Traffic is choking a lot of the cities around the world. Along with making our daily commutes a pain in the butt, traffic does everything from wasting energy and adding to pollution, to being a serious cause of stress for humans. After all, it’s called road rage, not playing with kittens rage. PLP Architecture thinks they’ve come up with the cure for traffic, and it makes me sweat with anxiety, just looking at it.
The call it CarTube, and it’s a series of underground, interconnected tubes with high speed conveyor belts on them that can take cars out of high traffic areas and move them past the blockages and closer to their destinations. Their long-term goal is that the tubes will eventually get rid of surface roads all together.
According to The Architects’ Journal, PLP has called their CarTube the “next best thing since teleportation.” That type of mentality might explain why this seems so poorly thought out to me. In their perfect set up, cars on the conveyor belts would travel in what they refer to as a “platoon system.” That means they would be close together in small tunnels, and all controlled by artificial intelligence. If you watch simulation below, you’ll see that it pretty much means you’ll be squeezing into a tube that’s just a little bigger than the car you are riding in. Essentially, you’ll be in a moving coffin. It’s truly a claustrophobic’s nightmare.
Given the choice, I’d rather just take the bus.