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Speed, weather, and cargo storage are mostly about transportation over...distances. For most shorter hops you need none of those things. Hence my statement. Of

Speed, weather, and cargo storage are mostly about transportation over...distances. For most shorter hops you need none of those things. Hence my statement. Of course existing cities wouldn't be rebuilt from scratch. But cities change all the time. Driverless cars certainly are better suited for the way cities are today. But as it becomes obvious that there are alternatives that don't require as much wasted real estate as cars use, and that crucially don't give up the personal freedom that cars provide, cities can and will adapt to that. The city of 2035 will likely be moving down that kind of path, whatever the exact details look like. New development will be designed for it from the ground up. This is just how transformation happens.

aetherson 12y ago
Speed (at the ranges that we are talking about) is important at the distances that we are talking about. Weather and cargo storage are totally distance-independent. But let's take a step back. We're imagining the sort of default rosy driverless-vehicle future, right? Driverless cars can be made that are fully autonomous, at least as safe as human drivers in essentially all conditions, and not terrifyingly expensive. We agree that in that case the driverless car is strictly more attractive to riders than the drivered-cars of today are, right? So if the value that a person today puts on having a car is A, and the value that future person puts on having a future car is B, then B > A? Indeed, B is much greater than A? And we also agree that today, cities are pretty car-oriented? So A is large ENOUGH that cities pander to it to a large degree? And there's a positive feedback cycle here where when cities pander to cars, that makes cars actually more valuable compared to the competition. Now what you're saying is that when we replace A with B, where B >>> A, cities will (eventually) pander to cars less. Why? The thing that you suggest is that cars waste real estate. Which, certainly, they do. I do note in passing that driverless cars might waste less real estate (for example, they could be sent to more distant and more inconvenient parking structures, or the utilization of people / car could go up with a rides-for-hire model). But whatever, at the very least the real estate efficiency of driverless cars is no worse than the real estate efficiency of regular cars. So meanwhile, today, the rail + maybe something like segway model has value X. We agree that X < A, right? That in America at least cars provide more value than transit, and so people get cars, and so cities pander to cars. Now you seem to be envisioning that in the driverless future, rail + segways have value Y, and Y is not only > X, it's also > A, and in fact > B. Why? What is it about driverless segways that is so great? Unlike driverless cars, they don't seem like they provide much value for their users (you aren't going to read a book while your driverless segway takes you to your destination, and though maybe they'd be a little better when drunk). And, further, we're saying that driverless segways are that awesome even if they have to reverse some inertia of cities currently being designed kind of "against" them, and indeed, even if they have to reverse yet more inertia because the FIRST thing that happens in our driverless future is people buy driverless cars and become a constituency for even more city-pandering-to-cars. I don't see it. Maybe if it takes a long time to get to driverless cars, because right now I think that the car domination of the world is getting a bit milder. Maybe if the current trend continues for a few decades, and then cities have become more hostile to cars, driverless or otherwise, the increased value of cars won't be enough that it will get over the inertia. But if we get good driverless cars in the next decade or fifteen years? In-city rail is just going to die in almost all cities. And once it's dead, it will be dead for a long, long time.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  You're kinda taking the "faster horses" side of things, if you know what I mean. You're comparing the real estate efficiency of cars to driverless cars, which is not what I'm doing. I'm comparing the RE efficiency of cars to segways, and segways win that hands-down, no comparison. The other benefit is psychological. You transform a development from being centered around cars to being centered around people. Even a person on a segway is a person. A person in a car is a car. This, I would maintain, is the larger benefit to average citizen. It's a more desirable experience. Developers win with more usable real estate, citizens win with a much more pleasant scale and experience. The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area. The bigger assumption you're making is that people will "have" cars, and I'm not sure that will be the case. For me, that's the biggest unknown about transportation in the next couple of decades. Will people own cars, or will they merely use cars from a large pool of cars (either civic or corporately owned)? Uber, for example, is starting to promote the idea of not owning a car at all to young people. They've been doing a good job of hyping the convenience of that lifestyle, and a limited set of people have bought into it already. I also recently noticed they're starting to play a prestige angle with black SUVs and so on. They're actively playing that up, which fills the other need personal cars currently serve. Uber's endgame is very clearly a fleet of autonomous cars, and some cities are making very early sounds about building their own fleets. I don't know how that's going to shake out. There are powerful forces pushing both ways. But, if personal car ownership does become a thing of the past, a lot of the pressure you imagine for city development to have an even greater universal (as opposed to limited areas) accommodation for cars goes away. The other major unknown is if cities simply become less desirable in 20-30 years. Given increasing automation, the nature of work may change to a degree that some of the economic incentives for city living decrease. That trend, if it even builds at all, will be slower to develop, but potentially even more powerful.
  - aetherson 12y ago
    You're misunderstanding my comparison. I'm saying, "real segways are more space efficient than real cars. Despite that, people prefer cars to segways (by a gigantic margin)." So from there, I get to, "future segways will be more space efficient than future cars, but I don't see that turning people towards future segways -- because we can already tell that people don't value space highly enough to make them want segways, and it's going to be pretty much the same comparison in the future." Here's another bit of pseudo math: real cars >>> real segways. Driverless cars >>> real cars. Driverless segways ~= real segways. Thus driverless cars >>>>> driverless segways. I'm not taking a stance on the ownership model of cars, either. I don't know if in a driverless car world people would own them or rent them for hours or days at a time or rent them for the duration of a single ride. I'm just saying that people will USE them a lot. And regardless of who owns the car, if everyone USES the driverless cars a lot, then cities will be built around cars. And cities that are built around cars are hostile to segways, driverless or otherwise. You say this intriguing thing: "The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area." I think that my fundamental point is that that doesn't seem true. If driverless cars are highly available to people, I think they'll just use the driverless cars end-to-end. Your driverless car trip will put you at the doorstep of wherever you're going. At that point you don't need a segway. Segways are for when your inter-area transportation CAN'T get you the last mile of where you're going -- that is, they're for rail. And rail, I think, is dead if we get driverless cars soon.

aetherson 12y ago

Speed (at the ranges that we are talking about) is important at the distances that we are talking about. Weather and cargo storage are totally distance-independent. But let's take a step back. We're imagining the sort of default rosy driverless-vehicle future, right? Driverless cars can be made that are fully autonomous, at least as safe as human drivers in essentially all conditions, and not terrifyingly expensive. We agree that in that case the driverless car is strictly more attractive to riders than the drivered-cars of today are, right? So if the value that a person today puts on having a car is A, and the value that future person puts on having a future car is B, then B > A? Indeed, B is much greater than A? And we also agree that today, cities are pretty car-oriented? So A is large ENOUGH that cities pander to it to a large degree? And there's a positive feedback cycle here where when cities pander to cars, that makes cars actually more valuable compared to the competition. Now what you're saying is that when we replace A with B, where B >>> A, cities will (eventually) pander to cars less. Why? The thing that you suggest is that cars waste real estate. Which, certainly, they do. I do note in passing that driverless cars might waste less real estate (for example, they could be sent to more distant and more inconvenient parking structures, or the utilization of people / car could go up with a rides-for-hire model). But whatever, at the very least the real estate efficiency of driverless cars is no worse than the real estate efficiency of regular cars. So meanwhile, today, the rail + maybe something like segway model has value X. We agree that X < A, right? That in America at least cars provide more value than transit, and so people get cars, and so cities pander to cars. Now you seem to be envisioning that in the driverless future, rail + segways have value Y, and Y is not only > X, it's also > A, and in fact > B. Why? What is it about driverless segways that is so great? Unlike driverless cars, they don't seem like they provide much value for their users (you aren't going to read a book while your driverless segway takes you to your destination, and though maybe they'd be a little better when drunk). And, further, we're saying that driverless segways are that awesome even if they have to reverse some inertia of cities currently being designed kind of "against" them, and indeed, even if they have to reverse yet more inertia because the FIRST thing that happens in our driverless future is people buy driverless cars and become a constituency for even more city-pandering-to-cars. I don't see it. Maybe if it takes a long time to get to driverless cars, because right now I think that the car domination of the world is getting a bit milder. Maybe if the current trend continues for a few decades, and then cities have become more hostile to cars, driverless or otherwise, the increased value of cars won't be enough that it will get over the inertia. But if we get good driverless cars in the next decade or fifteen years? In-city rail is just going to die in almost all cities. And once it's dead, it will be dead for a long, long time.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
You're kinda taking the "faster horses" side of things, if you know what I mean. You're comparing the real estate efficiency of cars to driverless cars, which is not what I'm doing. I'm comparing the RE efficiency of cars to segways, and segways win that hands-down, no comparison. The other benefit is psychological. You transform a development from being centered around cars to being centered around people. Even a person on a segway is a person. A person in a car is a car. This, I would maintain, is the larger benefit to average citizen. It's a more desirable experience. Developers win with more usable real estate, citizens win with a much more pleasant scale and experience. The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area. The bigger assumption you're making is that people will "have" cars, and I'm not sure that will be the case. For me, that's the biggest unknown about transportation in the next couple of decades. Will people own cars, or will they merely use cars from a large pool of cars (either civic or corporately owned)? Uber, for example, is starting to promote the idea of not owning a car at all to young people. They've been doing a good job of hyping the convenience of that lifestyle, and a limited set of people have bought into it already. I also recently noticed they're starting to play a prestige angle with black SUVs and so on. They're actively playing that up, which fills the other need personal cars currently serve. Uber's endgame is very clearly a fleet of autonomous cars, and some cities are making very early sounds about building their own fleets. I don't know how that's going to shake out. There are powerful forces pushing both ways. But, if personal car ownership does become a thing of the past, a lot of the pressure you imagine for city development to have an even greater universal (as opposed to limited areas) accommodation for cars goes away. The other major unknown is if cities simply become less desirable in 20-30 years. Given increasing automation, the nature of work may change to a degree that some of the economic incentives for city living decrease. That trend, if it even builds at all, will be slower to develop, but potentially even more powerful.
- aetherson 12y ago
  You're misunderstanding my comparison. I'm saying, "real segways are more space efficient than real cars. Despite that, people prefer cars to segways (by a gigantic margin)." So from there, I get to, "future segways will be more space efficient than future cars, but I don't see that turning people towards future segways -- because we can already tell that people don't value space highly enough to make them want segways, and it's going to be pretty much the same comparison in the future." Here's another bit of pseudo math: real cars >>> real segways. Driverless cars >>> real cars. Driverless segways ~= real segways. Thus driverless cars >>>>> driverless segways. I'm not taking a stance on the ownership model of cars, either. I don't know if in a driverless car world people would own them or rent them for hours or days at a time or rent them for the duration of a single ride. I'm just saying that people will USE them a lot. And regardless of who owns the car, if everyone USES the driverless cars a lot, then cities will be built around cars. And cities that are built around cars are hostile to segways, driverless or otherwise. You say this intriguing thing: "The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area." I think that my fundamental point is that that doesn't seem true. If driverless cars are highly available to people, I think they'll just use the driverless cars end-to-end. Your driverless car trip will put you at the doorstep of wherever you're going. At that point you don't need a segway. Segways are for when your inter-area transportation CAN'T get you the last mile of where you're going -- that is, they're for rail. And rail, I think, is dead if we get driverless cars soon.