Musing About Personal Transportation Systems Over Time

I am so glad I don’t live back in the 1800’s. Imagine catching and harnessing the horses to pull the wagon in order to drive for hours or days to the nearest city or large town to pick up needed supplies.

In fact, I’m also glad that I didn’t live back in the first half of the 1900’s, when one had to travel in a mechanically unreliable car, getting 10 miles to the gallon, running on tires that often were punctured as you drove over bumpy 2 lane roads for hours to go shopping at the nearest city.

With all that said, I was driving from the rural Town of Summerton, where I live today, to the big city of Florence the other day in my 2015 auto on the 4 lane I-95 Interstate Highway and started thinking about what my grandkids are going to be saying 40-50 years from now. Think about it.

I can just hear my grandkids in 2050 talking about how we used to actually drive our own gasoline powered cars way back then on roads. They will talk about how their grandparents actually took a whole hour or two to get to the nearest big city just to go shopping. Can you imagine!

As they place a call to Uber to get a self diving flying vehicle to make the short 15 minute trip from Summerton to Florence for some unusual purpose, they will chuckle about why someone would even think about going shopping in a store. When they tavel or shop, they will simply put on their smart glasses, enter the virtual reality world of tomorrow, and do their shopping online.

Oh! Also, they won’t have to wait 1-2 days to get what they bought, it will arrive at their doorstep in less than an hour. If it can be 3-D printed, it will arrive electronically almost immediately and will be printed out right their in your smart home of the future. Think about it! It may seem farfetched, but it wasn’t so long ago that your great grandfather was hitching up the horses to go to town.