A Quantum Leap For Cities And Towns

A Coordination Problem With A Solution

In 2023 the idea of Freedom Cities was floated. 2025 looks to be the year they could happen if we take make the right moves. The idea is Freedom Cities would be built from the ground up on federal land. Investment in drones and air taxis would be promoted. There would be the creation of “hives of industry” where the next step change in city development would occur, a ‘Quantum leap’.

Excitingly new cities are not required, we can revitalise what we have; it can be done in existing towns and cities, and the technology for the new transportation rails leaps forward thanks to the right to own, use and transact property. This is freedom.

The idea of ‘Freedom Cities’ is to create cities with streamlined regulations, making it easier for businesses to operate and for people to live and work. This can be achieved through regulatory arbitrage, where cities compete to attract businesses and residents.

This de-regulatory approach draws inspiration from international special economic-zone models, like Próspera, Schenzen and Dubai, while creating a framework for innovation. A freedom city could administer a streamlined environmental review, shortening the approval process from years to months and saving tens of millions of dollars. Performance-based standards, rather than prescriptive regulations maintain environmental compliance.

Transportation Opens Possibilities

Cargo drones and air taxis transform transportation and connect rural and urban locations. Developing these new transportation and delivery systems will connect communities like never before. This means increased income for towns and cities and reduced reliance on old creaking systems.

When the ‘Freedom Cities’ plan came about, analogies to Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the transcontinental railroad were invoked, as Teddy Roosevelt’s vision for a national park service and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. The goal is to reopen the frontier and reignite the builder’s imaginations, giving hardworking families a new chance at the American Dream.

The fantastic thing is we can achieve much of this in existing cities. It doesn’t need to be a binary choice. Existing cities can grow. Yes, it feels more challenging to break through sclerotic rules and regulations, but many States and cities do have people willing to push innovations forward and jettison many of the old and outdated policies and regulations. The beauty of the existing system of property ownership means that the aerial economy can be opened today.

Aerial Transportation

Towns, cities, and our lives become orders of magnitude better when the transportation system connects rural, suburban, and urban locations. Products and services delivered through the air to your doorstep remove traffic congestion and make the streets safer.

This aerial transportation system gives us all this, and we can earn from it. In the United States, the landowner owns the airspace above their land, and if they have a way to, they can rent it to drone and air taxi companies. The technology to help now exists, and we have been building it.

If you don’t have a home or land but want to buy the airspace above someone else’s, you are free to do so, and you can gain from its use. This gives additional income. It enables a new dawn of transportation to happen faster because everyone is correctly incentivized and coordinated.

The low-altitude aerial economy needs air rights owners to monetize their airspace. Drones and air taxis need places to land and take off near where humans want them. This means under-utilised airspace can be brought into the economy and become useful. Aerial routes and aerial skyways get created through supply and demand in private and state-level airspace.

Airports were not developed where they are because they are the most convenient for people in local towns. There are trade-offs. Housing near airports is often less valuable than those without a flight path. But many people, if they owned a piece of the flight path, would want the aircraft in their airspace paying them. You might even reduce or increase the price to enter or exit the airspace to encourage commercial entities to use it. This is the way forward for the low-altitude economy.

Other benefits include building drone launchpads and air taxi takeoff and landing areas on private land. As an example, when airports reduce their landing charges, demand increases. Likewise, in towns and cities, under-utilized private land can be used to develop drone stations and vertiports for the new aerial economy. Benefitting the private landowners and the community, supercharging development.

Drones and air taxis must get in and out of private airspace to have a viable commercial business, and local communities are the winners.

Learnings From Corporate “Innovators”

In the current development of flying cars and air taxis, what we have seen to a large degree is comparable to train carriages developed before rail tracks. It is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg situation, but we can see that air taxi manufacturers have started to fail. For example, Lillium and Volocopter, the German air taxi manufacturers, have collapsed.

While some of these failures can be attributed to poor management and slow regulation, the same people building them are the same people who have presided over a dying car and aviation industry that lacks any real innovation.

Abstracting away from the operational failure of these European companies, the learnings need to be seen so the same outcome does not happen in the US. The main reason they have not taken off is because the users also own the tracks, and up until now, they have had no technical way to connect the trains with them.

The low-altitude airspace is owned by private home and land owners, and the companies must have permission to be in their airspace, or they are just big, shiny trespassing white elephants.

The best we can see happening on the current trajectory for electrical Vertical Take Off and Landing vehicles (eVTOLs) is they replicate helicopters, using the same infrastructure and serving the same small customer base. This is not progress and so they need to change course quickly.

Shifting Gears

I will change this, open the skies, use the freedom people have with their air rights and land to bring underutilized 3D space into the ecosystem and reward those who own it. This gives the drone and air taxi industry the rails they need.

To guard against narrow thinking, the inventor Thomas Edison used a simple test to measure prospective employees' mental openness. He’d invite a candidate to lunch and serve a bowl of soup. He’d then watch to see whether the person salted his soup before starting it. If he did, he wouldn’t be offered the job. Edison felt that people were more open to different possibilities if they didn’t “salt their experience of life” before tasting it. - Roger von Oech

Using aerial and land infrastructure to develop the next generation of transportation and growth through a decentralized network boosts the wealth of all communities; 2025, here we come.

Thank you all for reading.