I love this guy. trains solve all the worlds problems :)

His discussion is focused a bit more on europe which I think is a very different environment than the US. We don't have trains and want to go larger distances more regularly. We also have a much larger airport infrastructure and a complex airspace system that handles the issue of flying over populated areas and flying approaches safely quite well. So as long as things aren't falling of the plane over someone house (which really isn't a problem even with todays airplanes) I think until we get high speed rail, small airplanes are the next best thing

>We don't have trains

If you take optimizing transportation options as a holistic problem, rather than focusing on any individual user who needs to travel those 50-500 km distances, more trains is a far more straightforward and efficient investment than flying cars, no?

>We also have a much larger airport infrastructure and a complex airspace system that handles the issue of flying over populated areas and flying approaches safely quite well.

Well, yes, at the scale of our current number of commercial aviation flights and a very small number of private planes. You're proposing to kick it up how many orders of magnitude, if we're talking number of air vehicles simultaneously in the air? You need to build an entirely different traffic control system for that, and noise pollution becomes a far more vexing problem. That last one, I'm guessing, is the idea killer if we're talking more than a small number of flying cars. If you ever get to a point where this is an actual concern, i.e. there are actually a lot of them in the air, wait until those rural voters get their hands on you and start contacting their state lawmakers, and until those representatives start law-making.

> So as long as things aren't falling of the plane over someone house (which really isn't a problem even with todays airplanes)

But it is a problem that increases with the number of vehicles in the air.

>I think until we get high speed rail, small airplanes are the next best thing

Is it though? Building good passenger rail (no need for actual HSR) is a solved problem with proven solutions, tested for decades all over the world. How many decades will it take to actually develop a "production-ready" small airplane operable by very quickly trained sorta-pilots, and then deploy the infrastructure needed for N of them to safely operate in an M-kilometer radius? I don't have a good feel for what you think N and M will be, so it's hard to tell. But I'm gonna go ahead and guess it's a far less well-defined question than "how long will it take to connect two cities with 200 kmh rail link".

edit: yes, I'm nay-saying, playing devil's advocate while rooting for the devil just a tiny bit, but I'm not trying to be a jerk, and I am open minded and looking forward to your responses.

> If you take optimizing transportation options as a holistic problem, rather than focusing on any individual user who needs to travel those 50-500 km distances, more trains is a far more straightforward and efficient investment than flying cars, no?

maybe. But people are still tied to the trains schedule and don't have the "get in a go" freedom that they do with a car. I don't know the details of what it actually takes to build a train network but my intuition is telling that it's fundamentally more investment because of the land requirements.

> You need to build an entirely different traffic control system for that

probably true. but I think it'll take some time to get there and that gives us the opportunity to invest in that. The more modernized airplanes we have, the more opportunity we have to start creating a more automated ATC system that uses digital communication between the airplane and ATC, rather than the voice system we use today.

> But it is a problem that increases with the number of vehicles in the air.

We (as an industry) have gotten pretty good at knowing how to build an airplane so that parts don't fall off (this is a facetious example, I'm really referring to general system reliability) that revolves around rigorous production standard, and those we definitely must continue to follow.

> Building good passenger rail (no need for actual HSR) is a solved problem with proven solutions

True, but even those solutions are starting to become outdated. Rail also has a very high safety bar because of the consequence of failure, so developing a new rail network is really hard too.

> How many decades will it take to actually develop a "production-ready"...

We expect that we will 10x the number of vehicles flying over the next 10 years, so N is ~10k, and M is 500km. In the US, we already have that infrastructure, and I suspect (based on not much but my own intuition) is that it'll take another 10 years to get that infrastructure updated to support every 3x (sqrt(10)) increase in N

I don't feel tied to train schedules when they go between cities every 15 minutes and between countries every two hours or so. That's the situation near me currently and that's sufficient to not look at a schedule for short trips but just show up, and for the holiday-distanced trips you need to plan it anyway and leaving an hour later is not going to make any difference