[MuffinFlavored]

> So much of our intellectual and financial energy seems to be directed toward overclocking the horse and buggy

I don't personally think it's realistic to expect everybody/all people (who mainly work for a living/work hard) to ask them to give up the luxury of spending their hard earned money on being able to transport themselves (to and from their job) in something other than the comfort of their own car. I think you're suggesting "we should all be doing public transport, it's more efficient."

You aren't wrong, but there's a human/emotional element/aspect here.

[JimtheCoder]

Personally, my time in my car is some of the only pure "me" time I have, and I would hazard a guess that it is the same for many others.

A car to me is a personal, climate controlled cocoon, where I can turn on whatever music I want, have a coffee or a snack, and escape for the 30 minutes or however long it takes to reach my destination...without the chance of being bothered by anyone else, much less any of the other belligerents that you are sure to find on public transit from time to time.

I will continue to own and drive my own car for this simple fact...

[VBprogrammer]

I love driving as much as the next person but being on the roads at commuting time is hell on earth. Battling all of the other sleep deprived idiots to travel 3 miles in an hour. It's awful.

[dzikimarian]

For me it's 15 minutes in pretty relaxed traffic and music/audiobook. Garage to office door + easy detour to shop if necessary.

In the summer bike is nice alternative, but during bad weather there's nothing comparable to the comfort of car.

Please remember not everyone lives in bay area with long commute and mild weather all year long :-)

[michaelteter]

The article was about that person's reality of 230km round trip commute each day, and the discussion was related.

A 15min commute as you have is a different situation (much better!). Nobody is trying to take away your car. I realize that it is often framed that way in US media, as if the options are public transport OR private cars. I have a car in the Netherlands which I use for some trips where public transport is not the better choice. But when possible, especially when going from one major city to another, public transport is such a nice luxury. (It also means I can go have fun at that late night party and never face the decision of whether to drive somewhat inebriated or not.)

[dzikimarian]

Well I met guy on HN, who was adamant that bike is always the right choice, as long as you dress properly. Given recent 30cm of snow, then melted by rain I kinda disagree :-)

But yes, if we try to complement them, not just ban, this is very reasonable. I also travel by train quite often because it's simply very convenient compared to car.

[dsfyu404ed]

The people doing 151km trips aren't doing that. They're only spending the "busy" end of their trips under those conditions.

[xracy]

Okay, but what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?

I get it might not be exactly the same, but walking/biking/Public Transiting with headphones in for a period of time is all that and more. And with the exception of a bike, you can do all of those things without having to sit in traffic...

[michaelteter]

> Okay, but what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?

This would probably make some people uncomfortable, but one fantasy I can imagine which might be nice is to have private transport capsules. We could own our own capsule and decorate/style it to our liking. It has common exterior form factor, with power, plumbing, etc. connectors.

We go from home to the nearest capsule station (where ours is in automated storage). We schedule picking of the capsule so it is ready for us upon our arrival. We set the destination, hop in, and the delivery system takes us for a ride. Hell, with a nice private capsule you could sleep, watch movies, work, even have "fun" with a partner. The system (ideally) ensures you arrive at your desired capsule station end point, whereby you exit and set your storage option.

This would take more space than current public transport (a lot more!), but it would take less space than a typical individual car, not to mention less roads as the exchange systems would be optimized and operating in three dimensions.

[xracy]

I think the problem with this, is that, like the original post states. It's still trying to optimize the horse and buggy.

Anything that's giving you a per-person riding experience is not going to perform as well as batching a bunch of people together for a common ride.

[michaelteter]

This would still be mostly a common ride, although the space requirements would be increased significantly. But with the automation and routing systems (and coordination) it would be far superior to cars on roads.

[xracy]

It still sounds like we each have our own individual pod that's less efficient than if we had one common pod that can handle a bunch of people going in a common direction.

Distributed systems that have to coordinate multiple moving parts are more prone to breakage, and single points of failure.

Not to mention the infrastructure that's required to build millions of what it sounds like are indivdiual train cars (albeit, much smaller), and the tracks required to get people to where they're going.

You're reinventing the train, but worse there... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvvA_GToc0M&ab_channel=AdamS...)

Better would be to make train cars with seats that have better isolation for people traveling in small groups. But honestly, I think we're overestimating the number of people that need this. And there's a small possibly they could still be serviced by a small car in a world where 80% of people are able to use other services.

[TeMPOraL]

> what if we could do that in a way that each person didn't take up 100 Sqft?

I think GP's point is that it's more about space than about travel. Walking, or being on a public transport with headphones on, doesn't replace that - it's at most a very poor substitute.

The point is to be able to hide from other people - to have some minimum personal time, in a personal space, free from nagging and expectations of your spouse, children, friends, co-workers and bosses. Driving in a car to work enables this, because for the duration of your commute, you can ignore everyone's calls and requests guilt-free. It's the law that says you can't pick up a phone on the road. It's dangerous. You're also not driving for fun, you're driving to/from work. Nobody can have any expectations of you during that time. Yes, commute in traffic is torture. That's a feature. It gives you plausible deniability.

I may be breaking some unwritten fight club rule by spelling it out loud. Sorry. Also, I don't drive - to work or otherwise. But to the extent what I described above is a major part of car ownership, more and better public transport won't help, because it doesn't address this major part.

[michaelteter]

This still smells like some greater problem. If retreating into our own private cars, solo, is the only way we can get some solitude and space from others, then we have painted ourselves into a corner.

Long ago I briefly shared an office with an "old guy" - an expert in a particular topic which gave him more freedom to behave strangely and not get fired. His strange behavior was to spend half of his lunch hour at his desk, leaned back, mouth wide open, napping. That was traditionally not acceptable behavior in a professional environment, but he apparently decided it was for him. So he did it. While it was a bit of a shock at first to the other employees, eventually we all became accustomed to it and even kept our voices down in the hallway outside when we new it was his nap time.

The point is that we have the freedom, even if it seems scary, to make some decisions about how we want our lives and how to get the balance we need. I am only just starting to learn how to do this.

The commute drive solo time is clearly not the same quality of solo time as many other options (choose your favorite).

When I had young children and a busy house, and my normal full time job, the bathroom was my solo space. Unsurprisingly, people didn't seem too interested to come bother me when I was in there. So I would read entire books while seeking solitude. Instead, it is conceivable that I could have just gathered everyone and made some agreements about what we all need, including sometimes privacy and quiet. Granted, a toddler will not respect those agreements, but the spouse can help ensure it works most of the time.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree with your points - though I think you're underselling the "even if it seems scary" bit.

I love your bathroom example, because it speaks to the same need as the "car commute solo space". You say:

> it is conceivable that I could have just gathered everyone and made some agreements about what we all need, including sometimes privacy and quiet

And the same is be true of me (having small children too), and of the aforementioned commuters. We could. But, for some reason, we don't. Can't explain it, but the very idea feels truly scary. That's why the comment upthread resonated so well with me - I don't drive, but I understand striving to get "solo time" in a way that doesn't have to be justified directly, but instead is a plausibly deniable side effect of some external necessity (like having to commute to work).

[michaelteter]

> Personally, my time in my car is some of the only pure "me" time I have, and I would hazard a guess that it is the same for many others.

I totally get this, and I was in the same situation for many years (the young children period of my life).

However, imagine that instead of a 1hr commute, the commute was 30 minutes. Now your day has 1 hour "free" that you could choose to spend doing something for yourself. Maybe it's gym time, or maybe a music practice room in a building near your office, or yoga in the garden of the office rooftop.

As I say, I did share that same feeling when I was doing the normal commute/family thing. But it still points to a problem. We should be able to find or make the time and space to have a cocoon of calm or whatever we need and still have a life+family+work. I don't think that a small side-effect of solo driving in traffic which provides something like that cocoon is at all the right way to get the life balance we need.

[lancewiggs]

However this personal decision comes at a tremendous cost to the rest of society, and we are not pricing that correctly.

[otikik]

> without the chance of being bothered by anyone else

They can still crash into you. Belligerance also exist behind the wheel, and it can can kill you.

[xracy]

I think this is the wrong way to think about it.

It's not about taking away people's cars, it's about making public transit so good (and building cities/neighborhoods that you don't need a car in), that you don't want to take a car, because it's less convenient.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc&t=569s&ab_channe...

I think this quote really nails it: "A developed country is not where the poor have cars, it's where the rich use public transit"

It's also worth noting that car driving is the worst kind of positive feedback loop (not a positive thing). Cars need Parking, which makes it harder to put things close together, which makes you need to drive places to get there, which makes you need parking. And cars are much bigger than humans, so the amount of space needed for cars, also increases much bigger than it would for humans.

[yellowapple]

Not to mention that public transport doesn't go everywhere. Even places with healthy and robust public transit networks only reach a subset of a metro area, and only a subset of that has routes that stop with acceptable frequency.

I think the answer lies in things like e-bikes, mopeds, and motorcycles. Rail as a high-speed backbone and an e-bike for last-mile sounds close to ideal - especially if I can charge the bike while on the train. Bike lanes ought to be the rule rather than the exception. Bike racks and moped/motorcycle parking spaces (ideally - again - with outlets for charging batteries) could and should be ubiquitous.

[michaelteter]

Fortunately more cities are starting to experiment with car-free zones, and they are making shared or subscription bikes (e-bikes often, at least in hilly places) more common. People in those areas report being much happier, and actual communities seem to begin to form as there are more people crossing each others' paths on a regular basis.

[dagw]

For me the weakness with public transport isn't so much getting around in the city (I basically never drive in the city), as it is getting out of the city. Getting to my favourite down town restaurant is 15 minutes by car or 20 minutes by public transport door to door, so I take public transport and don't have to worry about parking. Getting to my favourite hiking spot by the coast is 30 minutes by car or 2+ hours by public transport, so I take the car.

[acdha]

I’m hoping there’ll be a more mature rental / car share market, too. It’d make a lot of sense to have no/low-car city centers (e.g. accessibility and delivery only zones, low speed limits & non-prioritized roads, etc.) and more high speed road infrastructure on the edge of cities but the people I know who’ve had significant issues with things like Zipcar reservations seems like the greatest barrier for that. If people are use to going when they want, you need to deliver reliable availability to get them to reconsider.

[yellowapple]

Even putting vehicle storage on city edges (and/or concentrating it close to highways) would mitigate a lot of the problems we currently see with car-centric infrastructure. Even if I own my own car, I don't necessarily need it to be close by if I can rent a garage somewhere - so long as I can get anywhere in town (including said garage) easily and quickly via public transit and/or bike and/or foot.

[acdha]

This is also where I wish we’d market price it more: having to pay for street parking would make it obvious how much taxpayers have been subsidizing it, often at everyone’s expense (pedestrians stuck with narrow sidewalks, drivers using ostensibly two-way streets which are now only one-way between increasingly large vehicles).

[otabdeveloper4]

There's a lot of ways to describe commuting in traffic jams, but the word "comfort" is probably not in the top ten.

[pizza234]

> I don't personally think it's realistic to expect everybody/all people (who mainly work for a living/work hard) to ask them to give up the luxury of spending their hard earned money on being able to transport themselves (to and from their job) in something other than the comfort of their own car

Societies don't need to ask citizens to choose a given mean of transport; they can route their choices them by making some means more convenient and other ones less.

Increasing car costs and reducing lanes/streets/parkings, while making the public transport more frequent/extensive/comfortable, will make citizens choose public transport (or more sustainable means) themselves.

On the other hand, when cities are developed (in certain cultures or at least areas) with private transport in mind, and it can be hard or impossible to redesign for public transport.

[generalizations]

> Societies don't need to ask citizens to choose a given mean of transport; they can route their choices them by making some means more convenient and other ones less.

I'm reading that as, "we don't need to ask, we can just make them do it." Which to me is pretty arrogant.

[sagarm]

Society has made the choice so far to make owning a car as convenient and inexpensive as possible, while allocating almost no resources to other options. And no, usage fees including gas taxes don't cover the cost of roads -- let alone the land usage, externalities, and supporting infrastructure like drainage.

[landemva]

> Society has made

Big eu cities are expensive to park cars. Not inexpensive. Some cities such as Stockholm are banning commuter cars.

[michaelteter]

HN has a pretty strong majority of US readers, I think. And as I'm American, I recall that many other Americans have little idea what life is really like outside the country. (What goes on day to day, or how life works, in other countries is just not well understood.)

From the US-centric view, society (or rather, energy and automotive companies and their lobbying) has made the decision to put all the focus on cars, and to even put intentional negative spin against public transport.

It seems to be slowly changing in some states or a few cities within some states. And yes, it does seem to be very different depending on which way an area leans politically. The "red" (Republican) areas are vehemently against public transport and frame it as the government trying to take away people's rights to go where they want (in their own cars).

Unfortunately for the areas trying to put energy into public transport and non-car alternatives, there is a vast amount of corporate finance and influence that works against it at all levels of govenerment.

[pizza234]

> I'm reading that as, "we don't need to ask, we can just make them do it." Which to me is pretty arrogant.

It was never "asked" in first place; there was a large discussion on HN around the article about automakers driving the policies (https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history).

It's also not forcing anybody; it's a shift of conveniences. In a hypothetical situation with fantasy metrics, making a city 2x as comfortable for sustainable means (bikes, motorbikes, public transport) and 0.5x as comfortable for cars will not force anybody to use the former - people who love their time in the cars will still be able to.

(I stress that this applies to cities where logistics make a restructuring possible, which is not the case everywhere)

[abenga]

The US already "makes" commercial and residential building developers dedicate large proportions of their lots to meet minimum parking requirements in order to make it easier for people who want to drive do so. Is this "pretty arrogant" as well?

[janef0421]

I don't think most people see car commuting as a luxury. It's very stressful.

[MuffinFlavored]

Tough to say “most”. You’re probably right but a non-zero amount of people who pay luxury cars like Mercedes/BMW want a) status symbols but b) the time they spend in their vehicles as enjoyable.

[MrMan]

this is an argument from 1985. there is no room for this kind of selfish thinking now

[entropicgravity]

And not to mention the epidemiological aspect, hello covid. A compromise situation could be individual transport but much smaller than current cars. Because EV's scale much more easily than ICE technology it's practical to have EV's with, say, a three person occupancy that take up half of a current car lane. This is the best of both worlds. Single occupancy vehicles and a city's transportation infrastructure doubles at zero cost.

[janef0421]

E-bikes are quite close to what you are describing, and are already remarkably popular.

[erik_seaberg]

Speaking of range, ebikes today vary a lot, some do 100 miles but some can only do 20 (which wouldn’t even get me to the office on the shortest route).