Your Flying Car Is Running a Little Late: A Century of Commuting Promises, Undelivered

Every American who has ever sat motionless on a highway while a radio traffic reporter cheerfully describes the jam they are currently inside knows, on some cellular level, that something has gone terribly wrong with the future. The future was supposed to be different. The future had been promised — in magazines, at World's Fairs, in breathless corporate films with orchestral soundtracks — as a place where the commute had been solved.

The future is taking the exit ramp. The future is merging. The future will be there in approximately forty-five minutes, assuming no further incidents near the interchange.

The Prophecy Begins: Wings for the Working Man

The serious business of predicting revolutionary commuting technology began in earnest after World War II, when American optimism and American engineering had just conspired to win a war and it seemed reasonable to assume they could also defeat the morning rush hour.

The personal helicopter was the era's great commuting dream. Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and a rotating cast of enthusiastic engineers spent the late 1940s and 1950s assuring readers that the family helicopter was coming. It would be as common as the family automobile. Husbands — and it was always husbands in these illustrations — would step out of their suburban ranch houses, climb into their personal rotorcraft, and lift serenely above the gridlock below, arriving at the office refreshed and on time.

The Jetsons, which premiered in 1962, didn't invent this vision. It inherited it from a decade of genuine expert belief and gave it a cartoon dog.

The personal helicopter, it turned out, had several problems that the magazine illustrators had glossed over, including but not limited to: the difficulty of piloting one, the noise, the cost, the infrastructure required, the weather, and the deeply unsettling question of what happens when several million people are all doing this over the same city at the same time.

The Monorail Moment

If the helicopter represented the aerial solution to American commuting, the monorail represented the terrestrial one — and it arrived with a marketing campaign that has rarely been equaled in the history of transportation.

By the 1960s, the monorail had become the universal symbol of the modern city's transportation future. Walt Disney installed one at Disneyland in 1959, and the effect on the national imagination was roughly equivalent to seeing a UFO. Here was the future, sleek and silent and elevated above the messy streets below. Cities across America began drawing up plans. The 1962 Seattle World's Fair put a monorail in downtown Seattle and basically dared the rest of the country not to follow suit.

The monorail's actual adoption in American cities was, to use the technical term, minimal. The reasons were familiar to anyone who has watched a large infrastructure project interact with a city budget: it was expensive, it required political will that evaporated, it didn't connect to existing transit networks, and the car lobby was not, historically speaking, a fan of alternatives to the car.

Seattle's World's Fair monorail still runs its original mile-long route today, connecting two points that most Seattle residents do not regularly need to travel between. It is charming. It is not the future.

The Underground Option: Tubes, Pods, and Pneumatic Dreams

When the sky proved too complicated and the elevated rail too expensive, the futurists went underground. The pneumatic tube transit system — essentially a very large version of the tubes that banks use for drive-through deposits — attracted serious engineering attention in the 1970s and again, with tremendous enthusiasm, in the 2010s when someone put a new name on the old idea.

The RAND Corporation published studies. Designers rendered gleaming pod-cars rocketing through vacuum tunnels at speeds that would reduce the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco journey to thirty-five minutes. Tech billionaires became very excited. Hyperloop became a word that journalists had to learn to spell.

As of this writing, no American city has a functional hyperloop system carrying passengers anywhere. Several startups that promised to build one have quietly pivoted, merged, or dissolved. The Los Angeles-to-San Francisco journey by car takes approximately six hours, depending on traffic, which is to say depending on the I-5 through the Central Valley, which is to say: plan for more.

The Telecommuting Escape Hatch

Perhaps the most interesting commuting prediction — and the one with the most complicated relationship with reality — was the idea that technology would simply eliminate the commute by eliminating the need to go anywhere.

This prediction has been circulating since the 1970s, when Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave suggested that the "electronic cottage" would allow Americans to work from home, reversing the historical flow of workers into city centers. Through the 1980s and 1990s, telecommuting was perpetually described as an imminent revolution that would reshape cities, empty downtowns, and restore suburban parents to their children's soccer games.

For decades, it remained a minority practice, available to some workers, adopted by fewer. Then, in March 2020, a virus accomplished in two weeks what forty years of futurism had failed to achieve. Remote work exploded. The commute, for millions of Americans, simply stopped.

The futurists were right! Except the revolution arrived via pandemic rather than technological enlightenment, and its aftermath — the hybrid schedule, the return-to-office mandate, the Tuesday-Thursday in-person requirement — has produced a new and creative form of commuting misery rather than eliminating the old one.

Traffic: The Prediction That Actually Came True

Here is the prediction about American commuting that proved most accurate, though nobody made it as a prediction because it wasn't the kind of thing futurists wanted to say: traffic would get worse.

Every new highway built to relieve congestion generated new demand that filled it. Every suburb built on the promise of affordable space required longer drives to reach it. Every decade in which the flying car failed to arrive was a decade in which more cars appeared on the same roads.

The American commute in 2024 is longer, on average, than it was in 1980. The average one-way commute time in the US hovers around 27 minutes — which sounds manageable until you multiply it by the 130 million American workers making that trip twice a day, five days a week, sitting in the same traffic that the monorail was supposed to have fixed sixty years ago.

The flying car is still coming. Several companies are working on it, and this time the battery technology is genuinely better. Whether it will solve the commute or simply add a new layer of chaos above the existing one remains, as the prophets like to say, to be seen.