I like trains.
The cities and towns of the future might end up going back to mostly trolley traffic, shared with bicycles and other forms of micromobility. This would not just be better for the people who live there, but it's overwhelmingly better for the environment. I expect (battery) electric car-like vehicles will still be around, but they'll be mostly for actual, practical use, like ambulances, fire trucks, moving vans, construction vehicles, buses, and maybe taxis.
Welcome back to Futurism, the gemlog where I talk about how the future could be better than the present (there's NOTHING BUT room for improvement), by embracing solarpunk principles.
Intercontinental travel
Air travel is one of the worst contributors to anthropogenic climate change [citation needed]. Unfortunately, however, it is the best way to cross the oceans because it's fast; you're not spending months out on the sea in the complete darkness with no guarantee of food.
I propose that air travel be restricted to the coasts and maybe only for certain times of year. Certain uses of air travel, particularly firefighting and rescue operations, would still be allowed to operate as normal. The rule would be that airports can't be more than some number of miles from the ocean.
I feel like we would still be doing boat travel, but without fuel-based boats. Instead, we might use some form of solar sail, either one that's basically just a speed boat with solar panels or some kind of solar cell mechanism that's built to move through the water. We're doing something similar to this in space, so we should be able to do this on the water.
Europe is not a continent
Eurasia is a continent. I'm not even sure if "Europe" counts as a subcontinent; maybe Spain does, though. While yes, what counts as a continent is mostly arbitrary, there exists no distinct dividing line between Europe and Asia, we just kinda made it up. At least the Americas have that thin central region to divide them.
We only have "seven" continents because religious people really like the number seven and also probably petty politics (who controls what areas).
At most, we have like six, but probably more like five: America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica.
Note: geologists consider there to be seven continents, separated by continental crust, but they are different from the traditional Western notion of seven continents. Their model seperates America but not Eurasia, and also considers Zealandia as its own continent. To be clear: even in this model, Europe is still not a continent.
It still makes sense culturally to consider America one continent, rather than two.
Although for the purposes of transit, there are only three: the Old World, the New World, and Australia. And I guess Antarctica, but who's going to want to go there anyway?
Oh and an odd thought: how might climate change affect the separation of the Americas? We're already seeing Africa starting to pull apart from Asia. Will sea level rise cause the Americas to be (more distinctly) split?
Long-distance intra-continental travel
Europe and Southeast Asia already seem to have this down pat. Want to go long distances really fast? We have a tool for that: it's called a TRAIN. Specifically, high-speed rail.
It's not impossible that we run high-speed rail lines between, say, Europe to Britain and Britain to Ireland, or over the Russo-American continental bridge. In fact we probably should, so we can cut down on air travel.
The Americas really need a lot more high-speed rail. A pan-American line and a transcontinental coast-to-coast line would be nice. Improved reliability and frequency of Eurasian systems would benefit everyone living there, too.
Also, apparently trains don't divert to stations? Like you have a split line that goes into a station, and another one that keeps going around it. HSR is elevated by necessity already, so traffic intersection shouldn't be a big deal.
If we're going to make trains fully electric, they should probably run regularly with grid power and have a rechargeable emergency battery that is capable of taking the train to the next station and stopping it there (and powering information systems to communicate about it). A guaranteed maximum distance between stations would help a lot with this; I think when the US built its railroads, they did something like this, and it gave birth to a lot of towns.
Local travel
I'll be honest, I'm not completely sure how trams (trolleys/streetcars) work. I think it should be fine if they come to a stop in the middle of the road (just not blocking an intersection). They should also be fine completely automated. So, they should also have an emergency battery, but it would be for graceful stopping, communicating (including with flashing lights), and navigating out of danger. They'll probably keep their doors open or unlocked or whatever so that, before it starts moving, you can cross over the tram if you need to get to the other side of the street. Their battery should be smaller than a train's backup battery, because it doesn't need to power the engine for nearly as long.
Micromobility, such as bicycles (including e-bikes), scooters, and mopeds, are already seeing a boom worldwide. I'm hoping and expecting that it becomes the default mode of transport in-city.
Buses still have a use, mostly redundantly: in case a train or tram becomes unavailable for some reason. They might also still be good for school, although letting them use the regular system to let them wander and explore isn't a bad idea either. They'd be EVs for sure, maybe hybrid BEV and hydrogen fuel cell EV. Existing buses should be retrofitted.
Taxis might also still exist. Of course, assuming the anarchistic, communistic/socialistic future assumed in other Futurism articles, they'd probably be free of charge to use. I expect they would be EVs, like the buses, maybe even autonomous (yes, they would have to be low speed travel only). It would probably be up to the culture to instill that this is meant as a last resort only, like when you're late for something or need to be somewhere by a specific time.
Final thoughts
Shifting away from inefficient, private passenger vehicles whenever possible is not just good for our people and our infrastructure, but it's a huge boon for the environment as well. Stopping the excessive use of cars to get everywhere will take everyone understanding what the default mode of transportation is: walking; and building our cities and society around that instead of cars.
I want to disclose that parts of this piece were made with Google's speech-to-text technology. It had to be manually edited and revised, although it reduced the friction to write this article. Unfortunately, alternative Android keyboards and speech recognition engines do not compare to Google's, so that's what I use when I want to use speech-to-text.
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