Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, "Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND."
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars
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The more people try to "innovate" transportation the closer it gets to going back to trains. Driverless cars, for efficiency have them communicate with eachother, to accelerate and brake at the same time, for example. That's just less efficient and more expensive trains.
There's a massive failure condition for your example - sure, autonomous cars behave like trains when they communicate with each other to sync acceleration and deceleration, but they can also separate themselves from the collective to drive you to the door of your home. In the train metaphor this would be like you sitting in your own train car, and the train car separating from the rest of it and driving you to your doorstep.
Or you could have a train that drops you off either close to your home or close to a bus station that drops off near your home. This would require a walkable city, so it's definitely not as simple as just building tracks and bus stations. The issue is that Americans are so used to car dependent infrastructure, that when they try to imagine what public transport would be like, they think of it in the context of where they live. That's why I think so many are opposed to the idea. It's not an impossible task, it's just that it'd require money and effort, so it probably won't happen.
It also won't happen because not all of us live in cities. The "fuck cars" crowd never has any solutions for rural locations other than "don't live there" as if rural areas serve no purpose. As long as farms are a thing there will be people out here, either farming themselves or supporting farmers,and things like scooters and trains either won't work or only partially solve the problem.
Anyone who thinks getting rid of cars is a viable strategy in the US of all places is delusional.
You are talking about a minority of vehicles though. 77% of US personal vehicles are non-rural, hence, fuck them.*
I also don't think many people want to get rid of every single car everywhere for every purpose. Most cars are personal vehicles in built up areas and that's where they cause the most problems and make the least sense.
*From 2017 NHTS https://nhts.ornl.gov/
You reinvented switches.
I think you miss part of transportation system that says system. It's more than one element.
oh no, if only someone hadn't centralized like, a point, say, a station, where people could conveniently access the train of cars....
they could call it a... hmm.... TRAIN STATION?
Why cars? Why not buses, trams, trolleys or even bikes?
whoooosh
There's an argument to be made that driverless cars make more efficient use of our existing infrastructure, namely, roads, and are more adapted to the hellscape of sprawl that we created. Traffic jams could effectively be eliminated if you get rid of people that treat the left lane like a regular traffic lane, people going too slow, people going too fast, etc. It's not like building more trains is going to suddenly mean that trains are convenient - there is a VAST amount of sprawl, and it's not going anywhere. It took the steel industry shutting down in Pittsburgh, and 60% of the population relocating, before people got the bright idea that actually living closer in to the population center makes sense and turn small outliers into ghost towns. I'm not against trains, I just think the scale of the problem is larger than most people understand when they say "build more trains."
The best long term solution for both nicer cities, happier people, and less environmental damage is to overhaul our infrastructure. Don't build trains in car dependant cities, make the car dependant cities walkable with public transportation that will leave you within a few minutes of your destination. The real reason self driving cars are the "future" is because selling cars has a higher profit margin than train/bus tickets.
Buses. It's almost driverless car with 1/80th of driver per ~~driver~~ passanger. Also it's 1/80 of car per car equivalent.
Not a foregone conclusion, at all. The average car occupancy now is something like 1.2 people, and self-driving cars might drop that below 1. Time behind the wheel is a cost that people pay for mobility, among other costs, and the Jevons Paradox says that if you make a commodity cost less per unit (i.e. more efficient) we end up using more of it in total, e.g. coal, or lighting. We could have more traffic as people send their empty cars on errands, for example. To get the benefits, you’d have to ban private car ownership. That seems like a heavy political lift, considering that they don’t even expect half of the U.S. private auto fleet to be electric before 2050, and those are available for sale right now.
The bit of the puzzle you are forgetting is the taxpayer-subsidized roads lose half their lobbying funds when electric cars are a thing. Wihtout trillions being spent sabotaging transit and micromobility it starts looking a lot better for cities to buipd a bike path for $1 million thna a highway upgrade for $1 billion
How to not make a train out of cars:
Now you got Certanly Not A Train™.
Why it's certanly not a train? Because it still has terrible rollong resistance and low material efficiency.
That not true!
For some places rail is too expensive or inflexible. So you need driverless cars, but you can make them cheaper by not having so many of them, instead having really big ones, and since driverless is not ready we hire a human to drive for now.
So sometimes you get buses!