Solar Concentration

When I was a small child, I loved the game Simcity 2000.  This game, by Maxis, posits you as the mayor of a city, who is tasked with designing the city and helping it grow.  One major factor, which also applies to real life, is energy use, as your city is not satisfied to live in primitive times, and expects electrical service in all structures.   The use over time is also simulated, as a city in 1900 only wants to light up the night, then power grows as radio, television, personal computers, and other things get developed.  Power use tapers off in later years, as the various gadgets get more efficient.
Simulated mayors had multiple options for electricity, just as actual cities do, and each had their advantages and drawbacks.  For example, coal was very cheap, but polluted your city with thick black smoke, and people thought it was sort of ugly, so it was bad for nearby property values.  Nuclear power worried people.  Solar and wind were environmentally friendly, but had low output that sometimes didn't work at all, plunging the entire city into darkness.   Fusion power was the ultimate, but the most interesting option was orbital solar, which the game called "microwave" for some reason.
As described in the flavor text, "microwave" power consisted of having an orbital satellite, which orbited the earth, gathering power in giant solar panels, and firing a power-transmitting laser into a collection dish in your city.  The power plant mostly existed as a place to fire the laser, and convert that laser into power that your city could use.  It was kind of expensive, and the flavor text warned you that the laser could possibly misfire, resulting in some random building (typically near the plant itself, the laser is trying to hit the right spot after all) being baked until it exploded.
 What if we powered cities this way in real life?   The satellite would have to be orbiting the equator, in a geostationary orbit, in order to be in range of the city at all times.  The alternative is to have a large number of satellites, and a complicated schedule establishing a duty cycle, in which the satellite closet to the city is charging the plant, while the others are storing up additional power.  Of course, the satellite would have to store up enough power to fire for 12 hours with no sunlight, because half of the earth is by definition experiencing nighttime.
 It would be green, and fascinating, but also difficult, cumbersome, and with some nasty consequence if anything went wrong whatsoever.  Still a better idea than half the things we're currently doing for power, though.

Will Wheaton's Laser Jackhammer

A while ago on July 13th, Will Wheaton proposed that the jackhammer that was annoying him at the time be replaced with a new system, that would, instead of using a vibrating hammer to break apart the rocks and concrete of the urban jungle, vaporize it with lasers. Mr. Wheaton feels that this would be quieter, which would disturb his work significantly less.

An interesting idea for sure, and it would certainly change urban renewal forever. Unfortunately, it would come with some strange side effects. For one, lasers do not remove the rock so much as heat it to about 1200 degrees, at which time it chemically changes to carbon dioxide and a fine mist of glowing orange chunks of calcium oxide that will instantly ignite everything they touch. Elaborate safety systems will be required to ensure that your construction workers do not routinely set either themselves, or passing pedestrians, on fire. In order to prevent this, a vacuum system will suck the molten rock into sealed containers for later re-use.

The energy use of this system will be somewhat extreme. Just like water, most rocks resist being heated up and cooled down, especially the limestone that a typical city like the kind Mr. Wheaton lives in is made of. A power plant capable of putting out some 50 megawatts, the energy used by an entire block of Mr. Wheaton's city, would be required to keep the lasers firing, the vacuum pulling, and the other safety systems containing the mess. If we just plugged this in, brownouts would be likely, and portable power systems are unlikely to keep up with the load. At least, not without being louder than the original jackhammers were.

Lastly, this system might not be quieter. While the sound would likely be less irritating than the repetitive, machine-gun-esque thumping of a jackhammer, it would almost certainly make a loud whirring noise while in operation. The vacuum pump that pulls the heated rock away makes noise. The power use makes a loud hum. The rock makes sounds as it heats up, and chemically disintegrates, plus if any water hits the rock, it vaporizes with a loud hiss. The noise would be continuous, and almost certainly distracting.

As irritating as the construction is, the jackhammer is unfortunately a better solution for the moment. As one possible improvement though, many jackhammers are gasoline fired, making them unnecessarily loud. Instead, we will replace the gas motor with an electric one, which makes no sound by itself. The jackhammer's only sound is now the metal hammer striking the rock, making a tapping sound as it does so. If we then insulate the office buildings a little better, the sound will become unnoticeable to the people working above.

Solid Tires

When I think about tires, the more I realize how completely weird they are.   Our roads are full of vehicles that ride on inflated air.  Why?  A completely solid tire would cause too much wear on the road, but they're also vulnerable to puncture, deflation, and so on.

There's a number of reasons that we do this.  Tires need to be soft enough to not damage the road that you're driving the car on, provide enough friction to prevent the car from sliding, and hard enough that the engine doesn't get overtaxed by pushing them.  (Deflated tires have a greater resistance to actually turning). 

So the usual solution is to have inflated tires, filled to a set pressure.  (Mine is 35 PSI, about twice atmospheric pressure.)   If driving conditions change, you can inflate it more, for greater gas milage, or less, for more traction.  For instance, in a very sandy road, I might want to deflate my tires to 20PSI to make sure that I don't skid.

However, since basically 100% of my driving is on cement or asphalt roads, which change very little, and puncturing a tire is a severe problem, I was thinking, as a longer lasting solution of a tire that instead of being inflated, was filled with a memory-foam like substance.  This tire could not be punctured, would perpetually remain balanced, and could be used until the treads physically wore off.

On the downside, if you did ever need the characteristics of the tire to change, you'd have to pretty much have to remove all four tires and put on four new ones.

Uranus

Our seventh planet from the sun has been known about since ancient times, but most of the ancients thought it was a star, as only a dim point of light is visible from earth.    In the 1970s, we got our first good look at it, and what we saw was a dull green-grey sphere.   However, this planet has a greater significance.

Uranus is one of the odder planets in the solar system.   It has a much greater axis of rotation, being either 96 or 106 degrees, depending on which of the two definitions you are using.   If you are basing it on the way the planet rotates, and assuming the rightwards based rotation  is the north pole, then it's 106 degrees.  It's the coldest planet in the solar system.  There is one planet further way, Neptune, and the numerous dwarf planets beyond like Pluto, but these have additional internal heat from radioactivity that warm them up.

But soon enough on geological time, Uranus will have to become our home.   In one billion years, our home star will become a red giant star.   The innermost planets will be incinerated, and if we can't move the earth in time, it will be charred into a lifeless glowing rock.   And we too would be baked if we can't move the earth in time.

When the red giant phase is complete, the habitable zone, currently in our orbit, will have moved to the Uranus orbit.   I'd like to believe that we'll move the earth into being a new moon, but in all practicality, we'll probably just abandon the earth and rebuild on the various moons that are already there.

We'll need energy, in greater quantities than I can readily imagine, and technology that I can't even dream of, but we have a billion years to do it.

Voice Controlled Mouse

Computers have made a difference in thousands of people's lives. Partially because of the automation, storage, and processing of information, but partially because it offers an increasing routing around of disabilities, allowing people who used to require an entire fleet of people to function to instead command their computers to do it for them. This seriously reduces the expenses of experiencing a disability.

For example, suppose you lost both your hands in a serious accident. Your life now has serious problems, such as an inability to open doors, dress or wash yourself, and an inability to do huge numbers of jobs out there. But now, you can do some of those things again because you can now control a computer mouse with only your voice.

The program allows you to divide your screen into an arbitrary grid, and then "click" corners of that grid, all by speaking words. Combined with text-to-speech software, a computer can be operated entirely your voice, which would be pretty handy if you for some reason no longer have hands. I can also see this linking up with a domonics system, in which you can command "open door," and it does, "fill the bathtub with 90 degree water," and it happens (this would be the Fahrenheit scale, as 90 degrees Celsius would cause serious burns), "wash my back" and it gets scrubbed down. Within the confines of this type of house, the lack of hands is no longer an obstacle. In the outside world, prosthetics would still be necessary.

This system currently only runs on OSX, but if the applescript component could be ported to Perl, or another openly available language, then this could be ported to other systems as well. Way cool.

Crows Vs. Falcons

In Tokyo, feral crows have become a serious problem. They clog traffic with dropped nuts. They poop on practically everything. They steal food from street vendors. They literally snatch candy from small children, then fly away. The city of Tokyo decided that they might fight back.

While most people would have gone on a crow hunt with firearms, or laid elaborate baited traps, Japan's famous for its odd solutions. In this case, they found a teenage falconry expert and had her pet falcon go hunting.

This has been more effective than expected. The falcon killed a bunch of crows, and the vast majority ran away in terror, deciding that if the humans can call up predators like that, they're probably not worth dealing with. Problem, crows?

Remote Controlled Excavation

In Canada, a man has been excavating his basement. This much is not news. The surprising part is his choice of tools: Remote controlled cars. Every Sunday, he sends down the remote controlled toys, sends them to part of the basement, has them dig, dig, put the dirt into a rock-crushing like machine, in miniature, of course, and haul the dirt to a centralized location for later hauling away. There are two reasons for doing it this way. One, he's a remote-control hobbyist, and has a lot of remote controlled things on hand. Two, the area is not conducive to humans most of the time, reaching temperatures as low as -30C every winter. This system of his gives him an ever-enlarging basement that can be used for storage in his business, all without leaving the heated, comfortable part of his house. Of course, the mad engineering way to do this would be to also automate the direction of the machines, which would then perpetually enlarge the basement according to a central computer's plans. The initial setup would be very very difficult, but thereafter, your basement would slowly grow (downward) with time. Humans might need to occasionally build a floor, stairs, and a ramp for the RC vehicles.

Quadcopter Construction

A popular robot for fun is the Quadcopter, a robotic flying machine that has four helicopter-like rotors, and can do all sorts of aerial maneuvers by varying the speeds of its rotors. And some time ago, someone taught them to build building frameworks. Wait, what?
Discovery News reports that the University of Pennsylvania has developed Quadcopters that can manipulate plastic rods with a magnet on one end into the framework of pretty much any building. The metal end of one rod connects to the magnetic cube on the other, to form extremely solid building frames. Presumably one could finish it off with walls and floors that also attach to those magnets.
Already, people are imagining using these to throw up buildings in a hurry in places where it's impractical to take human construction workers. War zones. Mars. Antarctica. The quadcopters will cheerfully work in all of those places. And given a solar-powered charging station, they can work until they run out of parts. Admittedly, they sound like a swarm of angry bees from hell and being in the vicinity of them would be quite unpleasant, so I don't imagine them working urban construction anytime soon. (Especially because scaled up to the point where they'd make human-sized buildings, the noise would certainly rupture your eardrums.)

Contraflow

Most American cities have some sort of highway system for transportation. Highways are streets that have very high speed limits and offer a sort of right-of-way to the drivers on them, and traveling for a semi-long distance in America is really tricky without one. Most cities' highways dangerously fill up when the workday starts or stops, which is really annoying.
The natural disaster that occurs in my region is hurricanes, and something interesting happens when one is coming. The authorities set up a "contraflow" system for the highways, in which the other direction of a highway is reversed, since all traffic needs to be leaving town at the time. (They come back after the hurricane.) This gave me another idea to defeat the whole rush hour phenomenon.
Highways now are set up evenly divided between the two directions. If a highway has eight lanes, it will have four going in one direction and four going in another. With this, I replace the barriers with a more mobile one, such as slots with metal doors that we can remotely pop up or down, and we divide it six lanes in one direction and two in the other. We switch configurations at noon and midnight. It won't totally solve the problem, but it will now be much much easier to deal with.

Freeway Redundancy

I used to live in Los Angeles. The Westernmost cities of the United States tend to have a grid shape where the terrain permits. There are a lot of advantages to a grid shape, one being that it's much much harder to get lost. Another is that one blockage can always be routed around. The Internet was built on this idea, though in practice it has a lot of choke points.
Then I ended up moving east. The easternmost cities of the United States tend to have roads based on cattle trails, so everything bends and curves around for no apparent reason. And one immediate thing I notice: There are ways around clogs, but they're not always direct. In fact, they often make little to no sense. Except New York. New York is a grid.
Most communication, including transportation, benefits from redundancy. When there's more than one way to do something, no blockage is genuinely possible. You can always go around. This is helped by GPS devices that know where you are, and where the roads are, and how your road can lead to your destination. This is helped more by ones that have live traffic reports, quickly showing to you to the fastest possible route.
Another theory says that traffic grows to fit road capacity.

Cell Tower House

A coworker of mine has a very interesting idea: A house built upon a series of cellular towers. He's experienced with such technology, and knows it comes in various grades, and the strongest grades come with the ability to carry hundreds of tons up hundreds of feet. Perch a small house on four of them. This house is accessible by winch-elevator, which all cell phone towers have because the equipment can weigh over 150 pounds, and no human being is willing to carry that much up what amount to a ladder, by hand.
Slightly over one hundred feet in the air seems like a manifestly insane place to build a house, but there are a lot of good reasons for building it there. For one, it tends to have a good strong wind. Open the windows of this house in the summer, and a cool breeze banishes the excess heat. In the winter, keep it sealed up tight and the sun will pleasantly warm the complex.
For another, security. Cover the support legs in solar panels, and climbing the legs is now impossible. Only the winch elevator can get you in and out, and that you can key so that it only works in your presence (perhaps you have to enter a password to unlock it, or perhaps you need a physical key.) Burgle a house 100 feet in the air? Pffft. Burglers would move on to easier to enter structures. It's also safe in inclement weather: build it strong enough to endure a hurricane, and it's literally the best place in town in case of flooding.
Quality enginering is the key. It needs to start with an excellent base, one well-fit to stand strong and immobile in the local earth. It needs to be built of reasonably high tension materials that won't break when hit with 100MPH winds. It needs to be able to lift 400kg. (Let's say up to 200kg of people, about 3 or 4, and 200kg of cargo, like groceries, furniture, etc.)
For best results, it would also have batteries and pumps, so it could be relatively self sufficient.

Carbon Dioxide Seperator

I want to create a system to flush carbon dioxide from air. Why? I do have a good reason.
"Stuffiness," the sensation commonly found in enclosed rooms with no air circulation, is almost assuredly a carbon dioxide buildup symptom. The air feels oppressive and stale, and one has an immediate urge to try to open a window. One feels drowsy and irritated, and everything smells bad. I know this because as a small child, I used to like to hide under blankets, which would become stuffy in short order, to the point where I started to associate hot air with stuffy and cold air with fresh. The stuffiness was due to poor air circulation: the carbon dioxide of my breath would build up until I exited the blanket.
NASA probably knows a few ways to do this, as it became critically important on space missions. You only have the air you bring with you in space, so it is critical to keep it as fresh as physically possible. Drowsy, confused, astronauts poisoned by their own breath is a bad thing. Their technique involves a rather complicated membrane system performed under pressure.
If I were to invent my own system, I think I would work with the chemical properties of carbon dioxide itself. I can extract it by cooling it off -- carbon dioxide sublimates long long before oxygen precipitates into a liquid. I can extract it with pressure, bringing the carbon dioxide into its liquid state and siphoning it off. I could even extract it with chemical combinations, like Sodium or Potassium Hydroxide, which tend to absorb carbon dioxide until they reach a saturation point, but I'd want an industrial type technique that I could set up and not have to personally fuss with afterwards.
Having installed one of these systems in a house, stuffiness is banished forever. What to do with the carbon dioxide? I can shunt it out of the house, thus getting all the benefits of opening a window without losing all my heating, which is sweet, but for even better works, I can use it as the security system for a greenhouse. The greenhouse is, when no humans are expected inside, flooded with all the carbon dioxide from the house. All pests die. Any intruder dies. It's just plants and a few bacteria, with the plants slowly reoxygenating the place.

Lifting the Low Countries

The low countries of Belgium and the Netherlands, and the Maldives, are quite worried, and justifiably so, about the rising ocean. All three countries are very close to sea level, and parts of the Netherlands were actually reclaimed from the sea at great effort and expense. This post concerns the Netherlands and Belgium the most, as the Maldives can't afford this solution just yet.
I think, starting from the German border, we should carefully record each building's blueprint, demolish it, and rebuild it on poles 60 meters high. We'd also retrofit the plans for things useful to the people, like electricity, phones, central heating and air conditioning, and whatever else could sensibly be installed in the plans, because, well, why not. The streets would be on poles (like a freeway), the houses on poles, with yards on poles. It would be very tall. We'd sweep through the countries doing this until we reached the sea. Then, when the crops are harvested, the dearest plants transplanted, and everyone high and safe, we'd board off the sides and fill the inside with cement to stabilize everything. The low countries would now be the high countries, and would survive the highest sea rise possible.
Expensive, for sure, but I think if national survival were ever on the line, they'd find a way. Also, I think the highness would form a tourist attraction.

Traffic Tech

I was born in Los Angeles, a city with miserable amounts of traffic. Every rush hour, the entire city comes to a standstill, because there are too many cars on the road and they are in each other's way. The slightest slowdown anywhere in the traffic grid makes slow-moving, congested, stop and go traffic lines that go on for miles and miles. A traffic engineer once told me that traffic jams like that start when there is over a critical threshhold of cars, and one of them goes slower than 35MPH on the highway. (That would be 20 - 30 MPH under the limit, a significant slowdown.) Often, this is an accident, reducing at least two cars to 0 MPH and other cars around it to speeds under 20MPH as they slow or stop to gawk.
Most of China's cities are even denser than Los Angeles, and can suffer traffic jams that are longer than the city itself. So there's a big effort to push some of this traffic to busses, trains, and subways. And now on top of that, busses just got a big improvement. Busses may just be one very large car, but it's one very large car that takes so many people around that 30 or 40 other people aren't driving a private car. So it reduces traffic slightly. The new busses from China are raised above the street with a hollow first floor that cars can drive right through. Busses and their perpetual stopping are no longer a source of traffic jams. If the bus isn't going fast enough for you, you can drive right under it. If the bus stops to pick up passengers, you'll go right under it and no one on the bus will notice. The people are still transferred about...but as far as the cars below are concerned, it's like it's not even there.
I'm now thinking, what else can we do to alleviate the traffic problem? Near Los Angeles there's a really great light rail system, but it stops short of the city where'd be useful. Why? Taxi lobby bitched and the city caved. It would be helpful if that would be extended, perhaps into a subway system? And speaking of subways, if we build a tunnel highway beneath existing ones, we'd have twice the capacity in the same space.
But to really solve the problem, we'll need some sort of transportation that's completely different altogether.

Sea City

70% of the earth is covered by ocean. It's wet and salty, and only really populated with life in the shallows near the continents. Further offshore in the deep, life lacks the shelter to survive, so there's just an endless expanse of water. On the depths below, there is darkness, as the ocean has absorbed all light, and a sand-and-rock bottom. I have a plan to make this...useful. I wrote about it once before, so let's see
Using construction submarines, we build a large and hollow structure, and use cans of strongly compressed air to purge it of water. The structure will need a semipermiable membrane filter, to filter seawater into drinkable water, a submarine airlock, so people can reach it, and be divided into rooms. This is now an undersea city. It can be sold to the nearest nation....or an exploratory sort of person to found a new one, if it's far enough away from the others. The city will need electric power for lighting, some sort of commerce or hydroponics for food, and some plan to deal with the brine and wastewater. (They could be taken to treatment plants onshore with pipes, or they could be just flushed back out to the ocean at large.)
A better still idea would be an underground tunnel at the bottom, below even the surface, with rail and road lines that lead to the nearest on-land nation. Better than that would be to connect to the nearest several, thus becoming a transit hub. Air would flow through the tunnel, as would trains and cars carrying goods and people. The self-sufficiency of the sea city would be greatly improved. And you wouldn't need the expensive and difficult submarine lock anymore.
Last time, I suggested windows. These would be, from the point of view of the inhabitants of the city, useless. In the kinds of locations where this would be most plausible, there isn't enough light to see anything. It's dark 24/7, because the ocean above absorbed all the light that falls on it. Windows would only be interesting ecologically, as there could now be an ecosystem that starts with plants living on the light that leaks out sea city's windows. What plant could endure the pressure? Not many. The windows would be as helpful as your house's windows are on a dark and moonless and cloudy night. You can see your own reflection...and not much else.
I predict this will gain little traction until it becomes necessary. Already, every scrap of land on Earth is claimed by some nation or other, but many nations have large empty tracks. If these fill, perhaps offshore colonies may be considered, but no one's going to bother before. Perhaps a bunch of wealthy libertarians might like to do this, as it would leave them free of existing governments and rules as well as being hard to invade. Perhaps a displaced group might want to find some place, any place, where they won't be persecuted, and this is one of many possible solutions. Perhaps a group fond of solitude might do this to shut themselves off from the rest of the world.
Nah, not likely.

Hikkikomori City

"Hikkikomori" is a culturally-specific psychological syndrome, affecting only people of Japanese cultural upbringing. People with this condition are withdrawn and fearful of interacting with other people, and tend to live in their parents basement well into old age. They tend not to work, shrink from education, and spend all of their time on hobbies, much to the great irritation of everyone around them. The closest way to describe them in western psychology terms would be a mix of Agoraphobia (they do not wish to leave their homes at times), avoidant personality disorder (they really don't want to interact with anyone besides their families), Autism (they tend to have very narrow, obsessive hobbies, and again the not fitting in with society thing), and extreme shyness (they find even talking to a shop clerk to buy something unbearable). Japanese psychologists claim there are up to 1 million such people in Japan. Their parents all wish they'd just move out and get a goddamn job already.
I'm imagining a city, built beneath a mountain, and having space for up to 1 million people. A train, subway style, connects this city to the rest of Japan. The city is made of little rooms cut from the stone, and has electricity, water, and Internet. There are many gloomy apartments, perfect for Hikikomori hobbies. And living here has...conditions.
For one, people living here will be charged rent. You can earn it with psychological studies on re-socializing the Hikikomori, or, we'd have a number of jobs that don't require dealing with the general public. (Socializing tends to be easier for 'Hikki" people if the other person is also one. For one, there's a greater chance of empathy in the encounter.) Many jobs would revolve around things the person could do in a small room by them-self, like programming, art, industrial design, or assembly of small objects (which would arrive and be sent back by pneumatic tube). The most extroverted position available would be store clerk, who would sell things to people feeling particularly brave that day. (I predict most goods would be sold by vending machine.) Most contact would be by internet and telephone, which these kinds of people tend to be more comfortable with than face-to-face contact.
The train would regularly go back to surface Japan, so that people could visit their famlies, and hopefully, report an improved quality of life. Japan would probably want to regularly send in psychologists, both to study the disorder and to provide therapy to make people able to function outside this little city beneath the mountain.
If this existed, it would also test a theory popular with Japanese psychologists, that "Hikkis" are the way they are because they have different ideas about independence, interdependence, and the self, which subjects them to intense bullying in Japanese society, which makes them socially withdraw. If this theory is true, then "Hikki City" would thrive. If they are, like western psychologists suspect, just really obsessive agoraphobics with varying degrees of autism, then I think "Hikki city" residents would tend to not pay their rent until forced to move back to their family's home in shame.

Redoing Signs

Street signs are important. They tell you what street you're on. They tell you about changes in the rules, like speed limits, where to stop, and about when the road changes, like the addition or subtraction of lanes.
Some signs around the country are worn. Having been in the ultraviolet glare of the sun, enduring erosion from wind and rain, their bright and vibrant colors have faded. The sign becomes dull and hard to read. It would be cheap to replace it...if you could get there. Signs are printed metal from silk screen, and not terribly expensive. Especially in bulk.
Along with my proposal to rebuild the roads, I think we should replace the signs. With power tools, we remove the bolts that held the old sign in place, we then hold the new sign in place and bolt it in place. We should have a new supply of bolts in case the existing one gives us any trouble, or is in any way rusted or deteriorated.
This would give jobs, and make the roads so much nicer to drive on. Surely that has some economic value.

Central Vacuum

There is an existing system in which a building maintains a vacuum chamber, from which all air has been forcably removed. This leads to ports. connecting a hose to the port makes it work like a vacuum cleaner: material is forced into the hose with air pressure, about 14 pounds per square inch.
This may seem like a lot of work considering that vacuum cleaners already exist. However, with an average level of vacuuming, the chamber uses less energy, distributed through a longer period of time. It is easier to maintain, and several parts of the building can be cleaned at once. These advantages are promptly nullified if you do something like leave the ports open, which will require the vacuum system to run constantly.
Although this system already exists and can be found in all kinds of homes and businesses, I still think it's worth discussing.

The Great Underway

I don't think anyone really likes living near a highway. They're loud. (VRRRROOOOOOOOOSSSHHH!!) They're grey. They increase the amount of traffic near you. And when there's a traffic snarlup..... HONKHONKHONKHONKHONK, and then it promptly spills over to the nearby streets, because people get impatient. I'm sure the city doesn't like the loss of so much land either. So much land that could, I don't know, be a business district.
I'm imagining a layered highway. On the top layer, a two lane road with a business district on either side. Quiet. Calm. Peaceful. 35 MPH speed limit. And occasional lanes down to a lower layer. This one has no stop signs or traffic lights, and the speed limit is 55 MPH. It's enclosed, which reduces the sound the cars make, with paintings along the side showing what the next exit leads to. The exits are special lanes that go back up to the surface street. And in the middle, there's an occasional lane down one layer more.
The lowest level has speed limits of 120MPH (or higher). It's meant for the really long hauls, Interstate or further. Fans on the ceiling drop air resistance by a significant amount. Your massive rocketing speed remains unnoticed at the surface, as you are quite some way down. Exits lead back to the main freeway level every so many miles.
Ideally, this would use the earth as a sound absorber. If you lived near this freeway, you might not notice, even though the lowest level's outer lanes ran directly under your house. You would just notice that there were shops nearby, and when you needed to go in the freeway's direction, you could get going at a fast or ludicrous pace within a very short amount of time.
I have three concerns to work out. One is exhaust. If I don't vent it somehow, it will build up to lethal levels in the lowest tunnel. Another is water management. If this gets lower than the local water table, all hell breaks lose engineering wise. The last is breakdowns. If you run out of gas or your engine fails at the lowest level, then what?

Floodproof House

Some 90% of humankind lives within 10 miles of the ocean. Historically, that's because only sea-ports gave one access to the world market, and those living further inland had to be content with what goods could be hauled by wagon. Now that trains and trucks exist, people still prefer living by the sea because the beach is fun, and there's a near guaranteed supply of water in the form of rain. (One would be unwise to try to drink the ocean. Too saline.) Another 9% lives near rivers for similar reasons.
However, there's an obvious downside to living near water: storms. Some forms of weather can raise the levels of water until it's quite inconvinient to the nearby humans. The water gets in your house and promptly ruins everything it touches, usually because mud and/or pollution come with it.
Looking at houses, they look rather water-tight. There are no obvious gaps in construction, and you can spray the average American home with a hose without anyone inside noticing. This is deceptive. Water changes shape to fit its container, and so tiny gaps in nail holes, cracks made by mechanical stress or termites, provide just enough space for water to sneak inside. However, the primary defense that American homes have against floods is basically being built on each a little tiny hill, which slopes down to the street, encouraging water to flow down the street instead. Past that, nothing really.
I can engineer a waterproof house. It would have certain disadvantages. One could not open the windows, and it would get dangerously stuffy inside, as it would breathe only from the attic. However, it would also not be ruined by hurricanes, flash floods (as occurs near rivers during heavy rain), or other storms. Occupants could wait out even the worst storm in reasonable comfort. (Warning, electrical power, phone service, and internet service not guaranteed.)
I would do it by sealing things, as is done in bathroom construction. A plastic or rubber gasket would surround the entire house, extending into the windows, which fit on with a watertight flange, and are sealed with a thick layer of calk. There would be zero space for water to enter, and therefore, even in the worst flood, the interior would stay dry. The windows would have to be rated for significant pressure, lest they rupture during a hurricane (high speed winds and pressure differential outside and inside), or a major flash flood (water is heavier than air, again resulting in a really big pressure differential). Also, for breathability, I would make the house tall. At least two, and probably three stories. Let's go with 3. Only the 3rd story's windows open, and that's where your house gets fresh air from. A venting system circulates it to the lower floors. (The regions most at risk of flooding tend not to have earthquakes. Usually.) A decorative siding would be pasted onto the seal to give this house the look of a home (and not an avant garde scupture.)