Transportation and travelling

Transportation and travelling 

People are travelling for many reasons, for example:

• It is a good way to learn about life anywhere else, to learn new things, to understand other cultures, their traditions and to get to know new people.
• For a holiday – to relax, to get some rest from daily stereotype, or to experience something thrilling…
• To learn foreign language, to become better at it.
• From necessity – people need to travel to work, school, to do shopping, visit family/friends…

Means of transport:

• By land:
  • Car
  • Train
  • Bus
  • Bicycle
  • Motorcycle
  • Underground
  • Foot
  • Hyperloop
  • MagLev
• By water:
  • Boat
  • Ferry
  • Ship
  • Cargo

• By air:
  • Rigid airships
  • Hot air (gas) balloon
  • Jet aircraft
  • Plane
  • Helicopter
  • Parachute
• By space:
  • Spacecraft (space shuttle)
  • Sub-orbital aircraft

Different means require different level of preparation before actual travelling. For example if you are travelling by air, it is expected, that you are travelling great distance and you won’t be coming back that early, so you need to pack clothes, hygienic necessities, some food and water (there is usually on board service, so not that much), etc. But when you are travelling by car for not so big distances, you don’t need to pack a whole lot, because you are able to go back, but it depends, that if you want to stay in the destination and how far the destination is, it is individual, but these are just the most often cases.

Situation in Slovakia

Here in Slovakia the travelling isn’t as easy as in more advanced countries like Germany or Japan. Yes, the infrastructure is built. But the lower class roads are often old with many potholes. The highway isn’t completely connecting the two biggest cities in Slovakia, at least there is railway connecting every city, almost every town and the main paths are undergoing gradual reconstruction, which enables trains for achieving higher speeds and lower fail rate. Bus transportation system is fully working and (almost) every village has got access to this mean of transportation.

Slovakia does not have sea in its territory, but there is Danube river, which is often used for water transportation of cargo, not much for passengers. There are three international airports with regular flights in Bratislava (Letisko M.R. Štefánika), Košice (Letisko Košice), Poprad-Tatry (Letisko Poprad-Tatry). Overall, you can get where you want to get, but in Slovakia you need sometimes more time and patience, than in other countries.

Who knows, maybe we will be leaders in transportation sometime in the future, but not today.

Advantages and disadvantages of different means of transportation:

Car (fossil fuels)

• Quite fast way of travelling
• Not dependent of schedules
• Availability

• High environmental impact
• Expensive travelling alone
• Can be dangerous (accidents)

Train

• Reliability (almost as airlines)
• Safety (right after airlines)
• Can be fast
• Dining car
• Energy efficiency

• Can be crowded
• Not ideal accessibility
• Dependent on schedule

Plane

• Pretty Fast
• Comfortable
• Good services

• Really expensive
• Weather dependent
• Poor accessibility

Sub-orbital aircraft

• Ultra-fast travelling (EU®US: <1h.)
• Amazing experience

• Ultra expensive
• Hard to get by

I consider invention of the wheel by far the most important invention as basis for modern travelling and transportation means. Yes, the wheel is built from different materials and many different ways based on era of human kind. Although nowadays we are also using and inventing more efficient and faster technologies, than thousands years old wheel technology. For example jet engines, magnetic levitation, EM drive, etc. In the future we are expected to overcome fossil fuel combustion engines and focus on fossil fuel independent combustion or electric energy engines. We can use more for example electricity stored in batteries, hydrogen energy, bio fuels…

But we still don’t have enough expertise and there are many revolutionary technologies yet to come. Atom fusion energy is one of them, then maybe EM drive, antimatter production and way how to extract energy from it, warp or any other FTL drive, and so on…

We Slovaks do have one of the most powerful passports on earth, it is really an advantage, because we are free to go almost anywhere in the world. If you have money and knowledge, you can travel around the world by many possible ways. For longer distances is plane the most used, or if it is possible, the way cheaper means of travelling are by car, train or for example. For short distances we can use some human energy powered means, bicycle is far the most popular.

It is not using any fuel and can be sometimes faster than car, because you don’t have to use roads for cars and thanks to its compact dimensions you can use even very narrow places to pass through. Cars can be slowed down by traffic jams or accidents, which you can with bicycle easily overcome.