Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Relevant xkcd:
see how efficient cars are (relative to human sized hampster balls)
https://www.xkcd.com/2684/
fun fact: it is illegal to not credit xkcd!50 people pureed and pressed into high-protien calorie-dense tiles:
It’s always relevant!
Hilarious 🤣!
Completely agree with your point, not trying to detract or anything, but why 69?
Because it’s just a nice number
It’s divisible by both 3 AND 23. Only every 69th number has that property, so you could call it kinda rare.
Explain to me how you solve the mass transportation issue in non metro areas. I live in Montana, where cities are an hour or three apart by vehicle, but even in said cities, outside of the main commercial areas, people are spread out. Like, really spread out. There is a single bus stop eight blocks from my house, with exactly four scheduled pickup/dropoff times. My kids go to school with other kids who live twenty miles away. Commercial rail doesn’t exist, except for a single cross-country Amtrak line with a station four hours away from here.
Images like this are illustrative, but they completely ignore the physical reality of how vast swathes of the US are laid out. You can’t just flip a switch and have bus stops on every corner and rail lines connecting your major cities and residential areas. That’s a massive undertaking that would cost way more in up front infrastructure than maintaining and augmenting existing highway program already does.
How do you change the culture away from cars where there is literally no realistic way to do it for 99% of people in areas like this? And how do you push for infrastructure change when there is no anti-car culture? It’s a chicken and egg problem where you have no chickens and you have no eggs.
Well you already expressed how to solve it. Issue is we have to think of a strong bus service and train service as a proper service rather than a for profit business. We can do it just we won’t.
Montana is around 147k square miles large it costs $1-2 million per track. We could cover every square mile of Montana for $147 billion which is half of the aid we have sent to Israel since it’s existence or 1/10 of our military budget. For $10 billion you can have train tracks every 15 square miles. For perspective there is 73k miles of public road in Montana supposedly.
If we brought all our troops back to the USA and used them as manpower and spent our military budget on infrastructure we could have 7 million miles of track laid in the last 10 years. For perspective we have 4 million miles of road in usa by quick glance.
Oddly enough, rail served more rural communities earlier on in the 20th century than they do now. This is due to disinvestment and the prioritization of personal vehicles. So not only is transit realistic, but it was the way for many railroad towns to be connected to each other and the rest of the country. Obviously that’s historical evidence, life is more complex now, but things can still be made to work with transit. Increasing bus frequency and coverage sounds like it would help your community.
- No one is expecting someone in Montana, hours away from others to give up their car. Although incorporating more of the externalized costs might invent some people to make other decisions.
- There’s always something we can do better.
Even the most remote area has some sort of gathering points that can be concentrated into a walkable area. Basically - when you drive your car to church, you should have the option of walking to a brunch place and a grocery store, picking up your niece arriving on Greyhound, and yelling at your local councilman, before driving back. You should have the option to do more with fewer trips
You can also connect rural towns by cycling routes. Some parts of Australia are doing this by adding cycling tracks to long-abandoned rail links (would be nice if some of these were used as rail again but that’s another story). Yes, not everyone is going to be willing and able to use these but it’s great for tourism, and even getting a small amount of people out of their cars now and then is a win.
Here too. I was just reading about a town in western Maryland giving financial incentives for people who move there, and one of the things they mentioned was a rail trail connected into DC, 184 miles. I guess they were trying to say it’s a rural town but you can still get into a city
The issue is solved at scale in cities. There is no need to change rural centers at the moment until the pressure is relieved where it will have the most effect. Maybe even freeing tax dollars for the state to help with rural areas instead of millions of intercity roads being damaged daily by large vehicles. Every dime you save in the city can be subsidized for rural areas if it is no longer needed. Or can be used to further assist struggling populations in the city. Everything that benefits people will find its way to also benefitting you in some way.
Hey fellow Montanan! Check out Big Sky Rail Authority’s arguments for implementing a southern passanger rail service, or think of the benefits of increased bus service connecting the larger Montana cities. We have main travel corridors across the state that could be greatly improved by a public transportation network, linking rural communities and connecting them to larger city centers. Combine that with local bus service, walkable communities, and biking infrastructure in places where it can be supported like Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, etc can improve traffic and livability of the towns. Also, think of the improvement to traffic conditions for people coming into town from surrounding rural communities if you can divert a good portion of traffic to public options. In a rural state like ours, there’s always going to be some need for personal vehicles, but there’s still lots of places where having more public transportation options could improve our communities and lessen our climate impacts. Sure, it’s going to look different than in other parts of the country, but still a lot of room for improvement around here.
69 people, eh?
Walking: Can’t cover large distances quickly. Not sure why that’s even included in this?
Bus: Pollution source whether it carries passengers or not. No service in rural areas. 1 crash = 69 people injured. Pathogen hotbox. You can’t smash in one.
Bicycle: 1 thunderstorm = misery. Limited range and can’t travel on motorways/freeways.
Car: Only pollutes when you use it. Goes anywhere you want 24/7/365. You can definitely smash in one. Carries big things like a trolley full of groceries or IKEA furniture.
E-Cars etc.: All the benefits of the car plus no pollution. Huge smugness boost.
adventures in missing the point and faulty comparisons.
Also, cars are extremely wasteful when not in use. They have to be parked somewhere and that’s space not used productively.
You mean you CAN smash on a bus?? Outstanding :)
I’m not against having a car for when I need it. I’m against pretty much requiring it to be a functional adult to do just about anything without public transit becoming my new hobby.
Work: 20min drive, 1h 20min transit, 2h bike
Groceries: 10min drive, 45min transit
This includes a bunch of walking to/from stops and half the time spent waiting since my city’s public transit hub/spoke model is designed for airplanes requiring you to bounce between hubs.
There also isn’t consistency. A favorable route might only come once every few hours. If one hop is running late, it can wreck the whole route.
My work route is pretty direct but it takes 12min walking, 0-20min waiting for a bus to my local hub, 0-40min waiting for the right train, and another 15min walking to the office. If they got those wait times down to like 10-20min total, I’d be more inclined to use it. Right now “something” comes every 20min, but sometimes the routes alternate so your route may come every 40min instead of 20min.
Walking: a great form of transportation for short distances. However too much modern infrastructure gets in the way of walking. We should be able to walk more places than we do, even just from one store to the next. I did live in a city carlessly for a while and the combination of transit and walking was much more convenient than cars, most of the time
Bus: if you don’t mind the audience ….
A car pollutes as its materials are mined from the ground and smelted into metals. A car pollutes when oils are refined for its various plastics and lubricants. A car pollutes when it is retired to a scrap yard to sit leaking oil until it is crushed and recyled (polluting through that process too).
To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed that I was commenting in the “Fuck Cars” group cos I just responded to something that popped up in my feed. I’m not about trying to be disruptive in someone else’s house. I was going for humor more than anything. Sorry.
None of this is true for busses. They’re made of and run on magic
Buses service more people per pollution over their lifecycle.
That’s a MUCH better argument and the one you should stick with.
That was the argument the entire time, you smug imbecile
No his argument was that cars pollute when they’re not running and implying that buses don’t, you smug imbecile.
have you ever seen normies riding bikes that close? it doesnt end well. lol
not everyone has the coordination to ride in a peleton.have you ever seen normies riding bikes that close?
Yes. In the Netherlands. It ends fine.
…You mean the people with plenty of experience in riding bikes because they do it constantly?
I’m referring to the country named in the title of the post.
Im a 69 person.
While I’m a strong proponent of reducing and possibly eliminating car use, this image is disingenuous. They neatly packed 69 (nice) people into a medium bus, sure. But when showing cars, it’s almost 1 persons per car (I counted 15 cars in a row and there are 4 rows, so 60 cars). You can definitely use cars more efficiently than that.
Assuming that actually autonomous self-driving cars exist, they could be extremely efficient. Especially if you treat them like ride sharing taxis. In other words, a lot of people could share the same car and that would reduce the amount of owned cars. They also never waste space being parked. So I can see how when we make a real self-driving car, it can potentially reduce traffic. Especially for all those cases where public transportation doesn’t work.
And what the heck is a “connected car”?
Two facts:
- The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
- Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars. They will circle empty with no passengers and drive to pick up passengers empty (dead heading) even with a fully rideshare system. If there is widespread private ownership of autonomous vehicles (and you bet your butt that car companies will campaign for this aggressively to keep sales up), the dead heading problems only multiply. If you don’t believe me, look up any recent literature on the topic: by most accounts it will be worse, not better. Dead heading is only the tip of the iceberg of problems there.
Regarding your first point, I’m aware that that is the unfortunate truth. That IS the issue with cars when it comes to efficiency. If you load the car with 3-5 passengers it easily beats busses in efficiency, according to my calculations. But that’s not gonna happen.
Regarding your second point, the core of the issue is just capitalism, not self-driving cars or privately owned cars.
Cars don’t have to drive around empty if they are some sort of shared transport that can pick up the nearest passenger.
If companies aren’t gonna cause unnecessary car purchases only those who need them anyway will own them.Basically, the problem with cars is not cars themselves as a concept, it’s the overuse and misuse. But unfortunately, that isn’t changing anytime soon.
Even being generous with using SUVs, a really small bus can fit 30+ people, in the same space that would occupy two SUVs with less than 10 people combined.
Would love to see those calculations.
If you load the car with 3-5 passengers it easily beats busses in efficiency, according to my calculations.
Huh? If you’re being very generous you can fit 3 cars into the space of 1 bus. A bus can definitely hold more than 15 people.
I have already rescinded that decision in this comment. But I wasn’t comparing the volume, I was comparing the amount of useful work done relative to the weight. If you wish, the details are in the linked comment.
Basically, the problem with cars is not cars themselves as a concept, it’s the overuse and misuse. But unfortunately, that isn’t changing anytime soon.
So true, extra emphasis on the misuse in the US. I was recently in Iceland, which is a very car centric country, and I was amazed by how much better their car situation was. They kept their roads nice and tight, used roundabouts, they had 30kmph(18mph) speed limits in residential and city centers, raised sidewalks, etc. Best of all most people drove small cars! It was the first time I enjoyed driving and didn’t mind being around cars because I actually felt safe.
But then I got back to the US and it was disgusting how wasteful we are with our car infrastructure. Instead of 9ft car lanes our lanes are 12ft minimum often with 8ft buffers. Even small suburban streets are 40 to 50 feet wide. Our parking lots look like lakes of asphalt, and our intersections are so fucking huge there is no safe way for a kid to use them
And what is the average occupancy of a bus in your North American city?
Regarding your 1st point, yes, it is a problem that cars are underutilized. So I think that in addition to promoting public transport, for the time being, we could also promote proper usage of cars. Here in Europe, we don’t have much problems with cars compared to US, but oh boy you guys overseas need to tame your F-150 owners.
Regarding the 2nd point, it’s not a fact but an opinion. With which I don’t really agree. I believe that true self-driving cars will eventually surpass the capabilities of meatbags, but I will look up the literature. Solely based on what you said, it seems to me that the “dead heading” problem is just a logistical issue that can be solved using science/technology (if the fleet of cars is algorithmically dispersed enough, they will always pick up a nearby passenger, as a hypothetical solution).
But yes, the corporations remain an issue and they will surely find a way to mess everything up. That is a separate problem that also needs solving, capitalism and overconsumption.- The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
- Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars.
-
Is that for rush hour? Because, overall, the national average is closer to 1.5
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Fully agree.
- How so? Wouldn’t autonomous cars disincentivize car ownership, meaning fewer cars that can be on the road?
See the argument of induced demand: “Oh everyone is using self-driving cars, that means there’s more space for my car!”
I’m not a car owner, so I might be wrong. But I don’t think it’s normal for people to decide owning a car based on whether or not there’s room for it.
Also, I think they meant that self-driving cars that will be taking non-owners to their destination. Since there’s already a car that’s taking me, I don’t need to buy my own.When people feel there’s more room for cars/infrastructure is more hostile to walking, they are more inclined to buy and use a car. That’s why adding lanes to highways never works to reduce traffic. You are not making more space for the same amount of cars, you’re inducing non-car owners to switch and get one, or already existing car owners to use it more, resulting in more cars in circulation.
Similarly, autonomous cars are perceived as taxis which people irrationally perceive as emotional license to acquire and use a car. Narratives like cars as freedom or tech companies coming to take your car.
Sure, it is counter intuitive, but there’s a billion dollar marketing industry dedicated to exploiting this and other similar cognitive biases. See green washing and the use of recycling to promote further consumerism. Or using health labeling to keep unhealthy foods in high demand, etc.
The problem you described sounds more like a side effect of the core issue – corporate greed. Cars can be bad, and overuse is a problem, but let’s not blame them for the faults of the system. Until the core issue is fixed, nothings will be truly efficient and useful, because those aspects will be sacrificed to profit.
You can use cars more efficiently but by and large they aren’t.
Also, you think people are gonna share a car? Fat chance. People would need to work out shared upkeep, time slots to have it, etc.
We simply need to stop subsidizing cars which is the whole point here.
Doesn’t Lyft work sorta like that? Idk, it doesn’t operate in my country, but from what I’ve seen online, it’s several strangers sharing one ride.
But after giving it more thought, I tend to agree with you on this. Except… After posting my comment I got curious and decided to calculate the efficiency of cars vs busses. I always assumed that they were way more efficient than cars (cause lugging around 2 tons of steel just to move 1 or a couple 70kg hairlines apes is stupid). But it turns out that busses only win if we compare it to cars with only one passengers. So basically, at half load, both are about equally efficient (about 10%). And on average a bus is only half full. Turns out, busses are really heavy… there’s of course the density, of course, and busses win if you give each passenger their own car, but if we pack cars fully, they will be significantly more efficient. Not to mention if you use smaller European cars that carry basically their own weight in passengers.
So my conclusion is, to maximize efficiency in the future we should try to implement a system of highly packed smaller sized transportation devices.
There are multiple levels of efficiency or benefits here for the bus over the car
- no worries about driving or parking
- all incomes, ages and skill levels
- can handle groups
- can handle more people, such as at rush
- don’t require street parking
- don’t require parking lots
- don’t require as many garages, gas stations, repair shops
Doesn’t Lyft work sorta like that?
I’ve only ever heard of lyft being a normal taxi service where people just use their own cars they already own. Also, I dunno where you’re getting your numbers for the calculation you’re doing, that would probably be something good to include. You could say the same for everything I write, I guess, but none of my criticisms much have to do with the numbers, except for this: I dunno what “smaller european cars” you’re using. Most cars nowadays are like, 2 tons or so at the least, probably more, and you could maybe get one ton of human body weight, at the most, if you had several 250 pound chucks riding around in one car, which I don’t really imagine to be the case normally at all.
There’s also an efficiency created by the “inefficient” route planning of the bus. By having something that travels in a loop, rather than having every individual travel to every individual point, we’re trading some amount of efficiency in terms of total time spent by everyone (theoretically, but this time is probably eaten up by increased amounts of car traffic in reality), and we’re trading that for a slight increase in the amount of foot traffic that people are collectively engaging in, which is probably a good thing. So that’s a total decrease in curb weight as a factor of total travel time, which is a decrease in road maintenance.
You’re also probably looking at a massive decrease in mechanical maintenance for buses compared to cars, using one big engine, set of brakes, A/C systems, etc, rather than like 15-20 smaller non-standardized sets, and maintenance costs for the specific roads you’re traveling on via bus means you can engineer in less maintenance over time compared to a more spread out system.
Density is also a pretty big consideration, because real estate downtown, i.e. the location most people are going to want to go, is at a high premium, both for people and for the city/state’s tax base. High density has the capacity to provide a sustainable tax base for the cost of providing utilities and maintenance by the city… Unless you park the series of autonomous cars all in some huge superstructure outside of town, and then basically just merge them straight into the highway, where you’d still have to overbuild and deal with a massive amount of car infrastructure (more than just the space you’d save on all this parking, since you could just have a couple pickup and dropoff spaces, if that, compared to all this other parking taken up downtown). I can’t really see it working out, and even at the normal densities we’d be looking at, I’d struggle to come up with a way by which it’s more efficient overall.
There’s also other types of buses, if we’re just talking about emissions efficiency, or energy efficiency. Obviously an overhead electrified bus is probably the most desirable, just behind a tram or a streetcar or whatever. Then you have the weird stupid hybrid battery overhead-electrified buses that I hate, and then probably all your natural gas buses and diesel buses and whatnot, and then your pure battery buses.
If we’re talking about autonomous vehicles, then we’re kind of also sidestepping all these questions about like, the scalability of the AI for this, and the computing power we’d have to use on that, constantly. We’d have to deal with the traveling mailman problem on a near constant basis, something which public transport can mostly sidestep by assuming passengers will come to it, and that public transit will be of a high enough density to create desirable locations simply by stopping there. We have all the pedestrian and cyclist traffic conflicts which we’d encounter, or else have to segregate from these cars entirely (something normal traffic already struggles to do adequately). And if we’re segregating the traffic entirely with a large amount of infrastructure, which definitely makes this much more achievable and easier, if still not easy, I think it makes more sense from a top down maintenance perspective to just go for trams or streetcars, or subways, or something like that.
I think the only real way in which I can cook up a reason this might be done, is because it’s outsourcing costs onto the public, and onto the state. Road maintenance can be done by the city, or state. Probably, this would mean that the autonomous vehicles would not be segregated, which means it’s less of a good idea, which I believe, is the primary reason it hasn’t been done. Then, the taxi service could basically make a bunch of money on their highly necessary transportation, which they have created a large need for, simply by existing and demanding a large amount of infrastructure by existing.
Use bicycles, e-bikes, and walking for individual pedestrian point to point travel. Fuck all the bullshit excuses people give about how, oh no it’s too hot out, too rainy, too hilly, what do I do with this cargo that’s not large or consistently arriving or departing enough to be loaded by a freight train, or by a professional truck, but isn’t so small that I can carry it, what do I do with all my kids, etc… Use cars sparingly enough to fill the very minor amount of gaps that can’t be bridged by bikes, cycling, and public transit, as a method of last resort. Mostly for people that would maybe need to live out in the boonies, like park rangers, maybe. Actual farms, not the stupid rich people playtime “ranches”, and industrial locations, they usually have a large enough cargo haul to justify a small freight train, or a large truck taking a small route to a freight yard.
I dunno where you’re getting your numbers for the calculation you’re doing, that would probably be something good to include
Absolutely fair. In fact, since yesterday night I tried to do more variations of my calculations for different types and now I, at least, heavily doubt my own conclusions and, at most, disagree with my conclusions entirely. Especially taking into consideration some of the aspects that people like you mentioned. But here’s my approach. When I was saying “efficiency” I specifically meant percentage of useful work done relative to weight (I know it’s not a be-all, end-all metric, but that’s what I chose). For example, a 2 ton car carrying one 70kg person has efficiency rating of:
(70 kg / 2,070 kg) * 100 = ~3.38%
Then I did these calculations for 1, 3 and 5 passengers, which makes 3.38%, 9.50% and 14.89% respectively. Then I took a random bus (curb weight = 12000 kg, max capacity 40 passengers), and repeated the calculations for 1 passenger, half and full occupancies. That came out to 0.58%, 10.45% and 18.92% respectively. Seeing that at half occupancy, cars are basically as efficient as busses, and knowing that on average busses are not even half-loaded (around 40%) I concluded that cars are in fact very efficient, given that you use them properly.
But of course that isn’t the whole picture. Some issues with my numbers that I found:- average car is much lighter than 2000 kg (regular sedans are about 1500 kg, and a typical European car is around 1100 kg)
- busses at that weigh actually have much more occupancy
- it’s unfair to compare half occupancy, because statistically cars have 1.2 passengers on average.
Taking these things into account, I (mostly Claude) made this calculator. It even has rough numbers for certain cars and bus types. Using that calculator I can clearly see, that busses win, even when lighter cars are reasonably utilized.
talking about autonomous vehicles
This was a sci-fi hypothetical anyway, even optimistically, I don’t think we will have truly self-driving cars for another 5-10 years. I agree with a lot of what you said, but we can’t really apply today’s approach to that future sci-fi scenario. For example, if we have a swarm of hive-mind public cars that anticipate each other’s moves, then those potentially could be way more efficient than route based traffic. But I don’t wanna fixate on the hypotheticals.
Regarding your last paragraph, I don’t own a car, mostly walk and use trams. But I live in Europe, and here in Warsaw, we don’t really have a car problem. Sure, the work commute hours are a bit loaded, but otherwise, public transport is really good and a car is barely needed. So yes, until further notice, avoid cars if possible.
Thank you for such a lengthy and detailed response!
Every panel is flawed
People don’t walk that closely together
People don’t bike that closely together
Only a double decker bus could fit that many people without cramming people in like sardines
Moving cars should obey a safe following distance, so unless traffic is gridlocked, they shouldn’t be that close either
Things being close together isn’t really an issue here because it’s just meant to visualize the volume. They are not trying to paint a realistic scenario, I don’t think.
Bikes even if not packed as closely massively decrease the total volume. Even if they were all riding all after one another on a bike lane it would be miles shorter than cars on a road.
And as for the bus… I have been on busses that full. You clearly have not travelled peak hour traffic on a busy route. Just look at any Japanese or Indian train to see how space efficient they are able to transport petiole
Just look at any Japanese or Indian train to see how space efficient they are able to transport petiole
“Space efficient” is a very kind euphemism for “being packed cheek by jowl and smelling what everyone had for lunch.”
Yeah public transit is for ugly disgusting poor people!
/s
I know plenty of ugly disgusting rich people and would also not like to smell them or feel them rubbing against me.
Just add more buses in that case. This is the good kind of induced demand.
Even then, in a well designed city, there are enough viable alternatives when buses get too crowded (walking, cycling, trains, even a slightly different bus route).
I’d argue against that.
The concept of robot taxi sounds nice, but it devolves into an unsustainable mess. Ride sharing isn’t simple, especially when we talk about uncertain way points. Meaningfully matching cases where people can share a robot car with completely random drop off is a logistical nightmare. I used to work at a Ride hailing company as an analyst, and people being unhappy with the duration of the shared ride was the biggest issue for that category (removing for generic cases like payment issues).
Additionally, I’m sure it’s going to be a safety factor. I’m unlikely to get into a car with a random stranger when there’s literally no one else in the car. Miss me with trusting some corporate with safety in such cases.
Thank you, that is a very interesting insight. But besides sharing cars in parallel (multiple passengers at once) there can also be sequential sharing, which is, I understand, a regular taxi without a driver. But I think that high availability of cars like that, which are cheap, would still reduce the amount of car owners, and consequently increase public transportation utilization.
Why do something that complicated when bus and tram lines are way more efficient? Cities need to take the money they apend on subsidizing car ownership and invest it into mass transit.
Because trams and busses can’t fulfill every need. Certain point to point transportation options still need to exist, we just need to make them as efficient as possible.
And as I mentioned in another comment, turns out busses aren’t really as efficient as I thought they were. Fully packed small cars are way more efficient, turns out.
Most cars only ever have 1 person in them, 2 occasionally, and rarely ever more than that inlesst it’s a damily trip somewhere. A bus with 5 passengers is taking up less space than 5 cars of any size. Even in mass transit Meccas like The Netherlands obviously still have private cars that people use. But designing transport infrastructure around more efficient methods allows for use cases where a personal car iis necessary fleeting. Obviously moving trucks and delivery vans can’t be replaced by a tram. But a well designed city wouldn’t require me to drive my car just to pick up eggs and a loaf of bread, or to get a beer at a local bar, or go to a baseball game.
I’ve done ride shares a few times with Uber and it went pretty well. Basically it only worked from downtown to the airport, as the only scenarios with similar routes. Maybe a sporting or music event would be the same, I don’t know
I’m not sure what you mean here by Downtown.
But again, if all you’re looking for is a good transport system from one high population density area (airports almost always are) to another high population density area, you’ll be better served by having a reliable and decently fast metro train or the likes, than a cab, as long as people don’t mind walking for 5-10 minutes from their closest stop. If that distance is higher, by all means taxis are amazing for last mile connectivity. But expecting cars to solve public transport at large has always looked like a losing battle to me.
Boston. I’ve gotten shared rides between downtown Boston and the airport but that’s the only scenario where I’ve been able to
It’s also a bit of a cautionary tale on transit, because Boston managed to screw that up with too many connections making it take too long.
- Subway. But only the blue line, no connection to red line, and you need to transfer to a bus.
- silver line. Connects to red line only. Glorified bus, drives in regular traffic.
- park and ride - no overnight parking.
- AirPort Express bus. Only serves outer burbs
If I want to goto the airport from my home in the inner ‘burbs:
- commuter train is up to 2 hours apart, limited hours. Can head into town, walk a block or two to the blue line, wait as long as 20 minutes, take that to the airport. Wait up to 5 minutes for a shuttle, take that to the terminal. Not practical.
- drive to red line. No overnight parking. Wait up to 20 minutes for subway, take it to silver line. Wait up to 20 minutes. Get stuck in traffic in the tunnels. Not practical.
I have lots of great transit options but none that connect smoothly and frequently enough to actually use. This is better when living in the city but still all the connections and delays turn what should be a great transit experience into an impractical one. I’m going to end up driving to the airport every time (up to three day trip or Uber for longer)
Never been to US, so I won’t comment on the specific infra.
However, I have lived in multiple cities, and have seen multiple cities build their metro networks from scratch in 20 years. And they’ve been absolutely over and beyond what could’ve been achieved by any improvement in car infrastructure, apart from demolishing entire houses and shops to expand the roads on both sides.
The solution would be autonomous single seat cars, similar to the podbike. They would only be like ~1m wide (3 feet) and could use mostly bicycle transmission hardware and be extremely aerodynamic at commuting speeds.
Without needing steering you could also do two seaters with seats that face each other, so could also be low to the ground and narrow for aerodynamics.
The majority should still be bus or tram or train but autonomous cars could unlock a lot of possibilities because they fill the gaps. We just haven’t seen the “correct” design for autonomous robo taxies yet.
The solution would be autonomous single seat cars, similar to the podbike.
Interesting proposal. I think that a single-seat vehicle will inherently be too inefficient cause you need to have all the infrastructure, but you carry only 1 person. 2-4 passenger vehicles would probably still be most optimal.
But yes, I do believe that autonomous cars will unlock possibilities that humans can tap into. Eventually, robo-car will not be equal to a taxi, it will be more than that. But I hope that it’s publicly owned and not corporate.
2-4 passenger vehicles
Yeah that would need to be planned together with the city planning and redesign to make mostly walkable cities / suburbs.
Someone mentioned statistics that average passenger number is 1.2. And with an autonomous taxi you wouldn’t need to drive your kid somewhere and then pick it up, you’d throw it in the single seat podcar and get notified once it arrived. So for rides where you can’t take public transport or a bicycle / velomobile, the passenger number would be closer to 1. Then you’d have double seater podbikes which would also be good for shopping if you have bags of stuff you can put on the seat in front of you.
Then you’d still need 4 passenger vehicles but they would be incredibly rare. Plus delivery trucks for grocery stores etc.
As for embedded energy for a “podcar”, it only weighs like 50kg compared to the 2000kg of a car (ok probably more like 150kg). Presuming that autonomous vehicles are vastly more safe than normal cars and almost never crash, you save on infrastructure too. You don’t need a heavy windscreen out of glass because you don’t need high visibility (glass is required for wipers and because plastic gets dull over time). You only need much smaller motors, batteries, simple bicycle style wheels, lightweight breaks, and no steering wheel and no cockpit. At least for speeds lower than say ~60 kmh (40 mph) you could literally use bicycle hardware.
If what you say is true, and they can fit all the necessary tech into 50kg, or anything under the weight of an average human, then I agree, in efficiency, that (50%+) beats even the best bus scenario (35% at full capacity) according to my calculations. By efficiency, I mean what percentage of carried weight is useful.
Hmm, weight of the podbike is 90kg, so it’s probably closer to 200kg as an autonomous vehicle. It would be awesome if it could beat a bus but that is unlikely.
You could make it lighter but it becomes a question of manufacturing cost (lightweight is costly, like composite) and battery size and how often it drives itself to charging and how many solar / wind you need at the charging station.
You’re correct sir, this thread is nothing more than shitty propaganda. Instead of, you know, going with actual real facts.
another 20 years of progress put on pause.
aint democracy great lol
Democracy is. Capitalism isn’t. And honestly people aren’t either. I can trust any one person but I cannot trust all the people. But any other system other than democracy is bound to fail its people in one way or another. Haven’t heard of a functional technocracy surviving very long but it may be the only viable alternative
At least the last one involves far fewer parking lots.
Are you not into
trainstrams?Does that make him tramsphobic?
We can’t be all trampholic (wait, why not?)
A lot of those “highway programs” include things like removing barriers to aquatic organism passage, reducing congestion and emissions from the movement of cargo, and other things that don’t suck. It’s still weighed too heavily in favor of cars and highways for sure, but there’s more getting funded by the IIJA & IRA than just, like, freeways.
A lot
or two fifths of fuck all
Reducing congestion is mostly attempted by building and expanding highways, which is proven not to reduce congestion. The vast majority of the budget is spent on building and expending highways.
Imagine seeing 69 random strangers walking down the street, densely packed in like that, for no reason. Just comin at you.
You’ve never been outside your tiny town, have you?
Are you saying that you DON’T walk that close to other pedestrians?
Isn’t it how it works in New-York ?
Average day in Mumbai railway stations
Finland: Oh look, tourists.
“Quick, say hello in Latin!”
Salvete!
Hope that bus is going to 69 very separate locations some of which are at least 20 miles from the closest urban area and in opposite directions to accommodate those who cannot afford or don’t want to live in a city.
This person has never lived anywhere close to an actual small American town and has no idea how small towns are structured.
Wait, me or OP?
“What if things were better?”
“No, you imbecile, you absolute buffoon, things can never be better because they are the way they are”
“Here’s a solution”
“That solution doesn’t work for A LOT of people”
“Well you don’t think it’ll work for valid reasons you must not want anything to work ever”
“That solution doesn’t work for A LOT of people”
Mass transit is how you create large population centers. A big reason small towns collapse stems from the degradation of their incredibly expensive per-mile asphalt system collapsing under the weight of heavy trucks and eighteen wheelers. The cost of maintaining the road infrastructure cripples the municipal budget.
Commercial Rail takes that weight off the back of the local community. And busing allows for denser housing closer to the center of town, which saves money on everything from municipal plumbing to trash pickup to public schooling to health care delivery.
Historically, small towns have relied on centrally located city services to both fuel local commerce and keep cost of living down. The death of a small town’s city center is typically the prelude to the collapse of the township on the whole. That’s a fact people who actually live in these towns are keenly aware of. But it is routinely overlooked by big city suburbanites who think everyone in the family owning a $40k personal vehicle is normal and taking the bus or the bicycle into town is something rural communities are totally unfamiliar with.
I’m not a big city suburbanite nor can I afford a $40,000 car.
I’m not sure what small towns are collapsing under the weight of roads, though I’m sure its a problem for some.
Our biggest financial issue is an unnecessarily bloated police force. The state maintains the major roads here and many smaller roads are private, dirt, maintained by an HOA, etc. Though yes, some areas have some potholes, though not nearly as bad as those in large cities I visit like Memphis or Louisville.
Also small cities, within the town center are perfectly walkable and small enough that we don’t really need a bus. But to get to that walkable area, you need a car.
If you and your buddies want to invest and run a train though every small town in the US, I’m all for it.
However,
"Mass transit is how you create large population centers. "
Some of use don’t want large population centers or we’d live in the city and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I’m not sure what small towns are collapsing under the weight of roads
…
The ASCE’s 2017 Infrastructure Report Card notes that at least 27 states have “de-paved” roads in the past five years in order to reduce ongoing maintenance costs. In one particularly notable example, Stutsman County, North Dakota — which spends $32,000 per year on each mile of their 233-mile asphalt road network — estimates that if those same roads were de-paved, the cost per mile of maintenance would drop to just $2,600.
…
David Hartgen, lead author of the Annual Highway Report, notes that a few states are “really falling behind on maintenance and repairs.” And there’s an estimated countrywide road maintenance backlog of $420 billion.
Telling townships to maintain large, far flung asphalt road networks is demanding the impossible.
Our biggest financial issue is an unnecessarily bloated police force.
In biggest municipalities that’s true. But then the largest time sink for police is… traffic enforcement.
If you and your buddies want to invest and run a train though every small town in the US, I’m all for it.
Much of the rail infrastructure already exists, although cities have been cannibalizing it to expand the highway capacity for decades. Show me a small town in America that’s older than 50 years and I’ll show you the rail line that runs through it.
But getting permission to actually use it? That’s not a money problem. It’s a politics problem.
Come to think of it, the town in from had a train, as did most of the neighboring towns.
That is until they ripped all of them up to make bike paths. Florida Rails to Trails I think it was called. And they did a half-assed job in a lot of places, just ripping up the rails and then not really providing or maintaining the “trail” part.
What you are dong there is actually an argument against the other side of the issue. Exclusively Residential zoning plans are what create the situation you are referring to and they also account for the constant risk of bankruptcy of car centric cities. Dense, multi-use zoning allows for the creation of transit corridors where a single bus stop can serve several hundred people within a 5 minute walk, instead of serving just a handful of people within a 20 minute walk (the problem you are complaining about).
Valid and I had not considered that.
However, this post is in “fuck cars” not “fuck poor zoning laws.” The solutions and complaints I see in this thread have NOTHING to do with remapping the way cities work, which would be necessary to even be able to consider saying “fuck cars” for the vast majority of suburban / rural residents.
The comments here seem entirely fixated on “solving” a symptom of a much larger problem by creating several more problems for other people because it would be more convenient for them.
And while your solution is nice for those in the city I ask again, what if someone lives 20 or 30 miles (not 20 mins walking) away because they can buy a 3 bedroom house in a neighboring city or unincorporated rural area for the price of renting a small studio apartment in the city, and have a nicer view.
They are both the same single problem. Remember that fuck cars is not about the hate of cars solely, but about the car centric infrastructure and its externalities on society. “Fuck cars” as a phrase is just the succinct summary of a largely complex and multifaceted social issue.
Thank you that’s a helpful explanation. I found (find) the name of the group misleading if that’s the case, though I understand group names are supposed to be catchy.
Thinking of riding a bicycle so close to others at any speed scares me a bit.
Stay away from the Netherlands you’d have a heart attack
I think I’d be fine if I did it every day, heh. Cyclists in Japan are fairly nuts, but cycle infrastructure isn’t great here. Technically, only the young and elderly can ride on most sidewalks but there’s a basically-undefined carve out for “those who feel they cannot ride safely in the street” which means that nearly everyone gets on the sidewalk and nearly take out pedestrians all the time. This got really bad when uber eats first became a thing in Tokyo.
Doing 50 that close to other cars would also be very uncomfortable.
