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Article completely misses the underlying issue of running out of land near urban centers to create new suburbs. Cars made suburbs viable, but only so far from
by Retric 1y ago
Article completely misses the underlying issue of running out of land near urban centers to create new suburbs. Cars made suburbs viable, but only so far from cities.
One solution which ignores all the issue presented is relatively high speed rail networks which avoid congestion to quickly reach city centers. Rail averaging ~100 MPH turns an unbearable commute into a viable one, assuming the tickets aren’t overpriced.
Level 4/5 Self driving cars are another possibility, the time is still lost but watching TV or even napping on the way home is a very different proposition. Better road networks similarly extend things somewhat.
- culopatin 1y agoLol talking about rails in the US is pointless at this point.
- Retric 1y agoUS uses quite a bit of rail, just not for long distance travel. DC metro for example has stations over 30 miles out, with other options extending that to over 60. A big part of this is having unsubsidized parking, if you or your company is paying 20+$/day on top of driving the incentives change.
- drewcoo 1y agoFreight trains are still a thing. About 20 years ago Buffet bought BNSF.
- Retric 1y agoThus the long distance travel caveat. US Fright is doing ok, but it got heavily dependent on coal which is going away fast.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y agoIn US, number of miles of rails only ever goes down. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183410/united-states-class-i-rail-mileage-since-1990/?__sso_cookie_checker=failed https://www.statista.com/statistics/183410/united-states-cla...
- Retric 1y agoRemoving redundancy is one way efficiency has gone up so much. https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/Figure1_5_0.gif https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/Figure1_5_0.gif
- xvedejas 1y agoRoads don't scale well regardless of whether the cars are self-driving. Once you get enough cars on the same highway, there's an inflection point where speeds drop quickly. This only gets worse as you increase the radius of viable commuting distance, since that increases the total number of commuters.
- Retric 1y agoThey scale when designed with scale in mind. Most cities need more limited access highways not just more lanes. Suburbs extend much further along highways for obvious reasons, yet they get built on the way to somewhere else not just for regional transportation. A perfect example being the south east of DC getting extremely underdeveloped relative to the west. But you can see the same pattern around many US cities.
- trollbridge 1y agoDC had a rather powerful lobby that tried to prevent building highways, particularly inside the District's limits, so very little got built in the DC-controlled areas (like the southeast). The west was in Virginia and didn't face nearly as much opposition. 50 years later, the economic growth has been concentrated in Virginia where adequate transportation facilities were built.
- Retric 1y agoExactly, massive economic growth follows such investments but people have largely stopped looking forward.
- xvedejas 1y agoThat would be a lot more land devoted to freeways, and the associated maintenance cost. But beside that, the bottle necks are mostly not the number of highways, but rather the number of exits near the urban center. I'm skeptical that the roads in the urban center can scale much beyond what we already see in the most car oriented commuter cities in any roughly 2d configuration.
- trollbridge 1y agoIt isn't 1950; people are mostly going places other than city centres. Old style rail doesn't work particularly well for that.
- kanbara 1y agoso you have high speed long distance and commuter rail, and then local transit options. and you can stop at places other than coty centres. my route from berlin to hamburg has a bunch of smaller stops. asia and europe get by fine with rail. if china can build 20 subway systems and 50 HSR routes in 10 years so can america
- Retric 1y agoRail doesn’t need to be a 90% solution, even 10% makes a major difference on the margins. Infrastructure like subway stations drive up local prices which means people who don’t use them tend to migrate somewhere else.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago> It isn't 1950; people are mostly going places other than city centres. We suburbanites avoid doing city stuff because the 11th-14th commutes (that week) would suck.