When can we expect a new mode of transportation? 

The question poses many considerations. A major portion of the answer is based on psychology, or opinion. The topic of transportation is one of the least sought after topics in normal conversation. Talking about transportation's future is opinion based. The united opinion is comparable to an individual arguing that someone else's favorite color is wrong.

Without the discovery of new innovations for new modes of transportation, there are no changes and all modes of transportation remain the same. Autonomous vehicles, Diesel electric trains, battery operated cars and planes proliferate complacency to the same modes instead of technological innovation towards anything new.

Possibilities

The blogpost: Vehicle Technology provides a glimpse of what’s necessary for discovering a brand-new mode of transportation.

The most serious concern of today’s transportation is its massive energy inefficiency. As Victor Schauberger once said; “understand and copy nature”. His reference pointed out that all nature is centripetal. He also made the claim in the 1930s that all modern transportation was centrifugal. It still is. The importance of his claim is that nature isn’t self-destructive. The opposite is true for the destructive nature of centrifugal motion. Nearly all of modern transportation is propulsion by chemical explosion. The physics of propulsion is forcing an object into resistance. Heat is the presence of resistance. Colliding particles produces heat. It displays an inefficient use of energy.

Alternatives

One of the factors to consider is finding an alternative to propulsion. One of the alternatives to propulsion-based transportation is found with the synchronicity of oscillations; they display frequency movement of motion. The mindset requiring propulsion for motion is an inconsiderate notion. That’s like saying a magnet only has one pole. The opposite of propulsion is attraction. Conversely, the terms: centrifugal and centripetal are not opposites. Similar to yen and yang, the two are functions of a whole.

New transportation innovations reaching sustainability require an efficient use of energy. Attractive motion is a viable consideration for transportation. The entire universe operates with the attractive pull of gravity.

Magnetic levitating (maglev) technology is one of the most efficient forms of transportation. Trains, however, are an antiquated 200-year-old mode of heavy rail technology. For a modern transit system to work well, it needs to provide customers the convenience of immediate direct to destination service. It’s impossible for a train’s heavy rail trunk line to provide convenient transportation which is needed for today’s sprawl development design in Western Society.

Crisis

Transportation of Western society is at a crisis point. The problem isn’t due a climate catastrophe, it’s the massive proliferation of inefficient modes of transportation reliant on propulsion driven vehicles. The blogpost: Current Transportation Dilemma speaks about the consequences of Western Society’s unsustainable transportation.

Transit is certainly a valid transportation methodology for the ever-growing metropolitan land-use design. Transit technology systems with smaller vehicle sizes can provide the convenience for immediate deployment and have direct to destination service capability. One such technology is the Ultra-light technology system of CyberTran. The hyperloop technology is good for long distance transportation solutions, however, its technology is inadequate for being a solution to the immediate needs of municipal transportation.   

Urban growth

In regards to battery operated autonomous cars, in terms of adhering to environmental, economic, and social issues (established in 1987 by the United Nation’s World Commission for Environment and Development; "Brundtland Report"), autonomous and battery operated cars are incompliant. Automobiles are unsustainable, other than changing the motor, a car is still a car, they’re still unsustainable. 

The reason cars are unsustainable is land-use. All urban growth is based on an area’s primary source of transportation. The automobile centric land-use design puts an area’s total dependency for transportation upon the necessity to own a car. It’s not as though owning a car is bad, however, having an area’s sole source of transportation necessitating car ownership is addictedness.

From researchgate.net is an article by Chris McCahill and Norman Garrick:

 As early as the 2000s, Crawford (2002) suggested that cars consumed as much as 70% of the downtown land in American cities. In a comparative study of 12 USA cities, McCahill and Garrick (2012) found that a ten percentage-point increase in private cars as the commuting mode was associated with more than 2500 m 2 rise of parking per 1000 people; and more than twice as much land was used for parking for each resident and employee in cities having higher rates of automobile use (roughly 30% more driving) (McCahill and Garrick, 2012).

It isn’t about the cars, it’s about land-use addictions brought about by the cars. 

In another article, from sciencedigest.com, it mentions some valuable points:

There is little dispute among transportation researchers that expanding highway capacity increases vehicle use. This phenomenon is commonly known as induced demand, and it demonstrates a fundamental economic principle: individuals tend to consume more of a good as the price of the good falls. In other words, wider highways increase traffic speeds and reduce the time cost of driving, thereby inducing additional vehicle travel. In the short run, when residential and employment locations are fixed, faster peak period highway speeds attract drivers from alternate routes, modes, and times of day. Then, in the long-run, faster speeds encourage additional social and economic behavior in areas made more accessible by the new highway capacity, which further increases traffic volumes.

Since transportation is the foundation to all urban growth, sustainable transportation is necessary for sustainable urban growth. The current modes of propulsion driven transportation elevate an inefficient source of transportation with an unsustainable infrastructure. The 1987 Brundtland Report isolated three segments of urban sustainability: environmental, economic and social. All three segments have to be resolved for urban growth to be sustainable. Again, to reach sustainability, transportation has to be sustainable.

Changes

In terms of sustainability, the rhetoric has changed. Green politics have pushed an ambiguous climate emergency narrative onto the media. Yet no one can explain its definition other than banning plastic straws will solve the problems.

Nonetheless, the California Air Resource Board (CARB, originated in 1967 by Governor Ronald Reagan) has legislatively improved California’s air quality of the exhausted fuel from California’s 30,000,000 registered vehicles. This, again, points to the unsustainability of automobiles being a land-use concern.

Expectations

There can be no changes to transportation without establishing a brand-new mode of transportation. Research and study for alternatives beyond propulsion technology are where to find answers.