The original note, as written at the time
It is my well concerted intention to avoid the taking to the urban sky the mess we have made with the street. Large noisy machines everywhere in the name of mobility. I really do not like the idea of a “flying car in the city”. In the future of urban flight, only ambulances and patrol vessels should be larger than a motorcycle. The rest of us can do with advanced small personal flight devices, a concept extension from personal walking devices. If the pain is for lack of shelter from the elements, we can set up parks, skyparks, green treelined promenades and covered sidewalk and sideflight refuges. How much money can we save from the purchase and maintenance of large personal mobility devices, and how much of this can we divert to the cause of building this healthy and motivational public pedestrian infrastructure.
Ongoing development
It is my well concerted intention to avoid taking to the urban sky the mess we have made with the street.
Consider what we did with the road. We gave it to the largest machine that could plausibly need it, and everything else adapted — pedestrians to crossings, children to backyards, the street itself to a corridor for movement rather than a place for anything. Now the road is a barrage of large noisy machines and we have spent seventy years trying to recover the space we lost.
If we let the sky go the way we let the street go, we will do the same thing again, only without the ground as a floor. Which is why I do not want the flying car in the city. Not the graceful one, not the electric one, not the one with the fold-out wings. The unit that ruins a place is not the one that is ugly. It is the one there are a great many of.
In the future of urban flight, only ambulances and patrol vessels should be larger than a motorcycle. That is the whole policy, and it is a good one, because it keeps the scale of the machine below the scale at which the environment is forced to accommodate it. A city full of small personal flight devices is a city where the air stays usable, the noise stays dispersed, and the sky remains something you can look at.
And the objection about shelter from the elements is fair, so let us answer it with the ground rather than the sky. Skyparks, green treelined promenades, covered sidewalk and sideflight refuges. If the pain is rain and sun, the answer is a roof, not a bigger vehicle. We can build the pedestrian infrastructure and we can afford it precisely because we are not buying a city’s worth of large personal flying machines and then maintaining them.
Think about how much money that saves, and then think about what it could buy instead: healthy, motivational public infrastructure that everyone uses, for the price of a fleet that only the comfortable could have afforded. The choice is not between progress and nostalgia. It is between two distributions of the same budget.
We have one chance to decide what the sky is for before it fills up. The street is the cautionary tale, and it is right outside the window.