The ultimate commuting: part 1

What if during the coming decades we could see teleportation and pain-free travel becoming somewhat of a reality?

Today, transportation of goods, of people has never been so easy. We can go around the world in a day, spend a one week holiday in another continent and no one really needs to walk anymore.

With mondialization, this trend is increasing. It is increasing the number of goods and people. Against what may headlines are showing, I do not believe that mondialization is dying. transport is a trend that has been increasing since the dawn of humanity and unless a civilization stall or collapse, it will not stop. Well.. let me stop here right now, I will not enter into a debate around mondialisation today. Let’s just agree for this one short essay that we see it as a net gain for civilization, leading to culture increase, widening of human possibilities and of abilities in arts, sport and sciences. Let’s just accept that this is the best mean humanity has to achieve global peace and equality for all.

Let’s also agree on the issues we face, cost of long distance transportation is still prohibitive for many humans, cars are unsafe and kill millions every year.

Many current modes of travelling create environmental problems: from airplaine and car noise, to air pollution from tires and unefficient gas burning to large roads destroying everyone’s living spaces.

It also consumes energy… and unfortunately, most of today’s energy participates to global warming.

The Scaling Problem

Now that we agree that all things being equal, transportation of goods and people is good — and we want more of it — we have to face a brutal reality: our current systems cannot scale.

More people, more movement, more demand. But adding more cars to already congested cities is like trying to cure a headache by hitting yourself harder. The car, as we know it, is not the answer. Studies have consistently shown that adding road capacity induces more demand, and you end up back at square one — slower.

What we need is a shift. A fundamental change in the way we think about moving through space. And it’s already happening, starting at the smallest scale.

The Small Commute — Wheels on Your Shoes 🛴

Soon 80% of the planet will live in cities. Cities are getting larger, denser, and yes, more congested. Living in Paris and cycling to work almost every day, I’ve seen this shift firsthand. It’s not a trend anymore — it’s a movement.

What we want is something that feels like having wheels on your shoes. The fantasy of gliding effortlessly through a city, covering 3 to 5 km in under 10 minutes without breaking a sweat, without a traffic jam, without parking hell. Electric scooters, e-bikes, cargo bikes, electric skateboards, unicycles — we’re getting there, and it’s exciting.

But here’s the thing: one size does not fit all. Someone doing a grocery run needs a cargo bike. An elderly person might need an assisted three-wheeler. A commuter crossing half of Paris needs something fast and foldable that fits on the metro. The ideal is not a single magic vehicle — it’s a diverse ecosystem of light mobility, on-demand, adapted to the person and the trip.

This is why the second key ingredient is availability. Not ownership. A bike parked at every corner you might need it, a scooter a 30-second walk away, charged and ready. We’ve seen this model work with Vélib’ in Paris, with Lime, with Bird. The infrastructure is catching up, slowly but surely. The challenge ahead is interoperability — making all these systems talk to each other, and making cities redesign their streets accordingly. Less space for cars, more for humans in motion. 🚲

You Don’t Think About It — Auto-Planning with AI 🧠

The next leap is invisible. It’s the one where you open an app (or just think about where you need to go) and a system handles the rest.

Imagine a truly cross-modal, automated planning system: it knows your calendar, your preferences, real-time traffic, the weather, and the availability of every vehicle type in your city. It routes you from door to door — scooter to metro to e-bike — and books everything in advance, optimized not just for time but for effort, cost, and carbon footprint.

This isn’t science fiction. The ingredients are all here: LLMs that can reason over complex constraints, real-time mobility APIs, and a generation of users already comfortable delegating logistics to their phones. What’s missing is integration — a unified layer that sits above the fragmented mess of apps, operators, and ticketing systems.

Think of it like a travel agent who lives in your pocket and never sleeps. The AI doesn’t replace the vehicle — it removes the friction of choosing and booking and planning, which is often more exhausting than the commute itself. When you stop thinking about how to get somewhere and just… go, that’s when mobility becomes truly frictionless.

Self-Driving as Teleportation 🚗✨

Here’s my favorite idea in this whole essay, and I think it’s an underrated one: teleportation is making you travel when you don’t think about it.

With sufficiently good prediction and automation, a self-driving car doesn’t just drive you — it reclaims the time you would have lost staring at a windshield. You work, sleep, read, watch videos, have a meal, play games. The journey disappears from your conscious experience. You were at point A, now you’re at point B. That is teleportation, in the only sense that matters.

Waymo is already doing this in San Francisco and Phoenix — fully driverless rides with no human in the driver’s seat, 700,000+ such rides logged in 2023 alone. The technology is real. Tesla is pushing hard with its Full Self-Driving suite. The question is no longer if, but when this scales. And when it does, the economic and behavioral implications are massive: why own a car when a robotaxi shows up in 90 seconds and costs less than parking? Why commute by metro when you can sleep in a pod that picks you up at your door?

Self-driving doesn’t just improve transportation — it unlocks a new category of time. And time, for most of us, is the real scarce resource.

Long Distance Travel — Fixing the Plane ✈️

Now let’s think bigger. What about 500 km? Paris to Lyon, London to Edinburgh, Boston to New York?

Planes dominate here, and honestly, I think planes are going to keep dominating. The Hyperloop dream is appealing on paper — pods in vacuum tubes, magnetic levitation, 1000 km/h — but building perfectly straight tubes across mountains, rivers, and entire countries is absurdly expensive. Virgin Hyperloop went bankrupt after $450 million and one test ride. The engineering problems (maintaining vacuum over hundreds of km, safety at those speeds) don’t have obvious solutions. I don’t think this is how we get there.

Flying works. It’s fast, it scales, and the infrastructure already exists. The problems with flying are real — carbon emissions, noise, airports being far from cities, the whole security theater — but they’re solvable. And solving them is cheaper than building a new mode of transport from scratch.

The carbon problem

The energy cost of flight scales with velocity squared, and we burn kerosene to pay that bill. But biofuels can cancel the carbon footprint entirely. Some argue we can’t produce enough biofuel to power all of aviation. Maybe not yet. But biofuels made from genetically modified microorganisms are a promising avenue to reach the scales needed. This is an engineering problem, not a physics problem. Big difference.

Beyond fuel, there’s a lot of room for improvement in aircraft architecture itself — lighter materials, better aerodynamics, electric taxiing, optimized routing. Each of these shaves a few percent. Together they add up.

The airport problem — bring the airport into the city

Here’s the idea I find most exciting in this whole section, and I haven’t seen anyone talk about it.

Airports are far from cities because of noise and space constraints. That’s not going to change. But what if the airport entrance was in the city?

Picture this: in the center of Paris, there are many bus stations. You walk in, board a bus. The bus is fully enclosed. Once the doors close, security screening happens inside the bus while it drives you to the airport. By the time you arrive at the tarmac, you’re already cleared. You walk straight onto the plane.

On arrival, same thing in reverse. You step off the plane, into a bus, and the bus drops you off at a station in the city center. No baggage claim hall, no long corridors, no taxi queue.

The “airport” in the city is just a bus station. The actual runway stays where it needs to be — far away, where noise doesn’t bother anyone. But from your perspective, you walked into a building downtown and appeared at your destination. That’s a lot closer to teleportation than what we have now.

This solves two problems at once: convenience (no 45-minute trip to the airport) and security (it happens in transit, not in a bottleneck). And it’s buildable with today’s technology. No vacuum tubes required.

Border crossing

The other piece: digitizing border control. Automating passport checks, automating customs, making the admin of crossing a country as fast as sending an email. A 90-minute flight followed by a 45-minute passport queue is not teleportation.

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This is part 1. I’ve tried to sketch the full arc of what I think the ultimate urban (and inter-urban) transport system could look like. In part 2, I want to go deeper on the policy and economics — because none of this happens without the right incentives, the right regulation, and the right political will. The technology is the easy part. 🌍

Until then, I’ll be the one on the bike.