I really wish people would stop claiming that the solution to cars is walking or public transport. I don't have a car either but claiming that people should "stop driving" is not a serious approach.

Cars are extremely useful and are not going anywhere. They have problems like carbon emissions and being extremely dangerous but those will have to be solved while preserving the fundamental utility of a cars: They are individual vehicles that can go nearly anywhere and carry considerable cargo.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that. But if public transport is better, if there are safe paved roads for cyclists, and if city center become safer for pedestrians, then maybe people will buy less cars and drive less miles...

The problem is:

1.) Public transportation in the US is at best, tolerable. Usually far worse. Not just in terms of coverage and utility, but in terms of cleanliness and safety. People use it because they have no other choice that is affordable. Get it to a level of quality like Tokyo or Seoul and more people would use it because they actually like it. I doubt that will happen anytime soon due to cultural issues, unless people are willing to tolerate draconian levels of enforcement.

2.) Bicycles are awesome, but you have to contend with precipitation, sweat, and theft. E-bikes help somewhat with the sweat, but then you have "traditionalists" that are trying to fight tooth and nail to ban them, and they are even more inviting theft targets. And you can still work up quite a sweat on an e-bike. Rain is still a problem.

3.) Living close to city centers is abominably expensive. People can drive in, or take public transportation in. But then go back to #1 in regards to public transportation.

> Public transportation in the US is at best, tolerable.

I think this is very dependent on where you live, in both DC and the Bay I think public transportation is good, but expensive. To me, the problem more appears to be an American cultural aversion to intermingling the working class and the "professional" class of people.

> 2.) Bicycles are awesome, but you have to contend with precipitation, sweat, and theft.

Every mode of transportation has some downsides. You could say 'Cars are awesome, but you have to contend with about ~40k people dying in crashes every year.'

> 3.) Living close to city centers is abominably expensive

Hm, maybe if we could densify cities by removing some of these large paved spaces that people are supposed to stay away from.

Regarding your first point, it's to a degree, subjective. But I would classify Bay Area transit to be pretty bad. Have not been to DC, but I live in NYC, where Newyorkers are often fanatically proud of the subway system. But I think the NYC subways are disgusting and horrible compared to say, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, etc. which while still imperfect, are the shining examples of what good, proper, public transit systems should be like. Various European cities also have far better subways.

Then again, many Newyorkers think the subways in those cities are horrible and unusable just because they don't operate between ~1-5AM.

>Cars are extremely useful

I agree, but I also think this is part of the problem.

Choosing to use public transportation for longer distances is a significant personal cost, while the benefit of lower costs in externalities is almost invisible.

Conversely, driving a car has a comparatively lower personal cost, essentially negative, since it increase freedom of movement. But the externalities are conveniently hidden by our economic and political systems.

Public transportation is synchronous by necessity. Private transportation is asynchronous. There are tremendous economic benefits to asynchronous transport. The truth is a robust system would have a healthy mix of both.

I absolutely agree, the synchronous/asynchronous description is both absolutely apt and correct. But the choice for the individual is muddled by the very concept of externalities.

It’s cheaper to pollute our planet, than enduring the inconvenience of public transport.

But the only reason that is true, is the terrible economic systems we all live under.

> "But the choice for the individual"

End it there and stop trying to make decisions for other people.

Cute!

I’ll easily do that when every single western country stops subsidizing gasoline and shoveling the consequences onto younger generations.

End it there, and stop defending old people destroying the very foundation that humanity depends on.

Cars are extremely useful for traveling long distances, traveling between cities, and for those rare times when you need to haul a lot of stuff, but they are terrible as daily transportation. They are the solution to a made-up problem that they alone exacerbate, which is that our cities are too spread out. There's no particular reason your immediate neighborhood doesn't have a small grocery store and all the other amenities you require for daily living. (That's how we built cities before the automobile, obviously.)

That's a design choice and it's a particularly bad one that's making your life less convenient, your body less healthy, your streets less safe, and your environment more polluted. When everybody drives you get congestion, which forces people to spread out more, which increases the reliance on cars...and so it goes.

The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density. That's why it works in NYC and doesn't work in Los Angeles.

But that means it's not just a matter of building mass transit. First you have to build taller buildings.

And even then there are going to be places where it's just not happening. It doesn't matter how you change the zoning, nobody is going to build skyscrapers in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming.

LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density.

The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.

Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a feedback loop.

Taller buildings are not required for density, far from it. Look at Somerville, MA, where just about nothing is higher than 3 stories, yet they fit almost 20,000 people into a square mile -- and they like it. What they don't fit is 20,000 parking spaces, and that makes all the difference.

The car did not directly kill density, it enabled people to choose less density.

A small number of people like Robert Moses wielded enormous power over how our civil infrastructure was built in the post war period. Moses was famously opposed to public transit, going so far as to deliberately build bridges with overhead clearance too low for buses on routes to one of his beach developments.

During this period the federal dept of transportation was offering to pay 90% of urban freeway projects. There are a few famous examples of people negotiating a different outcome, like the light rail vs mt hood highway in Portland, Oregon. But the bulk of local politicians simply took the free money and built massive freeway infrastructure without much consideration of the future.

So no, this was not some broadly democratic choice or invisible hand of the market. It was a small number of politically powerful people making unilateral decisions using vast government funds.

People wanted to live in the suburbs. It was definitely promoted by government and business leaders, but it was also desired organically by people. It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape. The suburbs were a boon to the economy, to standard of living, to incomes, etc. I found a great video from a filmmaker on this subject:

How The US Government Sold Us On The Suburbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmL6xIg-EJ0

> It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape.

A lot of people still do. The people that could afford to move to the suburbs were also people that could afford to move out of tenements in the city, too, generally.

OTOH, it allowed them to be farther from (and outside shared facilities like schools, etc., with) the tenements and the people stuck living in them. (Which, due to economics and outright, overt discrimination in both lending and things like restrictive real estate covenant, especially meant non-Whites.)

I'm aware, and spent a decade living in that sort of neighborhood where most of the buildings are still original to their 20's construction.

The point is that suburban sprawl was something that was ultimately lead by a small group of people, and was done without a lot of foresight, particularly about induced demand.

Of course many people chose the new suburbs. One of the problems with this style of building is that it is indeed very appealing when it's at it's initial lowest density state. The problem is that as people move into the suburbs and congestion begins to rise, suburban sprawl has no answer. Those wide open freeways that felt so fast and convenient initially become the bane of your commute or even doing simple errands.

Then people get frustrated, and believe the only answer is still that same default idea to return to that initial utopia: just expand the freeways even more! Except as we see today, that simply doesn't work, and the pattern just repeats.

The whole context could have been different, and that would have resulted in very different decision making from consumers, particularly today.

I'll use Portland as another example, as I'm both familiar with it and it's something of an outlier on these issues historically. All the cool neighborhoods that are desirable to live in now are where the old streetcar lines used to run. The entire shape of these neighborhoods is different, with high walkability, because of the remnants of that transit system.

The streetcar system here was deliberately deconstructed here, again, largely due to powerful special interests. The auto and tire industry worked quite hard on promoting buses as the new modern approach, a vision local politicians also helped promote.

Today Portland is reconstructing the street car system, as part of a larger overall transit plan. 100 years later we can see we wished we'd just kept and maintained the original track system, and designed our zoning around it.

That's really the core point I want to make: suburban sprawl is a mirage, that appeals initially. However it fundamentally cannot deal with congestion, which means sprawl only has three possible futures: Door one is continued cycles of expansion and induced demand where congestion just gets worse in the long term. Door two is a mode switch, to provide a meaningful transit option to relieve the pressure of congestion without freeway expansion. Door three is economic collapse, where the whole question is mooted because entire subdivisions become blighted places no one wants to live in.

A large portion of US suburbia is headed for door #3 atm over the next half century. Hopefully we can be smarter than we were half a century ago.

I love making the free choice between a car that costs hundreds each month vs unlimited public transit for $90

My time is money, and public transit costs a lot of time and frustration. And with a car, I have freedom to go anywhere.

There is absolutely nothing like a free market in housing. Many low-density suburbs would already have naturally densified if they were allowed to. The reason they have not is that it's illegal. People aren't choosing less density. They're banning density.

If that's what people actually wanted, they wouldn't need to regulate it with zoning laws.

That's a distinction without a difference.

It doesn't enable people to choose, it made a choice and forced it upon everyone.

Somerville, MA is in the middle of the Boston metro area. It's saturated with three and four story buildings and the downtown is 10+ story buildings. It's tall buildings.

LA County is full of detached single family homes and undeveloped land.

Downtown? What downtown? We don’t have one.

If your talking about Assembly Row, that’s a “town center” development. Used to be a movie theater and a sea of parking lots. It doesn’t factor into Somerville’s style of urbanism.

You could argue Davis Square or Union Square I suppose. Bit, no, there's really no urban core the way Boston has one. I'd note that, in spite of that, Somerville is the 16th densest city in the US (with the caveat that comparing city densities involves somewhat arbitrary political boundaries). Cambridge is pretty much in the same boat and is at #26.

OP called out "skyscrapers". What counts as the precise cutoff for "tall buildings" is always going to be a matter of opinion.

But I live in Cambridge, MA and I can assure you Somerville would remain one of the densest cities in the union if every last building therein was lopped down to 3 stories by a giant lawnmower.

> The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.

People have very naive explanations of why the US is so bad at density and urbanism. Canada and Australia, which are very similar to the US, have very dense cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Melbourne. Do they not have cars in Canada and Australia? If you want to find the real reason why all other developed countries have dense cities with good public transport, but the US doesn't, you need to look at what's different between the US and all other developed countries.

Canada might have certain urban areas with public transport, but huge swaths of the country depend on cars. That is the same situation as the U.S. except we've got 10x the population as Canada...so we've got more people in more places. As for Australia, a huge chunk of the country is desert, and most people are situated along the coasts.

The U.S. doesn't want urbanism. People by and large do not want to live in dense urban areas. Some people like it, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. With the remote work revolution, it's going to become even less appealing to live in a dense urban area.

There's a trope here that the US is some incredible outlier when it comes to per capita auto ownership. It's not. It's in the same ballpark as other wealthy developed countries. It's poorer countries (in Europe and elsewhere) that have lower rates of car ownership. According to a recent Pew survey [1], the US has slightly lower per capita car ownership than Italy and is in the ballpark of countries like France, Germany, South Korea, and Japan.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/a-pew-sur...).

People who don't want density should be free to avoid it. What they should not be allowed to do is pass laws that prevent the rest of us from enjoying the benefits of density. The primary reason we don't have increased density in the United States is that it's illegal in most cities to build enough new housing to meaningfully densify neighborhoods.

From the internet:

Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city. In Toronto, there are 4,457 people per square kilometre. In fact, Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541).

And crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594) and Boston (5,376).

>Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city.

The transit systems in both cities operate across the entire metro area not just the "city" proper.

Vancouver Metro Area: 2,463,431 / 2,878km² = 856 persons per km²

San Francisco Metro Area: 4,729,484 / 9,128km² = 518 persons per km²

(Numbers from Wikipedia)

>Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541)

Brooklyn is not a city. It's a densely populated subsection of one.

>crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594)

I'm not sure why you think Chicago and Philly are not comparable to Toronto despite being being only 1% and 3% more dense. They're effectively all the same density for the purpose of this discussion.

To put those density numbers in a bit more perspective: the entire country of the Netherlands has a population density of 521 persons per km². This is including the rural areas. While I wouldn't want to be without a car and happily own two, I can take public transit within walking distance from home, and I'm on the far outskirts of the country.

My (simplified) understanding is that it's more about the ideals. Back in the day, part of the American dream was to live in a semi-secluded suburban neighborhood and own 2+ cars per family. Only the poor and young people were expected to live in city centers. Therefore, the affluent citizens spread out, and cities evolved to cater to their needs, i.e., support private cars and the road system at the cost of not properly funding public transportation. In European cities the ideal was the opposite, and it was thought that only peasants would stay secluded and all the affluent people should live in the cities, which in turn should have great public transportation for practical reasons. I'd imagine that ideal extended to Canadian and Australian cities as well.

The difference is the treatment of poor & homeless. Public transit buildings/vehicles are some of the only inside spaces where they can spend time. Then people with enough money avoid public transit as much as possible. Then they vote against more funding for transit because it is not useful to them.

Toronto: not actually that dense.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+density+tor...

Well…OK, the core of Toronto is pretty dense, but the megasprawl that is amalgamated Toronto is not that dense.

But good luck getting by in any non-major metro area in Canada without a car. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver…maybe Ottawa…it's doable, but the second you get into the suburbs, or cottage country, it's Subaru time.

> very dense cities like Montreal

Remember it was founded in 1642. The older a city is, the more dense it is.

LA also happens to have a vast bus system that is heavily used.

We do not have subways partly because it would be very hard to build them in LA's geology. Seismic activity as well things like natural tar pits.

Historically I don't think its right to say cars killed the density. LA was several cities that grew into each other. Part of the reason LA is so wide is because of white flight to the outskirts. Do you build transit for something like that?

> almost 20,000 people into a square mile

That's less than 1/3 the density of Manhattan and about on par with SF.

Right...

>where just about nothing is higher than 3 stories

The point is that cars destroy density regardless of what your building height limits are.

You don't have to build skyscrapers to achieve high population density, you just have to build 3-6 story buildings close together. See Paris for an example. And you can have functional public transport at modest population density as long as the road network is a well connected grid and not a maze of cul-de-sacs. See Toronto for an example.

I agree that most of the US has been designed explicitly around the car, but there is no need to be fatalistic about it. Most US cities (including LA) had good public transportation before WW2, and they could have it again if they wanted.

Yeah, there's a cool project [1] that maps out all the historic streetcar routes in SF. There used to be a LOT of them, they all got ripped out to make more room for cars. There were rail tracks on the bay bridge! Those got ripped out in 1956 apparently. Everything was converted to buses so yeah, there's still public transit but I definitely feel like something valuable was lost there. I'd also argue that much of the bay area was built for street cars (they existed after all!) and we could always put them back if there was a compelling cost/benefit to doing so.

[1] https://sfstreetcars.co

LA has good public transportation but car-induced sprawl makes it less useful than it could be, and car culture here makes public transportation less appealing and less used than it could be. but if you live & work near one of the train lines, it’s awesome.

The rest of the world is rife with small, rural towns that nevertheless have great public transit systems, or at least ones that are more effective than what we see in the US. The major difference is that these places are willing to invest in the public sphere, and they're by and large willing to permit construction that is not car-centric (i.e., no parking minima to subsidize drivers).

Could you give a few examples of small rural towns where people can afford cars but instead the town has great public transit? Genuinely curious!

Iowa City, Iowa

Am I missing something? Iowa City seems to have only busses, and they run hourly. Perhaps I'm wrong?

If I'm not wrong, then we have vastly different definitions of "great public transit" -- I would not be happy there without a car.

Redmond, Oregon

Am I missing something here too? Redmond seems to have only inter-city busses.

Whistler, BC

  > The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.

This just doesn't seem to be true. It probably needs some density (think "town", not "farmland") but the fundamental prerequisite is a commitment to planning and building public transit infrastructure, rather than automobile focused infrastructure.

Lot's of relatively low density places in Europe, Japan, etc. have very functional public mass transit. It's not universal, but there are good examples.

If you start with the assumption that approximately everyone has a car, you can choose build cities in ways that only support that...

Precisely. And the second fundamental prerequisite is frequency. Make public transport frequent enough, and with privileged access (eg bus lanes) and it will be more convenient than private cars.

> The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.

What does "high" mean? I think this should be quantified, preferably by someone qualified.

Unqualified opinion: It seems to me that if we took all of the money spent on personal vehicles, time spent driving, fuel and emission costs, infrastructure maintenance, and costs to human happiness + safety, we would be able to provide a better transportation system.

That's not exactly true. Bus systems are viable for low-density urban areas. Indeed, prior to the mass adoption of the automobile, buses and streetcars were fairly ubiquitous, even in such heavily urbanized areas as Peoria (population at the time: 70k).

Running a bus isn't that expensive. Running one every 15 minutes around a small town in a loop isn't that expensive.

I don't think there's anything fundamental about density. Its about ridership and funding. Even LA could have functional mass transit if it had the will to fund 15-minute busses on a grid all day. A 25 cent tax on gas would do it. If even 2 people average rode each bus, it'd break even on traffic density as well?

Listen you’re totally right.

But even if car people lived somewhere with the best public transport in the world, they would drive.

It’s not about technology or even reality. This conversation is a lot like trying to tell private health insurance users about single payer systems. Or private school users about federalized education. Or telling people with 4 children or 0 children how to live in a world where a thing like the sedan is designed for people with 2 children.

It is telling rich people you know better and also they are wrong, which is not an emotion you’re permitted to send.

Many people are stretching the budget to have a car. With an adequate bus system that gets you anywhere in town taxi distance with a maximum single transfer of 15 minutes, there are perhaps many who's lives would be greatly improved by ditching the car. Or even just keeping the job if the car breaks down. Or using the car just for weekend jaunts.

> 25 cent tax on gas would do it. If even 2 people average rode each bus, it'd break even on traffic density as well?

Busses accelerate, decelerate, and turn differently than cars, so even if in terms of steady-state flow the two-riders = break-even argument is correct, it's not in city traffic.

Moreover, I'd like to see your work on operating and capital costs, especially accounting for road wear for which the usual approximate rule of thumb is that it varies with the fourth power of vehicle weight.

Well, I'm repeating something my old boss Eric Carlson at Unisys said, in his Master's thesis on City Planning.

And remember, the City busses are running only every 15 minutes. So whatever effect they have on localized traffic, it's very intermittent.

The city I live in has around 65 thousand people and has perfectly functional public transportation. This doesn't ring true for me.

Los Angeles is spread out because it had functional mass transit at the turn of the last century. The Red Car interurban line sprawled out from downtown into the county and housing popped up six blocks on the side from every stop. Later mass car ownership filled in the blocks further out and the space in-between stops.

In that same period, just about every large town and small city had a trolley line.

You don't need skyscrapers for mass transit. Just enough political will to keep it funded.

> The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density.

The Chinese and Japanese rail networks would like a word.

Twenty years ago I interned in a small robotics company, and one of scientists there was a Phd from Berkeley. He had done his thesis on dynamic controls for autonomous vehicles. I was asking him a bunch of questions, and at the end he just said that it's a moral question, and that they've already solved all these problems -- "you just connect the cars together physically, and it's called a train". I thought it was pretty funny and insightful.

The city that I live in is very spread out.

The idea of hopping from a subway to a bus to another bus just to get to a doctor's appointment sounds awful. And if I had to take 4 young kids along with me for the trip, double awful.

For the denser cities - my wife and I lived in SF for close to five years. As our family grew, and the city space grew more populous, parking spots were really rare. Getting to a pediatric appointment was misery. We knew the above scenario was our future. And it sounded completely miserable. So we moved to a spread out, suburban city.

I want to go directly to the location and start the errand as soon as possible. I hate waiting or slow buses or waiting for people to get on, get off. I just want to be able to go.

Indeed, the creature comforts of a car is probably the big reason they are so successful compared to the alternatives. I rode public transportation well into my late twenties I think. When some folks would accompany me for the trip at times they didn't even own hardy thick winter coats to be able to bear the cold elements outside. People who haven't had to spend significant times standing and waiting to be picked up outside can be pretty shocked at how unpleasant the experience can be, especially given harsher locations.

Come to reflect more on the public transportation experience you'd often overhear people's aspirations and progress towards car ownership, especially among the teens from what I recall. Forgot all about that frequent occurrence.

Your city is very spread out because everyone has a car. This is why this is such a difficult problem - transport networks, whether road or rail - are a fundamental part of the anatomy of a city. You can't simply take a city which grew up around driving and replace that with taking the train, any more that you can transplant a crab's exoskeleton into a rabbit.

Nonetheless, our cities must eventually become crabs. So we need to have a plan for how we're going to make that transformation gradually, as the cities grow and evolve.

Agreed, but self-driving cars would enable self driving buses and they could be great.

One problem with buses is that paying the drivers is expensive. As a result buses need to be big to amortize the cost of the driver across lots of users. But big buses don't work well in low demand times of the day. The only option is to run them less frequently, which sucks for users. And big buses don't fit down small streets. And fewer larger buses means fewer routes. Self driving buses could solve all these problems.

I'd still prefer to walk or cycle, but I'm probably biased because I live in a warm, dry and flat part of the UK and don't have kids.

Couldn't we already have self driving buses if we just put them on tracks? They go a predefined route anyway :)

Roads are cheaper than rails, and easier to change.

Buseses on wheels are more flexible than trams or whatever on tracks, and can route around a collision.

Rails in the road are a severe hazard for cyclists and somewhat hazardous for pedestrians.

(sarcasm)

>I'd still prefer to walk or cycle, but I'm probably biased because I live in a warm, dry and flat part of the UK and don't have kids.

I'm glad you said this because it's a key point so many in this thread appear to miss: what works for one person or locale is not the solution for another, therefore cars aren't going away but this does not negate the legitimacy of bikes or trains either.

> Agreed, but self-driving cars would enable self driving buses and they could be great.

Self-driving cars would enable self-driving taxis which would be superior to both private vehicles and public transport.

Imagine if there was no need to park and you could summon a vehicle of the appropriate size at will.

I have a theory that large fleets of self-driving taxis will make congestion worse (compared to private cars). They have to drive to you, then drive wherever you want to go, turning one vehicle journey into two ( * ). There are lots of other factors to consider but that seems to be a fundamental problem with the taxi model. I'd be interested in replies that explain the flaw in this theory. I assume it is wrong because I haven't heard anyone else say it.

* It could be even worse. Imagine the morning rush - thousands of taxis have driven to peoples' homes and then driven them to their work/school. Then most will have to park until the next peak of demand in the evening. Either they park in the city, or they drive to an out-of-city parking lot, then drive back in to collect, then drive people home, then drive somewhere else to park until the morning rush. What would have been two vehicle journeys using a private car became six.

The issue is throughput and latency.

Public transit is high throughput (and can be low latency if you are lucky and stay on the same link) but as soon as you have to make a transfer (bus to train or bus to bus) the latency immediately spikes up. And the latency pretty much is unbearable as soon as you move to and from a non-central location (suburb to suburb) or not during peak hours.

To further use the computer network analogy, the last mile is generally also a problem. Doesn't matter if most of the network is fiber, if my house can only get a twisted pair the network is going to be bad. Same thing if the bus station or train station is 2 miles from my house; it's like it didn't exist.

It is a large and very heterogeneous world. There are plenty of places where public transport will work best and plenty of others where a car (self driving or otherwise) is much more useful.

Public transit is obviously one facet here. But another is just flat out poor urban planning in the U.S. Walking and bicycling should be more viable forms of transportation. But there are only a small handful of cities (arguably just one) where that's currently feasible in the U.S. It's pretty ridiculous that we've spent the past 100 years designing our cities around the least efficient, least pleasant, most dangerous form of transportation in existence. Like you, self-driving and electric cars don't interest me a whole lot—I feel like they're largely missing the point.

Only 5% of the U.S. population of takes transit to work, 2-3 percentage walk and .5% bike. And everyone else drives or works from home. I don't think it's missing the point at all.

A lot of self-driving is likely to replace taxi service, not make its way to private ownership.

The advantages of individual vehicles for motion around a city are diminished wait times and arbitrary point-to-point linkage. One is not constrained to traveling only on the public transit arteries plus foot-travel distance.

(The tradeoff of fossil fuel consumption is huge and should not be ignored, however).

electric kick scooters (and bikes) make foot-travel distance less relevant in many places, extending the serviceable radius around a station from 1/3 mile to 2-3 miles. we just need to turn street parking into dedicated bike/scooter lanes to make it safe enough for more people to choose this option.

Possibly. Americans seem real reluctant to hop on a bike, and I don't think it's just for safety reasons. Big chunks of the US are too cold to want to be outside that much, a lot of the year.

But more dedicated bike infrastructure would be a huge help in general.

"Big chunks of the US are too cold to want to be outside that much, a lot of the year."

There are surely limits to everything and not everyone is into extreme sports, but even in the winter I really like cycling. Much, much more, than the virus infested public transport.

There is a saying, there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.

Clothing won't help when the roads are slushed up.

Spikes do, though. But like I said, there are certainly limits for most people.

But most people probably consider a grey sky, where some rain drops may fall, their limit.

sure, there are some parts of the US that get too cold and snowy, but there's plenty of the country that doesn't (like my own neck of the woods, southern california).

i was more pointing out that 2 relatively inexpensive changes (use scooters, convert parking to bike lanes) could dramatically change the balance of cars vs. public transport in those places (not everywhere). it doesn't have to require a wholesale change of our built environment to get benefits now (even for those dependent on cars).

I live in California which is known for its "car culture," but that aside I don't think I would ever be comfortable with only using public transportation or not owning a car. Having a car is convenient and gives you full control over exactly when and where you want to go.

I was working at a large corporation a couple of years ago and looked out over the parking lot which covered many acres - there were roughly 3000 cars there. And this was just one of 4 campuses of said corporation in my area. In total they have well over 10,000 cars parked on those parking lots every day (prior to covid, anyway). At an average cost of $25,000 there were around $250M worth of cars parked on those lots. And they sit Idle there for 8 hours/day. Most cars are sitting idle 95% of the time. That's a lot of capital just sitting doing nothing most of the time not to mention all of the land required to store them.

Getting the rich to subsidize new tech is a great way to democratize it, though. The self driving car's endgame might not be a car after all.

They don't help as much as mass transit but they help in a couple of ways.

The most significant is that we spend a huge amount of inner city land on parking. We could build denser without worrying about that. A fair amount of inner city traffic is people cruising around looking for parking too. Also, outlying rail or subway stops should really have a lot of development around them but often in the US they're surrounded by parking lots for people commuting in to work. Reducing the need for parking really helps in this case.

Also, people currently have to buy a car big enough for their greatest needs. You don't need a large a car when commuting in to work as when you're taking a road trip with your family but if you're thinking of buying a car you need one to do both. So hopefully we see the average car on the road being much smaller than they are now.

Could not agree more.

As someone who commutes primarily via bicycle, I've always been mystified by colleagues and friends who choose to drive to work in the densely populated northeastern city while cycling through center city is faster, more fun, better for your health, etc. There are obvious times when driving a car will make more sense, e.g. transporting delicate flowers, but for the average commuter it breaks down to the fact that the car is just somewhat sacred in our society. It is an important aspect of the American identity and our vision of success in this country, and so here we are, innovating around cars with technologies like self-driving rather than looking forwards to new potential paradigms of transportation.

This is just in regards to the average commuter, I'm sure that self-driving does have its place in like, moving 40' containers in low-density areas.

I completely agree. I see the benefit for things like trucking. For cities though, I would much rather live in a place like Amsterdam or New York than one that's completely car-centric, even if the cars drive themselves.

I take the subway everywhere in my city in the US. I don’t expect it to be perfect and I’m not disappointed.

I’m also very happy to let my car drive for long boring stretches on long trips. I find I arrive at my destination much more relaxed. And yes, I keep my hands on the wheel and eyes watching around me. The car does the stupid stuff like keeping the car in the middle of the land and watching for other cars all around.

> how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people?

Public transit can't haul freight cross-country. Self-driving vehicles can.

As others have pointed out, self-driving vehicles could significantly cut the operating costs of public transit. This also seems like a major win for investing in public transit.

> Public transit can't haul freight cross-country. Self-driving vehicles can.

Freight should be hauled cross-country on rails, not on roads.

You're absolutely right!

Freight cannot be efficiently moved between the railyard and final destinations on public transit, on foot, or on bicycles. Self-driving vehicles can do this.

There's also what's known as the "geometry" problem - 1 self driving car takes up as much space as 1 human driven car.

Part of the problem is the general incompetency and mismanagement of US public transit construction -- the costs are insane, even when compared to "socialist" "high-cost" union-heavy Europe.

This was a great read on why we get so little for our money: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... - and it busts the common misconception that it's 100% because unions. (tldr: it's because politicians get rewarded for creating jobs (votes) and spending money on contractors (lobbying), and because we outsourced everything)

One SDC takes up slightly less space when we factor in the necessary buffer around human-driven vehicles to account for human reaction times and safety perception.

A fleet of SDCs snaking down a road can "tuck in" tighter to each other because computer reaction times are better (especially if they're networked and sharing decisionmaking signals).

Of course, it's still not as space-efficient as a bus. But the bus infrastructure as a solution has been challenged by COVID-19.

If autonomous vehicles werebto ever become cheap and reliable, I fear induced demand could have a much larger effect on traffic volumes than the role it plays in traffic now when vehicles rely on human occupants. As people find more creative use cases for autonomous vehicles, the roads would fill up with ghost cars performing any number of progressively more trivial tasks until traffic returns to equilibrium.

Quite possible.

The constraining factor on SDC commonality in the short-to-medium term will be maintenance. These cars require dedicated service (which is why they'll likely start as replacements for taxis, not privately-owned; people will have to be hot-rodders to want to do all the work necessary to keep the sensors clean and tuned).

There may be a threshold in the future where the sensors are hyper-rugged or self-maintaining, but it's a little ways off. The maintenance burden will keep the ghost cars down in the short- to medium-term.

Presumably if all cars were self driving, or say 90% were. Then that would become the next "public transportation". And if they were all electric, the footprint would be less harsh as well.

Personal cars will never be the "next public transportation". The density just doesn't work. Personal vehicles are the least space-efficient (to say nothing of energy efficiency) means of transportation among buses, trains, bicycles, and walking. You can't solve congestion issues by replacing a more-dense option with a less-dense one. The only thing self-driving cars solve for is freeing up a person to read or do something else during their commute.

Congestion itself isn't the issue. Wasted time and fossil fuels is. And most of my friends who take public transportation to work have a commute that is longer than my friends who drive to work.

Right now there is a difference in quality of that time in that your attention is more free when taking public transit but self driving cars fix this issue.

It's not public transportation in the same way that taxis aren't solving the public transportation problem. But also, why is it that there is this assumption that when self driving cars become a reality, they'll also be electric? The two problems are completely orthogonal, and while solving both of them are important, making self driving cars electric isn't a priority for most companies today.

> There's also what's known as the "geometry" problem - 1 self driving car takes up as much space as 1 human driven car.

Human-driver cars consume parking spaces at the destination, self-driving cars don't have this limitation. They park themselves away from high-traffic areas or they could ferry other people around.

When cars will be driving themselves, you wont need to own one... one of the many parked near your home will come pick you up.

tl;dr public transit definition needs to stop being confined to rail and buses.

I have always been in the camp that real dystopian future is tens of millions trapped in large cities instead of being free to live and travel where they want. I can never willingly place myself back into a large city.

there is no reason the concept of public transportation does not include self driving vehicles in many sizes. already this day we run separate transit vehicles for those with handicaps which make regular bus and train travel difficult or impossible to access. So why not smaller cars that can serve any one in need at any time regardless of where they are located.

one of the most common traits in any recently freed or booming economy is the personal vehicle and for good reason. it offers the means to travel where and when you want to not be trapped in one location.