Jarrett Walker on Flying Cars

Musing on a tweet by Scott Edgar that asserts that "a sizeable share of contemporary science fiction is really just bad faith rationales for not building bus lanes," Jarrett Walker examines the concept of flying cars in Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" books, which take place in "a 25th Century world where automated flying Uber has crushed all other modes of transport, creating a dreaded concentration of monopoly power from which flow the crises that drive the plot."

In the books, conflicts are resolved by a system of "neutral justice." But, Jarrett writes, "a city that functions (rather than just symbolizes) needs a much finer shared web of legal and cultural systems. There must still be rules about where you can land a flying car, or what you can throw in a sewer drain that goes to the local river, or whether you can build a factory next to people’s homes. In the absence of such rules, we must imagine the libertarian urban world that the unrestrained flying car would make."

Jarrett questions whether "we should want to 'abolish geography', as so many transport gadget inventors have promised over the years," and how it would affect our conception of citizenship and civic engagement. "[I]n a world of such universal travel, [have] all these places become so identical that you might as well work from home?" In "a placeless society where you and your neighbor listen to different news sources to the point that you have incompatible views about reality," "would you still be able to cooperate about fixing the fence or agreeing on quiet hours?"