Well if Trump took his head out of his ASS and put our money into infrastructure as he promised with his big, lying mouth.... we would have what other countries are experiencing. The train that goes 300 miles an hour.
Virtual Presence.. you plug into your VR at home and it simulates you being anywhere, from office to vacation spot with interactive capability between connected hosts :)
Streets that are designed to run downhill in any direction you are traveling. You won't need an engine, transmission et al or have to buy fuel, just maintenance of your brake system.
Just gotta abandon old fashioned thinking of the physical laws that normally apply and instead we''ll be doing things more efficiently with the application of quantum mechanics.
Very hard to think of any genuine "leap forward" that might or can occur, especially given the growing governmental fear of anything sufficiently reliable and energy-efficient, such as the Diesel engine.
I am surprised that given the countries' geographical sizes, the US and Canada have not gone in for high-speed trains, such as used in Japan (who exploited a British invention the UK's politicians and money-traders were too afraid or ignorant to embrace) and France.
The UK is building what it calls HST2 (High-Speed Train 2) to bring London within commuting distance of the English Midlands and North. It's hard to justify in a physically compact country - Birmingham is only about 200 miles from London, Leeds about 300 - but it would suit continental distances as in North America.
Kittigate suggests replacing conventional physics with quantum. Well, for "quantum" read "nuclear". Quantum physics describes how atoms work. In effect this is already done where transport systems use electricity generated in nuclear power-stations. You cannot break any of the laws of physics: it takes a definite quantity of energy to accelerate from rest and keep moving, a given mass against given resistances. That is so irrespective of transport type, load, speed or energy source.
Norway is heading for near-universal battery or hybrid cars. The UK Government wants the same, but most politicians seem barely unable to understand why fuel, power and energy are not synonyms. At the very least they have not bothered to think how it can possibly work for a very large part of the population in a country whose geographical, meteorological, population-density, housing and road constraints probably vary far more than in any other country over the same area Britain occupies: the mainland would fit a rectangle roughly 800 X 300 miles.
I think the future for transport is not going to be some magical new big technical development - all possibly or actually feasible ways are being used or are being investigated. Even battery-electric vehicles are not new: they were being built in the 1900s but thanks to their contemporary technical limits, the petrol engine soon made them almost obsolete. The new ones are simply developments of them based on new battery and motor developments, not revolutionary leaps forwards.
As I said above you cannot break the Laws of Physics hence of the question's subject: Engineering. (I don't use the vapid, debased and essentially meaningless "T- word"!)
I believe the future is going to be a great social, not technical, move; to times when personal journeys in your own vehicle will become limited to commuting and short trips not far from home. Even these will be very difficult or impossible for many, in a good many developed countries. Public transport might rise to the challenge if allowed and encouraged suitably, but faces considerable problems of political, funding, geographical and engineering limits. Altogether, these will have profound social, commercial and national-economic effects, but so far it looks as if few of those paid to understand such things to beyond my lay level (and certainly beyond that of most politicians, journalists and environmental campaigners) have considered this.
Kittigate 