8 ms·

Riding alone in a car is an increasingly unaffordable luxury

45 points by theBashShell 7y ago

rayiner 7y ago
> When it is given away, drivers overuse available roads, and clog them. The waste is colossal. An estimate by INRIX, a consulting firm, suggests that the value of time lost to traffic in 2018 in America alone reached $87bn. Is it "colossal?" The U.S. is a $19 trillion economy with 156 million people in the labor force. $87 billion is about $557 per person annually, about half of what people spend on coffee each year: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/american-coffee-habits-spend-coffee/story?id=16923079 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/american-coffee-habits-spend-coff.... That's actually much lower than I would have thought, considering that traffic is such a big fact of life. That suggests that measures to reduce traffic may not be worthwhile.
- jandrese 7y ago
  I mean it's so thoughtless of people to waste time in traffic instead of teleporting everywhere. Even if we eliminated cars people still have to get to work/stores/church/school/home/etc... Mass transit options are more efficient in many ways than single occupant cars, but only occasionally are they faster.
  - alexandercrohde 7y ago
    The point is, if everybody was on a bus there wouldn't BE traffic. There would be no such thing as a traffic jam, because the road would be 90% empty.
    - SerLava 7y ago
      I mean, you would also have millions of people spending 5 hours riding between bus stops every day. Cars are a bare necessity due to how badly we fucked up urban planning. And we fucked it up because we planned around cars.
      - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
        You need private transportation in rural areas due to the sheer size and remoteness. You also need to plan around cars in urban areas for people coming from rural areas. That's not to say you shouldn't focus on public transportation in urban areas, but it's not possible to ignore cars.
        shereadsthenews 7y ago
        Eh let’s don't. The thing about rural areas is nobody lives there, by definition. Our city centers should not be degraded so a tiny minority can drive. Instead we should have the Swiss/German S-Bahn model where outlying areas have train stations that take the rural folks to cities quickly and efficiently.
        s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
        Many people do live there, just more spread out. It's not degrading city centers, you still need trucks to stock your stores, you still need tourism. If everyone that lived in the city centers took public transportation, the already built roads would be freed for foreign traffic. As you say, there's nobody living in rural areas so they wouldn't have a huge impact on the roads. They can share it with the buses and trucks. I see this kind of elitism of urban > rural a lot here.
        shereadsthenews 7y ago
        Elitism is when you tear down thousands of homes in black neighborhoods so rural drivers can go non-stop downtown. Elitism is when you spend a billion dollars on a freeway interchange in the middle of nowhere while cutting bus service in downtown Milwaukee. Elitism in America always works in favor of rural people because rural America is overwhelming White and American elitism is just racism.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - bg4 7y ago
      Yes, there would. It would be traffic jams full of buses.
      - shereadsthenews 7y ago
        No. If you sent a bus down every street in San Francisco every minute, the throughput in terms of people per hour would be dramatically higher and the streets would be empty.
        bg4 7y ago
        The claim was that there was no such thing as a traffic jam. I suspect induced demand and bus bunching would cause bus filled traffic jams.
        shereadsthenews 7y ago
        And yet in cities that are transit-oriented it doesn't happen.
      - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
        Buses can transport many more people than cars. https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almost-everything.html https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
    - kleiba 7y ago
      Traffic jams is not the only cause of longer than necessary travel. I used to use PT religiously for many years when I was a young man. To get to work, using PT where I live means a one hour commute as opposed to a 20 minute car drive (one way). Now, having family, I prefer to save those 80 minutes every day and spend them with my kids -- however, there is hardly ever any traffic jams worth talking about where I live. The sole reason for the longer traveling time on PT is that both my house and my work are not located in the center of the city but on the outskirts. All PT is organized in a star-like pattern, i.e., to go from my house to my work, I first have to take a bus and a train to get into the city center and then another bus to get out of it again. With the car, I never have to into the city in the first place but can drive right around it. What I'm trying to say is: I find it very hard to imagine that even a very tight public transport net would be able to cover all individual connection needs efficiently. Where I live, a lot of people _do_ use public transport but for many people it would take a lot to make it an attractive alternative (and I'm just taking about travel time here, never mind all the other personal advantages of having your own personal space in which you travel). Public transport is also quite costly around here, although it's already subsidized by tax money. If everybody starting using PT tomorrow and paid for it, this would create the instant funds needed to extend the connections to meet most people's needs. But it is a chicken/egg problem: as long as the system as it is is experienced as vastly inferior to someone, it will be very hard to convince them to use it. But without more substantially more people using it, the necessary funds to improve the system is missing. Government money (aka, taxes) could help but massive sums would be needed and already now there is never enough public funds to attend to all the things we expect our administration to take care of.
      - shereadsthenews 7y ago
        What you’re describing is a land use problem not a transportation problem. There are many cities where most trips are made by foot and most of the remaining trips are by bus or train and very few are by driving alone in a car.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - tomatotomato37 7y ago
      You're right, the congestion instead would be at bus depots and stops. Moving any big group of things around, whether they be cargo containers, cars, people, or html packets, will incur some level of congestion. Also I'd feel like we'd just be exchanging time stuck in traffic to time stuck on a bus as it deals with other people's destinations first
      - noxToken 7y ago
        Thank you. This is what a ton of other comments are missing. I've had to occasionally go to our main corporate office. If I rent a car from the airport, it's about 18 minutes from airport parking lot to door. Taking public transit means the absolute fastest I can get from transit stop to door is 32 minutes (25 minutes of transit + 7 minutes of walking). Taking public transit is an additional 14 minutes added to my commute time. I'm not against public transit. People are pretending or under the wrong assumption that getting more people onto buses and rails means that the new commute time is now equivalent to driving a car on a road without traffic. You need to factor in time waiting for transit, stops between your pickup and destination, and last mile. Dense cities suffer from less of the last mile problem, because buses can take routes all through a city with more stops. Moving to the outskirts of the city will have a larger last mile problem where few buses are patrolling.
        danmaz74 7y ago
        Driving a car point to point without traffic is obviously going to be faster. But if everybody drives point to point, there will be a lot of traffic and jams. The difference with public transportation is that it could move everybody without traffic, but if you remove the traffic lots of people want to use their car - profiting from the other people who use PTA and free their streets. Classic tragedy of the commons.
        noxToken 7y ago
        > but if you remove the traffic lots of people want to use their car - profiting from the other people who use PTA and free their streets This is true, but there's still a layer beyond that. There are cities where the layout is built to address the last mile problem. There are hub locations that can allow you to get from point A to B and to C within 5 minutes of each other on foot. This isn't true for many Americans. Take my example from earlier. If you didn't bring your lunch, your 5 minute walking options from the office are very limited. Expanding to 10 minutes gives more options, but the selection is still very limited. 10 minutes via car gives a much better selection, but 10 minutes via bus (due to waiting and intermediate stops) doesn't get you much further than 10 minutes on foot. Other examples include running and errand after work. If I need to grab something from a store, how much additional time is needed to add an extra stop to go 5 minutes off of my normal commute path? Again, I'm not against public transportation. Cities need to be designed to accommodate public transportation. Otherwise we are exchanging time idling bumper-to-bumper for time waiting and time hitting intermediate stops.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Private v. public transit is yet another example of the linear relationship between latency and throughput; private transit is low latency and low throughput, while public transit is high latency and high throughput. Someday we'll all have flying scooters/jetpacks and be able to get anywhere point-to-point without being bottlenecked by latency or throughput, but until then, it's gonna be a matter of balancing the two.
  - peteey 7y ago
    Not all transport time is "wasted". Consider the difference of a normal vs congested road. Suppose a trip would normally take 15 minutes, and takes 25 minutes in congestion. The 10 minute difference is the waste. The 15 minutes is some acceptable transit time you agree we must have. This discussion is centered around the waste. Claiming there is some essential traffic time is a straw man argument
- naravara 7y ago
  >about half of what people spend on coffee each year: Yeah, but the difference there is that when people spend money on coffee, they're getting a cup of coffee out of the deal. When we spend money on traffic, we're getting hypertension and car accidents instead. That number is literally just time lost in traffic jams. That doesn't even factor in disutility incurred from actually being in traffic like lost sleep, road rage, traffic fatalities, etc.
  - varjag 7y ago
    You get hypertension from coffee too..
- jetrink 7y ago
  I wonder how equally distributed that cost is. If it follows a Pareto distribution, which would be my first guess, then it would be costing 20% of the population over $2000 per year. If so, it would be relatively insignificant to the economy at large, but worth still worth tackling for specific states or cities where the problem looms larger.
- Balgair 7y ago
  Compare and contrast the use of roads today with another famous public works project: The Roman grain dole. The grain dole in Rome was MANY things at MANY times. But one aspect of it's effects on the Roman economy was the increase in luxury good purchasing in certain times and places. Much like today, basic food requirements took up a lot of the income for poorer citizens. By giving out food for free, these plebians were able to spend that money on more goods and services, thereby increasing trade in the ancient world. (NOTE: this incredibly simplifies a lot of things and is very debatable). That said, roads act in a similar way. If you have to pay a toll for every road, then poor people will use the roads less. If the roads are free, then poor people will use that toll money on other things. Per the article and the issue of traffic, I guess this means that poor people have more of their time taken away from them whilst sitting in traffic as they drive further and are not being driven around by chauffers. If we got rid of this 'time tax' that is traffic congestion, it would be better for poor people. They would use their time on other things that are good for the economy or their lives. I'm also skeptical that this 'time tax' is all that high. Emotionally, traffic is a nightmare, and well extends past my time actually spent in it. But that's a seperate issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae
olliej 7y ago
I mean it's also tremendously inefficient, in terms of physical real estate, throughput, and energy efficiency.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Roads are perhaps the single greatest invention ever, in terms of economic enabler and value creation, right after the wheel. Sliced bread is substantially lower on the list.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    Please don't conflate roads with single-occupancy driving. Roads have many uses, including the facilitation of buses, the delivery of pizza and the distribution of firefighting equipment. The subject being discussed here is the use of single-occupancy automobiles, which not only create all this unproductive time, but also clog the roads for other uses. Cars make roads worse, not better.
    - fromthestart 7y ago
      What? Cars are what make roads fundamentally useful. Unless we want to force everyone to live in cities, single occupancy cars are a necessity, since covering all destinations with public transportation is impractical, especially suburban/rural environments.
      - opportune 7y ago
        Rather than forcing people to live in cities, we could stop subsidizing transportation for suburban living and start subsidizing public transportation for urban living
        zaroth 7y ago
        Yet in fact, the subsidies for public transit are higher (as both percentage and net dollar amount) than they are for roads.
viburnum 7y ago
“Converting calories to gas, a bicycle gets about three thousand miles per gallon.” https://twitter.com/grescoe/status/1122883766207352832?s=21 https://twitter.com/grescoe/status/1122883766207352832?s=21
- sdinsn 7y ago
  But "converting" my free time to gas, it gets worse MPG than cars.
  - prolepunk 7y ago
    I get extra free time because my commute also counts as gym time.
    - nvader 7y ago
      If you haven't already seen this article: https://peopleforbikes.org/blog/bicycles-are-instantaneous-teleportation-devices-says-science/ https://peopleforbikes.org/blog/bicycles-are-instantaneous-t...
  - jchrisa 7y ago
    In urban areas like the one I live in, most trips are faster by bike. Especially considering I always get the closest parking and almost never wait in a queue.
    - robbyking 7y ago
      Where I live now, my bike ride to work is twice as fast as my bus commute, and in SF, it was about 30% faster. That said, my wife and I are both all season bike commuters, and because we make almost all of our trips (grocery shopping, taking our son to school, etc.) by bike, bikeability is a huge factor for us when we make housing decisions. Nearly all the public transportation/cycling naysaying I read seems to be from people who didn't consider (or at least didn't prioritize) non-private automobile transportation into their housing decision, and typically, it's at great cost to them[1]. 1. http://cityobservatory.org/transportation_housing_affordability/ http://cityobservatory.org/transportation_housing_affordabil...
Kiro 7y ago
I've stopped taking the car completely due to environmental concerns. I see no justification unless you absolutely have to.
- happytoexplain 7y ago
  >I see no justification unless you absolutely have to. That's an extremely broad qualifier for a pretty particular topic. I think that the vast majority of people either absolutely have to use a car, or can pretty easily not (or in fact would be inconvenienced by using a car). I think it is a very small percentage of people who are somewhere in between those two cases, for whom there is a realistic choice to be made one way or the other.
  - firethief 7y ago
    > I think that the vast majority of people either absolutely have to use a car, or can pretty easily not (or in fact would be inconvenienced by using a car). I doubt either of those categories exist, yet alone form a dichotomy
    - taborj 7y ago
      There are millions of people who absolutely have to have a car. There are lots of us living in rural - and even suburban - areas where public transportation is virtually nonexistent.
  - Kiro 7y ago
    Absolutely needing a car sounds like a very US centric problem where public transport seems to be very underdeveloped. I know very few car owners who is in that situation but then again, in my country the public transportation network is amazing.
- taborj 7y ago
  Hey, you ever do anything just for the fun of it? For some of us, driving is that thing.
prolepunk 7y ago
TLDR "Driving is bad and economically unsustainable and highly subsidized. Ride hailing apps take advantage of that to make profits in their bid to displace service workers (taxi drivers) and usurp their wages. However these companies may run out of investor money before accomplishing this. A lot of municipalities are now considering congestion charges. Walking and public transit may also be an option" I'm a bit annoyed how the article takes the angle of cheering for Uber and Lyft while barely mentioning public transit as a solution that doesn't economically exploit underprivileged people.
fopen64 7y ago
The car is the last place you might have some privacy, listen to loud music, talk to yourself. I take "micro-vacations from marriage" consisting basically of driving alone a couple days. The bathroom is arguably the other remaining place for complete privacy, so I understand completely people that can afford huge bathrooms with magazines, TV, etc.
zaroth 7y ago
Driving is increasingly affordable which will drive a new wave of taxes to capture the surplus. A high utilization Tesla Model 3 has costs per mile, including electricity, of around $0.10-$0.15/mile. For comparison, the gas tax alone on the average vehicle was about $0.01-$0.02/mile 10 years ago. (Depends on your state and your MPG) When that vehicle can drive itself from most Point As to most Point Bs on most days, public transit doesn’t have prayer of competing. So new regimes will be needed to fund the roads, but roads are one of the few good things government does for me. I really like roads. Make more and make them better, make them smooth and make them smart. Make them safe and make them fast. And then we will all use them to go out every day and make money. The good news is we won’t need a lot of new parking spaces in this rapidly approaching future. But we will need some new forms of taxing driving, and I’m mostly afraid of the privacy implications.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Gas tax is a usage tax to fund transit cost, they _should_ be taxing electrics. Delaying a few years to accelerate the transition is fine but it will ultimately have to happen. What isn't so easy is taxing based on actual usage which a gas tax does fairly well. Resisting a government GPS tracker to tax you appropriately will be important in the coming years.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    What will inevitably happen is they'll tax miles and gas. Because revenue streams never go away and government has no qualms about screwing the poor so long as it can be framed in a politically useful way (screwing those backwards hicks who still drive cars).
    - colechristensen 7y ago
      Roads are expensive and it makes sense to fund them partly at least proportional to use. People who don't drive cars are unusual, if you think otherwise you're in a bubble and don't much understand the rest of the country.
- 7y ago
mywittyname 7y ago
I believe the ever-declining affordability of driving is going to decimate real estate in the US. We have upwards of 80 years worth of home construction designed almost exclusively around the ability to drive. With the assumption that cars and fuel would forever be cheap and that the Federal government would continue to heavily subsidize road construction. I'm curious to see how people solve this problem. Wealthy people can afford to move into urban centers to save money on commuting costs, but relatively poor people will be stuck in the old suburbs. I suspect motorcycle-class vehicles will begin appearing from upstart manufactures which are effectively single- or dual-seater three wheelers with closed cabins that are cheap to purchase and operate.
- ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  Another related problem is that these suburbs were planned and financed on a cash accounting basis, rather than accrual. This means that tax burdens (or other municipal revenue methods) need to increase to cover the replacement of aging infrastructure as the relatively wealthy flee the old suburbs. This was a big factor in the Ferguson riots in 2014, IMO. The city had significant budgetary pressure that they managed through for-profit policing (traffic fines a big one), which intensified the racial divide there, and this is why the budgetary pressure arose.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  If people living in urban areas start using public transportation more, it frees up the road for suburban and other foreign traffic.
- francisofascii 7y ago
  The US could have its own yellow jacket revolt in a few decades or so. And I suspect the govt. will subsidize it further. Perhaps you will see a rise in bus commuting from the rural towns.
- thingification 7y ago
  Let's solve it by keeping cars and fuel forever cheaper, and solving congestion! Tunnels, electric cars, nuclear power (or solar, if you're prepared to sacrifice people's as-yet unsatisfied needs and unsolved suffering to that).
Grue3 7y ago
Nah, it's already more affordable than taxi (through carsharing, at least in my city), and will be even more affordable when autonomous cars get deployed (even for people without driving license). Car ownership will be a luxury, but there will always be a demand for moving from point A to point B alone.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  For a while I was commuting from Mountain View to SF. It was cheaper and faster for me to drive to the Daly City BART station and park than it was to take the Caltrain (on which there was usually standing room only). This is including the purchase price of the car depreciated over the lifetime I expect to own it, fuel, parking, and maintenance.
kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
Isn't it the other way round? Driving is increasingly being made affordable on the backs of basically every other means of transportation, many of which are the only means available to the poor. If mandatory parking space regulations etc and other things that spread the price of what is an extremely private luxury on to the general public were removed, let's see how affordable driving remains then.
sandworm101 7y ago
Unaffordable? Compared to what? Maybe in SF/NY. I live in an area with nothing, none, nadda, no version of public transportation that can take me from anywhere near home to anywhere near work. Setting aside the unusual hours I work, my occasional need to haul stuff that is awkward on public transport (military stuff), not driving is not an option.
prolepunk 7y ago
I find this image to be highly relevant to the discussion. https://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/016/837/4581cc8adf783652c6f5829d28aa87f1.png https://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/016/837/45... A bit a flashback from 1940s and the urgency of arguments at that time about conserving resources.

45 points by theBashShell 7y ago

> When it is given away, drivers overuse available roads, and clog them. The waste is colossal. An estimate by INRIX, a consulting firm, suggests that the value of time lost to traffic in 2018 in America alone reached $87bn. Is it "colossal?" The U.S. is a $19 trillion economy with 156 million people in the labor force. $87 billion is about $557 per person annually, about half of what people spend on coffee each year: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/american-coffee-habits-spend-coffee/story?id=16923079 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/american-coffee-habits-spend-coff.... That's actually much lower than I would have thought, considering that traffic is such a big fact of life. That suggests that measures to reduce traffic may not be worthwhile.

jandrese 7y ago
I mean it's so thoughtless of people to waste time in traffic instead of teleporting everywhere. Even if we eliminated cars people still have to get to work/stores/church/school/home/etc... Mass transit options are more efficient in many ways than single occupant cars, but only occasionally are they faster.
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  The point is, if everybody was on a bus there wouldn't BE traffic. There would be no such thing as a traffic jam, because the road would be 90% empty.
  - SerLava 7y ago
    I mean, you would also have millions of people spending 5 hours riding between bus stops every day. Cars are a bare necessity due to how badly we fucked up urban planning. And we fucked it up because we planned around cars.
    - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
      You need private transportation in rural areas due to the sheer size and remoteness. You also need to plan around cars in urban areas for people coming from rural areas. That's not to say you shouldn't focus on public transportation in urban areas, but it's not possible to ignore cars.
      - shereadsthenews 7y ago
        Eh let’s don't. The thing about rural areas is nobody lives there, by definition. Our city centers should not be degraded so a tiny minority can drive. Instead we should have the Swiss/German S-Bahn model where outlying areas have train stations that take the rural folks to cities quickly and efficiently.
        s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
        Many people do live there, just more spread out. It's not degrading city centers, you still need trucks to stock your stores, you still need tourism. If everyone that lived in the city centers took public transportation, the already built roads would be freed for foreign traffic. As you say, there's nobody living in rural areas so they wouldn't have a huge impact on the roads. They can share it with the buses and trucks. I see this kind of elitism of urban > rural a lot here.
        shereadsthenews 7y ago
        Elitism is when you tear down thousands of homes in black neighborhoods so rural drivers can go non-stop downtown. Elitism is when you spend a billion dollars on a freeway interchange in the middle of nowhere while cutting bus service in downtown Milwaukee. Elitism in America always works in favor of rural people because rural America is overwhelming White and American elitism is just racism.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - bg4 7y ago
    Yes, there would. It would be traffic jams full of buses.
    - shereadsthenews 7y ago
      No. If you sent a bus down every street in San Francisco every minute, the throughput in terms of people per hour would be dramatically higher and the streets would be empty.
      - bg4 7y ago
        The claim was that there was no such thing as a traffic jam. I suspect induced demand and bus bunching would cause bus filled traffic jams.
        shereadsthenews 7y ago
        And yet in cities that are transit-oriented it doesn't happen.
    - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
      Buses can transport many more people than cars. https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almost-everything.html https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
  - kleiba 7y ago
    Traffic jams is not the only cause of longer than necessary travel. I used to use PT religiously for many years when I was a young man. To get to work, using PT where I live means a one hour commute as opposed to a 20 minute car drive (one way). Now, having family, I prefer to save those 80 minutes every day and spend them with my kids -- however, there is hardly ever any traffic jams worth talking about where I live. The sole reason for the longer traveling time on PT is that both my house and my work are not located in the center of the city but on the outskirts. All PT is organized in a star-like pattern, i.e., to go from my house to my work, I first have to take a bus and a train to get into the city center and then another bus to get out of it again. With the car, I never have to into the city in the first place but can drive right around it. What I'm trying to say is: I find it very hard to imagine that even a very tight public transport net would be able to cover all individual connection needs efficiently. Where I live, a lot of people _do_ use public transport but for many people it would take a lot to make it an attractive alternative (and I'm just taking about travel time here, never mind all the other personal advantages of having your own personal space in which you travel). Public transport is also quite costly around here, although it's already subsidized by tax money. If everybody starting using PT tomorrow and paid for it, this would create the instant funds needed to extend the connections to meet most people's needs. But it is a chicken/egg problem: as long as the system as it is is experienced as vastly inferior to someone, it will be very hard to convince them to use it. But without more substantially more people using it, the necessary funds to improve the system is missing. Government money (aka, taxes) could help but massive sums would be needed and already now there is never enough public funds to attend to all the things we expect our administration to take care of.
    - shereadsthenews 7y ago
      What you’re describing is a land use problem not a transportation problem. There are many cities where most trips are made by foot and most of the remaining trips are by bus or train and very few are by driving alone in a car.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - tomatotomato37 7y ago
    You're right, the congestion instead would be at bus depots and stops. Moving any big group of things around, whether they be cargo containers, cars, people, or html packets, will incur some level of congestion. Also I'd feel like we'd just be exchanging time stuck in traffic to time stuck on a bus as it deals with other people's destinations first
    - noxToken 7y ago
      Thank you. This is what a ton of other comments are missing. I've had to occasionally go to our main corporate office. If I rent a car from the airport, it's about 18 minutes from airport parking lot to door. Taking public transit means the absolute fastest I can get from transit stop to door is 32 minutes (25 minutes of transit + 7 minutes of walking). Taking public transit is an additional 14 minutes added to my commute time. I'm not against public transit. People are pretending or under the wrong assumption that getting more people onto buses and rails means that the new commute time is now equivalent to driving a car on a road without traffic. You need to factor in time waiting for transit, stops between your pickup and destination, and last mile. Dense cities suffer from less of the last mile problem, because buses can take routes all through a city with more stops. Moving to the outskirts of the city will have a larger last mile problem where few buses are patrolling.
      - danmaz74 7y ago
        Driving a car point to point without traffic is obviously going to be faster. But if everybody drives point to point, there will be a lot of traffic and jams. The difference with public transportation is that it could move everybody without traffic, but if you remove the traffic lots of people want to use their car - profiting from the other people who use PTA and free their streets. Classic tragedy of the commons.
        noxToken 7y ago
        > but if you remove the traffic lots of people want to use their car - profiting from the other people who use PTA and free their streets This is true, but there's still a layer beyond that. There are cities where the layout is built to address the last mile problem. There are hub locations that can allow you to get from point A to B and to C within 5 minutes of each other on foot. This isn't true for many Americans. Take my example from earlier. If you didn't bring your lunch, your 5 minute walking options from the office are very limited. Expanding to 10 minutes gives more options, but the selection is still very limited. 10 minutes via car gives a much better selection, but 10 minutes via bus (due to waiting and intermediate stops) doesn't get you much further than 10 minutes on foot. Other examples include running and errand after work. If I need to grab something from a store, how much additional time is needed to add an extra stop to go 5 minutes off of my normal commute path? Again, I'm not against public transportation. Cities need to be designed to accommodate public transportation. Otherwise we are exchanging time idling bumper-to-bumper for time waiting and time hitting intermediate stops.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Private v. public transit is yet another example of the linear relationship between latency and throughput; private transit is low latency and low throughput, while public transit is high latency and high throughput. Someday we'll all have flying scooters/jetpacks and be able to get anywhere point-to-point without being bottlenecked by latency or throughput, but until then, it's gonna be a matter of balancing the two.
- peteey 7y ago
  Not all transport time is "wasted". Consider the difference of a normal vs congested road. Suppose a trip would normally take 15 minutes, and takes 25 minutes in congestion. The 10 minute difference is the waste. The 15 minutes is some acceptable transit time you agree we must have. This discussion is centered around the waste. Claiming there is some essential traffic time is a straw man argument
naravara 7y ago
>about half of what people spend on coffee each year: Yeah, but the difference there is that when people spend money on coffee, they're getting a cup of coffee out of the deal. When we spend money on traffic, we're getting hypertension and car accidents instead. That number is literally just time lost in traffic jams. That doesn't even factor in disutility incurred from actually being in traffic like lost sleep, road rage, traffic fatalities, etc.
- varjag 7y ago
  You get hypertension from coffee too..
jetrink 7y ago
I wonder how equally distributed that cost is. If it follows a Pareto distribution, which would be my first guess, then it would be costing 20% of the population over $2000 per year. If so, it would be relatively insignificant to the economy at large, but worth still worth tackling for specific states or cities where the problem looms larger.
Balgair 7y ago
Compare and contrast the use of roads today with another famous public works project: The Roman grain dole. The grain dole in Rome was MANY things at MANY times. But one aspect of it's effects on the Roman economy was the increase in luxury good purchasing in certain times and places. Much like today, basic food requirements took up a lot of the income for poorer citizens. By giving out food for free, these plebians were able to spend that money on more goods and services, thereby increasing trade in the ancient world. (NOTE: this incredibly simplifies a lot of things and is very debatable). That said, roads act in a similar way. If you have to pay a toll for every road, then poor people will use the roads less. If the roads are free, then poor people will use that toll money on other things. Per the article and the issue of traffic, I guess this means that poor people have more of their time taken away from them whilst sitting in traffic as they drive further and are not being driven around by chauffers. If we got rid of this 'time tax' that is traffic congestion, it would be better for poor people. They would use their time on other things that are good for the economy or their lives. I'm also skeptical that this 'time tax' is all that high. Emotionally, traffic is a nightmare, and well extends past my time actually spent in it. But that's a seperate issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae

olliej 7y ago

I mean it's also tremendously inefficient, in terms of physical real estate, throughput, and energy efficiency.

zaroth 7y ago
Roads are perhaps the single greatest invention ever, in terms of economic enabler and value creation, right after the wheel. Sliced bread is substantially lower on the list.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  Please don't conflate roads with single-occupancy driving. Roads have many uses, including the facilitation of buses, the delivery of pizza and the distribution of firefighting equipment. The subject being discussed here is the use of single-occupancy automobiles, which not only create all this unproductive time, but also clog the roads for other uses. Cars make roads worse, not better.
  - fromthestart 7y ago
    What? Cars are what make roads fundamentally useful. Unless we want to force everyone to live in cities, single occupancy cars are a necessity, since covering all destinations with public transportation is impractical, especially suburban/rural environments.
    - opportune 7y ago
      Rather than forcing people to live in cities, we could stop subsidizing transportation for suburban living and start subsidizing public transportation for urban living
      - zaroth 7y ago
        Yet in fact, the subsidies for public transit are higher (as both percentage and net dollar amount) than they are for roads.

viburnum 7y ago

“Converting calories to gas, a bicycle gets about three thousand miles per gallon.” https://twitter.com/grescoe/status/1122883766207352832?s=21 https://twitter.com/grescoe/status/1122883766207352832?s=21

sdinsn 7y ago
But "converting" my free time to gas, it gets worse MPG than cars.
- prolepunk 7y ago
  I get extra free time because my commute also counts as gym time.
  - nvader 7y ago
    If you haven't already seen this article: https://peopleforbikes.org/blog/bicycles-are-instantaneous-teleportation-devices-says-science/ https://peopleforbikes.org/blog/bicycles-are-instantaneous-t...
- jchrisa 7y ago
  In urban areas like the one I live in, most trips are faster by bike. Especially considering I always get the closest parking and almost never wait in a queue.
  - robbyking 7y ago
    Where I live now, my bike ride to work is twice as fast as my bus commute, and in SF, it was about 30% faster. That said, my wife and I are both all season bike commuters, and because we make almost all of our trips (grocery shopping, taking our son to school, etc.) by bike, bikeability is a huge factor for us when we make housing decisions. Nearly all the public transportation/cycling naysaying I read seems to be from people who didn't consider (or at least didn't prioritize) non-private automobile transportation into their housing decision, and typically, it's at great cost to them[1]. 1. http://cityobservatory.org/transportation_housing_affordability/ http://cityobservatory.org/transportation_housing_affordabil...

Kiro 7y ago

I've stopped taking the car completely due to environmental concerns. I see no justification unless you absolutely have to.

happytoexplain 7y ago
>I see no justification unless you absolutely have to. That's an extremely broad qualifier for a pretty particular topic. I think that the vast majority of people either absolutely have to use a car, or can pretty easily not (or in fact would be inconvenienced by using a car). I think it is a very small percentage of people who are somewhere in between those two cases, for whom there is a realistic choice to be made one way or the other.
- firethief 7y ago
  > I think that the vast majority of people either absolutely have to use a car, or can pretty easily not (or in fact would be inconvenienced by using a car). I doubt either of those categories exist, yet alone form a dichotomy
  - taborj 7y ago
    There are millions of people who absolutely have to have a car. There are lots of us living in rural - and even suburban - areas where public transportation is virtually nonexistent.
- Kiro 7y ago
  Absolutely needing a car sounds like a very US centric problem where public transport seems to be very underdeveloped. I know very few car owners who is in that situation but then again, in my country the public transportation network is amazing.
taborj 7y ago
Hey, you ever do anything just for the fun of it? For some of us, driving is that thing.

prolepunk 7y ago

TLDR "Driving is bad and economically unsustainable and highly subsidized. Ride hailing apps take advantage of that to make profits in their bid to displace service workers (taxi drivers) and usurp their wages. However these companies may run out of investor money before accomplishing this. A lot of municipalities are now considering congestion charges. Walking and public transit may also be an option" I'm a bit annoyed how the article takes the angle of cheering for Uber and Lyft while barely mentioning public transit as a solution that doesn't economically exploit underprivileged people.

fopen64 7y ago

The car is the last place you might have some privacy, listen to loud music, talk to yourself. I take "micro-vacations from marriage" consisting basically of driving alone a couple days. The bathroom is arguably the other remaining place for complete privacy, so I understand completely people that can afford huge bathrooms with magazines, TV, etc.

zaroth 7y ago

Driving is increasingly affordable which will drive a new wave of taxes to capture the surplus. A high utilization Tesla Model 3 has costs per mile, including electricity, of around $0.10-$0.15/mile. For comparison, the gas tax alone on the average vehicle was about $0.01-$0.02/mile 10 years ago. (Depends on your state and your MPG) When that vehicle can drive itself from most Point As to most Point Bs on most days, public transit doesn’t have prayer of competing. So new regimes will be needed to fund the roads, but roads are one of the few good things government does for me. I really like roads. Make more and make them better, make them smooth and make them smart. Make them safe and make them fast. And then we will all use them to go out every day and make money. The good news is we won’t need a lot of new parking spaces in this rapidly approaching future. But we will need some new forms of taxing driving, and I’m mostly afraid of the privacy implications.

colechristensen 7y ago
Gas tax is a usage tax to fund transit cost, they _should_ be taxing electrics. Delaying a few years to accelerate the transition is fine but it will ultimately have to happen. What isn't so easy is taxing based on actual usage which a gas tax does fairly well. Resisting a government GPS tracker to tax you appropriately will be important in the coming years.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  What will inevitably happen is they'll tax miles and gas. Because revenue streams never go away and government has no qualms about screwing the poor so long as it can be framed in a politically useful way (screwing those backwards hicks who still drive cars).
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    Roads are expensive and it makes sense to fund them partly at least proportional to use. People who don't drive cars are unusual, if you think otherwise you're in a bubble and don't much understand the rest of the country.
7y ago

mywittyname 7y ago

I believe the ever-declining affordability of driving is going to decimate real estate in the US. We have upwards of 80 years worth of home construction designed almost exclusively around the ability to drive. With the assumption that cars and fuel would forever be cheap and that the Federal government would continue to heavily subsidize road construction. I'm curious to see how people solve this problem. Wealthy people can afford to move into urban centers to save money on commuting costs, but relatively poor people will be stuck in the old suburbs. I suspect motorcycle-class vehicles will begin appearing from upstart manufactures which are effectively single- or dual-seater three wheelers with closed cabins that are cheap to purchase and operate.

ThrustVectoring 7y ago
Another related problem is that these suburbs were planned and financed on a cash accounting basis, rather than accrual. This means that tax burdens (or other municipal revenue methods) need to increase to cover the replacement of aging infrastructure as the relatively wealthy flee the old suburbs. This was a big factor in the Ferguson riots in 2014, IMO. The city had significant budgetary pressure that they managed through for-profit policing (traffic fines a big one), which intensified the racial divide there, and this is why the budgetary pressure arose.
s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
If people living in urban areas start using public transportation more, it frees up the road for suburban and other foreign traffic.
francisofascii 7y ago
The US could have its own yellow jacket revolt in a few decades or so. And I suspect the govt. will subsidize it further. Perhaps you will see a rise in bus commuting from the rural towns.
thingification 7y ago
Let's solve it by keeping cars and fuel forever cheaper, and solving congestion! Tunnels, electric cars, nuclear power (or solar, if you're prepared to sacrifice people's as-yet unsatisfied needs and unsolved suffering to that).

Grue3 7y ago

Nah, it's already more affordable than taxi (through carsharing, at least in my city), and will be even more affordable when autonomous cars get deployed (even for people without driving license). Car ownership will be a luxury, but there will always be a demand for moving from point A to point B alone.

colechristensen 7y ago
For a while I was commuting from Mountain View to SF. It was cheaper and faster for me to drive to the Daly City BART station and park than it was to take the Caltrain (on which there was usually standing room only). This is including the purchase price of the car depreciated over the lifetime I expect to own it, fuel, parking, and maintenance.

kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago

Isn't it the other way round? Driving is increasingly being made affordable on the backs of basically every other means of transportation, many of which are the only means available to the poor. If mandatory parking space regulations etc and other things that spread the price of what is an extremely private luxury on to the general public were removed, let's see how affordable driving remains then.

sandworm101 7y ago

Unaffordable? Compared to what? Maybe in SF/NY. I live in an area with nothing, none, nadda, no version of public transportation that can take me from anywhere near home to anywhere near work. Setting aside the unusual hours I work, my occasional need to haul stuff that is awkward on public transport (military stuff), not driving is not an option.

prolepunk 7y ago

I find this image to be highly relevant to the discussion. https://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/016/837/4581cc8adf783652c6f5829d28aa87f1.png https://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/016/837/45... A bit a flashback from 1940s and the urgency of arguments at that time about conserving resources.