Since day one on earth we’ve moved from one place to another and in the future this will not change, but what will change is the way we will move and the things that will move us around and this was the theme for my regular on air catch up with Phil Staley of ABC Far North radio.

We started by looking at the future of private transport and the imminent arrival of cars that will morph between allowing us to drive as we do now and then, like today’s airplane pilots, when we hit the magic button the car will go into auto pilot drive us.

Moving forward  we are also expecting a downturn in car ownership down from today’s 2.5 cars per household to 1.7 cars per household in 2025 and the rise of car sharing schemes such as lyft, uber, carnextdoor, flightcar, waze and many others that will allow us to drive cars when and where we want without owning them.

In this horizon space we can also expect public transport change its operation for buses away from fixed timetables and routes to on demand uberesque style routes and timings where users will hail a bus that will pick them up from where they are and within the confines of a designated area take them to where they need to go.

Infrastructure will take time to build and bring to market, but it is likely that within the decade we will see the start of many maglev (magnetic levitation) trains like those already used in Shanghai which currently travels at the 430 kms per hour (and in 2025 should be able to reach 600 km per hour) which would be capable of a Cairns to Brisbane trip in 4 hours and of course the famous Japanese bullet train.

Our chat then turned indoors to talk about the elevator of next year, the willy wonka like maglev elevator (using similar tech to the train) that travels both vertically and horizontally. It may seem to be a “what for” question but 120 years ago the invention and adoption of elevators that travelled vertically change the way we live and work for ever and made the building of today’s skyscrapers entirely possible.

These elevators will do similar allowing many elevator cabs to use the same shaft at the same time and also to travel horizontally along the building allowing us to build wider and in various shapes knowing that we can transport people to anywhere within the building.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUa8M0H9J5o

As always a great chat, have a listen now (15 minutes 58 seconds) and then let me know which future transport you’re most looking forward to.