Future residents of Paramount Miami World Center, a 600-unit condominium building now under construction, may be the first in the world with a private skyport for their use, television station WSVN reports.
Infrastructure matters. Flying cars will never, um, get off the ground if they don’t have places to land. Helicopter landing pads and heliports are apparent answers to the question of where to touch down. However, landing spots or sky ports built specifically for flying cars could offer convenience and amenities specifically applicable for or adapted to flying cars.
“Ever since ‘The Jetsons’ came out, America’s been talking about flying cars,” Daniel Kodsi, Paramount Miami World Center’s CEO and developer, said in a statement. “It’s something that inspires you, something that you think about when you’re building a project. You’re saying, ‘Well, what is the future? What’s going to happen in the future?’”
“We said, ‘What an opportunity to convert our sky deck into some type of ‘Jetsons,’ sky port where you can actually land passenger drones?’ And this technology exists today,” Kodsi said.
Kodsi’s assertion about the existence of the technology needed for flying cars is accurate, but the timeline for the commercial debut of flying cars measures in decades, not years. But even if flying cars won’t be on the market for private use or in taxi service before the 2030s or later, infrastructure planning has to start sooner and now isn’t too early. Establishing government regulations for flying cars is an additional hurdle, but until the vehicles and infrastructure issues are clarified, rules will have to wait.
The consensus of companies working on or at least thinking about flying cars and taxis is they will take off and land vertically. If flying cars required even short runways, finding land space to build the airstrips would be a deal breaker unless our cities underwent major redesign, which doesn’t seem likely.
Kodsi’s vision of autonomous taxis landing on top of a residential skyscraper doesn’t sound outlandish, especially when the Paramount Miami World Center’s sky port landing pad rises to the surface of a swimming pool, as depicted in the accompanying video.
Early adopters who can’t wait to drive or ride in the first flying cars might want to consider a condo at the new Miami condominium building, which is scheduled for completion by the end of 2019. More than two dozen of the units in the building will be penthouses, which would be even more convenient for hitching a ride than traveling to the street to hail a cab or rideshare vehicle.
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