Flying Cars

The petition is entitled Fund research into the development and intergration of flying cars to British Airspace and the explanatory notes say

"Death, accidents and traffic jams are common throughout Britains roads, however there is an alternative that has been explored yet.

Flying cars will relive all traffic congestion, decrease the amount of time driving (direct routes) and cut deaths on the road to 0 as A) Cars wont be on the road to cause deaths B)If you have a flying car you will not want to crash it

So i urge the government to give more funding to this new form of eco-friendly travel."

Someone wanting to live in the 2000s predicted in the 1960s, I see ...

I'm particularly taken with "If you have a flying car you will not want to crash it". D'you know what - I don't think people want to crash their non-flying cars ...

Given how many bad drivers there are, I cannot imagine how disastrous this would be. And I'm also quite unconvinced by the idea of routes just being a free-for-all - on the one hand I'm not sure how you'd make it not be, but on the other I cannot imagine how chaotic a free-for-all would be.

And then there's the practicality ... Being airborne is tricky. It requires lots of effort. Personal helicopters, say, are not practical things to be around. A few very rich people haven't them causes little trouble, because aside from anything else they all-but-forcibly (possibly forcibly ... I'm not quite sure where to look up how, if at all, their use is restricted) land in controlled places and generally fail to be around the public.

I strongly suspect that no amount of research is going to make flight eco-friendly. It might, possibly, maybe, decrease congestion. The sheer energy-expenditure of keeping heavy things up in the air, however, is not going to be eco-friendly until and unless there's an eco-friendly method of energy generation and storage. And I really don't share your optimism that accidents would be reduced!