Why the focus should be mass transit instead of tolls to fix traffic congestion

The theory for toll systems is that by having a congestion charge, people will avoid using roads when they're congested makes sense, although it disregards several factors. Most people have to go to work between certain hours (which is why during rush hour the trains in Tokyo are crammed with people while outside of them they're not crowded at all) and that people often cannot relocate closer to work for various reasons (eg. children, unavailability of housing, etc.).

Furthermore, specialized white collar work (eg. software developers, lawyers, accountants, actuaries, etc.) often is only done in city cores, not in suburbs, meaning that people not living in the city core either have the choice to pay the toll or be underemployed.

As you mention, earmarking tolls to go towards improving public transit is a great idea; it will make the ratio of people paying tolls and taking public transit tend towards its equilibrium, as the more people deem public transit unusable, the more funds will go towards improving it.

Remote work / non-face-to-face meetings are a social and managerial problem. Having your employees commute has no cost to managers and allows them to oversee them more easily. (See for example Yahoo had remote work and took it away; this kind of progress is not on a ratchet).

... you've got a train

(particularly on the Intermediate Capacity Transit System / Copenhagen-like models, automatically run small and light cars for very frequent service)

There's no need to have self-driving cars to stop 1p1c. We've already got mass transit… Switch to semi-fullly seated buses and you've reduced the number of vehicles by a factor of 40.

Besides, since everyone starts work at the same time self-driving cars will have minimal effect on the number of cars on the roads at rush hour as long as there's only one occupant per car.

Much cheaper solutions than developing and constructing an entire new vehicle fleet would be to force multiple occupants per vehicle, and to have people start work over a wider time span.

Westerners are going to be very reluctant to do this, especially if it means sharing with random strangers.

The developing world already has lots of "minibus" transport, and still has plenty of traffic jams.

I would say high latency is not the reason, but road greed, and defensive driving against unwanted and unannounced lane changes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Road_Trains_for_the_Envir...

The bigger question is what realistic timeframe we're looking at. I know smart people who go on about exponential progress and all that think we're talking 10 years. I've also listened to researchers in this area who think it's 50+ years and IMO they're probably closer. The challenge is that accurately mapped streets only get you so far and there are a lot of real world situations a car would need to be able to handle that are well beyond the current level of tech.

People won't "buy" self driving cars, they will briefly borrow them from ZipCar, Uber or Ford.

The younger generation as a whole is much less interested in learning to drive or purchase a car. They will also be pushing to make this happen.

Just noting that if city governments were more competent, mass transit would not be an issue as cities would be a more desirable place to live and work as compared to the burbs.

Whenever I see a new mass transit proposal put out by a nearby city, it seems that the major underlying reason is to have a public works project to steer money to vested interests rather than to provide useful transit.

I felt so much safer and more relaxed driving 110 mph there than I do going 65 on an American highway.

No, they don't. They create pile-ups behind them when driving unreasonably slow. I see it every day. Dozens of cars stuck behind slow drivers and huge empty gaps of road in front of them.

The only way they would keep traffic flowing smoothly is if they did not drive slower than the surrounding traffic.

> The ones who create the problem are those changing lanes to gain 5 mph and get to their destination one minute sooner.

I think you might be ascribing causation where it doesn't exist. Most of the cars I see zig-zagging through traffic (which is futile given the problems I highlighted) do so because of the aforementioned slow drivers who unreasonably plug-up the road. People get impatient and the zig-zag game starts.

I see this effect every day. Leaving the valley the road slopes up. You are climbing. Early in the morning traffic is relatively light. People are moving at, say 75 mph. And then it happens. A few cars have drivers who, for some reason, do not maintain speed while climbing, they slow down to 65, even 60 going up the hill. The cars are perfectly capable of maintaining speed, it's the driver who does not.

When this takes place the effect is nearly instantaneous. Cars pile-up behind the slow-climbing cars and a few of them start zig-zagging to get around them. It's a mess. And with more traffic it launches a wave that ripples backwards and starts what eventually becomes a big problem as more people pile onto the highway.

The cause in this case isn't people who want to drive too fast, the root cause is drivers who do not maintain speed during a climb.

> If people would just pick a lane and a speed and stick to it the overall throughput of the road would be much improved.

I completely agree with one modification: Speeds need to be layered. There are people who want to drive unusually slow. There are trucks and buses that drive at 50 mph. They should not be allowed to get over to the left, pick that lane and stick to it.

That's the problem I am referring to. We don't have any rules that prevent someone doing 60 mph from inserting themselves into traffic flowing nicely at 70 or 75. They come into that flow and it's like a rock in an otherwise laminar flow stream, they create turbulence.

It's not about going fast, it's about extracting better efficiency out of the road. I don't have a problem with folks who want to driver slower. Good for them. Just get out of the way and let the rest of the traffic flow nicely.

[citataion needed]

No, that's not it. The road isn't being used efficiently. Traffic gets locked up behind slow drivers who cause a ripple effect. The reason people zig zag sometimes is because there are huge empty gaps in front of slow drivers.

These slow drivers and the lack of rules to manage a layering of speeds is part of the problem.

I am not saying I want everyone to driver 100 mph. No. That's not it. Quite to the contrary. People need to driver at the best speed for the road and road conditions. And those who want to drive slower need to get out of the way and enjoy their leisurely Sunday drive off to the right.

I see it every day across hundreds of miles of roadway cris-crossing Los Angeles. I am willing to concede that there might be a magical place in the US where people wake up every morning and say "what a beautiful day, I think I will carpool with my neighbor because we both work for the same company".

Not in Los Angeles. That's just not the nature of this city. This isn't a "factory town" where there are three destinations for the bulk of the population and carpooling makes sense. If I go down my block the distribution of destinations is probably as random as you can get. And these destinations are random in vector form. In other words, direction and distance. Carpooling is actually impossible.

And then there's the question of infrastructure and schedules.

Also, people are too spread out.

There's on person I know I could consider carpooling with. Here's the issue: I would have to drive 15 miles out of my way every day to go pick him up. He would have to drive 30 miles out of his way to pick me up. Meet in the middle? No can do. There is no infrastructure to support that. You'd have to leave a car at some random parking lot illegally in order to do this. And this isn't a solution that scales. Oh yes, our schedules are very different, which means that 95% of the time we couldn't carpool even if we wanted to.

People have kids, family, responsibilities. Who wants to get a call from school to go pick up their kid who just threw up, be 50 miles away and not be able to respond because they carpooled with four other people.

The whole thing is one big joke perpetrated on us by stupid politicians. Who know what the payoff may have been. It's certainly not helping anyone at all, just like the high speed train they want to build (what a joke).

Largely this is due to the buffoons who are consistently appointed to transit boards who tender everything to fellow political cronies that drain the budget and accomplish nothing. Transit like traffic is a political problem but running it is considered a patronage position where the CEO and board make over $300k/yr for never showing up to work and get a car allowance so they never have to experience the terrible service they run.

New York City has the longest commute times in the entire country. I've had friends who grew up ther and upon leaving literally said, "oh so this is what it's like to be alive. I thought all people did was work, commute, and sleep."

Walking to a bus stop sucks. Waiting for the next train sucks. Inevitably missing your transport or connection sucks. Listening to podcasts is cool so it's not the end of the world though.

People who live off public transportation live in tiny bubbles. A square mile here and a square mile there. Like you said, moving from one all walkneighborhood to another. God help you if you want more than one of ~five neighborhoods. And if you want to go see nature? Hah. sure you could rent a car or use a zip car but that's a huge hassle and people rarely do. Assuming you even have a drivers license which, much to my surprise, many folks are starting to skip.

You aren't wrong that it's a function of worldview. Perhaps one view is right or perhaps both are.

Random example: in the Portland area, a city known for both public transit and pedestrian/bike friendliness, I looked up routes from my current workplace to the university building I took most of my classes in, via either a car or public transit. Despite having a train line that handles most of the distance, that trip would take at least 90-100 minutes, depending on time of day. That assumes you start your trip at a time that doesn't require waiting for the first pickup. The same trip by car would take 25-40 minutes, depending on traffic. And with a reasonably fuel-efficient vehicle, the trip would cost less in gas than the cost of the transit fare. On top of all that, you can leave when you want to leave, not worry about which bus or train you need to catch, and not worry about getting stranded when the buses and trains shut down for the night.

This isn't an issue of worldview; by any almost objective measure, a car beats public transit, here in one of the most transit-friendly cities in the country.

(In the interests of a fair comparison: public transit does work better if you don't have the option of using a car, such as if you can't afford one, or if you have some legal reason you can't drive.)

Adding more public transit vehicles or routes wouldn't solve this problem, because the current set of vehicles aren't actually at capacity; by measures of throughput, they carry all the passengers that want to ride. However, by measures of latency and similar metric, public transit utterly fails.

Perhaps if you somehow convinced the entire population to use public transit, then you could put many times the number of public transit vehicles on the road without wastefulness, and partially solve the latency problem. But you'd have a lot more luck convincing people to use a fleet of self-driving electric cars instead.

I would welcome a similar latency-based comparison in a more transit-friendly area, as long as the comparison shows transit infrastructure getting better to compare well with cars, rather than driving infrastructure getting worse while transit stays the same.

1. You have to arrange your life around the schedule. The buses, OTOH, don't. Last winter it was not uncommon to wait half an hour with no shelter or place to sit, in below-freezing weather, for a late bus. The bus I get on in the morning has tended to be five to ten minutes late (which means delays for transfers), and once pulled in shortly before the bus making the next scheduled stop.

2. Once the bus does arrive, there may or may not be a seat available.

3. If the buses have shock absorbers, I've not seen or felt evidence of it. The driver's seat, OTOH, is quite the technological miracle of jerk (in the physics sense) minimization.

4. The buses aren't designed to accommodate any items a passenger might be bringing along.

5. The bus driver sometimes either can't or doesn't bother to set the bus's identification of itself (to potential passengers via signage or to apps). It's a good way to make people miss their buses.

I can only describe my experiences with the Allegheny Port Authority, others may differ. When I've called, the recording describing the menu runs at VERY low volume, perfect for trying to get help on a busy street with traffic noise. When I got through and described the issue, I was asked if I wished to register a complaint. I did; I think I may have gotten a followup on it once. OTOH, that's not been as much of an issue lately, because now you can only call between 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., just the thing for avoiding people having problems during the morning and evening commute.

I will celebrate when mass transit is disrupted out of existence.