Cars 

With the advent of hybrid technology, and more and more one-seater concept cars going on show, it’s evident that personal vehicles are being adapted to city driving. Take the Volkswagen Nils, a single-seat concept car with the lonely driver in mind. Made out of 460kg aluminium spaceframe chassis, it is powered by a 15kW electric motor supported by a rechargeable 5.3kW lithium-ion battery pack. By skipping out on the luxuries - such as extra seats, power steering and automatically-adjusting mirrors - the company has designed the vehicle to reach a top speed of 130km/h in just under 20 seconds. The Nils has a range of 65 kilometres, taking about two hours to recharge. 

Trains

The Shinkansen, or bullet train, has revolutionised the speed of rail travel in Japan. It usually travels around 320 km/h, but in test runs the Maglev, a magnet suspended locomotive, reached speeds of 500 km/h. Japan isn’t the only nation to boast fast trains: Spain, China, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK are just some of the countries home to high-speed networks. So, what if we had a high speed network here in Australia? That’s the commuter’s dream. Plans for a line have so far not made it past the drawing board, but the seed has been planted for future development. With a high-speed Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane network, you could get from Melbourne to Sydney in three hours. Business meeting in Canberra? Why not pop down in the morning, and be back in time for lunch? Obviously the network would need to make a stop off in Wollongong.

Buses

Sick of standing on the bus, flying down the aisle at every stop sign or sitting on a stranger’s lap at every corner, only to realise it would’ve taken less time to walk? This could be a first world problem no more. China, in a bid to remove itself from the top of the top-polluting list, has come up with a novel idea for future commuters. The Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment company is developing a “3D Express Coach”, also known as a “three-dimensional fast bus” - a bus that doesn’t go under, through or around the traffic... it goes over it. Sitting on purpose constructed rails, the six-metre wide beast could carry up to 1400 passengers, allowing cars under two metres high to pass underneath. Powered by solar energy and electricity, early prototypes of the express coach could travel up to 60 km/h. Track construction has already begun in the Mentougou district.

Walking?

Imagine a world where laziness is taken to a new extreme - where people no longer walk places, but rather, move around on single seated personal pods. In his entry to the Michelin Challenge Design competition, 19-year-old Iranian Mohamad Sadegh Samakoush came up with the Supple, a seat on top of a motor-driven sphere. The user doesn’t even have to steer - the in-built GPS function self-drives to wherever you want to go.