When I lived in a big city, I enjoyed train commuting. I could just get on the train and not think about it. I used to hate daily commuting by car. Now that I live in a smaller town, I picked a walkable one where I can walk to work. (Yeah, not everyone can do that.)
I do like cars for vacationing. I consider a car a recreational vehicle, but can't stand them for routine commuting.
But cars remain awesomely effective, because they can go from point to point, and they're so competitive that trains are only really competitive if: * you're going to be traveling for very long distances (but not long enough for airports to be faster), or * traffic is going to be utterly miserable, or * the train is RIGHT THERE and very convenient or, ideally, some combination of the three. (Driving to the commuter rail and having your office be Right There is an acceptable incarnation of point three).
Notice where trains are most effective: the northeast corridor (really dense population, traffic problems, city centers with workplaces served by train/metro), big cities on the west coast (e.g. SF, Seattle).
There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city. "A future without cars" looks like some of those cities and those city's problems - in particular, really expensive housing, especially if you want to raise a family and have multiple bedrooms (or, God forbid, a yard). Remember that median household income in the US is only $44k. If you're reading Hacker News I'll guesstimate you're probably making double that, maybe triple.
Anyway. Gas prices and the relative prices of train commuting/car commuting/real estate may change the dynamic of transportation in the future, but I don't think the densification that it entails is an unabashed good for the common man or that my preference for trains is a substitute for comprehensive realistic transportation policies. And if we must go down that road (so to speak) we're going to need to do a better job of making effective, useful, cost-efficient transportation projects than we have over the past few years.
"Slightly less than one-third of households said they had one personal vehicle1 available for use in 2001. A little more than one-third of households (40 million out of 107 million households) had 2 vehicles and slightly less than one-quarter had 3 or more vehicles available."[0]
This is an unimaginable number of cars. Given that a car costs, on average, $28,400[1] - and lasts around 8 years[2] - holy shit.
That doesn't even take into account the cost of running and fueling a car. At an average of ~15k miles per year, the total cost PER CAR is around $8,776 per year.[3] To our 'median household', which is more likely than not to have one or two cars, that's either 20% or 40% of their income. Since average spending on housing is 30%, that doesn't leave a whole lot left. No wonder we're all in so much debt.
The worst part is, US urban planning means that people are likely unable to work without access to a car.
Imagine a 20% increase in income tax, with the money being used to subsidize an outdated and damaging industry. That's what this is. It is holding back the US economy.
[0]http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_an... [1]http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/autos/aut11.shtm [2]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_ne... [3]http://www.boston.com/cars/newsandreviews/overdrive/2011/04/...
By American standards these are tiny but for EU commuting / shopping / city driving they're fine.
Fiat even has a two cylinder car on the market.
Get rid of the car industry, and the flying jetpack, massive underground subway, or whatever industry will come in to fill the gap. Economics isn't that simple.
NYC would be a lot cheaper if you could buy up some old brownstones, give the tenants end of lease + 6 months to find a new place, tear them down and build an apartment building. It would be very simple to fit a lot more people on manhattan if we just built taller buildings.
It's politics that makes dense cities expensive, not something intrinsic to the cities themselves.
Quantities related to a city’s infrastructure, such as the number of gas stations and the length of paved roads, did scale "sublinearly", meaning that the larger the city, the less of these were required per capita. But measures of economic output and innovation – the number of patents, total wages, GDP, even the pace of walking – scaled "superlinearly", showing increasing returns with size (see Graphs). "The scaling laws say that on average, as a city grows you can predict its output and input, its energy consumption, its wealth creation, its level of crime," says Bettencourt.
I have always thought the future would have personalized self driving subway cars. But, it's all about what you value.
The current state of affairs is not an expression of how people really want to live. It's an expression of the enormous subsidies we have given to a particular lifestyle. Our governments fund suburban schools much better than urban ones. They spend enormous amount of money on constant road construction and barely spend anything improving public transit. We allow the huge costs incurred by fossil fuel use to be externalized, making car use seem much cheaper than it actually is. We penalize renters and subsidize home owners by allowing tax deductions for mortgage interest. Police spend large amounts of money, on a per capita basis, enforcing uniquely suburban concerns like drunk driving, compared to how much is spent on run of the mill urban crime fighting.
It is almost certain that without these massive explicit and implicit subsidies, peoples' expressed "desires and wants" would look very different than what we have now.
The great part of high-speed rail, etc. is that you can relax while they do the driving and you arrive close to your destination. However, driverless cars give you the best of both of those worlds, and other than wind-resistance (which drafting largely solves) you have similar efficiency.
PS - Does anyone find "driverless car" to be the 21st century equivalent of "horseless carriage"?
Yes, I love high-speed trains, because they're on a track, and while this obviously does not guarantee safety, it certainly makes it feel much safer to me.
Compare to air travel. Even with the meticulous maintenance and regulatory requirements, a significant fraction of the population is scared of flying (to some degree). Driverless cars are better in one aspect (operates at ground level), worse in others (proximity to other vehicles), just different in some ways (computer versus human pilot), and complete unknowns, so far, in others (regulation).
Even if the actual crash/injury/fatality rate of driverless cars is nil, how do you design a 300mph computer-controlled car to not be scary for passengers? I want it to work, as I recognize the advantages, but it seems like the social problems will be even tougher than the technical problems, and I'm definitely not going to be an early adopter.
The best words I've read all week.
I must have missed the bit where he said that. I thought he was saying that we could find better solutions.
I don't even drive non-family member to a local lunch because of my problem. So I really would be a shut in if I had to go places by bus.
On the plus side, there could be a new client for an eco-friendly home food delivery service if they moved to such a system.
* Health dangers from emissions -- an issue of (certain implementations of) internal combustion, not the form factor of the vehicle: personal auto vs. bus or train
* Health dangers/obnoxiousness of long commutes -- likewise, a complicated thing which doesn't immediately suggest "ban cars" as the obvious solution. (If anything -- everything else being the same -- self-driving supercars should result in the shortest commutes: point-to-point (last mile), no waiting, no traffic congestion (from AI)
* Infrastructure NIMBY (roads, sprawling parking lots): rail lines have the same issues, with the tradeoff that the sparser your mass transit ugliness is, the more excruciating inconvenience the last-mile segment of a commute is (try living 10m walk from a subway stop). Flying "cars" are almost certainly infinitely worse, because of their extreme noise
None of these are arguments against private transport; they are arguments against specific implementations of private transport, and don't at all imply the conclusions the author derives.