A man named Jerry Sanders CEO of AirTran is paving the way to the future with a new kind of public transit called AirTran

These “cars” are set in a track which electromagnetically suspends them in the air and can propel them forward at speeds up to 60 mph with a capacity of up to four passengers. However increasing the maximum occupancy is the one of the next steps in the companys production.

Skytran, based in Mountain View, California, has been developing the system for five years. These cars will debut in the campus of Israel Aerospace Industries in Tel Aviv, Israel, which partnered with SkyTran to help develop the cars, and run for approximately 900 feet. If all goes well there then there are plans to expand it to at least three other nearby Israeli cities. Several U.S. cities have also expressed interest in SkyTran’s systems, said Sanders, including Baltimore and Inglewood, California. SkyTran hopes to begin building its system in Baltimore next year.”Either one of those two cities could have our next pilot systems soon,” he said, adding that major airports like Paris’ Charles de Gaulle are also considering it.

The AirTran systems steel and aluminum parts are not only much more simple and easy to assemble, they take only a matter of days to go from pieces to working condition, but they also leave a much smaller carbon footprint than traditional subways, trains, and buses. Only requiring about a third of the energy a hybrid car would use.

They also cost marginally less, to build a kilometer of track it would cost $8 milllion and an additional $25,000-$30,000 each car, although this seems expensive, building a kilometer of underground subway track can cost between $100 million and $2 billion.

The system uses magnetic levitation technology to propel the cars. Electromagnets produce the lift and force to propel the cars forward which makes the system very energy efficient and much better for the environment than burning fossil fuels.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt put a multi million dollar seed investment into Sanders and his corporation. However Sanders has not disclosed the exact amount. Sanders hopes that this investment, among other things, will support the transportation of the future, along with simultaneously doing the environment a huge favor.