Someday, we’ll supposedly be able to zoom from one city to the next in no time flat thanks to the Hyperloop, but that day is not today. Elon Musk’s high-speed transit system Hyperloop One has been successfully tested, and promises to cut the 400-mile trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco down to just 30 minutes, but it’ll take it a while to get off the ground. In the meantime, our options are still limited to air travel, personal vehicles, trains and buses. Buses are easily accessible and cheap, but they cost a whole lot of time and discomfort instead.

If you’ve ever taken an inter-city bus trip, you know how it goes. More often than not, you’re crammed in with dozens of other people, breathing stale air, hoping the person coughing next to you won’t get you sick. Even worse, inter-city bus travel is notoriously inefficient, requiring a lot of stops and ultimately taking a lot longer than it would if you were driving a car. Ever wish you could just block out your surroundings and sleep through it without drooling on somebody’s shoulder?

A new service called ‘Cabin’ aims to bridge the gap between bus travel and air travel with comfortable one-person sleeping pods, so you get your own private little area in which to stretch out and lay down during a long drive. The company bills itself as “the dreamiest way to travel between LA and SF,” acting as a hotel on wheels that transports you to your destination while you’re sleeping.

The company worked with hospitality architects to “completely reinvent the bus as we know it,” outfitting each pod with hotel-like amenities like free wi-fi, fresh bedding, complimentary water, tea, coffee, earplugs and even a melatonin supplement to help you fall asleep.

With a round-trip cost of $230 to get back and forth between San Francisco and LA, Cabin definitely isn’t the cheapest option; you can take a Bolt bus for just $50, and many airlines offer routes between the cities for as low as $69 each way. But we all know how much comfort airlines have sacrificed in recent years to keep their costs down, and an air trip with a pod this cozy would cost many times that amount. Plus, there’s no dealing with airports, hidden fees or traffic.

The future of inter-city travel will likely include self-driving vehicles and highway trains, but for now, this seems like a pretty cool option, especially for people who feel particularly stressed about flying. Cabin launched last year as SleepBus, and after a highly successful test run, raise $3.3 million to continue, with plans to expand to the East Coast.

If you’re that person who’s always asking for a ride or help moving, or you’re just too crazy busy to go grocery shopping or clean your own house, there’s a range of apps that could make your life a whole lot easier. Moving beyond the usual suspects like Uber and Amazon Prime Now, these city-centric apps streamline urban lifestyles, giving you assistance with things like transit planning, sharing rides, choosing a place to live, hiring people to assemble your IKEA furniture or getting liquor delivered to your doorstep.

Via Ride-Sharing App

Based in New York City, Via is a cab alternative in the vein of Lyft and Uber, but offers ride sharing, so you get into a car full of multiple passengers and pay less. The service charges a flat $5 fee for each of the first five rides and $7 thereafter (or still $5, if you buy the rides in advance.) Passengers are asked to meet their drivers on a street corner instead of being picked up at a specific location, and if you’re late, you have to wait for the next vehicle. It may not be the fastest way to get somewhere if you’re in a hurry, but it’s a cool alternative to city buses for everyday rides.

Urban Engines App

Which public transit route should you take at rush hour to avoid slowdowns? How did last night’s storm affect light rail service? Depending on what’s going on in the world, the flow of traffic changes. The Urban Engines app takes a variety of data points in big cities like Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Toronto and Los Angeles and uses them to determine which routes are best at which times. Best of all, it has an X-ray mode function that superimposes maps, bus or train routes and stops over the city as viewed through the camera lens of your phone, so you can easily find stops around you. It also continues working when there’s no mobile service as long as it has the right maps downloaded, so it won’t cut out underground.

Instacart App

Get groceries delivered from local stores (maybe even ones that aren’t included with Amazon Prime Now’s similar app service) via Instacart. The whole process is surprisingly fast, partially due to the fact that Instacart typically reserves its own checkout aisle at each participating store, ushering its shoppers through the lines. It’s pretty ideal for those times when you just can’t be bothered to leave the house (like when you’re sick, suffering from a hangover, or just really busy.)

Drizly App

Who doesn’t want wine, beer and liquor delivered to their door on demand? Drizly is an alcohol delivery app partnered with liquor stores in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, D.C. and other cities, with a goal of building the biggest online catalog of booze available for delivery in the U.S.

Hello Alfred App

These days, you can even order housekeeping and butler services on demand. ‘Hello, Alfred’ is an app that connects you to ‘carefully vetted’ helpers who visit your home once a week according to your desired schedule, doing chores like cleaning, grocery shopping, picking up dry cleaning and shipping your packages.

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Whatever You Need On Demand 10 Apps That Streamline Urban Life

Two-person monorail pods zoom down from the sky at a command from your smart phone in a futuristic commercial transit system set to be installed in Israel. The on-demand system appears to be a realistic answer to the age-old objection lobbed against public transportation by lovers of the personal vehicle: buses, trains and subways don’t work around your own schedule.

Not only can you just walk up to the monorail station and hop right onto your own personal pod without having to share your space with strangers – this monorail technology is far more advanced than a vehicle that the average person could ever own. And it’s not just a concept dazzling the internet for a few days before it’s forgotten, destined to someday become a laughable unrealized vision of the retro-future. Or so it seems.

SkyTran Inc. has signed an agreement to build an actual high-speed levitating monorail system at the Israel Aerospace Industry campus in Lod, Israel. Suspended 20 feet above the ground, the hovering maglev-based monorail handily solves traffic problems by whizzing over the streets at high speeds.

Of course, the question is, will it catch on? Plenty of cool ideas were constructed as temporary demonstrations, but were never actually reproduced for public use. It’s hard to say, but it’s an interesting compromise, and passive magnetic levitation technology is poised to become an efficient and sustainable way to get around big cities.

Far from the stereotype of a dark and grungy underground space where you don’t want to touch anything with your bare hands, these 15 standout subway stations are practically art galleries. From the gilded Baroque metros of Moscow to the world’s largest glass dome in Taiwan, these transit stations are worth a stop just to take a look around.

Drassanes, Barcelona

An old subway station in Barcelona, built in 1968, was covered with new surfaces to create an entirely new look, with black resin floors and lightweight white glass-reinforced concrete over the walls. The result is bright and clean with pops of color and a much more updated feel.

Radhuset, Stockholm

Stockholm boasts an incredible 90 decorated subway stations, each of which bearing its own unique visual identity. This one, Radhuset (courthouse) was built in 1975, and resembles a bright red cavern.

Westfriedhof, Munich

The dramatic Westfriedhof station in Munich, Germany features eleven large lamps that cast colored lights onto various areas of the platform. The ceiling and walls are just barely illuminated in a deep, dark blue.

Komsomolskaya, Moscow

The busiest transport hub on the Moscow metro is a showcase of Stalinist architecture, with a palatial Baroque theme in bright yellow. It’s one of the most luxurious subway stations in the world, with marble columns, murals and massive chandeliers.

Toledo, Naples, Italy

The stunning Crater of Luz by Oscar Tusquet Blanca is the centerpiece of the Toledo station in Naples, Italy – one of the most art-filled subway lines in the world. The Naples metro features 13 ‘Art Stations’  that aim to give everyone a close-up look at prime examples of contemporary art.

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Underground But Overboard 15 Extreme Subway Stations

A train station envisioned for the town of Sevastopol in Ukraine seems to be perpetually covered in clouds, topped with a light, helium-lifted structure inspired by airships. ‘Under the Cloud‘ consists of a passenger terminal building and a buoyant freeform canopy that hovers over the green roof of the main building.

The canopy shell has an aluminum frame with longitudinal and transverse trusses, the helium gas held inside a rigid framework in bags. With the guy lines securing it, it really does seem as if it could lift away into the sky at any moment.

Says designer Arthur Kupreychuk, “The supporting structure of the canopy is similar to the structure of an airship. The canopy strives upward by buoyancy forces, if its average density is less than the density of the atmosphere.”

What’s the purpose of this canopy? Judging by the designer’s other projects, it may just be for fun. Kupreychuk previously designed The Draft Parking Lot with the Car Service Station, another airship-inspired structure “conceived as the embodiment of the boundless creative thought of an architect, who often must try to restrict it and leave it unfulfilled.” This concept won the distinction of being “the most surreal project designed in ArchiCAD” in 2011.