Traffic is bad in general. The average SFite gets around on train, bike, walking and uber. To drive your own car is pretty hellish. If you try to drive a car over the bay bridge whenever there is traffic, it can take an hour. When there is no traffic, it takes 8 minutes. With the BART, if there is 'traffic', then your standing for 8 minutes in a somewhat cramped car as you go through the transbay tube. If there is no 'traffic', then your sitting for 8 minutes instead. Traffic is not an issue with a subway.

I hate suburbia. It's isolating and bland. It's always a 10 minute car production to go fetch something quick from a 7-11 or equivalent. It encourages obesity and a lack of walking because you always have to get in a car. It encourages long commutes and rush hour hell on the highway. With a long train commute, I can read a book or do something productive with my time.

If I want to play my music loudly at 11pm, then I will get a unit that was constructed with soundproofing. If a city is hampered by inept NIMBYs that prevent new construction with soundproofing being made, then that has nothing to do with urban vs suburban.

I think you haven't experienced a proper metro system by saying public transit is a bus. Go to new york, and see how there is no 'traffic' delays in taking the subway. Where everything is avialable 24/7 and the city is alive.

That I can remember right now, I've taken the subway/train in New York, Boston, Chicago, London, San Francisco, and DC. Some of them are really great, others are not (looking at you, Green Line on the Boston T). Building these systems was almost certainly a great idea at the time.

My main point is that technology is now changing and I think that de-centralized mass-transit through fleets of automated cars is close at hand. And it can use the infrastructure that we already have. So building super-expensive fixed-line transit infrastructure within cities is not a good investment anymore. Even more so when you consider the turnaround time from initial planning to opening to the public is probably a decade.

Private transport takes up way too much space and is also inefficient. Why spend the energy and resources to build a 1-2 ton car for transporting 1-2 people? It seems like an odd idea.

1. You wouldn't need a car per person, only enough to comfortably serve peak demand. There's never a single point of time at which everyone in a city is on the road. (Except evacuations, but see point 3).

2. There is already about one car per person in the US.

3. Automated car fleets would presumably have a cheaper carpooling option, where the car picks up other passengers on the way to the destination. Like UberPool today.

4. Fixed-line transit costs millions to billions of dollars per mile, and easily takes a decade from planning to completion. Building roads takes a fraction of the time and money. And the roads already exist.

Automated car fleets work well for suburbs. But past a certain point, heavy rail train subways have far more throughput than the equivalent amount of cars.

Look at this image for example: http://imgur.com/gallery/v3ff7FY

Building & maintaining roads and highways does take a lot of money too. Building new roads vs building new railroad track on new land isn't that much different cost wise.

Try driving in rush hour traffic in the SF Bay Area, then imagine what it'll be like in a few decades when there are 40% more people in the area.

You can replace gasoline powered cars with electrics, but you can't build enough roads to handle the traffic -- there's going to have to be improvements in public transportation and smart planning to let people live closer to where they work and play.

Retrofitting cities with pub transit is expensive today, but it will be even more expensive tomorrow.

Self-driving cars can optimize limited road infrastructure. Of course, this means ALL cars would have to be in on it, but that isn't infeasible for 10 or 20 years from now.

So I kind of agree with parent. Doing something today might be outdated given tomorrow's technology enabling better solutions. But that is always a risk in infrastructure investment.

Why not just never improve anything, ever? I mean we might have self-driving cars in 20 years, but another 20 after that there will be something even better than self-driving cars, and who wants to own something that will be obsolete in 20 years, anyway?

We will have self driving cars in 3 to 5 years at this point...the writing is on the wall. We will have pervasive self driving cars in 10 or 20 years.

So to ignore something that is pretty much a sure bet to redesign your city over 20 years, when what you are building is meant to last 50-100 years, is kind of stupid. You do what you can with all information available.

I think you're overly optimistic with that estimate -- we'll have "driver assist" cars in 3 - 5 years that can navigate most roads in normal conditions, but will still need the driver to step in from time to time to help with unexpected conditions.

10 - 20 years is more likely for true self-driving cars that can operate completely without human control.

Traffic congestion is also a question of person density. If there were ways to increase people density per sq ft on those roads, with buses or, heck, some weird quadruple-stacked short-distance car transports, you can reduce traffic and commute loads as well.

Traffic is a compression wave. You brake, then the person behind you brakes, then the person behind them, etc. You accelerate, then the person behind you...

Highways that become automated-only will not have this problem. The cars can communicate with each other and change speed in unison. You don't even need to convert a whole highway, you can just reserve a single lane for automated cars and get most of the same benefits.

The near gridlock on SOMA streets every rush hour isn't because of a compression wave - there are simply too many people trying to drive out of the city at once. Even if magical cars could erase congestion on freeways, there's still the problem of not enough parking for everyone that would have to drive without public transit.

And don't say "But self driving cars will fix everything! They don't even need to park, they can drop you off at work and drive away". If the cars aren't parked, they are contributing to congestion. And since commutes aren't generally balanced, it's not like the self-driving car will leave Walnut Creek at 8am, drop you off in SF at 9am and then pick up a new passenger to head back to the East Bay - that car is going to be loitering around SF somewhere, waiting to take someone back home to the East Bay.

SF Muni carries 600,000 passengers/day. BART carries 400K (though not all to SF). Caltrain contributes another 50K. How could you possible accomodate all of these people without transit?

Like I said, building effective transit in existing cities is very expensive -- the BART system cost around $1.5B when it was built (around $20B today), but few would argue that SF would be better off without it.

>If the cars aren't parked, they are contributing to congestion. And since commutes aren't generally balanced[...] that car is going to be loitering around SF somewhere

You're right, traffic patterns are not balanced, so the cars returning to the hot areas for pickups will not be contributing to the traffic in the most-congested direction.

Also, SF already has BART, Caltrain, and SF Muni. I'm not familiar with the specific history here, but transit and housing are the limiting factors for where people live in the first place, so the number of commuters will expand when capacity increases. The better question is, what if SF didn't build those systems? It wouldn't be San Francisco today minus the trains, it'd be a totally different San Francisco. So you can't really take the ridership numbers from today as evidence that city couldn't cope without trains.

Also, this was all happening when self-driving cars were not around the corner. It's a different story today.

>You're right, traffic patterns are not balanced, so the cars returning to the hot areas for pickups will not be contributing to the traffic in the most-congested direction.

Except that in a city, all traffic contributes to congestion,there is no single "commute direction".

>Also, this was all happening when self-driving cars were not around the corner. It's a different story today.

That "corner" is decades away, meanwhile, people need to get to work today -- and you still haven't explained how self-driving cars can replace a million+ trips/day on city streets that are already at capacity during rush hour. They may be self-driving, but they still drive on roads.

Kunstler has been writing about peak oil for ages, and is something of an expert in this area, despite being "crazy" - I mean, he definitely sounds crazy, but then again, there's a reasonable chance he could be right about the pending apocalypse, it's not like we're below the carrying capacity of the planet (given our resource usage) or anything.

There is no pending apocalypse. We'll hit peak oil around mid-century, and it's not like all of the oil just runs out at that point. We're investing heavily in research into renewables, and I figure that the politics of nuclear will improve in the next couple of decades.