[chadcmulligan]

I used chauffeured cars yesterday, I just shared them with other people. I went to the beach, and had no real plan, I thought I'll go here, clicked on my app and it told me where to go, usually walk a couple of hundred metres. I spent the day travelling and walking around cost about $20 and travelled a couple of hundred kilometres. I took my laptop and worked in between scenic spots.

I was thinking about this yesterday, I prefer catching trains and trams to buses - because trains don't throw you around when they turn corners, because the tracks can't have sharp corners. I was thinking if buses were made to be a little bit nicer - something like tour coaches then car usage would go down.

Self driving cars have a very real chance of becoming a nightmare scenario (and I used to think the future with them would be amazing), a world of roads everywhere always full of cars half of them empty going backwards and forwards all day every day.

Do other places have an app available like this - https://translink.com.au ?, there's a phone version to. If more people used public transport then it would become better. The system is also tied into a card which you can just tap on to travel, so if you change buses etc the final charge is just the number of "zones" you go through, there are 5 zones in the local couple of hundred kilometres.

One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams (and busways) have to include the cost of the rails. This distorts the relative costs and leads to suburbs created a long way from cities with ever increasing highways and highway costs.

[megablast]

> One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams have to include the cost of the rails.

Lots of costs aren't factored into cars.

Cars in the USA kill 40,000 people every year and seriously injure or disable over 4 million. No one really cares about the deaths, unless it happens to someone you know, and then they still keep driving. But that has a huge financial cost as well. Think of all the extra hospitals, equipment, staff, vehicles required to look after those people.

Then the pollution they cause is not costed, and that also kills people and makes them sicker.

And that is just the start.

[ctdonath]

Anyone is welcome to move to a low-pollution low-vehicle area and live a no-car life. There's a whole lotta such space in the US.

Yes, cars cause "unfactored costs". They also improve life, making the lives of hundreds of millions possible & prolonged. You can't complain about the costs without comparing the savings.

[TulliusCicero]

> Anyone is welcome to move to a low-pollution low-vehicle area and live a no-car life. There's a whole lotta such space in the US.

No there isn't. In fact, I can't think of a single one. Living in rural areas means being super dependent on cars. The center of major cities are less car dependent, but still there's plenty of cars around in every city in the US. There's nowhere in the US like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Tokyo.

> They also improve life, making the lives of hundreds of millions possible & prolonged.

Hardly anyone wants to get rid of cars entirely. But you can look at societies with substantially fewer cars and they have higher lifespans, and generally higher quality of life.

Almost like it's better to have options, rather than America's extreme car dominance.

[Mirioron]

>Living in rural areas means being super dependent on cars.

You say that because you're unwilling to give up the comforts that car use provides. Do you think that people elsewhere didn't have to give up anything when they decided against car use? You might think that it's fine to mandate bikes, buses and walking instead of cars, but pretty much everybody would rather have a car during a cold winter.

[TulliusCicero]

> You say that because you're unwilling to give up the comforts that car use provides.

Nope. I don't have a car. For a family of 3.

> You might think that it's fine to mandate bikes, buses and walking instead of cars, but pretty much everybody would rather have a car during a cold winter.

I'm not mandating anything; you are. I want options that make not-driving viable, while you're for the side that wants to force everyone to drive.

I don't even mind driving, I just hate being required to drive, which is the case in most US cities, because they were designed to make everything else worse.

[chadcmulligan]

> making the lives of hundreds of millions possible & prolonged

How so?

[ctdonath]

All that's nice if you're single and can toss all your stuff in a bag, traveling on other people's schedules.

Doesn't work for a family of 4 with a busy schedule and volumes of stuff to haul around (dog included), sometimes on very short notice.

[chadcmulligan]

Yes indeed, my days of carting kids around are behind me. Some thoughts on that -

Maybe introduce a group travel cost, some places do have family travel passes, so that would reduce costs. Hauling junk (and dog) becomes difficult, asian and some European countries seem to do this, how do they do it?

There should be answers for this, like automate the cars maybe is a solution, but maybe its introducing new problems (it is). Has anyone done a cost benefit analysis? Automating cars is definitely cool, but is there a better way?

Cheaper and better public transport is definitely possible, and the cost maybe is a lot less than a world full of cars.

The arrival of the phone and apps for public transport is a game changer, in the past random travel wouldn't really be possible because you had to learn bus routes and carry timetables with you, not so any more.

[tda]

If you think about it vehicles on asphalt/tyres (not buses as we know them) are superior to vehicles on tracks/steel wheels in every way (except rolling resistance). Vehicle to vehicle dista CE on the road can be as little as a few seconds, where on train tracks it is usually one to several minutes. Deadweight per passenger is in the range of 5-10x more for trainers vs buses. If a train breaks down, everything is blocked, on the road you just pull over and let others pass. I like to think that passenger rail is just an artifact of history/sunken cost phallacy, except maybe for underground high volume metro systems.

When looking over the vast 20 or so track wide rail intersection with multiple fly overs at Utrecht Central Station easily a minute can go by with not a single train passing, even in rush hour. And this is the busiest train station in the Netherlands. There is also a bus platform underneath which in a fraction of the space fits perhaps 20 (much smaller though) bus platforms.buses come and go continuously, largely over a single (two way) dedicated bus lane. This single road probably has a similar capacity as the twenty or so train tracks above, with extra long buses going by with minimal space between. If we were to pave the railway tracks we could have an incredibly safe and reliable transport system. Its actually quite a thing buses are already quite safe even though drivers make to long hours, share the road with many kinds of vehicles with mostly amateur (as in non professional) drivers, no central traffic control etc. Of course buses as we know it are not pleasant modes of transport, but that is probably only because they can also run on normal roads with sharp turns and traffic lights etc. I don't have the numbers to do a proper comparison but I think paving railroads could be quite an interesting business case

[chadcmulligan]

Good points, personally I just like trains :-), and they are more comfortable - but probably the history as you say.

They have busways in my local city (Brisbane, Australia) and special bus roads which remove the congestion problem https://translink.com.au/travel-with-us/bus-train-ferry-tram... and they are also built to be more comfortable to travel on. So yes Buses can be made better if they are designed to be. They're also introducing super buses https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/new-sup... maybe I live in a public transport hot spot - who knew.

[oftenwrong]

In my city, the subway trains can carry ~1400 people. During peak commuting times, a train comes every 5 minutes or so. Even our largest buses only carry ~100 people. You would need a bus to stop every ~21 seconds to match that capacity. That rate probably can be achieved. Stops would have to be designed to reduce the overhead of disembarking/boarding cycles, since there would be ~14x as many as with a train.

[em-bee]

trains travel at a much higher speed than cars. and they carry many more people at that speed. what you say may make sense for street trains or trams that have to share traffic with cars, but the comfort of a fast train on a dedicated rail is no comparison to any bus alternative today.

[JustSomeNobody]

> ...if buses were made to be a little bit nicer - something like tour coaches then car usage would go down.

This and if I didn’t have to stand outside in dangerous Florida thunderstorms.

[chadcmulligan]

Yes nice bus shelters too. I can't help but feel if a fraction of the energy currently devoted to cars was focused on public transport then all the problems from cars would go away.

[mandeepj]

> because trains don't throw you around when they turn corners

Trains are way bigger jerks than buses. They definitely throw you back when you they start after stopping at a station or stop sign. And, they definitely throw you back at turns. So, double whammy.

[akvadrako]

You must use some shitty or extremely fast trains.