A TED2013 attendee takes a ride on a Boosted Board. Photo: Michael Brands

When engineering grad students Sanjay Dastoor, John Ulmen and Matthew Tran met at Stanford University, they lamented the fact that there was no good way to get around campus. And so, they invented one: a longboard skateboard fashioned with an electric motor.

Sanjay Dastoor: A skateboard, with a boostIn today’s talk, given at TED2013, the three give demo their Boosted Boards — which charge off a wall outlet, run for 1,000 kilometers on a dollar’s worth of electricity and are powerful enough to go up the famous hills of San Francisco at 10 miles per hour. They are small enough to be carried in hand and have a battery range of six miles.

“That covers half of the car trips in U.S. alone,” explains Dastoor.

It’s a fascinating concept — one that would make any skateboard-enthusiast a happy commuter. To see the boards in action, watch this high-energy talk. And below, see several more unusual vehicles that could someday greatly improve the morning commute.

A car that folds
Mentioned in Kent Larson’s TEDx Talk “Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city,” the Hiriko is a tiny two-person vehicle that folds in order to minimize its parking footprint. Three of these small vehicles can fit into one traditional parking space — which would greatly alleviate one of the biggest hassles of car ownership. As the Hiriko website explains, these vehicles are 100% electric and maneuver by spinning — which is just really cool.

An electric bike with handlebars that become a lock
Several electric bicycles are already on the market, even though they aren’t legal in every city. However, the nCycle is a particularly stylish and smart approach to the concept, which design blog Core77 brought to our attention. Designed with its battery inside a space-age frame, it’s meant to be both sturdy and lightweight. It’s handlebars morph into a lock and it has speakers in the back headlights.

A motorcycle meets a unicycle
Another design created for urban commuters, the RYNO (left) is a singe-wheel scooter that looks like something a gang in a sci-fi film would ride. Expected to go into production this year, this vehicle runs on a battery that takes an hour and a half to charge, and lets riders go, go, go for about 20 miles, according to Discovery.com. This vehicle self-balances, but if you want the security of a second wheel — the BMW Halbo (right) may be the vehicle for you.

A swing for the subway
A group of Washington D.C. Metro riders caused quite a stir when they posted this video of their “Metro Swing” on Vimeo in 2011. The swing attaches to the metal bars of the Metro, and allows anyone to make their own seat and — if there’s room — to channel their inner 5-year-old by swinging. Though it appears to be farce, they should consider manufacturing it.

A gyroscopic wheel for one
The Yamaha Wheel Rider looks like it could be a flying saucer. Only instead of moving through the air on its flat face, it rolls along the road on its edge, a la a tire. As The New Ecologist shares, this concept vehicle was designed by Yuji Fujimura and the fin in the back contains its turn signals. An even more beautiful version of a similar idea — Sanu K R’s personal transport system, which the designer tells Gizmag drives via a joystick and stays upright thanks to gyroscopic sensors.

The personal jetpack
It’s not at all a cheap option — it costs a reported $100,000. But in September of 2012, The Daily Mail told the tale of a British businessman who used a jetpack to travel 40 miles up the Thames to work. This man imported his jetpack from manufacturer JetLev. And this futuristic turn reminds us of Yves Rossy’s TED Talk, “Flying with the Jetman.”

And a Boosted Boards bonus shot: Jim Carrey tests out the board at TED2013. This shot was snapped by Tony Hawk who wrote on Instagram, “Came to #TED2013 for @amandapalmer, stayed to see Jim Carrey ride an electric skateboard (aka@boostedboards). My life is [still] weird.”

On March 1 — just two days after Elon Musk appeared on the TED2013 stage — a SpaceX CRS-2 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission for the International Space Station. Two days later, after the righting of a glitch, its Dragon capsule delivered a half-ton of supplies for the astronauts on board. And four days after that, the SpaceX Grasshopper had its most successful test to date. This reusable rocket launched 80 feet in the air, hovered for about 34 seconds and returned once again to the center of its launch pad.

Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ...So how did Musk, the cofounder of PayPal, get involved in space travel?

“It was from the standpoint of: What are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be exciting and inspiring? There’s a fundamental difference between a humanity that’s a space-faring civilization — that is out there exploring the stars and on multiple planets — compared to one where we are forever confined to Earth,” Musk says in today’s TED Talk, a conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson. “The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization: to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket.”

Musk’s company has slashed the cost of rockets by, they say, up to 75 percent, nudging us toward the idea of human life being multiplanetary. But this isn’t his only endeavor that could change our relationship to travel. Musk is also the mind behind Tesla Motors, which builds electric cars, and SolarCity, a solar-power firm.

“I think it’s extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. The overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century,” Musk says in today’s talk. “You have to come up with a really energy-efficient car, which means you have to make it incredibly light … We actually applied rocket design techniques to make the car light, despite the large battery pack.”

To hear more about Musk’s vision for the electric car, solar energy and commercial space travel, as well as his thoughts on how his divergent companies actually make sense together, watch this intriguing conversation. And here, more talks from visionaries in the field of transportation on what we might see in the not-too-distant future.

• Chris Gerdes: The future race car — 150 mph, and no driver
• Anna Mracek Dietrich: A plane you can drive
• Bertrand Piccard: A solar-powered aircraft
• Yves Behar’s supercharged motorcycle design
• Sebastian Thrun: Google’s driverless car
• Dennis Hong: Making a car for blind drivers
• Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock
• Robin Chase: Excuse me, may I rent your car?
• Kent Larson: Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city
• Burt Rutan sees the future of space
• Bill Stone: I’m going to Mars. You coming?

Watch the TED playlist “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” »

And see 5 fascinating cars of the future »

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

The cofounder of PayPal, Elon Musk has become one of his generation’s most aggressive, not to mention successful, entrepreneurs. As CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and CEO and CTO of SpaceX, his interests clearly lie in transforming transportation and creating an economy built on sustainable energy. Now he takes the TED stage to tell us more.

First, he talks about the genesis of Tesla, his realization while still at university that the development of a sustainable energy system is critical to the ongoing existence of humanity — and therefore a problem worth tackling. And while, yes, these cars require being fed by current electrical systems, his belief is that given the inevitability of electric transportation, perhaps Tesla cars will help to kickstart the genuinely sustainable system necessary to support it. “All modes of transport will become electric, with the ironic exception of rockets. There’s no way around Newton’s third law,” he says. “So the question is how you create a really energy efficient car.” In Tesla’s case, the key is to make it incredibly light, with an aluminum chassis and body made in North America. “We applied rocket design techniques to make the car light, despite the large battery pack.”

Musk clearly isn’t going to talk about his recent spat with the New York Times, but he does want to talk about the range of the car. “Customers of the Model S are competing with each other to get the highest possible range,” he says. 420 miles is apparently the record, though he acknowledges that 250 miles on a single charge is a more likely number. But what he truly loves about the Tesla is the driver experience. “The responsiveness is incredible,” he says. “We want people to feel a mind-meld with the car, that you and the car are one. As you corner, accelerate, it just happens. It’s like the car has ESP.”

But Musk isn’t just here to talk about Tesla. Another string to his energy bow: SolarCity, a company harnessing the power of the “giant fusion generator in the sky,” the sun. Why solar? “I’m confident solar will beat everything hands down, including natural gas. If it doesn’t, we’re in deep trouble.” With this company, Musk is attempting to create no less than a giant, distributed utility, leasing solar panels to homes and companies. “Utilities have been this monopoly and people haven’t had a choice. It’s the first time they have had competition,” he says. “It’s empowering.”

And so to SpaceX, a project Musk jokes might well prove to be the fastest way he can lose his fortune. Despite setbacks, they persist, and when he says the goal of the company is to advance rocket technology and convert humanity into a spacefaring civilization, it’s hard to laugh him off. Especially when he challenges us to consider which we’d prefer: Exploring other planets, or confining ourselves to earth and eventual, inevitable extinction.

The real innovation of SpaceX is to build a reusable rocket. The Space Shuttle was an attempt at this, he says, but it took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish a rocket for a flight, at a cost of about $1 billion per flight. That’s not a sustainable business model, and in the past few months Musk and his team have made good progress in designing a rocket that can take off — and land again safely. He shows video of a test, a 12-story-high rocket taking off, hovering at 40 meters, and then magically landing again. The audience is appropriately impressed. Even more so when he tells us that none of the design innovations in the rocket are patented. “Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable,” he says wryly.

As to how he manages it all, he has three tips for would-be innovators. First, work a lot. Secondly, study physics and learn how to reason from first principles rather than reason by analogy. Finally, he says, pay attention to negative feedback, particularly from friends. “That may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that,” he concludes.

This interview with 60 Minutes from June 2012 is well worth a watch:

Ancient clues
Five fascinating talks by archaeologists and evolutionary biologists about humanity’s beginnings and journey.

Planes, trains and automobiles
Drive a plane? Race a car with your eyes closed? Fly? 11 innovators in transportation show that getting from point A to point B doesn’t have to be boring.

Are we alone in the universe?
Can it really be possible that Earth is only life-sustaining planet in existence? These 5 speakers think there might just be something or someone else out there, and urge us not to stop the search.

It’s an experience that can inspire road rage in even the calmest person: an urban traffic jam where cars crawl along at a pace of inches per hour.  As Jonas Eliasson, a professor of transportation at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), explains in today’s talk, traffic congestion occurs in almost every major city across the globe, despite constant efforts to dissolve it.

At TEDxHelvetia, Eliasson suggests a subtle approach — give people small incentives not to drive on crowded roadways at peak hours. Why not do more? Because keeping just a small percentage of drivers off the roads is enough to clear traffic.

Eliasson gives an example from his hometown, Stockholm. In January of 2006, the city instituted a pilot test of charging a small tax—just one or two Euros—for vehicles to cross the city’s main bridges, which bottleneck because they are very narrow. With the new tax, traffic on the bridges dropped by 20% almost instantly, leaving the roadways clear. When the pilot test ended in July of the same year, traffic returned the very next day—along with traffic jams.

In surveying drivers, Eliasson noticed an interesting pattern. When congestion pricing was first introduced, 70% of people opposed the tax. However, over the next few months, support quickly grew to 70% wanting to keep the tax. Almost no one felt that they were being inconvenienced.

“You have to admire car drivers, they adapt so extremely quickly … Each day people make new decisions,” says Eliasson. “Each day all of these decisions are nudged ever so slightly away from rush hour driving in a way people don’t even notice.”

To hear more about how congestion taxes can work, watch Eliasson’s talk. And after the jump, watch seven more talks with powerful ideas that might change our commutes.

Robin Chase on Zipcar and her next big idea
Robin Chase revolutionized the car rental game with Zipcar, making it possible to rent a car for just a few hours. In this talk from TED2007, she rings a warning bell that fuel-efficient cars aren’t enough to solve our climate crisis. She gives a suggestion for how to truly transform the way we relate to our vehicles—road pricing to inspire efficiency and carpooling.

Anna Mracek Dietrich: A plane you can drive
Human beings have wanted to create a flying car for the past 100 years. So why has there been no real breakthrough yet? In this talk from TEDGlobal 2011, pilot Anna Mracek Dietrich shares how she and her team approached the problem from a different angle: why not make a plane that can be driven on the road, thanks to foldable wings?

Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock
Bill Ford’s great-grandfathers were Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. And yet, he’s hugely concerned about what will happen as more and more cars flood our roads. In this talk from TED2011, Ford introduces us to “smart roads,” “smart parking” and “smart public transportation”—all of which can communicate with each other, and with drivers to help them make better decisions. The hidden benefit: saving fuel and the environment. 

Gary Lauder’s new traffic sign: Take turns
Roundabouts are far superior to stop signs when it comes to preventing accidents and saving gas. In this short talk from TED2010, Gary Lauder suggests a less costly approach—“Take Turns” signs that combine the best of “stop” and “yield.”

Sebastian Thrun: Google’s driverless car
Yes, Google’s driverless car looks cool in demonstrations. But the real purpose is to reduce accidents. In this talk from TED2011, Sebastian Thrun of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab shares his personal quest to save a million lives a year with this new technology.

Kent Larson: Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city
In this talk from TEDxBoston, Kent Larson imagines a new way to park in cities—with a folding car that pilots itself and takes up just 1/7th of the space of a traditional vehicle. This innovation would mean that far fewer parking lots would be needed to serve a much greater number of people. 

Shai Agassi: A new ecosystem for electric cars
The entire country could be oil-free by 2020, says Shai Agassi. In this talk from TED2009, he shares a fascinating plan — a network of battery-charging and battery-swapping stations that can charge electric cars while they are parked and on the go. As it works out, stopping for a battery change would still be less frequent than stopping for gas.

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Navigating around big cities is rarely easy. Subway systems are generally crowded and unreliable, taxis are often expensive and prone to gridlock and bike lanes remain underdeveloped in too many urban areas.

But Sara Cantor and George Aye, the founders of Chicago’s Greater Good Studio, have an idea to make getting around their city at least a little bit easier. Aye, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago and former designer for the Chicago Transit Authority, and Cantor, a professor of design and former research director at Information Architects, are working on an app they hope will greatly improve on HopStop. They are currently designing a transportation app that will not only remind users of line closures, but will show them where to pick up a coffee along their route or remind them to bring an umbrella if rain is in the forecast. The app they envision could design a route to avoid staircases for someone with an injured ankle, or tell a user if they should take the crowded bus in front of them or wait a few minutes for a bus with a seat. The app will be created through crowdsourcing, with self-designated “Urban Agents” feeding data into the application to make it work.

Cantor and Aye’s project, Designing Chicago, has just been named the latest winner of The City 2.0 award.

In 2012, the TED Prize was bestowed upon an idea rather than an individual — The City 2.0, an online platform for the sharing of ideas to make cities function better. The $100,000 prize was broken into 10 grants of $10,000 each, to be given to a variety of projects spanning areas like transportation, education, housing, health, public space and food. So far, seven of the grants have been given out.

To suggest a project for one of the final three City 2.0 awards, nominate it through The City 2.0 website.