4 ms·

Cars are actually one of the least efficient means of achieving that.

by ashtonkem 5y ago

halfnormalform 5y ago
It depends what you mean by efficient. A bus is more energy-efficient but a car is way more time-efficient.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  They’re incredibly time efficient, until everyone else tries to do the same thing. This is why commutes in places like Atlanta and Los Angeles are notoriously bad. Also, cars are literally the least space efficient means of transit ever devised. Depending on cars for transit means everyone has to live further apart in order to make roads and parking big enough to accommodate all the cars[0], making commutes worse. Cars are also time inefficient over longer distances, trains (if we bothered to make them) and airplanes trivially beat cars. 0 - Underground parking solves the storage issue at a ludicrous cost. In many modern buildings the cost of the underground parking structure is often more than the cost of the apartment building above it.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Sure, but only if your world begins and ends with the urban public transit map and only includes white collar workers. Outside of areas with good public transit cars are the next best thing, and those areas start much closer to urban cores than you want to admit and even within good transit areas there is a huge amount of economic activity where the point to point nature or cargo capacity of cars enables economic activity that is not otherwise economically in the black. We need to have some amount of car infrastructure to enable all that. A side effect of this is that a bunch of urban workers who don't really have a good argument for commuting by car can and do because they can afford the luxury.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It always amazes that the universal response to arguments about reducing parking in cities is that someone will immediately cry “well what about the country!” It’s always hard to come up with a response more polite than “I wasn’t talking about them, why are you bringing it up?”

Cars are actually one of the least efficient means of achieving that.

halfnormalform 5y ago

It depends what you mean by efficient. A bus is more energy-efficient but a car is way more time-efficient.

ashtonkem 5y ago
They’re incredibly time efficient, until everyone else tries to do the same thing. This is why commutes in places like Atlanta and Los Angeles are notoriously bad. Also, cars are literally the least space efficient means of transit ever devised. Depending on cars for transit means everyone has to live further apart in order to make roads and parking big enough to accommodate all the cars[0], making commutes worse. Cars are also time inefficient over longer distances, trains (if we bothered to make them) and airplanes trivially beat cars. 0 - Underground parking solves the storage issue at a ludicrous cost. In many modern buildings the cost of the underground parking structure is often more than the cost of the apartment building above it.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Sure, but only if your world begins and ends with the urban public transit map and only includes white collar workers. Outside of areas with good public transit cars are the next best thing, and those areas start much closer to urban cores than you want to admit and even within good transit areas there is a huge amount of economic activity where the point to point nature or cargo capacity of cars enables economic activity that is not otherwise economically in the black. We need to have some amount of car infrastructure to enable all that. A side effect of this is that a bunch of urban workers who don't really have a good argument for commuting by car can and do because they can afford the luxury.

ashtonkem 5y ago
It always amazes that the universal response to arguments about reducing parking in cities is that someone will immediately cry “well what about the country!” It’s always hard to come up with a response more polite than “I wasn’t talking about them, why are you bringing it up?”