Or rather, it is the right tool, but the constituents are so uneducated about urbanism that they flatly reject it. Kind of an interesting dynamic when you think about it.
The limiting factor is money. Plenty of people are down to drive buses. But if you think about it a bus is just a gimped version of a light rail / subway. It holds less people, is less comfortable, more expensive to maintain and operate, and being a bus gives it no benefit at all over rail. The only reason buses exist is because we made some terrible design mistakes with cars.
> It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective.
I hear this all the time and it still makes no sense at all. Population goes where transit allows population to go. Cars resulted in low population density. By getting rid of cars, you get rid of low population density.
As for cost, there is no world in which every person owning an automobile is cheaper than public transit. It's not remotely close. Average cost of private car ownership in the US exceeds 10k a year. That's about 3.4T of private spending, or 14% of GDP. This does not include the cost of roads. A single year of private automobile spending would build 20k miles of high speed rail, even assuming costs were CA HSR high.
I feel like the "low pop density & too big" argument is one of those things that only makes sense if you never consider second-order effects.
Eh, this is a silly take. Almost all trips are going to a few destinations. Work, Home, Shopping, Schools, etc. A sanely designed city would just build transit to those places.
Self-driving cars are solving an unnecessary problem, if that makes sense. US made some truly terrible design decisions, and self-driving is sort-of doubling down on the disaster.
Where I think we agree is that cars mostly suck for cities, and cars that get self-driving tech tacked onto them doesn't solve most of the fundamental issues with cars as we know them today.
I think the question here is what is a practical roadmap to building better cities with the ones we've got?
An extreme distillation of my pov is: roads&rubber wheels > rails&metal wheels.
I believe roads&rubber are just far better for A-B transport by so many measures, but most importantly that it is an extremely flexible connective tissue because it can be incrementally and cheaply added to or changed.
We can make the big, slow, expensive changes to add rail, and that may (mostly) work (for some), but it is extremely unlikely to happen at scale because it essentially means upending how car-centric cities are designed using top-down process or fiat.
Meanwhile cities are living breathing things pulled in many directions by many forces. The question is whether those forces can be harnessed to bring cities toward what we want them to be. I think roads&rubber do that better, because they allow bottom-up, rapid incremental change that shares costs with citizens (by way of vehicles) and does not require anywhere near the level of commitment or consensus that rail does.
I think it's reasonable to assume that if self-driving tech starts showing up in 10 years, that in 30 years we'll begin to see several changes that push us towards our goals for cities:
* There will be cities that require only self-driving cars in city limits, which will begin the alteration of the rules of traffic flow, since rules can be reprogrammed instantly
* product (car ownership) will give way to utility as all tech does over time
* There will be roads that will be converted to mixed use (parklets, mini-parks, bike lanes, walking) and be limited to only smaller micromobility-like vehicles. An early version of this is SF's 'slow cities' streets in each neighborhood that have been cut off to (most) cars.
* Max size requirements & road size changes will start to be palatable, with roads being recaptured, property lines & zoning shifting, etc.
* longer commutes/travel would use (larger) vehicle types that specialize in long distance comfort whereas short commutes would use (smaller) vehicles that have higher throughput in high density areas.
And more. This is the kind of payoff we'd start getting by investing in self-driving tech today. And these are things that can be done in a lazy and politically simple way, making changes only as they make sense in the moment, not on long planning schedules and anticipations of ridership and population proximity in 25 years.
I doubt that in the same ~30 year span that you could get most cities to install more than a few light rail corridors, and they'd probably not have sufficient throughput and frequent enough stops. We'd have to get like 5-10x better/faster at big infrastructure projects including politically challenging things like eminent domain to get comparable results.
LA metro is a good example: remember the metro construction scene at the end of the movie Speed? That was 30 years ago, and in that time metro has eased maybe ~5% of total traffic and you still absolutely need a car to get around LA. How do we get the other 95%?
The ideal answer in my mind is neither cars nor rail, but a system that operates a lot like rail but flexibly sized and individualized, and using the basic roads&rubber approach of cars.
I mean it only took China 15 years. But then again Mike Johnson is speaker so.. well, it's not going well.
IMO the main risk around self-driving cars is that it will perpetuate terrible city design. Hopefully the tide will turn towards sane urban policy soon.
This is not actually true. The level of violent crime in 99% of the USA is the same or lower as most other developed countries.
For reference, more people kill themselves with guns in the USA than are killed by other people with guns. If gun violence were truly a huge problem, you'd think that suicides would be outnumbered by gun murders, but they're not.
The numbers look big because it's a country of 330 million people, but ultimately the number of people killed with guns is pretty low (and it's something that can actually safely be completely ignored if you remove gang-on-gang and drug trade related violence, which is the vast majority of firearms deaths). For example, Obama killed more children with drones in 8 years than children were killed with guns in the USA in 20 years. (In both cases we are talking about absolute figures <1000.)
The "USA has a gun violence problem" is one of those "everybody knows" memes, however, so good luck convincing anyone to the contrary.
You make it sound like suicide is totally fine and harmless. Isn't it shocking that lots of people kill themselves with guns?
Because that's the thing with guns: they make killing easy. They also make suicide trivial. I know people who have struggled with depression and survived multiple suicide attempts. If they had access to guns, I don't think they'd be alive right now.
The numbers don't just look big because the US is a large country. Corrected for population size, gun violence in the US is still at least an order of magnitude larger than in other countries. I know of no other country where schools practice shooter drills.
> For example, Obama killed more children with drones in 8 years than children were killed with guns in the USA in 20 years. (In both cases we are talking about absolute figures <1000.)
That does not seem to be even remotely true. Not for any part of that claim. Well, maybe the part about children killed by drone strikes being less than 1000, because I can't find figures about that, but the number of civilians killed by drone strikes in the last 20 years seems to be 10k-20k.
According to [0], 31780 children have been killed by guns between 2000 and 2020. According to [1], the number of children dying from firearms is rising and now larger than the number of children dying from cars or cancer.
Your entire suggestion that people killed by guns is not really a problem sounds incredibly callous about human life.
You want to talk about callous? Calling people who commit suicide "Killers" is callous (https://concealedcarrykillers.org/). Using suicides to pad statistics to push magazine capacity bans or bans on ergonomic features is callous. You pretending that children being pushed to take their own lives is the same as being killed as bystanders in gang violence or killed in school shootings just so it can be all called "gun violence" is callous.
I am not the person in this conversation who was suggesting that people killing themselves was not so bad. Are you suggesting it's callous to take suicide seriously?
Sorry, but your rhetorical trickery over people's lives is sickening.
Nobody is banning SFH. The push is to change zoning to allow more variety in residential structures. People without kids may prefer an apartment / greater density.
It sounds like your town is not affordable to some residents, so your local government needs to help support those residents. Your non-resident/resident distinction is meaningless in the US, because we have freedom of movement. Anybody can move to your town if they feel like it, and would them be a resident.
Internal movement restrictions come with their own problems, so probably not the best solution.
Perhaps if your town allowed for development, there would be sufficient supply, and you wouldn't need to subsidize housing?
