By the time you're building self-driving car-exclusive tunnels and the like, you really are getting very little benefit over a train system to justify doing it, especially when you take emissions into account.
I agree. Anything with low-occupancy vehicles feels like a dead end to me. Of all things, car ownership is the thing we're aggressively enabling/optimizing in 2018? Really?
I'm usually not a person who's sympathetic to complaints about advances in technology eliminating jobs. Not for a real overall long term gain to society. But autonomous cars putting swaths of people out of work while at the same time taking us in the wrong direction on traffic, emissions, etc. doesn't feel great. Those drivers losing work slowly over time as cities evolve truly better and more sustainable transportation options feels more right.
Aside from the opportunity cost of not furthering public transportation, autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking. We already have Uber creating waste by idling/driving around between passengers.
car ownership is the thing we're aggressively enabling/optimizing in 2018? Really?
On the contrary: making taxis cheaper (which self-driving can do, by eliminating the biggest cost - the driver) makes it much easier to live without owning a car.
If there was no Uber and such, I'd probably have to own a car for the exceptions not covered by public transport. And after paying for the fixed costs anyway, the marginal cost per trip is low, making me more likely to use it over PT.
autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking
Per the above, cheaper taxis → fewer owned cars → more free parking spaces.
Who happens to own the car, the driver or a service provider, is inconsequential in assessing the big picture consequences of more cars on the road vs. more sustainable options.
Say public transport covers 95% of my needs. If I have cheap taxis, I'll use public transport most of the time, and cars only 5%.
If I have to buy a car because I can't afford those taxi rides, I might use it for 30% or 40% or more of the trips, since it just costs me a bit of gas (or electricity) - the fixed costs are sunk.
I mean, the incentives are also kind of backwards -- it's usually free to drive and you have to pay to ride the train. If we're really looking at climate cataclysm it might be worth thinking about changing that dynamic.
It's "free" to drive in the sense that you don't have to take money out of your wallet to get into the driver seat of your car, yes. But that doesn't account for:
- The monthly payment on the car (if applicable)
- Liability / collision insurance
- Gas
- Tolls
- Parking
- Repairs
- Washes
With this in mind, public transportation is obviously way cheaper than driving – and exclusively using Uber may very well be in some cities, too.
But yes, I'd agree with you that many people don't seem to account for those hidden costs when justifying driving over taking public transit in a city that adequately supports it. Hopefully one day soon that will change.
In general, no, but generalizing can miss important local markets. I live in London and trains and busses do me fine. I honestly can't remember the last time I got into a car here; certainly years rather than months.
Big-city issues like parking and congestion charging can tip the scales quite a bit, with much better public transport than the rest of the country to compensate.
Trains also do not have to completely supplant cars to make a difference. If people take the train to work and use their cars to run errands around town it's still an improvement over driving everywhere.
Even shared bus services can made into something desirable with the right marketing and investment. The large tech companies provide luxuary coach services with WiFi to their workers and the people riding them are seemingly very happy with the services.
I mean, let's be honest here: a lot of people don't want to ride the bus because they associate it with poor people and don't want to share a vehicle with them. There's a lot of legacies of America's social problems getting tangled up with this question.
I mean even moderate-distance train rides aren't cheap. Look at the price of a single ticket from the outer zones of the commuter rail systems into the city
They do a pretty good job of getting you very close in London and NYC. Longer distance trains get you between cities much faster than in a car. They don't solve everything but they are definitely underutilized as a solution in the US.
We could put effort into making them better but it's not as sexy.
Metro service is the key. When frequencies get high enough the timetable exists only for the benefit of the operations personnel, customers don't care about it because their experience is like with an elevator. You don't ask for a timetable for the elevator, you just go to the place where elevators arrive, and wait, and very shortly there will be an elevator.
Very high densities are both the problem and the solution. They're the problem because under very high density private car ownership is infeasible, and the solution because public transport becomes fast and affordable. If you let it.
Exactly. A lot of the issues with public transportation are because we underfund the systems and they end up seeming worse than they could be. The complaints that users have are not with the concept of trains or busses but with the failures, which can be minimized with adequate investment.
Frankly I think commuter rail for suburban riders is great and I think there should be more of it too. Who the hell likes driving to work during rush hour?
I have commuted to work by car and by train and I'd much rather do the latter. If it were so self-evident that mass transit were worse you'd expect to see people everywhere drive just as much as Americans
Long range trucking is really the killer app. Fleets of N trucks can take an entire lane of road in sequence (almost like train wagons) and talk to each other and have M<N supervisors.
1. Building railroads is an order of magnitude harder than building roads (gradients, turn radii, clearance, yards).
2. Not even building, just repurposing. "This road/lane/whatever now SDV only."
3. Trains only run on rails. Trucks that could be run as SDVs on dedicated infrastructure and as human-driven on shared infrastructure tackle the last-mile problem far more efficiently.
4. Trains are built on the "smart infrastructure" paradigm (go straight at the speed which the signals tell you, until the signals tell you to stop); trucks on the opposite "smart vehicles" paradigm (road exists, everything else is your responsibility). This makes a truck rollout far more scalable (as in "just add this road to whitelist").
I'm usually not a person who's sympathetic to complaints about advances in technology eliminating jobs. Not for a real overall long term gain to society. But autonomous cars putting swaths of people out of work while at the same time taking us in the wrong direction on traffic, emissions, etc. doesn't feel great. Those drivers losing work slowly over time as cities evolve truly better and more sustainable transportation options feels more right.
Aside from the opportunity cost of not furthering public transportation, autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking. We already have Uber creating waste by idling/driving around between passengers.