8 ms·

I recently read a couple (long) articles basically arguing that the simple answer to transportation woes is not about self-driving cars and hyperloops, but basi

• smt88 9y ago
  Walking and mass transit suck for people who are: traveling with kids, obese, disabled, short on time, carrying groceries, elderly, and/or in a place with bad weather. That's not even mentioning people who can't afford to live in dense, central urban environments. Self-driving, solar cars solve all problems of mass transit and are far cheaper, since they use existing roads.
  • sandworm101 9y ago
    And anyone with more than a handbag to carry. Many workers travel with tools. Im going to training next month and have to bring about 80lbs of various stuff with me. Hauling that in and out of busses, not to mention finding places to secure it while i sleep/eat, wouldnt be much fun. But it all fits in my car nicely. And no, i cannot send it by courier.
    • lostdog 9y ago
      Maybe you really do need a vehicle, but improving public transit and walkability would get a lot of other people out of your way.
    • losteric 9y ago
      What kind of tools? Is there a functional reason for lugging your tools back and forth, or is that just how it's done? Could you leave those tools at work/training if they had secure storage? Alternatively, could the training facility offer a set of training tools while you keep your personal set at home for training?
      • bdamm 9y ago
        You clearly don’t do much work involving hand tools. The reasons to carry a portable tool locker on wheels are too numerous to mention. One, your locker, your key; theft is a major problem among contractor sites.
      • sandworm101 9y ago
        Im in the military. Its a pile of cloathing, tent and other junk for survival training. A few days at a base in the woods learning to start fires. But it is 0430 now. My alarm just woke me up. I need to be at my office in an hour, where ill take over responsabilities from someone who started thier day before midnight. It's before dawn on december 26th. It's cold. The busses arent running. The uber drivers are all asleep. Some of us still have to get to work.
    • kelnos 9y ago
      No one is suggesting that there aren't special cases where using a car is the right move. But the vast majority of cases where people take cars, replacing that experience with better public transit is entirely reasonable. Hell, improving public transit would improve your use-case as well; you'd have less traffic to compete with while driving.
      • sandworm101 9y ago
        Unless the goal is to pay for public transit by making car travel more expensive/painful. Then it is unfair to force all the carpenters to cover the costs for the office workers.
        • losteric 9y ago
          That's an incomplete view of the problem. Public transportation is used by people from all walks of life. Not just office workers - cooks, nurses, artists, school teachers, police officers, even employees of trade companies... and every citizen benefits from reduced traffic, lower infrastructure costs, and better health. Using car taxes to fund public transportation would not materially impact the carpenter. They'd just charge a little more. An absurdly high $1000/year tax spread across 50 clients is merely $20 per job - a more realistic $200/y tax would add $4 per job. Considering that public transportation increase average disposable income, the market can easily absorb that cost.
          • sandworm101 9y ago
            >> They'd just charge a little more. And so too can the office workers. To charge one group for the benefit of another, based solely on the manner of their employ, is the definition of unfair. This is what progressive taxation is for, not use taxes.
            • losteric 9y ago
              What? You either selectively read my response, or you're being deliberately obtuse with your focus on office workers. Car taxes ensure the market accurately captures negative externalities. There is no discrimination - if a doctor, CEO, and a plumber use cars equally, they are taxed equally. In contrast, low/absent car taxes are discriminatory subsidies. For businesses that require car usage, the tax is merely an operating cost. There is no impact on profit as operating costs are passed on to the consumer. Of course, allocating that revenue is still subject to local voters' wishes.
    • AlphaSite 9y ago
      Sure, but office workers for example would not have your issue.
  • hanbura 9y ago
    >Self-driving, solar cars solve all problems of mass transit and are far cheaper, since they use existing roads. They don't solve the arguably most important issue: road capacity. A bus that takes the same space on the road as 2-3 cars seats 30 people (and holds another 30 standing). Self-driving cars enable somewhat more efficient traffic patterns, but they will have a hard time overcoming the order-of-magnitude lead that buses have. And that's not even mentioning subways, those don't impact roads at all and move staggering amounts of people
    • fatbob 9y ago
      Buses are not always full. Their average capacity does not have an order of magnitude advantage.
      • notatoad 9y ago
        neither are roads. it doesn't matter how full the bus is when the road is empty, but the number of cars that a bus is taking off the road at peak road usage time is pretty close to the full capacity of the bus, in any bus system i've ever ridden.
        • michaelmior 9y ago
          This is assuming that everyone who is on the bus would be driving/riding in a car instead, which I'm not sure is true.
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
        • fatbob 9y ago
          Good point - maybe buses will stay around just for peak usage, but will be replaced by rented, right-sized self-driving cars for the rest of the time.
  • so33 9y ago
    The NYC subway accounts for 5 million trips each day, taking millions of cars off the road because they don’t need to exist in the first place. Traveling with kids? Something people do with public transit and walking every day. Promoting walking encourages healthy lifestyles; promoting driving (or just sitting in a car and not doing anything) encourages the opposite. Elderly or disabled people take public transit all the time. Short on time or carrying a bunch of groceries? Live out in the far suburbs? Then public transit isn’t for you. But it takes passengers who aren’t short on time off the roads, making your trip faster. Edit: Cities with bad weather have adapted the cities to support public transit and walking (think covered, elevated walkways in Asia). It’s not a zero sum game. Self driving cars will be great. Public transit is great (and can be great in more places 0if cities made more investment). Both can and should exist.
    • visarga 9y ago
      We have had self driving vehicles for a long time - they're called busses, taxis and trains, and can take many people at once who don't need to drive or own the transport. We're just automating that last one human who needs to hold the wheel of the bus/taxi/train and extending the reach of the network. I'm a little bit worried about self driving cars being used for auto-detaining people and delivering them to police/terrorists. When you get into a sdc, you lose your ability to get off anywhere you want, it might lock up the doors and deliver you to the mafia or police for all you know. Remember "auto-detention" I invented it here and now. :-)
      • heyalexej 9y ago
        The only way to travel in a SDC is with a set of diagonal pliers and screwdriver in you pocket.
    • smt88 9y ago
      I agree both can exist. The original article argues against SDC investment in favor of mass transit. I agree public transit is unequivocally great and important. I don't agree that most of our investment dollars should go to mass public transit over SDC public fleets. NYC is an exception and can't be replicated in most places, and the lack of transit options are still a burden on the groups I mentioned.
  • petre 9y ago
    These are all examples of European mass transit users. We even have places designated fir disabled, injured and elderly people on every bus, tram and metro.
    • kelnos 9y ago
      Hell, we even have that on SF buses and trains, and our transit is terrible. I regularly see people on Muni buses in wheelchairs, alone and unassisted.
    • smt88 9y ago
      I never said these trips don't happen or aren't possible. I said individual, point-to-point options are better for a variety of riders.
• hanbura 9y ago
  High-density housing with shopping and offices in walking distance would be massive steps towards solving Americas transportation problem. But this goes against the current US culture, so I'm not holding my breath. Better public transit is also great, but that's also hard to deliver in low-density suburbia. I agree that autonomous vehicles and Uber/Lift won't make travel times shorter. But they might help make the trip better because you can use the time better despite being in a car.
• lewisinc 9y ago
  What you'd be arguing for is, instead of revamping the way cars work, revamp the cities themselves. I feel like the market tends to side with whatever is the "lowest initial cost of entry" when picking which direction to go in, as much as I don't agree. So, between the choices currently available - what is the option that is the lowest barrier of entry financially?
• intopieces 9y ago
  America doesn’t want this. We vote against these designs time and time again. Nothing short of China style totalitarian urban restructuring will make US cities walking utopias.
  • kelnos 9y ago
    I live in a US city, and I still don't understand why this is the case. It completely baffles me why people would prefer to sit behind the wheel in stop-and-go city traffic, deal with pedestrians, cyclists, traffic lights, one-way streets, and parking, instead of designing and developing the city so everything they need is a short walk or at worst a quick transit ride away. It just seems like madness, like people are deliberately making their lives significantly worse, and they see the effects of that decision literally every day.
    • pacala 9y ago
      Because sleep deprivation is a major ailment. Nothing says good life like the neighbor above having a late night party, the heavy traffic starting about five am or the shrieks of the late night ambulances.
      • nojvek 9y ago
        Cramped living. Been there done that, hated it. I love the silence at night. Having a big living room and a little garden. Being able to actually look up the sky and see stars. I do like trains, but they can't get everywhere. I take a bus to work everyday but they don't operate 24h a day and not frequently enough. I'm the most excited about self driving buses. Even in predefined routes on special self driving lanes. Then its just a train carriage on a road :)
        • em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
          > "I'm the most excited about self driving buses." Agreed. Self-driving cars may be a sham "solution" to American's transportation woes....however self-driving busses should be considered as a very practical mass transit alternative to rail since the road infrastructure is already built. I've heard they are testing this out in Las Vegas: https://blog.caranddriver.com/letting-it-ride-las-vegas-puts-u-s-s-first-fully-self-driving-shuttle-into-service/ https://blog.caranddriver.com/letting-it-ride-las-vegas-puts...
• woolvalley 9y ago
  Self driving cars are the mass transit of low-density suburbia. Electric AVs in the next 10 years would be a significantly cheaper solution than remaking US infrastructure & political culture to be more transit friendly. That is why americans are especially excited about them.
  • petre 9y ago
    What's wrong with having a bus + driver service low density suburbia today, than a number of self driving cars? Even a minibus.
    • bdamm 9y ago
      Far too expensive to operate a sufficiently useful transit system for insufficient ridership to support it. The density does not allow the economics to work out.
    • vostrocity 9y ago
      Busses don't get cleaned often, lack modern creature comforts like leather surfaces and music, have distractingly bad noise/vibration/harshness, etc.
      • dotancohen 9y ago
        All of those concerns are much more easily addressed individually than by developing a vehicle that drives itself. There is no reason why a 14-passenger 8 ton Mercedes minivan could not be used as a small, relatively frequent bus as opposed to the huge, noisy MAN 40 ton chassis.
    • kelnos 9y ago
      Usage is low enough and destinations are various and sparse and distant enough that sufficient coverage to be useful would be prohibitively expensive, while incredibly under-utilized. You really need something more on-demand that will take you door-to-door.
• cdancette 9y ago
  While it seems obvious that autonomous driving is not a solution to urban transportation (cities are already crowded with cars), it can be a great one for long distance transportation. Roads are simple / cheaper to build than vacuumed tubes or railroads.