I have seen lots of good Discovery channel shows on cars that can “caravan” down the highway at 60 mph, bumper to bumber using some form of radar or magnetic sensor, or high speed mag lev trains, etc…, but what I really want is to get from point a to point b in as short a time as possible with as little effort as possible.
Short of someone inventing the teleporter, what is going to be the next widespread, publicly used, breakthrough in day to day transportation?
More effective telecommuting, I’d say. Not needing to go to work.
I have long tought that the next major breakthrough in trasnportation will be a computer controled road system, much like the one you saw on TDC, but a bit different.
The breakthrough that makes this possiable is true computer voice reconition. When you can get into your car and tell it where you are going in plain english. The car would understand “to work”, or “Hi car, how are you to say, I am off again to the rat race, please plot me a course”, or any variation and the car will know where you want to go.
Then the car will send this information to the internet via wireless and receive possiable routes. The standard route will be the default, which might or might not be the most direct. You will have the option to take a quicker route for a fee, or possiably offered a ecconomy route if the computer deams it would be good for traffic if you took a more round about route.
All that is left is to sit back and ride to work.
Why not teleportation? I mean, if you took a car far enough back in time people would’ve thought it was powered by black magic.
And there have been very small breakthroughs.
Zeppelins that use partial vaccum to achieve lift rather than lighter-than-air gasses, driven by electric motors with tiltrotor capacity for enhanced control, high density batteries for keel ballast, & lightweight solar cells on the top to increase range & recharge while docked.
Cost efficiency could be…impressive.
One-man heli-gyros & jetpacks.
at least, according to my 1960’s Popular Mechanics.
Oh, and moving slidewalks.
The Segway, of course. What, you don’t believe Dean Kamen?
Short-term: Fuel-cell powered road vehicles.
Longer term: As E-Sabbath suggests, eliminating much transportation altogether.
I don’t see that happening. We’ll still need to go to the store. We’ll still need to visit friends and family. We’ll still want to vacation.
Hell, if we didn’t have to go to work, we might just be out travelling more, not less.
Cisco, I’ve got to ask you, are you a city kind of person? Trust me. Most of the inefficient use of petrocarbons is in the daily grind, not the personal drivetime. You might drive further if you had more free time, but, barring maniacs like myself, you would not drive more. (I, on the other hand, would probably be up at Lime Rock going happily around in a circle.) Reducing the daily drivetime would lower burn, wear and tear on the roads, and even with the same amount of people per day, staggering the time of the drive would allow for better throughput. Bumper to Bumper is ten times worse than freeway speeds.
Well, I live in the middle of the 5th largest city in America so, yea, I guess I am.
I can walk just about anywhere I need to go or take a very short drive. I rarely drive more than 4 miles unless I’m going the 35 miles across town to my brother’s house. Something I would do more if neither one of us had to go to work :).
Do computers deam of electric seep?
I think greater computerization of automobiles, as well as the inevitible rise in highway casualties as the baby boomers age, will encourage automated freeways. My personal best wish, though, is for controlled fusion giving us near-unlimited energy we’ll need to produce elemental hydrogen and subsequent fuel cell technology.
LSD. It’ll take you for a GREAT trip. 
Walking.
Oh yea the baby boomer issues, I expect lower speed limits and brighter headlights till they die off.
For me that’s not an option. Since I’m doing lab work 4 out of 5 days at least, my job is glorified (if it even rates that adjective) manual labor much of the time. Unless I can set up a ten-million-dollar facility in my basement, I will commute for another ten years at least.
I’m just hoping for a fuel-efficient SUV that I can afford at this point. I’m not holding my breath.
By what measure is Phoenix the fifth largest city in America? Perhaps within the city limits, but it has big city limits. (By way of comparison, the area of the actual City of Phoenix is almost four times bigger than the City of Philadelphia.) In terms of the actual urban sprawl people have to drive thru to get to work, I doubt it. 
Anyway, I think you’re underestimating the revolutionary nature of eliminating commuting. Even if people were to travel more, getting rid of commuting would have a rather dramatic impact on society - North America cities, anyway, are structured largely to accomodate massive traffic flows in two directions, each at one general time of day.
Telecommuting will only take off after employers get to totally wire up your house to ensure you’re really working when you say you are. There are lots of jobs that could easily be done by telecommuting + conference calls right now, but aren’t simply because some mid-level manager insists that “productivity” equals “seeing people sitting behind their desks.”
Oh come on. People can’t walk anymore because they have gotten too fat. No one knows why that is. When medical science develops a pill for obesity then maybe people will be capable of walking extended distances once again.
It will just be a gradual improvement in personal transportation. There is a huge infrastructure built around the way we move, and that’s not going to change overnight. So you’ll see better, more efficient vehicles, with increasingly sophisticated electronic systems that help them avoid accidentss, navigate, etc. Perhaps there will be a revolution there with some new lightweight engine system or other breakthrough that allows a major change to the form of the vehicle.
But I predict that 100 years from now, people will be travelling about the same way they travel now - in personal vehicles. They’ll just be a lot better than the ones we have.
I also remeber seeing a study once (On the discovery channel I believe.) that LOTS of people got depressed not going to work because they were missing their social interaction.
Humans being the tactile creatures we are; I’m not so sure the whole "telecommutitng’ will catch on like one might think.
Anyway I’ll throw in my vote for computerized transportation as well. I’ll even take it a step further and say well see this with in the next four decades or sooner.,