> Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.

I would invite you to come and have a look in the Netherlands. It’s very common for octogenarians to cycle. My wife cycled up to the day of the birth of our daughter. Children have more independence because they can cycle to football practice on their own. Bike lanes are great for mobility scooters. It rains here, a lot! And it snows. I picked up our Christmas tree with our cargo bike. When I need to transport anything larger I will book a carshare, which are dotted around our neighbourhood.

And the result? People are happy and healthy.

European weather is still mild relative to the US. It will be so long as the Gulf Stream doesn't shut down.

Americans are fatter and less healthy.

Americans are busy and work longer and harder. ("Work hard, play hard.")

Americans buy more stuff. Big stuff. Lots of stuff. Frequently. (This is actually a superpower of our consumer economy.)

And more than anything else, America is fucking huge.

I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us. The proponents in the US trying to make it happen misunderstand the fundamental differences.

> I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us.

lol. You're what we call "carbrained".

Explain how the climate of the coastal West coast is unsuitable for year-round bicycling. Much of it is nicer than the Netherlands and has several times the population.

You do realize most of the US doesn't live on the West coast, right?

Your sampling is skewed.

It's been freezing cold here and any destination within our major city you want to reach is 30+ minutes away by bike.

> Car usage is going to 2-10x.

What a bleak vision of the future.

It's beautiful.

Automated conveyance from front door to anywhere.

Perfectly comfortable, unscheduled, private.

I cannot fathom the bleak pessimistic perspective of wanting fixed trains and busses over this. Crying babies, rude people.

American transit sucks and it's not getting better. It's tolerable in cities like NYC, but even so it's a far cry from Asia. If you're not American, please don't project. We'll never have that here. We are not dense enough for it.

I vote for the "bleak" interpretation.

The main problems with cars are not about the fuel they run on, or the level of automation. They're the space they occupy per passenger and duration of use, the mass they have to move around, the materials required to build them, tire particulates, and the danger they pose to other traffic participants. None of these are alleviated by the thing-du-jour the car industry presents as a solution to all the problems on any given day. The real issues are all endemic to the concept of a car in the first place.

And, maybe, if more people stopped seeing random encounters with some of their co-humans as just an annoying moment of having to deal with icky other people, we'd make some progress on our loneliness, aggravation and political polarisation problems.

It’s not about the climate. Cities are just too big.

Not big, sprawled - because of cars. In terms of population, most US cities are not very impressive.

That's because you're using planned economy principles for your cities.

Remove all zoning but for industrial zoning, and remove prop 13, like it is in most of Europe, and the invisible hand of the market will transform most of cities into medium-density mixed-use like in Europe, though in your case likely accomplished with 5-over-1s instead.

And with increased density, maybe you'd even have space for some public parks again.

There are two main reasons for what you describe: very flat terrain in Netherlands and people living in multi-family buildings mostly. Thus people don't ride any substantial distance according to Netherland's own statistics [1] and don't physically exert while doing so.

In the US average commute is 42 miles daily, that's over 67 km, or more than two weeks of riding a Dutch 12-18 y.o. does, or a month of riding of a Dutch 35-50 y.o. I'd like to invite any Dutch, who believes it's the same in the US, to ride 67km daily for 5 days straight, even in their own flat neighborhood. It might enlighten them why cyclists elsewhere wear special clothes too! And this is without hills...

1. https://longreads.cbs.nl/the-netherlands-in-numbers-2022/how...

I don't think this is a crazy take, but it is missing two big factors that self driving maximalists often ignore.

First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/mile all in (i.e. including depreciation, repairs, gas, etc) -- you can get down to half that pretty easily and maybe a little lower, but especially if you're spending tons of time in this car you're probably going to want a nice comfy one, which will cost more and depreciate faster. So, these trips you're imagining everyone taking constantly are not going to be accessible to most people. Cars are already the second biggest expense in most Americans' budgets, one which scales with mileage, and which self driving would only increase (have to pay for the lidar, on-device compute, whatever remote service handled edge cases, etc).

The second thing your predictions miss is geometry. Despite the decades of predictions about self-driving cars being able to run safely at much higher speeds and with much tighter tolerances than human-run cars, the tyranny of geometry and stopping distances (which actually won't change much even with millisecond reaction times) means that throughput of car lanes is unlikely to change much (though we could all imagine top-down infrastructural changes helping this a lot, eg coordinated self driving cars and smart roads, those seem unlikely to land anytime soon given American political inclinations). Imagine how spaced-out people are on the highway -- in each lane, 1.6 people (average car occupancy) every football field (300 feet -- safe stopping distance at 70mph). If you're trying to go anywhere more densely packed than that -- e.g., a city, a restaurant, a ball game -- you're going to start to run into capacity constraints. Mass transit, walking, and cycling all can manage an order of magnitude higher throughput.

So while I think your prediction -- that self driving cars will increase demand for road space -- is right, the valence that takes for me is much more negative. The wealthy will be able to take up way more space on the road (e.g., one car each dropping off each kid at each extra curricular activity), condemning the poor to even worse traffic (especially the poor who cannot afford a self driving vehicle, who will not even be able to play candy crush while they're waiting in this traffic). People will continue to suburbanize and atomize, demanding their governments pay for bigger and bigger roads and suburbs, despoiling more of the areas you'd like to hike in, with debt that will keep rolling over to the next generation. Bikes and peds will continue to be marginalized as the norm for how far apart people live will continue to grow, making it even more impossible and dangerous to get anywhere without a car. I hope I'm wrong but this is how mass motorization played out the first time, in the post-war period, and if anything our society is less prepared now to oppose the inequitable, race-to-the-bottom, socialize-your-externalities results of that phase of development.