History Main / FuturisticSuperhighway

* ''ComicBook/GhostRider2099'' takes this UpToEleven with Transverse City, which extends all the way from Chicago to Detroit. There are no buildings there; only long roads with countless lanes, and the vehicles range from ordinary cars to flying motorcycles to what are essentially mini-cities on wheels. You can find a car version of ''anything'', from luxury hotels to company headquarters to "stop and dine" restaurants. And ''nothing. Ever. Stops.''

* You can build these in ''VideoGame/CitiesSkylines'' with a "Road Anarchy" mod[[note:mods that remove restrictions for placing roads, unlocking unlimited height in the process]] and the right highway mods.

With all of these new changes, it only makes sense that highways and major roadways and traffic patterns change with them. Usually, the most noticeable difference that can be observed almost immediately tends to be how mass-transit roads tend to be a lot wider to accommodate for the increased traffic in the future society; very tall highways with more than 8 lanes to accommodate for two-way travel are not uncommon. Other advancements tend to incorporate magnets and magnetism in various ways to aid in a future car's ability to drive itself, maintain safe distances from other cars to prevent accidents, and/or allow cars to do impossible things like drive upside-down or vertically up walls.

Likewise, road vehicles tend to change with the times, too. A modern daily driving car can easily rival a 60 years old sports car in speed and handling, and modern freight trucks can easily move much heavier loads than their older counterparts; therefore, by extrapolation, most futuristic vehicles will be able to reach average speeds of upwards of 200 km/h or 120 mph, and futuristic freight trucks tend to be more than twice their normal sizes by today's standards. A lot of wheeled vehicles may also come with an AI computer on board that can drive the car by itself. Lastly, it goes without saying that [[FlyingCar a lot of future cars will also fly]].

Likewise, various road vehicles tend to change with the times, too. New fuel and engine technology can typically allow most vehicles to reach average speeds of upwards of a few hundred miles/kilometers per hour and freight trucks tend to be more than twice their normal sizes by today's standards. A lot of wheeled vehicles may also come with an AI computer on board that can drive the car by itself. Lastly, it goes without saying that [[FlyingCar a lot of future cars will also fly]].

With all of these new changes, it only makes sense that highways and major roadways and traffic patterns change with them. Usually, the most noticeable difference that can be observed almost immediately tends to be how mass-transit roads tend to be a lot wider to accommodate for the increased traffic in the future society; highways with more than 8 lanes to accommodate for two-way travel are not uncommon. Other advancements tend to incorporate magnets and magnetism in various ways to aid in a future car's ability to drive itself, maintain safe distances from other cars to prevent accidents, and/or allow cars to do impossible things like drive upside-down or vertically up walls.

* In the french scifi comic "Gipsy" the growing hole in the ozone layer has made air travel too dangerous, resulting in the creation of huge highways across the world. The main character drives one the huge big rigs that haul freight across the planet.

** Miles upon miles of vast, well-lit, underground tunnels long enough and wide enough to accommodate entire freeways; the clash between Spooner and the two truckfuls of USR robots is taking place at fairly high speeds and takes quite a while, which means they've all been travelling quite the distance. It's implied high-speed freeways in Chicago at least are mostly if not fully underground, whilst the ground level is for pedestrians and slower traffic, in addition to the historic elevated trains. (RealLife inner-city Chicago does already have multiple levels of roads in places—not just freeways, mind you, but avenues in the city centre itself.)

** Miles upon miles of vast, well-lit, underground tunnels long enough and wide enough to accommodate entire freeways; the clash between Spooner and the two truckfuls of USR robots is taking place at fairly high speeds and takes quite a while, which means they've all been travelling quite the distance. (RealLife inner-city Chicago does already have multiple levels of roads in places—not just freeways, mind you, but avenues in the city centre itself.)

** Miles upon miles of vast, well-lit, underground tunnels long enough and wide enough to accommodate entire freeways; the clash between Spooner and the two truckfuls of USR robots is taking place at fairly high speeds and takes quite a while, which means they've all been travelling quite the distance.

* Stage 1 Neo Hong Kong City, Scene 4 from ''VideoGame/{{Strider}} 2'' pits Hiryu against the [[SiblingTeam Kuniang Team]] as they fight on top of aircars speeding around the airspace of a SkyscraperCity.

* Stage 1 Neo Hong Kong City, Scene 4 from ''VideoGame/{{Strider}} 2'' pits [[TheProtagonist Hiryu]] against the [[SiblingTeam Kuniang Team]] as they fight on top of aircars speeding around the airspace of a SkyscraperCity.

* ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'''s Mega-City One includes a great number of different highway transit systems with average speed limits typically being over 200 MPH. The longest and widest of of these, the Superslab, is suggested as spanning the entire length of the city from north to south with a dozen traffic lanes in each direction. The very first strip in ''ComicBook/TwoThousandAD'' featured Dredd sentencing a criminal to Devil's Island--a prison set up on a large traffic island in the middle of the Big Meg's inter-city highway complex with no need for walls because busy traffic is constantly moving at speeds of up to 250 MPH all day and all night, guaranteeing instant death for anyone who tries to escape.

* In the Volume 1 ''Comicbook/{{Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles|Mirage}}'' story ''Sky Highway'', while set in an alternate dimension rather than a future Earth, this trope comes into play, as the Turtles and Casey Jones find themselves pursuing a group of mutants who have stolen their car, in a high speed chase on top of a floating highway in the sky of an alien world.

** All cars, including trucks, also drive on spheres instead of wheels, allowing them to move in a direction different from where the vehicle is facing. Makes parallel parking a lot easier. That is, if they parked their cars, which they don't. They put cars in garages that look like the dry cleaners coat rack. Better hope all your items are secured.

* The sections of ''Film/TotalRecall2012'' set in the United Federation of UsefulNotes/{{Britain}} show UsefulNotes/{{London}} with an additional metropolis built on stilts above it, with a multi-layered system of roads threaded around. Ascending and descending between tiers seems to be via special elevators. Oh, and the cars can either float slightly above the surface of the roadways, or hover suspended from the underside, doubling the capacity. This is in addition to the normal roads below and {{FutureCopter}}s around.

** ''Literature/ToSailBeyondTheSunset'' mentions in passing a network of high-speed superhighways where all of the cars were computer controlled to avoid human-error-induced accidents. At one point, a couple of characters mention the computer in their car was on the fritz, so they had to drive the old fashioned way, causing the trip to take far far longer.

* In the ''[[Videogame/{{X}} X-Universe]]'', travel is a slow affair courtesy of ships that often can barely reach highway speed. [[MegaCorp Jonferco]]'s slipstream "highways" first seen in ''X3: Albion Prelude'' and functional in ''Videogame/XRebirth'' completely revolutionized travel, allowing ships to accelerate to stupendous speeds to easily travel between different points of interest in planetary orbit or travel to completely different planets within a solar system. Where ships once had to drift to their destination for hours on end, now they are flung from point to point at a not-insignificant fraction of the speed of light in densely packed three dimensional energy slipstreams that can fit a dozen ships across.

** Highways return in ''X4: Foundations'', albeit with far less prominence due to backlash; most systems are traversed with a new "Travel drive" that ships can activate outside of combat to boost their max speed. However, like ''Home Of Light'', there is a massive highway "ring" that circles the center of the gate network, with highways feeding straight through a jumpgate to another highway light years away, allowing ships to traverse the major systems in a matter of minutes.

* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' all cars are hovercars, so there are skylanes along with regular ground roads. In "Bendin' In The Wind" the Golden Gate Bridge is now a hoverbridge, so it doesn't need an actual road on it... which is a problem, since the gang is on a 20th Century VW Microbus. Intergalactic trucking routes and railroads are also present, and "Rebirth", the first episode after the series was UnCancelled, features the Panama Wormhole.

* In the 1930's Le Corbusier designed and lobbied for his 'Plan for Algiers' which included a city-spanning concrete motorway running across the roof of a viaduct-like megastructure that would house 180,000 residents. He never convinced anyone to go ahead with the idea, which was just as well [[HistoryMarchesOn given Algeria's subsequent war for independence]].

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* ''Literature/TheCavesOfSteel'' had the strips, localways, and Expressway, the first being a series of progressively faster (or slower, depending on which direction you're going) moving walkways and the latter two being sort of a cross between high-speed moving walkways and perpetually moving and unending trams or trains. Interestingly, there were also more conventional underground motorways, but given the near total lack of cars, they're largely abandoned and used only by the emergency services.

[[folder:Comics]]

[[folder:Film]]

* ''Film/{{Metropolis}}'' featured some eleven lanes of traffic on the ground (remarkably prescient for some cities) and some absurdly high elevated roadways and railways.

* ''[[Literature/{{Lensman}} First Lensman]]''. In the BigApplesauce of the future, Lensman Virgil Samms drives his gyro-stabilised two-wheeler onto the Wright Skyway, a limited-access superhighway with a maze of feeder ramps running all the way up the skyscraper he's working in, and higher (presumably exits for {{Flying Car}}s). The only problem is learning to ignore the [[AdvertOverloadedFuture bombardment of very noisy advertising]].

* Creator/RobertAHeinlein:
** ''Literature/ToSailBeyondTheSunset'' mentions in passing a network of high-speed superhighways where all of the cars were computer controlled to avoid human-error-induced accidents. At one point, a couple of characters mention the computer in their car was on the fritz, so they had to drive the old fashioned way, causing the trip to take far far longer.
** In the short story "The Roads Must Roll", cars have become obsolete altogether. People and goods are carried on vast rolling belts that travel from one city to the next. It's very similar to the ''Caves of Steel'' example above.

* ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'' allows you to build "magtubes" once you finish the Magnetic Monopole research. They function like ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}}'''s railroads, allowing instant travel between locations with a continuous magtube path.

[[folder: WesternAnimation]]

[[folder: Real Life]]

* In the 1930's Le Corbusier designed and lobbied for his 'Plan for Algiers' which included a city-spanning concrete motorway running across the roof of a viaduct-like megastructure that would house 180,000 residents. He never convinced anyone to go ahead with the idea which was just as well [[HistoryMarchesOn given Algeria's subsequent war for independence]].

* In the 1930's Le Corbusier designed and lobbied for his 'Plan for Algiers' which included a concrete motorway running across the roof of a viaduct-like megastructure that would house 180,000 residents. He never convinced anyone to go ahead with the idea which was just as well [[HistoryMarchesOn given Algeria's subsequent war for independence]].

* In the 1930's Le Corbusier designed and lobbied for his 'Plan for Algiers' which included a concrete motorway running across the roof of a viaduct-like megastructure that would house 180,000 residents. He never convinced anyone to go ahead with the idea which was just as well [[HistoryMarchesOn given Algiers subsequent war for independence]].

* In the 1930's Le Corbusier designed and lobbied for his 'Plan for Algiers' which included a concrete motorway running across the roof of a viaduct-like megastructure that would house 180,000 residents. He never convinced anyone to go ahead with the idea which was just as well [[HistoryMarchesOn given Algier's subsequent war for independence]].

* In the 1930's Le Corbusier designed and lobbied for his 'Plan for Algiers' which included a concrete motorway running across the roof of a viaduct-like megastructure that would house 180,000 residents. He never convinced anyone to go ahead with the idea [[HistoryMarchesOn which was just as well]].

* In the 1930's Le Corbusier designed and lobbied for his 'Plan for Algiers' which included a concrete motorway running across the roof of a viaduct-like megastructure that would house 180,000 residents. He never convinced anyone to go ahead with the idea [[HistoryEnsues which was just as well]].

%% [[folder: Real Life]]
%% * Japan's highways are a prime example of this.
%% [[/folder]]

* Stage 1 Neo Hong Kong City, Scene 4 from ''VideoGame/{{Strider}} 2'' pits [[TheProtagonist Hiryu]] against the [[SiblimgTeam Kuniang Team]] as they fight on top of aircars speeding around the airspace of a SkyscraperCity.

%% ZeroContextExample entries are not allowed on wiki pages. All such entries have been commented out. Add context to the entries before uncommenting them.

** In the short story "The Roads Must Roll", cars have become obsolete altogether. People and goods are carried on vast rolling belts that travel from one city to the next.

* ''Literature/TheCavesOfSteel'' had the strips, localways and Expressway, the first being a series of progressively faster (or slower, depending on which direction you're going) moving walkways and the latter two being sort of a cross between high-speed moving walkways and perpetually moving and unending trams or trains. The protagonists, [[AndroidsAndDetectives Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw]], briefly get involved in a chase scene. Interestingly, there were also more conventional underground motorways, but given the near total lack of cars, they're largely abandoned and used only by the emergency services.