What, one wonders, is the appropriate response to someone who bursts into the room waving $197 million of other people’s money and declares job one is making sure your flying car has a place to land?
Do you:
Gently pry the cash from their tightly clutched hand?
Take away the LSD in their other hand?
Trick question! This is Florida, where hallucinogens are not required for flights of fancy. A year or two in Tallahassee will do the trick.
Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.
“The Florida Department of Transportation will not waste taxpayer dollars and spend it on everyday passenger vehicles,” FDOT wrote in documents revealed by the Miami Herald. Heaven forbid! Better to spend those millions and millions and millions of federal transportation dollars on what the agency calls an Aerial Network and the rest of us call Why.
FDOT said it spent three years engaging with the public about building landing pads for nonexistent flying cars. This certainly explains why it took the Herald’s lawyer to pry loose public records the agency was desperately clutching to its bosom.
Or maybe FDOT was just engaging with a different public. Or maybe some ears are more engaging than others. Like the ears of billionaire developer and megadonor Stephen Ross, putative owner of every downtown West Palm Beach sidewalk, high-rise, waterfront and parking meter.
FDOT was apparently very engaged with a company backed by those ears; also, the ears of Amazon, United Airlines, Uber, Delta, Toyota and Honeywell. All were chosen by FDOT to work on the pilot program.
Testing is taking place on 475 acres. This is good. If there is anything we have learned from rich people transportation, it is that their rides too frequently come in three speeds: drive, reverse and fire extinguisher. I speak, per usual, of Exploding Car Guy. But there’s also Jeff Bezos, aka Exploding Blue Origin Rocket on the Launchpad Guy. So, yes, I’m delighted that Amazon will have a hand in keeping airborne Florida taxis aloft and unsinged.
Did you know this was all Joe Biden’s fault?
Biden did a grand thing when he signed off on the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure law. Among other things, it provided money that could expand charging networks for electric cars. More chargers means fewer drivers going house to house along I-95, asking to borrow an extension cord.
Sadly, the kind-hearted Biden then let the law’s millions come to Florida, where those dollars were greeted with southern hospitality, MAGA-style: Weaponization! cried FDOT. Using the cash to curb carbon emissions would politicize our roads, and wouldn’t that be a horror, said the politicians who painted over roads because someone somewhere looked at a rainbow and thought about a sexual activity not their own.
Then FDOT Secretary Jared Perdue demanded to know why Biden wasn’t working harder on flying cars.
Perhaps because even Waldo Waterman’s fabulous 1937 Aerobile couldn’t reliably get off the ground. Because Moulton “Molt” Taylor’s mid-century Aerocar was done in partly by — irony alert — an oil shortage. Because in the 1970s, someone slapped a well-known explosive, aka the Ford Pinto, onto a Cessna, over the Cessna’s vigorous protests.
It went about as well as the Cessna expected it would.
No matter. Florida still had $197 million in federal money meant for electric vehicle charging stations idling away and flying cars “offer the greatest benefits to Floridians,” FDOT enthused. Which brings us to one reason FDOT might have been bosom-clutching paperwork. The Herald found it specifies which Floridians will be getting those greatest benefits. Flying car helipads will be available at airports, of course, for we unwashed masses.
But the other stated goal is to build them at golf clubs and luxury apartments. This is very unfair, and not just to our golf-loving president, whose airline food cart of choice is never going to fit into the delicate flying machines.
Maybe I am being too harsh. Maybe they will find flying car uses for the rest of us. Maybe they can airdrop cement into potholes. Better yet, maybe they can airlift extension cords to I-95.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer. Contact her at beall.news@gmail.com.