The Skyhighway by Kaveh Dimitri Salahi

The Skyhighway is a highway in the sky. It runs for the same distances as a ground highway, but its lanes are not strips of pavement. Each lane is a powered cable, about the size of a large wooden beam, held 10 to 30 storeys above the ground by towers placed every 300 to 400 metres, with small service drones riding on the cables between the towers. A standard Skyhighway has ten lanes side by side, 30 feet (9.1 m) apart, so the whole road in the air is about 82 metres wide. Vehicles fly on their own rotors, but they do not carry the energy for the trip. Each vehicle reaches up with a jointed arm, clasps the underside of a lane cable, and draws electric power from it while it flies along. The cable carries power, not weight. Because the power arrives continuously, a vehicle needs only a small battery for take-off, landing, and emergencies, and its range is set by the length of the cable network rather than by the size of its battery. The same clasp works for light passenger vehicles, for floating buildings, and for Project Caterpillar, a chain of hovering platforms that can carry 160 people as a sky bus or serve as a rescue bridge over a flood. Over water, mountains, disaster zones, and new routes where towers cannot yet stand, the cables are held up by free-flying lift drones alone, the way the Skyhighway was first conceived. Power comes from solar farms and other clean sources that are set aside for the Skyhighway and connected to it at feed points along the route, with solar power collected in space planned as the long-term source, as the network grows into a wider skyplatform. Like a ground highway, the Skyhighway has on-ramps, exits, intersections where traffic can turn or change lanes, and service stops beside the road where people can rest, shop, and eat, all in the air. Over time this creates a new level of city life above the existing one, opened slowly, route by route. This paper is written for government planners and engineers. Every major number is shown with the reasoning behind it, and Appendix A gives the simple physics used, so that any reader can check the figures. All figures are design targets. No hardware has yet been built or tested.