[me_me_me]

Can I have 30? I need to get to my hyperloop pod faster.

Those modern transportation 'solutions' are a sign of local maxima of current city design. A bad design that cannot scale any further.

So maybe instead we start on fixing cities?

[atoav]

> Those modern transportation 'solutions' are a sign of local maxima of current city design. A bad design that cannot scale any further.

Exactly. And for some reason the "solutions" always have the nice feature that they get those using them out of the sight of the rest of the lowly peasants living in those cities.

As if it hasn't been demonstrated how public transport can do wonders for highly populated if done right (e.g. look at japan).

[542354234235]

And with driverless cars around the corner, now is the time to integrate them correctly. The idea should not be to get in your Tesla at home and cruise on the highway and into the city to park at your office. They idea should be picked up at your house by an Auto that drops you at the lightrail station just in time to catch the next train into downtown, where you can hop in a 10 person driverless shuttle that drops you at the office after a couple other stops.

I mean, the real solution is to stop subsidizing suburbs, that are bleeding cities dry with the massive costs of infrastructure requirements and maintenance.

>“The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5 trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes. The reason we have this gap is because the public yield from the suburban development pattern — the amount of tax revenue obtained per increment of liability assumed — is ridiculously low. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability. The engineering profession will argue, as ASCE does, that we're simply not making the investments necessary to maintain this infrastructure. This is nonsense. We've simply built in a way that is not financially productive. We've done this because, as with any Ponzi scheme, new growth provides the illusion of prosperity. In the near term, revenue grows, while the corresponding maintenance obligations — which are not counted on the public balance sheet — are a generation away.” [1]

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

[atoav]

The advantages to self driving cars being used this way are even better:

- people driving don't have to take time to find parking lots

- the cars themselves don't need to be parked in the city, freeing up space

- depending on how many people are traveling together and what they are transporting different sized vehicles can be used

That being said: the most efficient form of transportation any human can do right now is the bicycle. It is fast too. During rush hour I am faster than car, bus or subway on my commute (German city) and as I am sitting on the computer for long periods anyways, having a little movement is great. And for weather there is appropriate clothings.

[mdorazio]

I see comments like this quite often without any suggestions for how it would happen practically. Let's talk Los Angeles, for example - where would you put light rail lines to sufficiently cover the low-density 400+ square miles of city sufficiently well to be better than cars? How would you acquire the requisite property & rights of way to run the lines? How would you fight the guaranteed NIMBY protests from local voters? Where would you get the tens of billions of dollars it would take?

"Fixing" a city is hard. And I haven't seen too many examples of it actually done, in comparison to cities that were built with public transit in mind from the beginning.

[throwaway210222]

> in comparison to cities that were built with public transit in mind from the beginning.

Tokyo and Paris were built with electrified, public transport in mind from the beginning?

Really?

[pasabagi]

Rethink taxation so people living in suburbs pay proportionately to the cost of running services to them, and you'd very quickly see a denser city. Dense habitation is just way more efficient, more ecologically friendly, and more cost effective. If this was reflected in the law, you'd very quickly get a situation like you have in Germany, where you basically go from multi-storey apartments to farmland with no suburbs in between.

[nradov]

Many of the suburbs in the greater LA area are actually separate cities. It doesn't cost more to run services to them. The services are right there.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Ha! I wonder which parts of Germany you mean? The cities I've lived in, the cities I know, and the city I live in now are not like that at all.

[pasabagi]

Leipzig has a pretty sharp divide, for example. If you walk west, you hit platenbau, then it's a bunch of farms. I figured a lot of east cities are like this (Gera, for instance, Halle, etc). It could be a matter of perspective - in London, you can drive for about an hour through suburbs before you see a single building more than two stories.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Hm. Could be. Never been in those parts, so far. My experience is much of Rhine-Ruhr Area and then 'the North', mostly Hamburg, sometimes the less crazy parts of Berlin ;-)

[pasabagi]

Yeah, definitely the rhine-ruhr area has some suburbs, but it's still way more dense than the UK. I get the feeling there's a big divide between west and east basically because of ideology: in the west, the state encouraged women to stay at home (no free kindergartens, tax-splitting between married couples, etc). This in itself makes a house with a garden way more attractive - if you're stuck at home looking after kids, then it's really nice to be able to do stuff in the kitchen while your kids play in the garden. They also had way higher car ownership. There's also stuff like building law (you can generally only build stuff that fits in the locale, so there's more space for potential suburban houses than apartment blocks) which I guess wouldn't be a factor in the east. Also high car ownership, (obviously) higher rates of house ownership, etc.

[jazzyjackson]

ironically LA was built with public transit in mind from the beginning. many housing developments were sold with light rail to downtown as an amenity to sell the houses. once the houses were sold, the rails were dismantled for being unprofitable.

[me_me_me]

https://theconversation.com/superblocks-barcelonas-car-free-...

He is an example.

[dagw]

Lots of US cities used to have great public transit. They were all later 'fixed' to remove public transit and make life easier for cars.