as I write this nears $4 a gallon.
Aaaaaaarrgggggghhhhhhh.
Where was I? Before my wallet's scream of agony? Ah yes. Well, consider this my doubting friends. OPEC, a government led cartel, led by a dictatorial government that we should have invaded already (Saudi Arabia), and that hates our Barbie making guts supplies most of the oil. Consider how we've banned off-shore drilling as much as we can, and how we made it hard to put up nuke plants and oil refineries. Robert Heinlein did have his problems but he had a point when he said the scariest words in the world were "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."
Consider a world with cheap energy, perhaps electricity from nuke plants, and cars that require parking lots that other dimensions would use for RV's. Consider how much fun it would be to send Michael Di Vars' Humvee into rush hour traffic, and have some little old lady run over his pint-size car in traffic.
10. Pimp yer' ride. Every vehicle out there is a work of art. Every vehicle is customized after-market with choices from thousands of different clever tricks. The Presiential Limo is flame red, except when it rains and then color change and hydrophilic paint changes it to blue with orange flaming words on the side 'Da Prez's Ride'. This is viewed as tastefully conservative.
To me, this is the 21st century. I want my flying cars.
Osevens, the problem with flying cars is this. If you're driving and your car runs out of gas or the engine stalls, you just pull it to the side of the road and walk. If a flying car breaks down or runs out of gas...... I hope you've had skydiving lessons.
Yeah, well, that's what the undercarriage airbags are for. POOFPOOF, happy landings!
A guy I knew was stationed in Germany during the Gulf War. He told a story about him and a friend that rented a Mustang to take out on the Autobahn. He had the Mustang floored at 140 MPH. His friend looked in the review and said "Eric, get in the other lane, NOW!!!" Eric did as he was told. As soon as he did, he said a pair of Lamborghini Countaches flew past the Mustang like it was standing still. He said they had to be going 200 easy. Too bad we don't have freeways like that here.....
O7, there are a few ways to look at it.
One, my grandfather predicted that everyone would be flying copters to work well before 2000.
But as a couple really smart guys pointed out, they could give us flying cars...as soon as they had a battery that was 10X as effective as the best we have now.
Two, such a battery would be the energy cell that powers the stereotypical laser blaster. So laser blaster=flying car.
Three, you can simply treat it as an authorial decision "I have them cause I like them".
Four, you can google up 'forgotten futures' and it should lead you to a website or three with pictures of Futures That Might Have Been. This is Generic Consensus SF Future with jetpacks, disintegrator pistols, World Government, and flying air cars.
Multiverser has one of this genre already. Perpetual Bar-b-que. Although its only partially of this genre.
And finally, five, which is This is the List of Mild Changes. But I agree that a List of Forgotten Future Techs aka Generic SF Consensus would be cool.
Flying cars actually have been designed, patented, and built. They fail to sell for a couple reasons. One is that they are expensive, both to build and to operate. It takes considerably more energy to lift such a device off the ground than to push it on wheels, and thus uses a lot more fuel. Besides, anyone who can afford such a thing can probably afford a helicopter, and helicopters are easier to incorporate into existing transportation services--the whole vertical take-off and landing thing is a big help, as trying to bring what is in essence a small airplane with a long-distance taxiing system (driving on roads) down on a typical street is tricky.
However, there is a more fundamental reason why that sort of reality has not been realized. As I observe in my article The Future at The Learning Fountain, those who predict the future are working from what they desire in the present; they fail to grasp that their children and grandchildren, who will genuinely form the future, will have completely different desires. Further, the future unfolds more from the surprises than the expectations, that there are developments no one anticipated whose ramifications take us in new directions.
In short, we do not have flying cars because they are not something most people now really want badly enough to get them. We wanted flying cars because we wanted to make it more convenient to go elsewhere, like (as with George Jetson) to work, or school, or shopping. This generation does not want to go to those places--it wants, by means of a higher level of mass communication than we have ever known, to bring work and school and shopping to their desktops, and not have to go anywhere. They are getting what they want; why should they push to create the future we wanted?
Their children will want something different. Maybe we will live long enough to see what that is.
--M. J. Young
I wouldn't mind having a flying car, if it was like Doc's DeLorean. What am I talking about? I'd be happy with a regular DeLorean........