4 ms·

Your facts are correct, but you are severely biased in one direction. Personal vehicles often save huge amounts of time, and are often the only reasonable solut

Your facts are correct, but you are severely biased in one direction. Personal vehicles often save huge amounts of time, and are often the only reasonable solution for many needs. I often use public transport, but the downsides can be extremely expensive. The inconvenience of buses often means it is cheaper to use an Uber (only available due to roading network). It isn't just a path-dependency. Public transport is often unpopular for extremely valid reasons (I personally hate cars and try to use public transport in the limited situations it has any use to me). Public transport is a nightmare for the disabled and the infirm. Public transport completely and utterly failed after the Christchurch earthquake - bad luck if you needed to rely on it!

Retric 3y ago
Personal vehicles only save time at the individual level, but individual driving slows everyone down due to congestion. Even if mass transit is only faster for say 10% of people taking 10% of drivers off the road makes a huge difference. Imagine pandemic levels of traffic becoming the norm, except as you get people out of cars driving becomes more efficient. That’s the feedback loop which makes it seem like mass transit is always slow even when it’s massively improving things. Building infrastructure is always an optimization problem and it impacts not just current users but also where people build apartments etc.
- robocat 3y ago
  Sure. But 1: any successful public transport solution must be be desirable by individuals. The alternative is to force people to use the system - that would not be democratic freedom! 2: any public transport has to be better than what we currently have. Cars are pretty damn good - even though they have downsides they also have some very valuable upside features! Most public transport currently has huge negative problems. It can work in large cities, but buses fail abysmally in my own city (~400000) even though expensive subsidies pay for most of it. Chesterton's fence - we have evolved to cars because they have features that are hard to replicate. I would like to see an Uber like shared transport on-demand system developed and deployed in my city. I did read about a city (I think in a scandy country) that has a working 24 hour system.

Retric 3y ago

Personal vehicles only save time at the individual level, but individual driving slows everyone down due to congestion. Even if mass transit is only faster for say 10% of people taking 10% of drivers off the road makes a huge difference. Imagine pandemic levels of traffic becoming the norm, except as you get people out of cars driving becomes more efficient. That’s the feedback loop which makes it seem like mass transit is always slow even when it’s massively improving things. Building infrastructure is always an optimization problem and it impacts not just current users but also where people build apartments etc.

robocat 3y ago
Sure. But 1: any successful public transport solution must be be desirable by individuals. The alternative is to force people to use the system - that would not be democratic freedom! 2: any public transport has to be better than what we currently have. Cars are pretty damn good - even though they have downsides they also have some very valuable upside features! Most public transport currently has huge negative problems. It can work in large cities, but buses fail abysmally in my own city (~400000) even though expensive subsidies pay for most of it. Chesterton's fence - we have evolved to cars because they have features that are hard to replicate. I would like to see an Uber like shared transport on-demand system developed and deployed in my city. I did read about a city (I think in a scandy country) that has a working 24 hour system.