Re:Elon Musk doesn't understand geometry
by Tade0 on Thursday July 06, 2023 @04:53PM
(#36622843)
> Musk assumes that transit is an engineering problem, about vehicle design and technology. In fact, providing cost-effective and liberating transportation in cities requires solving a geometry problem. This confusion is very common in transport technology circles.
It's actually a psychology problem and I wish more urban/transit planners understood that.
You'd be hard-pressed to make buses go bumper to bumper like cars in traffic, meaning there's space to spare even when most people use public transport to move around. Geometry is actually a constraint only on the terminals - parking lots consume a lot of land.
Meanwhile people choose to drive not because it's efficient (it's not, far from it), but because for them it has advantages which can't be summarized as a single number like average travel time. If you ask around you'll find that most people don't think too hard about the exact amount of minutes their commute takes. They just want to be on time and once that's taken care of, other factors become more important.
To solve this you have to change how public transport is perceived.
I'm not American so bear with me here: One way to do it is to give a familiar experience. If statistics are to be believed, half of US K-12 students get to school by bus. Also, people regularly fly. Private transport via air is comparatively rare. This is all mass transit.
To me the core features of these two experiences are:
-Everyone sits.
-Everyone is accounted for.
-Changes are minimized, if present at all.
-There's a schedule and it's treated seriously.
It appears that Elon Musk, despite being generally unhinged, knows more about human nature than transit planners, which is weird, because that's a low bar to clear.
It's actually a psychology problem and I wish more urban/transit planners understood that.
You'd be hard-pressed to make buses go bumper to bumper like cars in traffic, meaning there's space to spare even when most people use public transport to move around. Geometry is actually a constraint only on the terminals - parking lots consume a lot of land.
Meanwhile people choose to drive not because it's efficient (it's not, far from it), but because for them it has advantages which can't be summarized as a single number like average travel time. If you ask around you'll find that most people don't think too hard about the exact amount of minutes their commute takes. They just want to be on time and once that's taken care of, other factors become more important.
To solve this you have to change how public transport is perceived.
I'm not American so bear with me here: One way to do it is to give a familiar experience. If statistics are to be believed, half of US K-12 students get to school by bus. Also, people regularly fly. Private transport via air is comparatively rare. This is all mass transit.
To me the core features of these two experiences are:
-Everyone sits.
-Everyone is accounted for.
-Changes are minimized, if present at all.
-There's a schedule and it's treated seriously.
It appears that Elon Musk, despite being generally unhinged, knows more about human nature than transit planners, which is weird, because that's a low bar to clear.