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I'm designing an alien civilization that has achieved wormhole travel. Their devices are used by every member of their society and are usually located on their wrist. They type the coordinates of their destination, then shoot a small projectile in the air before opening a wormhole. The wormhole can be any size, and can get someone anywhere in the universe in an instant.

However, in their society they still have other means of transportation like hyperloops, spaceships, space elevators and even sea ships. Now my question is, why would a civilization that has such means of instant transportation still use other means of transportation?

Entertainment There are days when absolutely nothing will make you happy other than the sound of a Harley Davidson motorcycle polluting the atmosphere in style.

To Impress People One of my favorite scenes from the book The Stars My Destination is when the protagonist, hiding in plain sight via enormous wealth (and in a world with mental teleportation, not unlike your story!), arrives at a social function in a railroad engine. People stood and stared as workers laid track to the door of the mansion so the train could drive up and drop its passengers. Think about it. Dang.

Because the Line's Busy Do you remember the good old days when the smallest emergency guaranteed you could't get through on your cell phone... or your land line...? It's nice to think your population of (I'm suggesting) 9.2 billion can open 9.2 billion simultaneous wormholes — but the reality is they can't (and shouldn't). Too many wormholes in too close a proximity causes bad things to happen. (And probably would in real life. That, or the current existence of one wormhole guarantees through the magic of physics that no other wormholes within a specified distance can be opened.) So, whadaya do when everybody's using the line? You get on your Harley, of course....

Because the Destination is Popular Even if your world allows any arbitrary number of wormholes to open in close proximity... that doesn't mean there's enough landing space for everyone! The 100^th Marvel Movie (The Runaways save the world!) is opening at the Odeon and you absolutely must see it on opening night! The problem is, so do a number of people representing at least 700% of the actual number of seats in the theater. The result? Thousands of people trying to arrive in the same 500 square foot space — all at the same time. Gratefully, your tech simply won't allow the wormhole to form if there's not enough physical space to deposit you. So, you jump on your bicycle and hope like crazy you can beat at least 1,000 of those people to the theater! (BTW, if you think about it, this would be a very common problem at any goods distribution facility. It doesn't matter how big or small you can make the wormhole... there simply is only so much wormhole transit space to go around. Everybody else gets to use trucks.)

Your Wonder Woman Wormhole Bracers... Broke There ain't no such thing as perfection. It's pretty rare that the wrist controls for the wormholes break, but when your little brother swung the tree branch at you... well... Dad's not gonna be happy paying another $1,000 for a new cell phone set of Wonder Woman Wormhole Bracers. Bzzz, thank you for playing. Your consolation prize is you get to walk. (You can add to this one taking away your allowance, privileges, grounding you literally, or any other means of imposing reality on the unappreciative teen mind.)

There's Too Many People Near You You know what the basic problem with a rave is? They're packed! And in this city, raves are packed for miles. Oh, yeah! We're talking Zaphod Beeblebrox on tour! Woot! And you can't just open a wormhole in the middle of all that. You'd cut a dozen people in half as the event horizon formed. At least a dozen.

OK, to be honest, congestion (which at least three of these are talking about) will be a major reason why people don't use them.

You Can't Afford the Tech I don't own a $1,000 cell phone, do you? Some people do, others take the bus. That's the circle of life.

Because Security Disabled the Destination And last of all — The folks over at Fort Knox takes a dim view of people trying to open wormholes into their vaults. I suspect there are all kinds of government, military, corporate, institutional, judicial, and who knows what else locations that absolutely, positively do not want your wormhole to open anywhere other than where they permit. Which can easily be believed to be "nowhere on this site." Prisons come to mind. There will always be the need for transport into and out of locations where security is a big deal.

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  Energy expensive. Make a wormhole is a very energy hungry operation.


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  Expensive. Maybe it doesn't consume much energy, but the technology or the item itself is very expensive, not everybody can afford it.


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  Disbelief, Insecurity. Did you know that planes are statistically speaking the safest transport? They are in order of magnitudes safer than cars, but still, people have fear of planes, like your people have fear of wormholes. Maybe the first wormhole devices were quite dangerous and two or three great catastrophes occur with them. Now they are safe but some people got traumatized by the events and still not trust in them.


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  Luxury. Wormhole travel is instantaneous, but what if the user wants to rest while travelling? It's like cruisers trips, people go there also to rest, relax and get fun, in addition to travel from A to B. Some people love driving cars...

Disclaimer: I'm a public transportation advocate. I am heavily biased towards public transportation.

If everyone in a society has the ability to instantly go anywhere they wish, there will inevitably be conflicts. If two people want to travel to the same destination, they would need to queue up, or there would need to be some form of other restriction to prevent overloading the destination/having multiple wormholes end up at the same location/etc.

For a more concrete example, take a major event (sporting/etc) where members of society will want to be physically present. Controlling access to the locale when people will travel via personal wormhole would be a mess for both safety concerns (what happens if two people exit a wormhole at the same time and injure one another?) and would be a logistical nightmare as well (how do you organize burst loads of people traveling at the same time to the same location when they arrive at any time and at potentially any location?). The best solution would be to have people gather in multiple locations elsewhere and then travel to the locale in a high capacity mode of transportation. This is logistically simpler since the number of vehicles moving in the vicinity of the locale would be drastically lower than the number of people that would be trying to access the locale directly.

This is independent of the other concerns that have been raised with wormhole transportation in other answers.