
Automated Vehicles Can't Save Cities - ochang
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/27/opinion/automated-vehicles-cant-save-cities.html
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jenkstom
I get the argument, but my quality of life will be improved dramatically
without the constant road rage-inducing craziness of my 23 minute commute.

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Tiktaalik
It's quite likely that your commute will get longer than 23 minutes as
autonomous vehicles remove the barriers to driving and encourage more people
to drive, thus increasing congestion.

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alenox
Yeah, but you’ll be able to use all that wait time consuming ads!

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bob_theslob646
What I think the author fails to touch on well is the fact that transit is not
sexy or at least not sexy yet, at least in the United States.

Have you ever noticed that most car commercials capture the essence of a
confident person in control of their own destiny? I know it sounds like b __
__ __* but they all do it.

The reality is drivers are in control of their own destiny if they were
driving on a road by themselves.

The United States has to figure out a way to make mass transit sexy sooner
rather than later,otherwise it will never work.

The hilarious thing is investing in High-Speed Rail maybe one of the best
things that the US can do because not only will it make people happier if they
run as efficiently as they do in Japan but the cost of goods could severely go
down therefore eliminating some poverty which the u.s. census has reported
that transportation or rather lack of access to it has been linked to poverty.

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CodeWriter23
Sorry, the figure of 1600 cars per hour is complete and utter bullshit. If
just 5 cars get through a signal on a 30 second cycle, that’s 600 cars per
hour. For a single intersection. How many intersections are there in a city?

A well designed intersection can easily get 20 cars through per cycle.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of bus lanes and really a fan of light rail. But
I really hate this type of hype where basic assumptions don’t pass the smell
test.

And if you want to get into some real economics, a system like the LA Metro
Authority operates at about 20% Fare Box Recovery. That means for every $1 of
fare collected, a subsidy of $4 is required to keep the system running. At
least when someone drives their own car, they are actually paying their own
way.

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TheCoelacanth
The numbers appear to be for how much traffic can pass in a single lane's
worth of space. Their numbers make sense for a single traffic lane[1], one
subway line[2] and one 2.5 meter (a bit narrower than a standard traffic lane)
bike path[3], all of which take up pretty close to the same amount of space.

[1] [http://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-
engineer-...](http://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-engineer-
should-know/)

[2] [https://www.thoughtco.com/passenger-capacity-of-
transit-2798...](https://www.thoughtco.com/passenger-capacity-of-
transit-2798765)

[3] [https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5_Zhou-Xu-
Wang-...](https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5_Zhou-Xu-Wang-and-
Sheng-Estimating-Capacity-of-Bicycle-Path-on-Urban-Roads-in-Hangzhou-
China_2014.pdf)

~~~
CodeWriter23
A single lane does not tell the traffic story for an entire city.

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TheCoelacanth
It would be nonsensical to state numbers for the total number of people can
who move through an entire city because it is heavily dependent on how much
space is dedicated to each mode of travel. They are making a comparison of how
many people who can move through a given amount of space depending on what
mode of transportation they are using.

~~~
CodeWriter23
The figure of 25,000 people/hour in buses makes sense to me in a city like
L.A. This is where I'm taking issue with the whole article, their basis for
analysis is apples-to-oranges.

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TheCoelacanth
If you look at the sources I linked they give the estimates of 1900 vehicles
per hour as the theoretical maximum capacity for a lane of traffic, 30k people
per hour as the maximum capacity for a single subway line and 10k people per
hour as the maximum capacity for a 2.5 meter bike path.

Those are all pretty close to the numbers they gave for each mode of transit,
so it seems reasonable to assume that they are basing their numbers on
something similar to that. That is an apples-to-apples comparison because each
of those things takes up very close to the same amount of space.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I read your sources. Your source, in particular the 1900 cars/lane/hour
specifically illustrates the poor quality of this article, where the author
tries to take us into an alternate universe where the theoretical maximum flow
of passenger vehicles is 1600/CITY/hour.

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TheCoelacanth
The author never stated 1600/city/hour. That is an inference you are making.

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rmuesi
This was some weak ass logic.

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tim333
I was thinking that. Even the title implies cites need saving whereas in
reality they are growing merrily - it's the isolated small towns that need
saving if anything.

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noahmbarr
I think we can all agree that cities should be “humans first”, not “car
first”.

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jasonmaydie
cities don't exist in a vacuum. Many towns die because something essential
like a coal mine was removed from the economy, just like removing cars (no
matter how noble) could kill some cities too.

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eesmith
I wasn't able to read the article. It was completely blank in my browser.

Could you say who is saying that we should remove cars from a city, even to
the point that it would kill the city?

Because I've not heard anyone propose that. I've heard of car-free regions of
a city, and cities like Venice which effectively had no private cars, and bans
on some cars (like gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles in favor of
electric).

But never to the point that it would kill a city.

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bob_theslob646
You have to physically click the page on it in order for it to load. The page
is interactive even though the it doesn't explicitly say so. The New York
Times assumes you know.

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eesmith
Interesting. It's acting different now than yesterday, so perhaps they fixed
something?

Thanks for pointing it out.

Clicking on a bajillion one-sentence pages might win a design award but it's
awful to read. I didn't.

