Let's built a future with 300mph self-driving supercars and mach 20 spaceplanes -- addressing the actual desires and wants of most users (mobility, convenience) rather than imposing personal ethics of asceticism (mass transit, anti-urbanization). The author brings up a lot of valid problems with contemporary car travel (and notably none of its revolutionary advantages), but most of these orthogonal to the personal-vs.-mass transport issue he argues, e.g.
* Health dangers from emissions -- an issue of (certain implementations of) internal combustion, not the form factor of the vehicle: personal auto vs. bus or train
* Health dangers/obnoxiousness of long commutes -- likewise, a complicated thing which doesn't immediately suggest "ban cars" as the obvious solution. (If anything -- everything else being the same -- self-driving supercars should result in the shortest commutes: point-to-point (last mile), no waiting, no traffic congestion (from AI)
* Infrastructure NIMBY (roads, sprawling parking lots): rail lines have the same issues, with the tradeoff that the sparser your mass transit ugliness is, the more excruciating inconvenience the last-mile segment of a commute is (try living 10m walk from a subway stop). Flying "cars" are almost certainly infinitely worse, because of their extreme noise
None of these are arguments against private transport; they are arguments against specific implementations of private transport, and don't at all imply the conclusions the author derives.
I like high speed trains myself. They can run off the power grid, which means they can run off wind/solar/nuclear/hydro, and they are actually in some ways more convenient than cars.
When I lived in a big city, I enjoyed train commuting. I could just get on the train and not think about it. I used to hate daily commuting by car. Now that I live in a smaller town, I picked a walkable one where I can walk to work. (Yeah, not everyone can do that.)
I do like cars for vacationing. I consider a car a recreational vehicle, but can't stand them for routine commuting.
I like trains and commuting by train too. I can't stand traffic either.
But cars remain awesomely effective, because they can go from point to point, and they're so competitive that trains are only really competitive if:
* you're going to be traveling for very long distances (but not long enough for airports to be faster), or
* traffic is going to be utterly miserable, or
* the train is RIGHT THERE and very convenient
or, ideally, some combination of the three. (Driving to the commuter rail and having your office be Right There is an acceptable incarnation of point three).
Notice where trains are most effective: the northeast corridor (really dense population, traffic problems, city centers with workplaces served by train/metro), big cities on the west coast (e.g. SF, Seattle).
There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city. "A future without cars" looks like some of those cities and those city's problems - in particular, really expensive housing, especially if you want to raise a family and have multiple bedrooms (or, God forbid, a yard). Remember that median household income in the US is only $44k. If you're reading Hacker News I'll guesstimate you're probably making double that, maybe triple.
Anyway. Gas prices and the relative prices of train commuting/car commuting/real estate may change the dynamic of transportation in the future, but I don't think the densification that it entails is an unabashed good for the common man or that my preference for trains is a substitute for comprehensive realistic transportation policies. And if we must go down that road (so to speak) we're going to need to do a better job of making effective, useful, cost-efficient transportation projects than we have over the past few years.
Knowing that the median household income in the US is $44k, I am continually shocked at the amount of money spent on cars.
"Slightly less than one-third of households said they had one personal vehicle1 available for use in 2001. A little more than one-third of households (40 million out of 107 million households) had 2 vehicles and slightly less than one-quarter had 3 or more vehicles available."[0]
This is an unimaginable number of cars. Given that a car costs, on average, $28,400[1] - and lasts around 8 years[2] - holy shit.
That doesn't even take into account the cost of running and fueling a car. At an average of ~15k miles per year, the total cost PER CAR is around $8,776 per year.[3] To our 'median household', which is more likely than not to have one or two cars, that's either 20% or 40% of their income. Since average spending on housing is 30%, that doesn't leave a whole lot left. No wonder we're all in so much debt.
The worst part is, US urban planning means that people are likely unable to work without access to a car.
Imagine a 20% increase in income tax, with the money being used to subsidize an outdated and damaging industry. That's what this is. It is holding back the US economy.
"Buy a car to get to work, go to work to pay for car" is something that I'd bet a lot of people are familiar with. Suburban sprawl and the middle class.
I am amazed at the amount people spend no cars but again be wary of the thought that this inherent to cars.
It's about culture and keeping up with the Joneses.
My 15 year old 4 cylinder car costs not a lot to run and takes me everywhere. You can prise out of my cold dead hands :-)
Europe has been flooded in recent times with three cylinder cars, the Citroen C1, Toyota Aygo and Peugeot 107, VW Polo, Seat and a whole slew of others.
By American standards these are tiny but for EU commuting / shopping / city driving they're fine.
So you just choose one industry that's 20% of the economy to demolish and expect no side effects?
Get rid of the car industry, and the flying jetpack, massive underground subway, or whatever industry will come in to fill the gap. Economics isn't that simple.
"A future without cars" looks like some of those cities and those city's problems - in particular, really expensive housing...
NYC would be a lot cheaper if you could buy up some old brownstones, give the tenants end of lease + 6 months to find a new place, tear them down and build an apartment building. It would be very simple to fit a lot more people on manhattan if we just built taller buildings.
It's politics that makes dense cities expensive, not something intrinsic to the cities themselves.
If you're curious about this stuff, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High, and Ryan Avent's The Gated City, all of which discuss contemporary urban life and how restrictions on building height lead to suburban sprawl. In particular, based on their readings, I'm not sure this is true: "There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city." Some parts of cities scale sub-linearly and others don't; see here: http://www.creativeclass.com/_v3/creative_class/2007/05/26/c...:
Quantities related to a city’s infrastructure, such as the number of gas stations and the length of paved roads, did scale "sublinearly", meaning that the larger the city, the less of these were required per capita. But measures of economic output and innovation – the number of patents, total wages, GDP, even the pace of walking – scaled "superlinearly", showing increasing returns with size (see Graphs). "The scaling laws say that on average, as a city grows you can predict its output and input, its energy consumption, its wealth creation, its level of crime," says Bettencourt.
The real problem with cars is they directly kill 100's of thousand people and people waste 100's thousand lifetimes worth of mindlessly driving them around EVERY single year world wide. They also cost of resources and environmental costs to build, fuel, maintain, and create roads, but so do all their replacements. We can have different trade-offs when it comes to those costs but massive transportation networks are always going to be expensive.
I have always thought the future would have personalized self driving subway cars. But, it's all about what you value.
I don't see the anti-car position as asceticism. Rather, I see it as a recognition of the basic fact that peoples' expressed preferences are hard to separate from government policy in this particular domain.
The current state of affairs is not an expression of how people really want to live. It's an expression of the enormous subsidies we have given to a particular lifestyle. Our governments fund suburban schools much better than urban ones. They spend enormous amount of money on constant road construction and barely spend anything improving public transit. We allow the huge costs incurred by fossil fuel use to be externalized, making car use seem much cheaper than it actually is. We penalize renters and subsidize home owners by allowing tax deductions for mortgage interest. Police spend large amounts of money, on a per capita basis, enforcing uniquely suburban concerns like drunk driving, compared to how much is spent on run of the mill urban crime fighting.
It is almost certain that without these massive explicit and implicit subsidies, peoples' expressed "desires and wants" would look very different than what we have now.
Yes, I came in here to comment of this. Let's cure the ills of a device that is massively useful. Sure - cities should look more like NYC and less like Houston - I'll give the car haters that, but I'm with uvdiv, that I'd far prefer fast, clean versions that drove themselves.
The great part of high-speed rail, etc. is that you can relax while they do the driving and you arrive close to your destination. However, driverless cars give you the best of both of those worlds, and other than wind-resistance (which drafting largely solves) you have similar efficiency.
PS - Does anyone find "driverless car" to be the 21st century equivalent of "horseless carriage"?
Maybe I'm the one crazy luddite on HN (would not surprise me at all!), but I don't look forward to self-driving 300mph cars. The idea of trusting a computer system to keep me safe on open roads, in close proximity to other computer-controlled cars, sounds terrifying, not relaxing.
Yes, I love high-speed trains, because they're on a track, and while this obviously does not guarantee safety, it certainly makes it feel much safer to me.
Compare to air travel. Even with the meticulous maintenance and regulatory requirements, a significant fraction of the population is scared of flying (to some degree). Driverless cars are better in one aspect (operates at ground level), worse in others (proximity to other vehicles), just different in some ways (computer versus human pilot), and complete unknowns, so far, in others (regulation).
Even if the actual crash/injury/fatality rate of driverless cars is nil, how do you design a 300mph computer-controlled car to not be scary for passengers? I want it to work, as I recognize the advantages, but it seems like the social problems will be even tougher than the technical problems, and I'm definitely not going to be an early adopter.
Must be perspective. I, for instance, think we should all be terrified to share the road with scores, hundreds, or even thousands of multi-ton mechanical devices traveling anywhere from 25 to 70 mph which are operated by people, easily-distracted, endlessly fallible, and often foolishly reckless people. Computer-controlled sounds better/safer to me.
You do realize that a 300mph car is unfeasible due to drag? And that the close proximity is more of an issue with humans because of the inability to realize how much distance you actually need to react safely?
I agree with you. One thing that I have a problem with making everyone move to public transit is my IBS. I loath driving the way it is because of that, but I can at least pull over to a McDonald's or a gas station. It would be horrific to have to hold it on even the cleanest, fastest bus.
I don't even drive non-family member to a local lunch because of my problem. So I really would be a shut in if I had to go places by bus.
On the plus side, there could be a new client for an eco-friendly home food delivery service if they moved to such a system.
To me, what would be interesting about a world without cars (or even with cars, but vastly more attractive public transport) is that it would partly reverse a sad isolationist trend that's come along with the power and control given to us by modern technology.
I used to catch a bus every day through the city, and there were a lot of strange people on those trips. Gangs of 9 year old gangster kids drunk up the back. Little old ladies muttering racist slurs at asian students. A guy who hadn't showered in so long his clothes had gone partially transparent from the grease. I don't think I was ever in any danger, but it sure was uncomfortable sometimes. I work pretty close to home now (in fact, mostly at home), so it's not really an issue anymore. But strangely, I find myself missing that chance to interact with people who I didn't choose to interact with.
It seems like every time we get more power (like by inventing an engine that can move us around) we use it to get more control (now I can encase myself in a metal shield that prevents any accidental congress with the outside world).
A bunch of technology has gone the same way. Efficient worldwide shipping and postage means you don't need to go outside to shop. Communication moving online means you can block people you don't like rather than have to deal with them. OKCupid means you can pre-screen your dates to avoid accidentally meeting someone unpalatable. You can GPS track your kids so they won't ever end up lost or at the wrong sort of party.
And those are all good things that give you more control over your environment. But they also isolate you. Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease. Like every generation before us, we strike out against danger with the power of our tools. But our dangers are, at this point, largely invented. We're getting to a point where instead of being safe, we'll just be cocooned in a real-world filter bubble, where we never have to fear the unknown, uncontrollable, unsanitised real world that gets forced on us when we get on a bus or walk around a city. I suspect, for all our newfound safety, we'll just feel a bit unsatisfied.
I guess I've just argued myself out of believing that the future without cars is ever really going to happen. Maybe there'll be a virtual bus MMO.
Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease.
Bah, that isn't the fear of the unknown vs. the fear of the known. It is immediate, physical fear (in thirty seconds those gang members are going to mug me) vs. eventual, abstract fear (in twenty years, something might go wrong inside me).
Naturally, but that doesn't change the fact that distant threats are less fearsome than immediate ones, and that abstract threats are also less fearsome.
To be clear, when I say "abstract threats" I mean things we cannot properly think about. We know what it feels like to get punched, and we have some idea what it feels like to be stabbed, but we have no idea how to assign fear to something like chemotherapy until it happens to us. We know it is Bad(tm), but not the same way we know getting cut with a knife is bad.
You've done a great job of summing up one of the reasons that public transit in the US is as bad as it is.
My goal is to safely get from Point A to Point B, and I don't want to spend a lot of time waiting around at Point A, or sitting and waiting on the way to Point B.
We have three goals here, in order of importance. Let's call them safety, convenience, and speed.
Taking a bus with a bunch of drunken hooligans doesn't help much with that first, and most important, goal. I want my transportation to be safe, and the high crime rates on public transportation in the US speak for themselves.
Interesting experiences are great. Getting mugged isn't, and while I'm not a prime target (muggers don't usually pick on two-hundred-pound guys that spend a lot of time in the gym), five loud, drunk people in a gang is not the sort of situation I want to be around regularly.
Especially if I'm carrying a $1500 laptop and a $600 smartphone.
Convenience, at least here in SF, is also pretty miserable. I have not once had a bus arrive on-time. The trains are usually on-schedule, but conveniently frequent only during peak hours, and they only cover a small portion of the greater Bay Area. Don't even get me started on CalTrain.
If I want to meet somebody and I need to take a bus, I need to add an extra half-hour window around my journey. If you assume a normal tech-person salary, that lost half-hour makes it cheaper to take a taxi for most journeys.
Speed is good for trains; busses, on the other hand, live at the whim of traffic.
Japan gets all of these right in its major cities. I have never once felt threatened on a train, and delays are few and far between.
The tradeoff they make is in manpower -- station employees are everywhere. We tend to not like hiring lots of people in the US, and so public transit stations might have one or two visible employees, and certainly not visible, uniformed personnel at every platform.
This is why cars are as popular as they are. In SF, if I want to go from Pacific Heights to the Inner Sunset, a journey by bus-and-train pushes about an hour. By car, it's about fifteen minutes.
In my car, I have a stereo, air conditioning, and a clean, comfortable seat. Public transit, on the other hand, is pretty filthy here in SF, and for some odd reason they jack the heat up enough so that I need to do a little striptease whenever I get on a train.
All minor inconveniences, sure, but it adds up quickly, and what do I get in return? I'm late, have lost money in the long run, and arrive more often than not in a worse mood than when I started.
I really want working public transit here in the US, but the way things are going, I don't see that happening for at least another decade.
You have many of the same observations as me, but form a different conclusion. Although, one thing: you say, "My goal is to safely get from Point A to Point B..." Cars are a great way to kill 30 or 40 thousand people a year. Not very safe. And the quality of service (and riders) will surely improve on public transportation as more people use it, don't you think? Japan seems to prove that.
The quality of service will never reach the level of Japan. Transit operators have it easy there because people don't vandalize and they don't litter. This means that your maintenance costs are very low and it's more economical to buy high quality, comfortable seating.
As well, transit is only good for getting you around in the cities. Once you get out to "inaka", a car is all but a requirement, much like in North America.
This "world without cars" is a nice pipe dream, but the reality is that no matter how good your transit system, it's still a huge time sink to use it. The only time it becomes faster than a car is if you live in a dense city with poor traffic flow, and that accounts for a tiny percentage of the world population. That's also why it's only the pampered urbanites who dream of a carless world.
> if you live in a dense city with poor traffic flow, and that accounts for a tiny percentage of the world population
That's false. Most of the world's population now lives in cities. Deciding what percentage of those fall below the threshold of "poor" traffic-flow wise is difficult, but it's not "tiny". (http://www.gizmag.com/go/7613/)
Cars beget cars. The reason people need cars in a lot of the US is because they moved somewhere that they need a car to get to. People talk about the amount of time that things take without a car forgetting that said problem was created by cars in the first place. In places where most folks don't have cars you have a small grocery store every few blocks rather than a large one every few miles. The demographics of public transit differ from society at large because the well-off drive cars.
I grew up in American suburbia and have lived in Europe for the last decade. The amount of time required to say, go shopping, or commute to work has remained broadly similar in the half-dozen areas I've lived in, though the distances have not.
Progressively moving away from cars is largely a cultural rather than technological problem. Some well-done urban planning (including structuring energy prices to favor more efficient means) and a few decades to execute it could drastically shift the balance to where we have far fewer cars.
The generic "city" is not a very useful term here. How many people are there? There's a big difference between New York and Maza. What is the topography like? Is it sprawling like Phoenix? Or dense like Tokyo? How much density, population, and infrastructure is required to make a convenient and economical transit system? I'd wager far too much to displace cars in any meaningful way except in the largest cities.
Cars are used because they are versatile. Every other form of transport has far more narrow use cases.
That's not a huge difference - I actually wonder if the more direct routing and door-to-door service allowed by cars could make up that difference entirely.
> commuter rail kills .09 people per 10 million passenger miles.
The non-suicide number is quite a bit lower, though, by (probably) an order of magnitude. Pedestrians on the tracks in an area they aren't supposed to be, who are struck and killed by trains, are classified in the bucket category of "trespasser" fatalities. Unless they left a note or something it's usually impossible to conclusively say that they were suicides, but the assumption is that the vast majority of trespasser fatalities are suicides, because the number of people struck while trying to steal things or take illegal shortcuts is relatively small. And, trespasser fatalities account for 88% of total commuter-rail fatalities (p. 13 in that report). All other commuter-rail fatalities (passengers, collisions with automobiles, etc.) add up to 0.011 people per 10 million passenger miles.
The way I'm reading table 18, of the 526 commuter-rail fatalities, at most 285 of them are suicide-by-train. As you point out, trespassing is a wide category - it includes things like highway-rail collisions. That 285 number might be high, as it also includes things like a child straying onto the tracks that was hit by a train.
I'm not sure it matters. The automobile statistics seem to include various methods of suicide involving cars. If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.
> The automobile statistics seem to include various methods of suicide involving cars.
I'm not sure they include them equally, though. The most obvious way of killing yourself on train tracks is standing in front of a train, but the most obvious way of killing yourself on a road usually does not involve a car, but involves jumping from a bridge (which doesn't get counted as an automobile fatality).
> If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.
I'm not too sure about that one. If there are a significant number of people who, absent trains, wouldn't kill themselves, that would be significant. But I would guess a larger proportion are just choosing a suicide modality, and if it weren't trains, it'd be jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, taking pills, etc. It's hard to come up with any real data for that counterfactual, though. I suppose a blunt correlational approach would be to see if there's any correlation between availability of commuter rail and suicide rates, after controlling for other confounding variables. I would guess that there isn't one, but could be wrong.
is a Federal Railroad Administration report that breaks down the cause of trespasser fatalities. This isn't 100% comparable to the previous report, but it does claim that 23% of trespasser fatalities are suicides.
Appendix H breaks down the reported fatalities - it looks like walking and sleeping (drunk?) on tracks each claim more lives than suicide.
One really interesting story is the massive increase in car safety. Deaths per 100M vehicle miles have dropped from 1.73 in 1994 to about 1.09 in 2010.
Fundamentally, I'm not sure any of this matters. We're talking a very small difference in safety - to the point where convenience is probably more important to most people.
> high crime rates on public transportation in the US speak for themselves.
This isn't because riding on a shared, public vehicle turns people into hooligans. If you catch public transport in the US, you see a cross-section of people who are too young, old, poor or mentally ill to own a car. Naturally, there will be more crime.
The thing which would really annoy me about having to use a car everyday and, in total, spending a considerable time of my life driving it, is that you're doing just that, driving.
On public transport, you can read the news, write mails, write docs, read a book, do other things as you please, while still arriving at the location you want to go to, albeit probably a little slower (as you have to wait for the train/bus/tram and possibly have to walk to/from the station etc.).
I have never been to the US, so i cannot comment on the comparative part, though.
I don't expect to ever see safe public transportation in the USA in my lifetime. Our culture sucks. Japan works partly because like many other cultures in that area it's a community comes before the individual culture.
We've put up with crime for so long in the USA we've forgotten places actually exist without most of it. We've gotten so used to it we think it's normal to "avoid dark alleys" to "pull out your car stereo and don't leave anything visible, even a jacket or risk getting your car broken into" to "don't go to those parts of town"
While it is officially advised, as many things in japan are, they are by no means mandatory. In japan you might just as well see a sign saying "don't go out in the rain, it's dangerous".
in japan, i've been to plenty of dark alleys during night time, visibly carrying cameras etc. and i've yet to be encounter anything bad. i think it is fairly safe to say, that japan is a LOT saver than most parts of the world.
Not really a defensive reply, because I don't live in the US, but across the border in Canada we have a very similar culture and very safe public transportation. I grew up in downtown-ish Toronto and never saw a crime. There are crimes, just not too many that people fear taking public transportation. A typical subway ride in Toronto has plenty of people in suits. Bus transport in other cities in Ontario is also quite safe.
If you're truly introspective you can live in a building and never say hello to your neighbors. Everyone is in the same place but minding their business, listening their favorite music, etc.
Man has traditionally (going back 10 thousands of years) not had the type of interaction that you mention. Civilization brought man close together in this modern era. Tract housing, public transportation, ETC.
History shows us that is more in mans nature to be largely isolated except for a small group of people. Even when living amongst other people - traditionally people were much more spread out than now and did not interact with those outside of their small group very often
It is clear that man prefers to travel with privacy or cars would never have succeeded where alternatives exist. The convenience factor is huge too.
I prefer the freedom to go wherever, whenever and without some crazy person screaming at me on some bus or subway somewhere.
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." --Ayn Rand
The article falls flat on its face in the first two paragraphs when he says that car technology has not advanced in the last 126 years. That just being ignorant of how cars work if he believes that. And to call them a stupid technology is purely idiotic.
I love cars but I wouldn't mind if a better technology came around to replace them. The keyword being better and not just different. People are always going to want a way to independently travel. I live in NYC and while PT is convenient it is still a pain in the ass overall. Getting to places too late or too early because of the train schedule. Being forced to deal with the different weirdos of the city. Delays and breakdowns that happen more often than they should. There is a reason why there is still so much traffic in the city. People, for the most part, who can afford to take Taxis or have their own car still do.
Even if you have Jet packs or any other alternative travel tech that we know about now there are still going to be infrastructure problems. Clearing skyways for the jetpacks, knocking down structures which impede these skyways. And the results of a malfunctioned jetpack would probably lead to a more instant death than the normal car accident.
This paragraph alone "We sacrifice ourselves and our environment to these death traps, health hazards, planet killers, money sucks; these land-grabbers, respiratory rapists, and insidious isolation engines. And for what? The pleasure and convenience of rapid movement? That’s a problem we can solve in other ways." makes me not take the article or the author seriously.
I welcome advances in technology that allow us to travel more cleanly and efficiently. But we have to remember that cars serve a number of different purposes for different people. So until we can find one technology that is better & not hodge podge of different tech that replaces the car I wouldn't hold my breath about people willingly giving them up.
It's always important to consider the dark side. We didn't do much of that when we built car culture in the first place, so let's do it now.
So try:
"Let's build an unaffordable future where the super-rich live in hyper-inflated city real estate and the poor are consigned to unreachable rural pockets of cultural stagnation or to over-crowded ghettoes."
How will we create livable walkable cities where real estate does not hyper inflate?
Livable, walkable, affordable cities are dense. That is the primary factor in whether or not you can afford to live within walking/biking/subway distance. The rich people that want to live close to work are going to get first dibs on usable housing, and unless you build more than that, middle class residents don't stand a chance.
So much of that "hyper inflated city real estate" is not especially dense. So you get lots of rich people living in 4-6 floor, beautiful, historic buildings near the center of the city. That type of housing does not lead to livable, walkable cities.
If you want real estate prices to drop, and you want cities to be livable, you have to build an excess of dense housing. Right now it is near impossible to increase population density in the city, due to zoning restrictions, existing tenants, etc.
I don't know a solution to that, but I think it's the root of the problem.
Zoning regulations that mix living and work? Like much of Europe. The emphasis on commuting to a work district is a lot of the problem. If workplaces were evenly distributed you could walk to a nearby one.
Zoning is a huge problem in New York. Manhattan is completely ridiculous with how many 4-6 floor "historic" buildings there are wasting some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Chicago, in comparison, has a high-rise culture in its city center that makes for a lot more available housing stock and keeps prices down.
This is exactly why I call downtown (in New York and Chicago, at least) a suburb. I grew up in the city (Chicago and Brooklyn). The local city folk do NOT live in the city center. It's mostly tourists and people from the suburbs or out of state - all of whom pay more to enjoy proximity to the city center without having to deal with the diversity of living in a city.
In the vast majority of Chicago, buildings are generally no more than 4 stories tall. Usually just 2 or 3. And yet when I lived there, I found it to be infinitely livable and walkable.
The trick is strong community areas. Chicago reached its current level of density 100 years ago, when walking was a common mode of transportation. So the city naturally organized such that every neighborhood has its own "downtown" area, and every residence is within walking distance of such an area.
The primary function of the bus and trains system is to move people among these community areas. For example, I worked downtown in the Loop, so I took the train. But grocery shopping, going to the library, post office, hardware store, etc. were all easily done on foot. All this in an area where everyone lived in beautiful, historic 2-3 floor buildings.
And no, we weren't rich. It was largely a blue collar immigrant neighborhood.
The cost of real estate is a problem in certain walkable cities (New York, San Francisco) but not so much in others (Chicago, Portland, etc).
The other issue is that a lot of the price advantage of living outside the city is fictional, being the result of government policy. If government wasn't out there building highways to these suburban outreaches, subsidizing home ownership, preferentially funding suburban schools, keeping car use artificially cheap by allowing externalization of the costs of fossil fuels, the cost-benefit balance would look quite different than it does now.
If you don't fill up dozens of football fields worth of city space with parking lots but instead build buildings, cities tend to get a lot more manageable without a car.
Denmark partly did that by setting up most apartment buildings as resident-owned cooperatives with restrictions on subletting (though that form of housing isn't quite as dominant as it used to be, and the restrictions are looser than they used to be). Upside is that real estate in Copenhagen is quite affordable for purchase; downside is that the rental market is underserved.
Some of the motivation is more like the reason some American suburbs ban rental, more than price control, though: a desire to have long-term residents with a stake in the building as your neighbors (what George W. Bush called the "ownership society").
To get rid of cars, you need cities designed for people, not cars: otherwise everything is so far away that nothing gets ever done. We won't get rid of cars until oil is ridiculously expensive and we must give up. That will also leave much of the recent (since 1950's) development to decay, and new cities will emerge where there are new concentrations of people.
So, we will get a future without cars at some point, it's just not going to be a nice convenient continuum to something else.
I've been wondering how much of the difference between old-world and new-world cities has to do with the simple fact that new-world cities evolved from industrial-era settlements, while old-world ones resulted from agglutination of rural areas. The effect being that yours were designed for maximising production, while ours have a more emergent design, based on generations of people used to living within walking distance of everything.
Cities are still designed for people. It's just that they are choosing to live in large, cheaper houses with lawns instead of a high-rise apartment in NYC.
Also, let's add wi-fi hot-spots to all of them so that they'll create a giant mesh-network, providing cheap internet access for everyone. And ponies! Everyone gets ponies!
The "let's get rid or substantially reduce cars" crowd often is comprised of those who live in cities, and have no understanding of the indispensability of cars in rural areas. Work, shopping, some level of school, advanced medical, are often in one of the next towns 10-15 miles over, with your town having one of those as an anchor.
And notice I said "one of the next towns over". Stuff isn't necessarily concentrated in an "economic zone" like it is in cities. Work could be 8 miles east, the high school in your town, and the elementary school 10 miles north. Mass transit just wouldn't cut it.
This is a really, really good point. I live in a town in the south and like most southern towns public transit is just emerging or non-existent. From my apartment complex on an interstate to downtown where I work is around 17 miles at 60mph. The way roads and interstates are setup it's almost impossible for public transit to be possible. When I travel to SF or Boston its an odd but fun traveling experience. Back home it just doesn't work. I enjoy my Mustang and my commute to work.
Our country was built on steam trains, which were horrifically inefficient, but they got the job done. Currently we’re built on cars, which too are inefficient but practical. These things gained ground because there was a way to commercialise them, to make people say “I can’t live without that”. The question is: how can that be done with things like ultralights and bullet trains and public air? Could we really let the roads overgrow and just fly or rail everywhere? It’s an enticing prospect, but I fear that such a vision of the future neglects the many people who just can’t afford to make the switch.
Oh, and the nitpick of the day:
“We are the descendents [sic] of chimps…”
We have a common ancestor with chimpanzees (and bonobos); we’re not descended from them.
It really is an amazing testament to human ingenuity that something as mind-bogglingly complicated as the modern automobile could have ever become a consumer item. But their cost is profound (DanI-S sums it up here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872338). Surely, concern for people who "can't afford" expensive things would lead to adopting more public transportation, don't you think?
I love cars. I love driving them, I love working on them, I love the design language and history. They're one of the finest expressions of man's use of engineering to conquer his surroundings and go extremely fast. I'd also love a future where you don't need a car to commute, though.
I often wonder why there is such a common city style of dense commercial infrastructure (downtown) surrounded by further and further distant residential infrastructure.
Why don't we construct buildings that have both residential floors and commercial floors, for instance? At least then you'd have more options for living very close to where you work.
Why don't we construct buildings that have both residential floors and commercial floors, for instance? At least then you'd have more options for living very close to where you work.
Houston sort of does this via very relaxed zoning, which allows office buildings and stores to be placed right next to houses and apartments. It works better than you'd expect and it's usually not hard to live close to work, especially since housing is so cheap.
I'm in NYC now, and enjoy not needing a car, but the difference in rent comes to more than a new car every year.
Let's build a future where people aren't packed together like sardines twenty-four hours a day. Urban living takes the idea of personal space and crushes it down to a bubble three inches around your head, to the point where people think it's acceptable for your neighbors to hear you through the walls, to spend an hour every day sitting in a metal box with fifty strangers you don't talk to or even acknowledge, to walk by graffiti and not take it as a personal insult to your home city and by extension yourself. If the news that someone you know got mugged doesn't badly shock you, you owe it yourself to move somewhere better.
But a car can very easily beat a bicycle on time efficiency, assuming you're going more than half a mile.
A car can also beat a bicycle on opportunity exposure.
Both statements are illustrated by mine and many others' commutes. I drive 40 minutes each way, because I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there. I'd love to have found a job here, but at the moment my job is there. The job there would have been unthinkable without a car. Yes, I could ride the bus - train - bus, but it would take hours. For me, a bicycle would never get me there.
One of the many things that's holding back a national economic recovery is that some people can find jobs but can't sell their house to move to the new job. There's not enough movement and flexibility.
In my metro area, I have the opportunity to take any job that I can find, from ten to sixty minutes car radius. That means I eat. That comes from flexibility.
Hmm, you spend 40 minutes driving. How much time do you spend in the gym? What if you rode a bicycle for 1.5 hours and skipped both the driving and the gym?
The problem with a car in your situation is contextual. You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes of driving concentrating on driving. Not talking on cell phones, not texting, not talking, not even listening to music but DRIVING. The context of where you are driving "probably" changes too, highway vs. city but I'm guessing that sometimes switching your driving patterns lags a bit after you get off that highway offramp.
On a bicycle or public transportation, the context is completely different.
At the very least on a bicycle you are exercising (we can get into the difficulties later of urban riding). But there are other things, how great you feel, the fantastic views, the feelings of elation, the feelings of extreme accomplishments before the day even starts.
On public transportation you can read, operate your computer, talk to your commute neighbor or get other things done.
FWIW, I draw a 20 mile radius around my house and only look for jobs in that circle. I can figure out how to bike 40 miles a day.
All good points, but one size doesn't fit all. Without details, I'll say that a) I'm physically incapable of biking that far (although years ago I could think about it), and b) my life and schedule intersect with other people before and after work. A car allows me that intersection. Or to put it another way, that intersection (which is all but mandatory) dictates that if I have that job over there then it must involve a car.
Bikes and public transport are great when it works, and I'd love to take the bus or train, but the metro region and jobs and me are laid out the way they are, and that's (all but) that.
I will use my commute since i know more of the details. Its close to the OP of your reply....
I travel 50 miles per day to work, round trip. This takes me about 65 minutes total on average. That is an average speed o 54 mph.
If i were to bike that with an average speed of 16mph it would take me 3.125 hours.
If i workout for an hour a day, which is a very considerable workout to do daily that puts me at 2.08 hours per day with driving verses 3.125 hours per day for biking. So by driving instead of biking i can still get plenty of exercise to stay healthy and save an hour per day to do other things i enjoy. Family time, cooking, programming, reading, etc.
At this point i would say i will stick to driving. Don't get me wrong, i can't wait for driverless car technology... would love to have yet another hour back per day. the train and bus stuff doesn't work out well in rural pennsylvania. cars are pretty convenient here. the economics of cars works, and has for a long time, and in a capitalist based society, thats a large part of the equation. a lot depends on your measuring stick.
>You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes of driving concentrating on driving.
If you're cycling in an urban area, you're going to be doing a hell of a lot more concentrating than the average car driver does on the equivalent journey, or you're not going to be alive for very long.
If more work places had showers, that might be a workable solution.
Also: "I drive 40 minutes each way" 1hr20min of driving is not going to translate into 1hr30min of biking, with the only possible exception being if you spent the entire car ride in gridlock or parking lots.
And: "I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there". That you can find a job within 20 miles does not help him.
"You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes of driving concentrating on driving. Not talking on cell phones, not texting, not talking, not even listening to music but DRIVING."
Yeah, and I'm not supposed to eat pizza or drink so much...
There actually are showers at work, and a little gym, and an outdoor exercise station park. There's nothing stopping me from using all that except my interlocking schedule and my current physical issues. But mostly time.
My commute is in the "good" direction. My average speed is probably 40 or 45 mph, mostly freeway, and the opposite direction is often at a standstill. So it's a fair distance.
I'm all for finding jobs near home, and I moved where I am because there are a lot of jobs in the area. But circumstances put me there for now, not here. When I used to work here I would walk 40 minutes to work, and I liked that a lot.
"You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes ... driving." I used to bike to work when I lived in Seattle, and Port Orchard before that, and I can definitely understand the wish of any biker that drivers would hang up the cheeseburger and just DRIVE. :)
People who don't cycle much often think showers are necessary.
In reality once you get fit you don't sweat much (I get far sweatier on the tube than cycling), and if you're overheating you can always slow down slightly.
* Shower before leaving then you get rid of the dirt + bacteria that makes the sweat smell.
* Wear clean lycra - this wicks sweat away before it has a chance to start smelling.
In London my cycling commute of 1hr would take over 2hrs by car, and 1hr15min by train. Cycling is often the quickest way. You also combine exercise and commuting time which leads to a significant overall time saving. I don't feel the need to do a lot of other exercise after cycling 200 miles a week.
I bike regularly and trust me, these sorts of things vary a good deal between people. In my overly warm 70F office I feel like I need a shower halfway through the day anyway. There is no way in hell I'd bike for an hour or more before that. 45 minutes is my cutoff.
And major cities are major outliers in cycle commuting.
And that's the case in large part because your environment is optimized for driving. For me to get a car, I'd have to pay a fair bit more in rent to have somewhere to park, and I still wouldn't be able to drive to work (there's nowhere to park). And even if I could I'd have to pay £9 a day to enter the city. (Congestion charge zone, in London). But all of central, and lots of not-so-central London is within an hour's tube ride. And as far as cycling goes, there's a lot within a 60 minutes cycling radius from here.
Of course, housing prices are atrocious, but that's an entirely separate discussion.
One of the main reasons for that is that it's an awful lot slower. I live about 40 miles from work at the moment, which I cover in about 50 minutes door-to-door; there is absolutely no way I could achieve that on a bike. I'd guess that might take me 3-4 hours each way, so hence the bike is unfortunately not an option, regardless of its energy efficiency or cost.
Cars address a lot of needs. It's not surprising that there are superior solutions for each of those needs, but all of those solutions are significantly worse than cars for other needs. If you try to cobble together a car equivalent from those other solutions, you end up with something signficantly more expensive/less good.
The Accountant's Falacy: Anything for which the debit doesn't appear on your balance sheet is "free".
Follow busses in traffic for a while, and add up the total fuel, time wasted, etc. in all the traffic impeded by the less then 1/2 full (on average) bus. There is no branch of mathematics that could be used to argue that busses save the civilization money.
Consider if everyone was not disallowed by law(1) from carpooling for compensation. Roughly doubles the aggregate person-mile per hour bandwidth of the existing traffic system...
Bus driver unions and taxi owner associations are the net gainers of the lobbyist-written laws impeding transportation innovation; everyone else loses.
1) you can carpool all you want informally. You cannot set up publicly accessible systems which compete with taxis.
Whose vehicle wastes the fuel in the situation you described? That of the, usually one, individual who chose to incur much higher marginal costs by taking the car instead of the bus in the first place. Just like you cant't blame a cyclist for the fuel wasted by the people in cars waiting to overtake him on their 2km trip...
This article's view is a visionary one, and I applaud that: But people promote (bullet) trains, subways, etc. as revolutionary inventions when they really aren't. They've been around for 50+ years and have 'lost' to cars in the marketshare battle, in Europe, US, China, etc. I want us to focus on new technologies like the instead of continuing to push old ones like it's a 'sprawl conspiracy' keeping them down (when their use is optimized for downtowns). As uvdiv mentions, the personal vs. mass transit issue is big spectrum.
Things like the mag-lev pod transport system, flyways, etc. are awesome. We should develop all of them and try to make them the best we can. But it's a gigantic mistake to discount the car - we have something to learn from their success: People like freedom, people like privacy, not everyone wants to live in a dense city.
That's why I say better/self driving cars are the practical solution to the future, but we could easily see something else revolutionize the situation by 2060. And as for over-crowded roads, The current road network is way more than sufficient to handle traffic with self-driving cars: You can put 5-10x the number of cars on a highway and not jam it if computers are driving. Jetpacks, after all, will have the collision problem too.
This article, while well written and trying to think ahead, forgets something very important: cars are such a symbol because they appeal to one of the core aspects of human nature. The freedom of movement, the ability to choose where you go, the notion of being unrestricted and able to move about freely. Being herded on a bus is not in our nature.
Furthermore, to some degree, cars are actually more efficient from a personal perspective as an individual. If you live in the typical USA sprawl, you don't really want to take a bus somewhere. For example, one of my co-founders had to take the bus home from his office yesterday. The commute is normal about 20 minutes in traffic...the bus took almost two hours.
The issue facing the US is that our space utilization is far less compact in most places, which makes public transport highly inefficient. I'm all for more railroads and other means of getting people around, but the only cities with truly effective public transport are:
- NYC area
- Chicago
- Pittsburgh
...I'm trying to think of others, but I'm drawing a blank. Also, bear in mind I'm distinguishing between places that have transport vs. where it is effective.
As for flying cars and all those goodies, they won't happen. The reason is quite simple: if something fails, they fall and you die. The average joe is not able to properly handle a flying craft with that level of risk - and if it falls, it may land on someone.
The most promising advance so far is driverless cars. I do believe they will become commonplace soon as technology advances and they become able to handle regular driving. I personally wouldn't use them, but they would make the rest of the driving public much happier and I do expect that to be the next car revolution.
Sadly, in the US at least, public transport and flying cars are not in our future.
>> The freedom of movement, the ability to choose where you go, the notion of being unrestricted and able to move about freely. Being herded on a bus is not in our nature.
This feeling is becoming less and less possible in a lot of places. You end up having to herd millions of cars causing massive inconvenience to people who don't have cars; who in turn have to buy cars to make life liveable. If you want a constant sense of freedom buy a bicycle.
Solid points. To add to your safety point regarding flying cars: as bad as people are at driving in 2 dimensions, I can't imagine how horrible we would be driving in 3.
Can we just build two in the US? One in California and one in the North East where there's a clear need? We don't have any bullet trains in the US. It's starting to get embarrassing that we can't get our act together. Maybe we can get ours in red, like in Italy? :-)
Texas would be a good choice too, possibly better than California due to the lack of mountain ranges, and shorter distances between the major cities. I think the only reason SF-LA is being talked about more seriously than Houston-Austin-Dallas is the relative political climate in the two states. But even given that, there was a serious initiative to build a line in Texas in the late 1980s/early 1990s, killed in part by Southwest Airlines' aggressive lobbying.
I applaud the direction, but I do have one small nit to pick:
"there really hasn’t been much advance in car technology in the intervening 126 years"
You can drive all day every day for fifty years [1] and never use the biggest feature we've been researching for cars, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a breakthrough.
"Between 1970 and 2010, the number of fatalities decreased by 38% and the number of
injury crashes by 13%. In the same period, the number of vehicles and the distance
travelled more than doubled."
Many of those gains are due to the parade of safety technologies over the last several decades. Electronic stability control, airbags, crumple zones. If we go all the way back to Benz, then we should talk about seatbelts and shatter proof glass too.
Cars haven't exactly been stagnant, we've just had a subtler priority. Those safety advances will lay an important foundation, and hopefully be extended as we shoot for a "crash proof" personal flying vehicle.
As much as I respect Peter Theil I think this whole 'where are the flying cars' thing is a dead end.
Its essentially a futuristic projection of the 1950's, a time when no-one had any idea things like the internet would exist.
Imagining a society around transportation needs is redundant. Commuting is rooted in an era where cities grew around industrial activity that made the environment unpleasant (as opposed to the country / suburbs) hence the desire to travel between the two.
Vehicle emissions aside this isn't so true anymore.
Communications technology changes the way we think about distance, its much less necessary for most workers to group in the same space.
I think the future is about local communities / neighborhoods, remote working via the internet (from home or from mixed co-working spaces), and better public transport between districts and nodes such as airports.
The internet is going to continue to radically transform our society in ways we can barely imagine - and I don't really see why flying cars need to be part of that future (although recreational jetpacks would be fun:) )
There's a big reason I don't want to move to bay area to work. I love to live in Berlin just because I can get anywhere with a train anytime I want. And the funny thing is, in Berlin it is allowed to drink beer in the trains and subways and still I don't feel afraid at all, people behave. Trains work, are fast, safe and reliable most of the time.
When I visited in Berkeley I was horrified how bad the public transportation was in there. BART trains were most of the time fully packed, had only a few trains in an hour and traveling from the stations to home was slow and annoying. The bus transportation was horror. Most of the time they were late or not arriving at all.
I may have an European mindset, but living in the USA is just out of the question. Manhattan would be better, but then again paying above 1000 dollars per month from your apartment is kind of silly.
Flying "cars" are far from real, The Martin Jetpack which the author has mentioned is noisy, expensive and only has 30 minutes (31.5 miles max) operating time. However, there's much room to improve current transportation system, new technology and government regulations are constantly pushing fuel efficiency. Mass production air-based vehicles aren't viable unless energy production becomes cheap enough.
The next viable transportation system may be vacuum maglev train. The world already have Superconducting and normal conducting Maglev technology (JRC and Transrapid respectively) and mankind have built countless tunnels and bridges and concrete structures.
In the world and people that I currently see in front of me, any mode of transportation that requires a helmet is not viable for most people, whether that be bicycles, motorcycles or jetpacks.
However, I also think people are more flexible than I give them credit for. I see a lot of bicycles parked outside bars, and probably a fair number of those are DUI "graduates." I think I see some of those people riding to work.
The article claims "Silicon Valley, with all its wealth, intellectual resources, creative thinkers, and alleged determination to change the world for the better, has to lead the charge on all these fronts".
So far, most of the innovations in transport, be it high speed railroads, autobahns or moon missions, have all been done by government. That's simply because it's very hard to build a viable commercial model around infrastructure projects, especially if you expect to see a return within 50 years. If someone does find a way that would be great, of course, and in that case there's a good chance this person would from Silicon Valley.
The Earth's axial supercontent, Eurasia, is ideally suited to train transport. China has ambitious and innovative plans to build a Eurasian rail network capable of transporting people from Beijing to London in two days:
What we need are electricity powered flying cars. Then we can have green, walk-able cities and can use all that open space above us for transportation. We'll need some new kind of flying technology though, cos nobody wants to hear the loud noise of wind blades or deal with all the air pushing downwards. Perhaps hover "paths" where grass is below and not tarmac?
Flying buses would be much better than flying cars. Make a type of aeroplane that can do short flights (<20 miles between towns). Use capacitors that can be recharged between flights, and have an idling conventional engine in case of emergency. Even at relatively low speeds this could dramatically improve commute times.
Electric air taxis would be great for commuters. You would have to streamline check-in and security though. People will ditch their cars for a faster trip time.
Consider this scenario for a 20 mile commute:
1) Bike or walk one mile to local air strip ( a converted road)
2) 18 mile electric flight to destination town.
3) Bike or walk one mile to office from landing strip.
One insurmountable problem I see with advancing mass transport is that people simply aren't willing to spend as much on public transport than they are cars because they believe they have an equity investment in the car. Most people I know get upset spending any more $75-100/mo on a monthly transit pass, but are willing to pay $400/mo on car expenses since they "own" the car. As a result, I don't think really good systems will ever emerge except for where there is massive subsidization, and even those cases suck. For instance a few years ago when I looked San Francisco MTA had a budget of $750MM but only sold $110MM in tickets. The only bright spot I see are company run shuttles.
The other problem I see is that most people appear to be irrationally scared of cycling in cities/urban areas, even though most city cycling occurs at really slow speeds. I have been a cyclist in San Francisco for five years with only a few minor incidents. Whenever I talk to people who aren't cyclists about commuting in the city, they often respond as if I have an impending death clock over my head.
For people who think cycling is a major health boon: it really isn't unless you're commuting >5mi/each way or doing a lot of climbs. It's not that hard most of the time. I get way more out of a 30-40minute/run or squats in the gym.
Problem 1: This article is a giant anti-car rant with a few points of rational debate baked in that might help public policy. It's no more objectively helpful than reading a spiel from BimmerForums or ClubWRX on why they love their 300hp sports cars and would never give them up to be herded in a big, crowded, smelly bus.
Problem 2: Cars are currently the best solution to the problems we have. That's why they are #1 in the US. Not because they are horrible inventions, not because there is some conspiracy to keep them in their cars (Americans CHOOSE to live in suburbs with large lawns and lots of open space, since not everyone lives in a big city with subway systems and whatnot). Building lots of parking lots is still cheaper than figuring a way to shuttle people around in rural areas. America is big, land is cheap.
America doesn't look like Manhattan, NYC everywhere. For these people, cars are the best solution. And the next stage is not going to be a jetpack. It's going to be a self-driving car. The fact that average people put up with all the problems and headaches of cars that only car enthusiasts love (maintenance, repairs, buying, etc.) shows us that there are a LOT of advantages from cars that we need to match with new forms of technology. My take is: Improve cars, rather than trying to destroy them. Because 100 years of innovation of automobiles aren't for nothing.
My take: The near future is efficient hybrids (2025), electric or fuel-cell cars (2035), then self-driving cars (2060). People will continue to talk about completely changing the infrastructure of the US, having everyone take buses and subways to work, but cars will continue to be over 75% of commute options for the forseeable future. Why?
The problem with all public transport technologies right now is it doesn't solve the density problem. The majority of new population in the US is growing not in really dense cities, but in medium dense suburbs. Everyone talks about moving people into "livable, healthy, walkable cities", yet Americans largely choose to migrate out of those ciites into new suburbs. I wonder why. Maybe they don't like the crowds, the crime, etc. It's human nature.
Problem 3: Finally, here are some things that cars have solved that are unresolved problems in other forms of transport:
Freedom of movement. Go wherever you want, whenever you want, with no one telling you what to do.
Speed. Choose a random American's home and a random American's office. Driving by car, even in traffic, probably beats all other modes in terms of speed. That's why even in the Bay Area at most 20% of commuters go by public transport where over 70% drive.
Efficiency. Cars are actually quite efficient and getting more so, especially with hybrid technology. The average car beats the average city bus in terms of energy efficiency. And we are quite likely to get 50+MPG Cars and electric cars in the near future.
> Cars are currently the best solution to the problems we have. That's why they are #1 in the US.
Granted -- so long as you take the legislative and tax situation into account. That's part of the "problem" to which cars are currently the best solution for most people, but it's not unchangeable.
Or from a different perspective, you could say: the "problem" is that people want to live in places (like suburbs) to which there is no great transportation solution yet, so part of the "solution" has to include a tax system that hides the true cost of the most acceptable solution.
Would cars still be so appealing if the true costs were not hidden? People seem to complain a lot about $4+/gal gasoline, but the tax on it doesn't come close to covering the maintenance needs of the roads they drive on. Couldn't almost any technology be the "best", given the right financial incentive?
I agree that for the next 10 years, hybrid electric cars are the solid bet. They have the ear of the lawmakers, it seems, and so not only are they 'cool', but they've got massive tax incentives helping them. I'm completely in favor of more efficient cars, of course, but it does seem odd to offer so many benefits based not on efficiency, but on one particular technology used to achieve efficiency.
Gas taxes (and vehicle registration fees) can completely cover the cost of road construction and maintenance -- several states work this way. A number of US states have constitutional and legal requirements such that this is the only way they can fund their transportation departments. That some states spend many times as much per road mile (I am looking at you California) is a reflection of their inefficiency and politics, not necessity.
I am a strong proponent of the model where all roads and road maintenance should be paid for by gas and use taxes. It works well in states where this is a reality and a couple of studies have shown that they tend to produce better quality roads in addition to being more cost efficient than states where roads are funded out of the general budget.
The lack of a politically guaranteed budget forces a measure of long-term fiscal conservativeness and cost control on the government organizations that maintain the roads. There is a concept of long-term ROI; if doing a better, somewhat more expensive job today significantly reduces costs a few years down the road, it is worth it because it is effectively like increasing the DoT's budget via investment in future years.If they waste money, they can't go back to the taxpayers and ask for more. It provides a bit of negative feedback to the government decision process that is often sorely needed.
Roads definitely have subsidies, but according to the document above, much less than urban transit or rail - if people pay the full costs of cars, they should pay the full costs of transit (not your typical $1.50 bus fare). In urban areas like the Bay Area or LA County, car trips are about 80% of commute trips, with transit at 10-15% but local/state transit funding is WAY above 10-15%, with a lot of gas taxes being funneled to transit projects. I believe that first off, we are 'paying' the true costs of cars, as people have voted for a government that pays for highways through income income taxes as well as gas taxes.
You could argue the same way about incentives for public vs. private transportation - people get advantages for buying hybrid cars the same way the public transport is heavily pushed onto cities. I don't think the solution to suburbs is to make them all into cities, or that the solution to cars as they are today is to replace them with public transport - cars have succeeded in capturing a huge % of marketshare so we should learn from their success and improve private transportation rather than trying to change human nature.
I agree on most parts but..
"The average car beats the average city bus in terms of energy efficiency." You're just doing it wrong. Your American mass transit systems are organized badly, if you get so few customers, that they don't beat cars in efficiency.
"As of 2006–2007, the total energy cost of London’s trains was 15 kWh per 100 p-km, about 5 times better than a personal car.[45] For busing in London, it was 32 kWh per 100 p-km, or about 2.5 times that of a personal car.[45] This includes lighting, depots, inefficiencies due to capacity (i.e., the train or bus may not be operating at full capacity at all times), and other inefficiencies. Efficiencies of transport in Japan in 1999 were 68 kWh per 100 p-km for a personal car, 19 kWh per 100 p-km for a bus, 6 kWh per 100 p-km for rail, 51 kWh per 100 p-km for air, and 57 kWh per 100 p-km for sea."
I think the robo-car is the self cleaning kitchen of the 2010's. When your ML algorithm makes an error, it won't just be a drop in some abstract accuracy measurement -- someone will die. This is a hell of a lot of liability to take on. Google's self-driving car is a promo stunt. You would need a lot of infrastructure for it to be safe -- and with that infrastructure will come loss of the "freedom" you describe -- e.g. It'll be a kind of train.
Not like you have that freedom now. Yeah, maybe in some rural area compared to hoofing it for 30 miles :-), but we're not talking about that -- you'll still use cars there. It's not true in suburbia. That's why we have malls and big box stores with huge parking lots built next to highways. You are unnaturally constrained to the highways and roads that have been built -- the freedom is illusory.
Speed. Well, you're attempting to compare Caltrain to the alternatives. In no way does Caltrain compare to Metro north or NJTransit -- the reason people choose to drive is not because cars are intrinsically faster in those areas, but because the mass transit in the bay area sucks. It's like saying in 1997 that "people have chosen rationally" not to use a phone as a web browser. Yes, they have, very rationally in fact, but it says nothing about the intrinsic ability of a phone-like device to be a web browser.
Efficiency is a red herring. Even the post you linked to is inconclusive in that regard. If you step out of the box and consider that the same improvements to cars could be made to buses or trains, then apply the economy of scale a massive investment in transit would mean -- it comes out a little differently. In the same post, there is a comparison to transit in other countries -- the comparison gets a little weak at that point.
A friend of mine retold an observation he had read: If an alien species were to observe our planet from on high for awhile, they may come away with the idea that the automobile is the highest life form on the planet we call Earth...
I watched a documentary about Jacque Fresco where he shows some of his futuristic cities where this is implemented. Very interesting stuff with trains. Maybe a world without car will make the segways more popular.
Cars are one of the worst inventions by human kind. Aside from the points mentioned in the article there is also many deaths by cars (traffic accidents) and the huge amount of cars now days tend to saturate the roads and make mobilization a really slow process.
My solution would be to get rid of cars all together an use only electrical trains driven by few professionals who are less likely to cause accidents; with fixed schedules (and speed) time management would be easier for everyone. And for short distances encourage the use of bicycles (witch also helps to the obesity issues)
"A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of." ... "Of course, urban civilization was not buried in manure. The great crisis vanished when millions of horses were replaced by motor vehicles. "
* Health dangers from emissions -- an issue of (certain implementations of) internal combustion, not the form factor of the vehicle: personal auto vs. bus or train
* Health dangers/obnoxiousness of long commutes -- likewise, a complicated thing which doesn't immediately suggest "ban cars" as the obvious solution. (If anything -- everything else being the same -- self-driving supercars should result in the shortest commutes: point-to-point (last mile), no waiting, no traffic congestion (from AI)
* Infrastructure NIMBY (roads, sprawling parking lots): rail lines have the same issues, with the tradeoff that the sparser your mass transit ugliness is, the more excruciating inconvenience the last-mile segment of a commute is (try living 10m walk from a subway stop). Flying "cars" are almost certainly infinitely worse, because of their extreme noise
None of these are arguments against private transport; they are arguments against specific implementations of private transport, and don't at all imply the conclusions the author derives.