Star Trek TOS: civilian transportation?

[terrifel]

In TNG and later series, it seems as though it is reasonably common for civilians to own warp-capable shuttlecraft. Even relatively skeezy Han Solo-type ruffian characters might own an off-brand shuttle. Clearly not everybody has one, but it's not an obvious sign of status either. Like a boat, you might own one either for pleasure or to make a living.

The problem with this is that starship technology is hellaciously dangerous. Even if civilian craft are not powered by antimatter like Starfleet vessels, even a fairly small shuttle could potentially cause enormous collision damage at near-warp speed. At minimum, t'd be like a minivan-sized meteor strike.

Transporter technology is possibly even more potentially dangerous than a starship; on the other hand, the technology is centralized and so less subject to individual abuses. It's possible that civilians use a transporter network to travel long terrestrial distances, in the manner of a modern airport.

We may infer that shuttles are used for interplanetary travel, as McCoy once remarked that he was not a Moon-shuttle pilot. Evidently piloting a Moon-shuttle is a profession, which makes sense. Everyone doesn't own their own Moon-capable shuttlecraft.

TOS did not establish much about civilian life within the Federation, both by the nature of the show's premise and probably also for budgetary reasons. I don't recall that they ever addressed how ordinary folks get around on a daily basis. In "A Piece of the Action," Kirk seems vaguely confounded by the notion of an automobile. On the other hand, in "The Cage," Pike imagines horses as a typical element of his hometown fantasy. Perhaps after the automobile became obsolete, the horse made a comeback?

[Laughing Lagomorph]

I was thinking recently that we really aren't that far, technologically, from cars that can drive themselves. We have had cruise control for decades, now there is active cruise control that will slow down if the car in front of you does, there is blind spot detection, automatic parallel parking, and of course GPS navigation.

Of course no one would want to put their life in the hands of the current state of the art, but given a century or two of improvement you could have flying craft that would take you anywhere on the surface of the earth.

So that might be the answer for Earth and other well developed planets...fully automated shuttlecraft.