Tonight I was walking my dogs with my daughter and wife. There was a light drizzle and cars flashed by, an absurd level of risk to pedestrians that I'm confident future generations will look askance at. I was reflecting about how many teens in the foothills where I live take e-bikes everywhere and how E-VTOL "flying taxis" (basically giant drones capable to taking people places) are rapidly becoming a thing. Those twin emergent realities offer a glimpse of the near future. I asked one of my bots to pen together what that future could look like. See below and I hope you enjoy!

Imagine this: no more asphalt rivers threading through suburbia, no more crumbling potholes, no more endless debates over street repaving budgets. Instead, picture a patchwork of gravel lanes, lightly worn by neighborhood bikes and delivery bots, while overhead the air hums with electric vertical takeoff and landing (EVTOL) vehicles ferrying people across the urban archipelago. The age of asphalt, that quiet backdrop of modern life, may be closer to its sunset than we dare admit.

Asphalt isn’t just expensive—it’s heavy with second-order costs. It accelerates stormwater runoff, contributes to the heat island effect, and locks us into a paradigm of car-centric planning. But if EVTOLs deliver on their promises, we’re no longer tethered to that old geometry of surface-bound movement. Suddenly, the street ceases to be a necessity for daily transportation and becomes—what, exactly? A local commons? A recreational path? A post-infrastructure artifact?

This scrambles the Official Future that city planners have been sketching for decades. For generations, the urban planning imagination has been bound up in modes: cars, buses, bikes, pedestrians—all vying for space on asphalt. EVTOLs don’t just reshuffle the modal deck; they lift the game into the sky, where land use priorities collapse and recompose in ways that will challenge zoning codes, environmental regulations, and equity frameworks.

Here’s the catch: absent substantial reform, it will be messy. Very messy. We risk layering a cutting-edge mobility technology atop a brittle, inequitable, and often incoherent regulatory substrate. Without reform, we’ll see the worst version of technological disruption: a patchwork of privilege, where affluent enclaves zip above the gridlock while working-class neighborhoods endure neglected ground infrastructure. The planning profession, already grappling with a crisis of legitimacy, may find itself hopelessly behind if it clings to 20th-century assumptions about streets and public space.

And then there’s the wildcard: gravel. Gravel isn’t just cheaper—it’s looser, more provisional. It invites a posture of flexibility, experimentation, and even humility in how we design neighborhood environments. In a world of flying taxis, maybe the best street isn’t a perfectly engineered surface but a canvas of possibility, ready to adapt as human patterns shift.

What would it mean to move from the tyranny of asphalt to the freedom of gravel and air? To rethink the street not as a static conduit but as a dynamic, living space? And what governance tools, what public technologies, do we need to steward that transition wisely?

The future of streets is up for grabs. Let’s not pave over the chance to dream.