5 ms·

I would love to see a parallel universe, where collective transportation obtained the upper hand. Where countryside railroads are still operating, and where roa

I would love to see a parallel universe, where collective transportation obtained the upper hand. Where countryside railroads are still operating, and where roads/highways haven't consistently led to the expropriation of millions of people worldwide, and to the current car-oriented urban nightmare. See Ivan Illich for a demonstration that car-oriented urbanization is hostile and counter-productive, as opposed to what he calls "convivial tools" (empowering technologies). Would we still have the problem of climate change? Would we be on the same level of development?

unnouinceput 6y ago
To answer shortly to your questions. 1 - No; 2 - No. Expanded explanation. Due to economics you'd invest in a more expensive technology, using more manual labor, having less free time to think to more advance tech, which in turn leads to slower development. Using more manual labor would also, in turn, lead to less need for coal and oil demand and that would mean lesser climate change problem. My 2 cents
- southerntofu 6y ago
  > you'd invest in a more expensive technology How can collective transportation be more expensive than cars, as a whole? Most western countries had really well connected railroads going in all the very small towns and did that for pennies compared to the overall price of car society. The overall cost of cars is not just the individual car. It's also infrastructure that caters to cars, which requires roads everywhere (otherwise your car is pretty useless), parking spaces.. etc.. While i agree with the conclusion (better for the environment, and probably for everything else), and i agree manual labor is usually (though not always) preferable to industrialized labor, i don't understand why collective transportation would require more manual labor.
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    In cities you'd have instead of roads for cars, to cover each individual need, rolling sidewalks, going all different directions. Which means a lot of interconnected stuff to cover everything. If I want to go to my friend who is 3 blocks to the right and then a U turn and 5 more blocks to the left currently I take a car and I am there in 5 minutes. But if this society where individual cars don't exists but something else covers that highly customized needs for each individual - how you'd envision said technology? I would envision sidewalks on different levels, interconnected with elevators, and all of them on winches and trolleys and whatnot. Hence a lot more expensive technology to deploy/maintain. Or are we talking Sci-Fi and some alien technology became available to us?
    - rini17 6y ago
      WHAT? I think parent was talking about trams.
    - alvarlagerlof 6y ago
      It sounds like you live in an american city. I live in Stockholm, and people here mostly don't even dream of driving to each other or stores. It's expensive to park and own cars. Instead we have a large bus, tram, train, and subway network, and that's all that's needed.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        >I live in Stockholm, and people here mostly don't even dream of driving to each other or stores. So it sounds like they don't dream of it in the same way that many people in the US don't dream of being chauffeured everywhere in an Uber. It's so expensive that it's not even within the realm of possibility. Having "good" public transit as an option is very nice. I once lived in a city like that. But it's not hard to see why a lot of people (and not just in the US) choose suburbs and sitting in traffic as the option that sucks less than the others.
    - Talanes 6y ago
      Have you never taken a bus?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
fy20 6y ago
You can see that today if you visit any big cities that have a functional public transit system. London, Berlin, Barcelona, Singapore, etc. Sure there are still certain things that are easier if you have a car, but most of the time you don't need one.
deburo 6y ago
Public transportation didn't succeed as much as it should have probably because a significant amount of people hate it. Schedules, dirty environments, people uncomfortably close to each other during traffic hours, static dropoff locations. We might get there with Uber-like carpods if autonomous driving ever succeeds.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  I much prefer public transport and only use a car because its kind of necessary where I live. (South Africa) I think you'll find it interesting to learn about thow the car corporations convinced the US govt to focus on motorways instead of public transportation, which had huge implications for the way the US works.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    If what my cousin told me of driving in South Africa still holds from back when he went there to get his master's degree, I dont think I could blame anyone for being more comfortable not driving.
  - matz1 6y ago
    >the car corporations convinced the US govt but US govt is the representative of what significant amount of US people want. Public transportation sucks because it doesn't take you to where you want, when you want, from where you want.
    - southerntofu 6y ago
      > but US govt is the representative of what significant amount of US people want. How so? When you have a "choice" between a limited set of candidates, serious restrictions on voting rights (eg. following a conviction), and when candidates aren't bound to any form of contract (they can promise anything, do the opposite)? Also, what's even a democracy in an age of mass corporate media? I don't know about the USA, but here in France all major media are owned by billionaire sociopaths, and i can count on one hand the number of nationwide independent newspapers. Also, voter turnout for last USA presidential election was only 62% of voting age population, not accounting for minors and immigrants. That's not even close to representing anything. That's nothing like a "democracy" (power of the people). Democracy is when people make decisions for their lives. Not when they have to choose between a few power-greedy politicians to make decisions for them. > Public transportation sucks because it doesn't take you to where you want, when you want, from where you want. Only because we let governments/politicians dismantle public services to the point they're essentially useless. It is not the case everywhere, and was not always the case through history.
api 6y ago
Only the rich would have spacious living arrangements, and in larger cities only the rich would own anything at all. The rent would be very high. Anyone below, say, upper middle class would live in crowded slums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent You can see this today in dense cities where everyone leaves as soon as they have kids because they can't afford space.
- Valgrim 6y ago
  Housing cooperatives are very common in cities and are an attempt at breaking this cycle; you don't own your home, but a share in the apartment block. Because it is not operated for profit, the rent is so low that you can afford to accumulate and invest your capital in other ways (such as creating a business).
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    I visited a few housing co-ops near the university where I went to school, and you couldn't find a more disgusting, run down place to live in the city if you had tried. That was more of a rental than an ownership situation, which I suspect changes the equation a bit. Either way, co-ops are definitely not a magical solution.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  > Only the rich would have spacious living arrangements, and in larger cities only the rich would own anything at all. The rent would be very high. Anyone below, say, upper middle class would live in crowded slums. I'm sorry but how is that different from the present situation? There's slums around most cities in the world, including here in France or in the US. People may more than half of their wage (sometimes all of it) to get stuck into often-indecent housing. For most people, ownership is not even a dream, because the worry of having to struggle for monthly survival does not give you time and mindspace to dream. In fact, i would argue a serious public policy for public transports would have opposite consequences. The very real rural exodus has been exacerbated by public policies favoring life in big cities, but we could turn the tide. The continuing closing of many local shops (bars, bakeries, smaller supermarkets) on the countryside has consequences: it makes life on the countryside less possible/attractive without a car, it makes life more expensive for those who have a car, and it destroys social life and neighborhood culture. So the problem of housing is very real. However, it's an artificial problem. There's tons of unhappy people stuck in the ghettos around the big cities (here in western Europe the rich live in city center, not the suburbs), and tons of empty houses on the countryside to be bought for the equivalent of 5-100 months rent in the city (good opportunities for ownership), but there is no government program to make the connection between these two worlds that do not know each other. Also, even in the big cities, the prices are not driven by population but by speculation. For example, in Paris it's more than 1 million empty housing units (not secondary housing, actually ABANDONED housing), which is more than two apartments for every homeless person in the whole of France. Why are there laws (private property) to prevent people from having a home, that's another debate. But it's evident from statistics all across the western world that there is something wrong, and if someone in power really wanted to help anyone (spoiler: they never do) they could just do it by snapping their fingers.
nine_k 6y ago
For collective transportation to succeed, collective living has to succeed. That is, a lot of people should live densely enough in towns. This is what you see in Germany, Netherlands, (northern) France, England, for instance. Public railways are well-developed there, and have been for a century or more. But you can't expect the same in the US Midwest, for instance, where countryside and suburban living is prevalent. It's just impractical, so cars reign supreme.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> It's just impractical, so cars reign supreme. And a dedication to dense urban living would also seriously impact the development of those regions. Remote mining/lumber towns. Enormous farmsteads. The loan cowboy walking a fence for days. These are romantic concepts but they are also how resources are extracted efficiently. If people only ever stayed near mass transportation hubs North America would not be the powerhouse it is. To this day, huge areas of economic activity rely on that most common of tools: a person with a truck able to go where needed on a moment's notice. Beyond the suburbs, when your power goes out at 3am or your farm catches fire, the first and most likely only people on the scene will be driving their own vehicles.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Those regions would still have trucks to work with. In some ways they would be better trucks because they wouldn't have to sort though the trucks aimed at people who don't need a truck. When inspecting a fence line you want a slow truck with a lot of suspension travel. When you fill the bed of the truck you want a suspension that doesn't point the headlights at the sky, and don't care that the suspension system that can do this results in a rough unloaded ride.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      Nothing angers country people more than city people telling them whether they should be allowed to drive a truck. Emissions control, gas over diesel, even all-electric is open for discussion. Just don't suggest that they use an app to call an uber when smoke comes over the horizon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_wildfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_wildfire
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
I would love to see a parallel universe where mass transportation was never developed or desired and population levels remained low with an emphasis on local production and self-sustainability.

unnouinceput 6y ago

To answer shortly to your questions. 1 - No; 2 - No. Expanded explanation. Due to economics you'd invest in a more expensive technology, using more manual labor, having less free time to think to more advance tech, which in turn leads to slower development. Using more manual labor would also, in turn, lead to less need for coal and oil demand and that would mean lesser climate change problem. My 2 cents

southerntofu 6y ago
> you'd invest in a more expensive technology How can collective transportation be more expensive than cars, as a whole? Most western countries had really well connected railroads going in all the very small towns and did that for pennies compared to the overall price of car society. The overall cost of cars is not just the individual car. It's also infrastructure that caters to cars, which requires roads everywhere (otherwise your car is pretty useless), parking spaces.. etc.. While i agree with the conclusion (better for the environment, and probably for everything else), and i agree manual labor is usually (though not always) preferable to industrialized labor, i don't understand why collective transportation would require more manual labor.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  In cities you'd have instead of roads for cars, to cover each individual need, rolling sidewalks, going all different directions. Which means a lot of interconnected stuff to cover everything. If I want to go to my friend who is 3 blocks to the right and then a U turn and 5 more blocks to the left currently I take a car and I am there in 5 minutes. But if this society where individual cars don't exists but something else covers that highly customized needs for each individual - how you'd envision said technology? I would envision sidewalks on different levels, interconnected with elevators, and all of them on winches and trolleys and whatnot. Hence a lot more expensive technology to deploy/maintain. Or are we talking Sci-Fi and some alien technology became available to us?
  - rini17 6y ago
    WHAT? I think parent was talking about trams.
  - alvarlagerlof 6y ago
    It sounds like you live in an american city. I live in Stockholm, and people here mostly don't even dream of driving to each other or stores. It's expensive to park and own cars. Instead we have a large bus, tram, train, and subway network, and that's all that's needed.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      >I live in Stockholm, and people here mostly don't even dream of driving to each other or stores. So it sounds like they don't dream of it in the same way that many people in the US don't dream of being chauffeured everywhere in an Uber. It's so expensive that it's not even within the realm of possibility. Having "good" public transit as an option is very nice. I once lived in a city like that. But it's not hard to see why a lot of people (and not just in the US) choose suburbs and sitting in traffic as the option that sucks less than the others.
  - Talanes 6y ago
    Have you never taken a bus?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

fy20 6y ago

You can see that today if you visit any big cities that have a functional public transit system. London, Berlin, Barcelona, Singapore, etc. Sure there are still certain things that are easier if you have a car, but most of the time you don't need one.

deburo 6y ago

Public transportation didn't succeed as much as it should have probably because a significant amount of people hate it. Schedules, dirty environments, people uncomfortably close to each other during traffic hours, static dropoff locations. We might get there with Uber-like carpods if autonomous driving ever succeeds.

Synaesthesia 6y ago
I much prefer public transport and only use a car because its kind of necessary where I live. (South Africa) I think you'll find it interesting to learn about thow the car corporations convinced the US govt to focus on motorways instead of public transportation, which had huge implications for the way the US works.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  If what my cousin told me of driving in South Africa still holds from back when he went there to get his master's degree, I dont think I could blame anyone for being more comfortable not driving.
- matz1 6y ago
  >the car corporations convinced the US govt but US govt is the representative of what significant amount of US people want. Public transportation sucks because it doesn't take you to where you want, when you want, from where you want.
  - southerntofu 6y ago
    > but US govt is the representative of what significant amount of US people want. How so? When you have a "choice" between a limited set of candidates, serious restrictions on voting rights (eg. following a conviction), and when candidates aren't bound to any form of contract (they can promise anything, do the opposite)? Also, what's even a democracy in an age of mass corporate media? I don't know about the USA, but here in France all major media are owned by billionaire sociopaths, and i can count on one hand the number of nationwide independent newspapers. Also, voter turnout for last USA presidential election was only 62% of voting age population, not accounting for minors and immigrants. That's not even close to representing anything. That's nothing like a "democracy" (power of the people). Democracy is when people make decisions for their lives. Not when they have to choose between a few power-greedy politicians to make decisions for them. > Public transportation sucks because it doesn't take you to where you want, when you want, from where you want. Only because we let governments/politicians dismantle public services to the point they're essentially useless. It is not the case everywhere, and was not always the case through history.

api 6y ago

Only the rich would have spacious living arrangements, and in larger cities only the rich would own anything at all. The rent would be very high. Anyone below, say, upper middle class would live in crowded slums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent You can see this today in dense cities where everyone leaves as soon as they have kids because they can't afford space.

Valgrim 6y ago
Housing cooperatives are very common in cities and are an attempt at breaking this cycle; you don't own your home, but a share in the apartment block. Because it is not operated for profit, the rent is so low that you can afford to accumulate and invest your capital in other ways (such as creating a business).
- zdragnar 6y ago
  I visited a few housing co-ops near the university where I went to school, and you couldn't find a more disgusting, run down place to live in the city if you had tried. That was more of a rental than an ownership situation, which I suspect changes the equation a bit. Either way, co-ops are definitely not a magical solution.
southerntofu 6y ago
> Only the rich would have spacious living arrangements, and in larger cities only the rich would own anything at all. The rent would be very high. Anyone below, say, upper middle class would live in crowded slums. I'm sorry but how is that different from the present situation? There's slums around most cities in the world, including here in France or in the US. People may more than half of their wage (sometimes all of it) to get stuck into often-indecent housing. For most people, ownership is not even a dream, because the worry of having to struggle for monthly survival does not give you time and mindspace to dream. In fact, i would argue a serious public policy for public transports would have opposite consequences. The very real rural exodus has been exacerbated by public policies favoring life in big cities, but we could turn the tide. The continuing closing of many local shops (bars, bakeries, smaller supermarkets) on the countryside has consequences: it makes life on the countryside less possible/attractive without a car, it makes life more expensive for those who have a car, and it destroys social life and neighborhood culture. So the problem of housing is very real. However, it's an artificial problem. There's tons of unhappy people stuck in the ghettos around the big cities (here in western Europe the rich live in city center, not the suburbs), and tons of empty houses on the countryside to be bought for the equivalent of 5-100 months rent in the city (good opportunities for ownership), but there is no government program to make the connection between these two worlds that do not know each other. Also, even in the big cities, the prices are not driven by population but by speculation. For example, in Paris it's more than 1 million empty housing units (not secondary housing, actually ABANDONED housing), which is more than two apartments for every homeless person in the whole of France. Why are there laws (private property) to prevent people from having a home, that's another debate. But it's evident from statistics all across the western world that there is something wrong, and if someone in power really wanted to help anyone (spoiler: they never do) they could just do it by snapping their fingers.

nine_k 6y ago

For collective transportation to succeed, collective living has to succeed. That is, a lot of people should live densely enough in towns. This is what you see in Germany, Netherlands, (northern) France, England, for instance. Public railways are well-developed there, and have been for a century or more. But you can't expect the same in the US Midwest, for instance, where countryside and suburban living is prevalent. It's just impractical, so cars reign supreme.

sandworm101 6y ago
>> It's just impractical, so cars reign supreme. And a dedication to dense urban living would also seriously impact the development of those regions. Remote mining/lumber towns. Enormous farmsteads. The loan cowboy walking a fence for days. These are romantic concepts but they are also how resources are extracted efficiently. If people only ever stayed near mass transportation hubs North America would not be the powerhouse it is. To this day, huge areas of economic activity rely on that most common of tools: a person with a truck able to go where needed on a moment's notice. Beyond the suburbs, when your power goes out at 3am or your farm catches fire, the first and most likely only people on the scene will be driving their own vehicles.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Those regions would still have trucks to work with. In some ways they would be better trucks because they wouldn't have to sort though the trucks aimed at people who don't need a truck. When inspecting a fence line you want a slow truck with a lot of suspension travel. When you fill the bed of the truck you want a suspension that doesn't point the headlights at the sky, and don't care that the suspension system that can do this results in a rough unloaded ride.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    Nothing angers country people more than city people telling them whether they should be allowed to drive a truck. Emissions control, gas over diesel, even all-electric is open for discussion. Just don't suggest that they use an app to call an uber when smoke comes over the horizon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_wildfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_wildfire

StanislavPetrov 6y ago

I would love to see a parallel universe where mass transportation was never developed or desired and population levels remained low with an emphasis on local production and self-sustainability.