They may bring some efficiency to traffic patterns leading to better road utilization, but that only goes so far to make up for the much higher level of traffic that will result when it's much cheaper and easier to call a car when you want one.

San Francisco is already feeling the "Uber effect" of greater traffic from car-share services:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-traffic-...

Everybody loves the idea of new technology that allows them to continue doing what they are doing, in this case avoiding biking, walking, and public transit. Basically, people want to believe self driving cars will reduce congestion. Ergo, it's pretty easy to convince them it will.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nevius/article/More-ride-...

That article provides no evidence to support this claim other than the fact that 37k people have driven for Uber/Lyft/et al in SF. The author then extrapolates that adding 37k drivers to SF is a huge number. As if all those drivers appeared in SF ex nihilo.

Even if the cars are privately owned and people just have their car come in to drop them off at work before sending them out of the way to park somewhere (since inner city parking is scarce, so there's no space to park every car at the worker's building), that doubles the number of trips -- once to drop them off, and once to go somewhere and park.

And the remote parking may double the number of trips, but the parking is not going to be far away and will take much less space than a normal parking lot.

So when I hear "invest in public transit infrastructure," I feel like it isn't a concrete enough suggestion. Does it actually mean tear down most of America and replace it with a country where mass transit is practical, or what? I'd love never to have to drive again, but merely investing in public transit demonstrably isn't enough.

Since public transit requires a walking trip at both ends, it will never be very popular in areas where one needs to take a dangerous mile-long walk across a sea of parking and high-speed arterials, instead of a quick jaunt through a lively neighborhood.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/15/financing-subu...

https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs...

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republic...

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/18/highway-spendi...

Here there are two problems:

1) "Last mile": it's a 20 minute walk for me to get to the right transit line, and then 10 minute walk after I get off BART. The BART ride itself is only about 20 minutes; my "transit" use is mostly not actually on transit.

2) Timing: during most of the times of day when I'd make this trip, BART runs around every 20 minutes. If I'm one minute off, then I've spent 50 minutes walking or standing around for 20 minutes of actually being on transit.

We need more transit lines, going to more places, and more-frequent trains during the entire day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran

It seems like there's always a "we're going to try it here" phase, then it never goes further.

The upsides sound great - basically personalized mass-transit, using individual pods on an overhead track system. The pods and track are lightweight, and can likely be put into tighter routes and areas than a full-sized train can go, as well as not disrupting traffic or whatnot when it is installed.

It does have the whole "monorail" stigma to get around (which I don't really understand why or how "monorails" got the stigma - they have issues, certainly - but the whole meme seems to only have started since that Simpsons episode)...

If instead public transportation worked more like Uber or Lyft I could get behind that. I wonder if some cities with underused buses wouldn't be better off subsidizing their citizens use of Uber?

Congestion isn't a capacity problem, it's a pricing problem. EDIT: Given the amount of infrastructure we already have that is.

I suspect people with cars are still very protective of their ability to completely control their schedule; agreeing to ride in someone else's car makes it difficult to run errands after work without first stopping at home to pick up the car, for example. And what if they have a ride scheduled for 5pm but find out at 3pm that they need to stay later? With enough scale it shouldn't be hard to find an alternate ride, but we're not to the point where people can expect that to be easy.

I think people could definitely rearrange their lives a bit to make this better, like planning to run errands on weekends, or close to home (instead of work). Or setting reasonable boundaries with their employer (I'm scheduled to leave at 5pm, and not a minute after -- unless you want to pick up the tab for a taxi). But people are selfish, and stuck in their ways, and would, for some reason, prefer to sit in traffic.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Googleplex,+Amphitheatre+Par...

yes it does: http://i.imgur.com/RDHyKBh.gif

I would say even the minimal change of funding 2x as frequent trains on BART would do wonders for making it more useful. Unfortunately residents in the bay area have way too much say in what does and doesn't get built, so new stops and new lines are difficult, to say the least.

If you convince enough people to invest in self-driving car companies, eventually self-driving cars happen. Voters just approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for BART. They're not even using it to expand service--just to "maintain existing infrastructure". They need billions just to stand still.

> Voters just approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for BART. They're not even using it to expand service--just to "maintain existing infrastructure". They need billions just to stand still.

Yes, and that's what you get when you underfund something for decades. Technical and maintenance debt piles up, and it costs increasingly greater amounts of money just to hold the status quo. I don't know for a fact that this $3.5B couldn't be managed in a better way than planned, to not only maintain what we've got, but also improve, but it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, either.

I'm not saying it's wise, given how BART is currently managed, to throw (say) $10B at them, but, managed properly, perhaps it'd be enough to not only get them out of the hole, but also make actual real improvements? The trick is, of course, giving them that money in a way where we'd actually see good results, and I agree that, without other things changing, we probably wouldn't get much for that money. At least not enough to be worth it.

In the end it's the way the bay area is structured politically that's the problem. BART can't build new lines because the citizens along the way are all of the NIMBY mindset, and our governing structure gives them too much power, and politicians are too cowardly to override them. The Fremont->Diridon expansion plan has been on public maps since before I moved here in 2004; and we just finally got the Warm Springs expansion earlier this year. And who knows about San Jose. The delay isn't because BART sucks at building or managing construction projects, it's because the people and municipalities along the track path are selfish.

For comparison, Elon Musk built a space program, orbited the Earth and docked a rocket with the ISS for 1/10 of that amount.

I agree, it's not lack of money that's holding public transit back.

Certainly building a reusable rocket in a mostly greenfield environment isn't quite apples-to-apples with maintaining a decades-old transit system that is politically difficult to maintain and expand, but it does illustrate the point that amazing things can be done on a small budget.

Privatizing public services is often fraught with peril, but the bay area transit systems have proven that they're incapable of meeting needs with current management. Not sure what we can do here, unfortunately.