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You know what, in some parts of the world, they're automated! Driver-less trains, arriving every 3 minutes, running 24 hours with no union strikes or bad software that accidentally runs them into a kid or semi truck (if they walk out onto the rails it's really their own damn fault).
Individual personal transport is really a waste. I mean there's nothing wrong with having a car, but you shouldn't need it. It should be there in case you need to haul something or go way off the beaten path. All these single capacity cars taking people to and from work every morning is insane.
Unfortunately, I had nowhere else to be; there was no shoulder, no bike lane, and biking on the sidewalk is illegal there.
Anyway, what I'm saying is, biking in the US kind of sucks.
Writing as a cyclist who rides in the street, and used to ride on the sidewalk occasionally.
But going off of those designated streets can be dicey. In New York I feel relatively safe because traffic is such a crawl anyway that, aside from getting doored by a inattentive taxi passenger, you probably won't get run over at a high speed.
And then you have many of the other cities in America. Dallas in particularly strikes me as a city especially un-optimized for bicyclists despite the huge amount of land there. I mean, there's plenty of lanes for cars, and just about nothing for bikes.
An initiative to change America's non-car culture would probably take as long as it would take to make self-driving electric vehicles mainstream. And automated vehicles are probably more viable when thinking of the future, as America's population continues to age and fewer people can physically bike (or even walk).
So time, effort, and treasure is spent on changes that can be politically accomplished instead.
San Francisco actually has some decent support for bikes, and a lot of my coworkers that in the SF office go by bike, but that's because they are both dense enough and have such nice weather.
As a Wisconsinite: bikes are great. They are a seasonal and recreation activity. There are a handful of people willing to bike their 6-7 mile commute year round, rain or shine, snow or sleet. They are the elite badass club. This is not a trait urban planning can expect from the masses.
It's certainly a Bay Area blindspot to forget that most people in most of this country experience extremely unpleasant heat, cold, rain, snow, etc. a majority of the time, and see dry temperate days like our daily reality here as a rare treat.
Some of the same properties that make bicycles easy to power and easy to carry (say, up to your apartment) make them easy to steal; and there's little defense against crude and destructive methods like detaching the secured wheel or worse.
We could have full-bike lockers or other bike-parking corrals or contraptions that physically move them into an inaccessible space: bicycle goes into a slot, only comes out when verified by some means (physical or digital); but this requires space, delicate moving parts, and maintenance. But when compared to a single car parking space, the space requirement doesn't seem insurmountable.
I worked for a company that had the entire bike rack stolen. A truck just pulled up an few guy threw the entire rack, including all the bikes locked to the rack into a large truck.
Again, I don't know about SF, but Danish police don't really deal with bike thefts. That's an insurance problem, not something you waste police resources on. Of cause this makes it extremely frustrating to get your bike stolen. If you have GPS tracker in your bike you get track your bike leaving the country, the police is only rarely going to attempt to stop the thieves.
The level of density required for a bike to be a good daily commuter isn't the way a great many Americans live.
I just went and looked into Auckland's climate[0]. The record high is 87F/30.5C; the record low is 25F/-3.9C. The most-heavily populated parts of the US regularly experience summer weeks where every high is higher than that record high, and winter weeks where every low is lower than that record low. Hell, there are heavily-populated parts of the US that have weeks where every high is lower than that record low.
If anything, Uber/Lyft will increase bicycle usage, by providing a backup when the weather doesn't allow for riding.
United States is 33 people / km^2. Take all of Alaska's area away and make them all move to CONUS and it's still only 40 people / km^2.
With a lower natural population density, it would be surprising if people didn't spread out, and with that sprawl comes the car over the train. It's hard to make the train work when the population is 5 to 12 times more spread out.
I've never been to Scandinavia, so I have no experience to fairly judge.
And I've traveled to many different places in the world and my observation has been that, even in areas that have generally good train service, it by no means serves as anywhere to anywhere transportation.
A more Japanese approach (as mentioned several other times on HN within the last year and probably more before that), is roughly to zone by the 'nuisance impact' and also to plan local commutes along slopes of density (nuisance).
So you can have a mixed commercial / high density residential district around the transit hub, and a casually walkable (for fit adults/kids) commute from there to lower density housing.
American could have the same, even for rural areas. It's just been a matter of money, priority and the auto makers lobbying a lot to shift both of those two things.
I will have this station, at the cost of $54 billion, in _nineteen years_. If everything goes exactly as planned.
Uber can get me anywhere I want to go, for $8 or so, in fifteen minutes, today.
I don't like cars much either, and because of the calculus above, traffic is only getting worse. But you want to know why we don't have trains? Because America can no longer build infrastructure. In any sane country we could do this in five years at a tenth of the price, but for whatever reason, we can't. This is the only reason Uber exists at the scale it does: because it's a workaround for the fact we can no longer build anything requiring fixed infrastructure.
(By the way, talk about an industry ripe for disruption. What I wouldn't give for a good construction startup.)
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
(Although it is an excellent train system)
There are many good reasons why cars have won over all in the US.
Whether people should need a car is not(and shouldn't be) determined by your arbitrary moral judgment. It depends on their actual circumstances.
Given how trains have won over in Europe, its got more to do with city planning.
Just because we could plan all our cities around trains doesn't mean Americans will want to. I think a lot of people here are overconfident about how much better it would be if we just build trains all over.
Not all of us want to wait around everyday to be packed into a smelly, dirty disease distribution system that can shut down your commute for hours or take away your ability to get anywhere for days when they have maintenance issues.
Personally I can't wait to move back home where I could own a car, and live in a nice house in the beautiful suburbs where everything I need is 5-15 minutes away and I can go shopping at any time of day without worrying about being robbed.
I live a block from the train station. The store is less than a block from the next station. It still takes FOREVER to go there and back. I don't know how people who live farther out do it.
Not to mention you have no privacy. Cars let you have a lot more privacy than trains. Most people on hacker news care about online privacy,why they are so biased towards something in meatspace that preserves a little of the privacy we have left is beyond me.
I've read all the arguments and I just don't think it's superior in terms of privacy period, for convenience; public transit is only better in the most dense cities, even then it's convenience varies greatly by person depending on where you live and where you need to go.
No one is advocating that you _don't_ own a car. Cars were a great invention, they've reduced the size of our world, and genuinely made life better, no doubt.
But an entire world undertaking clown-like 40 mile commutes each way, or getting into their tin boxes just to drive down to a store 3 miles away to buy some dishwashing soap because they're too lazy for bikes is no panacea either. Because what you're saying that your store is literally less than two train stations away, and you can only make that journey in a car.
And that hyperbole about the "little of privacy we have left" is exactly that. Hyperbolic. What exactly are you doing in a car during your morning commute that requires levels of privacy that trains simply cannot offer? Listening to music? Reading a book? Working on your laptop? News flash. You can do all of that on a train, and no one cares.
What I will concede is that the US is particularly idiotic in not offering even a semblance of reliability in their public transport. I stayed in DC, and the metro their is prone to failure, with the buses being even less frequent and late. However, a well functioning public transit system is a blessing and every city/suburb lacking it is the worse for it.
I addressed the privacy point below, but to repeat myself, what you do during the commute is not my main worry, its where you go, when and with whom. I would think thats obvious.
"And that hyperbole about the "little of privacy we have left" is exactly that"
As to whether that is hyperbole, after the things that have come out in the last few years I think many people would agree with me not you.
The hyperbole here is your '40 mile commute'. Very few people have commutes that far. Its funny I would argue that those two situation are particularly convenient to do in a car. If you are one of those suckers with a super long commute you probably want the freedom to run errands on the way or have the freedom to stick around at one place until late ( after the stupid trains stop running for example) Quick store runs a mile or two away are actually quick when you don't have a 5-10 min walk to the train/bus stop and 5 - ? minute wait with the slow commute in between.
I just love this silly attempt all over hacker news and reddit to shame people into riding bikes. Why don't you stop lazily using that phone to communicate with people and go find them and tell them in person, or how about you throw out your oven and start roasting your meals over a fire. What is considered lazy is very subjective. Using technology that makes things easier/quicker is not something I consider lazy.
Also, I admit that my 40 mile commute was also a hyperbolic statement designed to achieve the same effect as yours. But, indeed, if you somehow contrive to create a lifestyle involving a 40 mile commute, I agree that the car is a superior solution. My contention is that we should strive as hard as we can NOT to end up with a long-ass commute.
And, again, far be it from me to shame you into anything. Enjoy your car if you do. Perhaps you're even one of the responsible ones who drives a fuel efficient hatchback, and only when he needs to. However, there is a good chunk of America that takes massive loans to buy $60,000 F-350s or something and then runs themselves into bankruptcy and zero retirement savings.
Also, using technology to make things easier is almost the definition of laziness. A scythe, as an example, cuts grass better than a manual lawn mower, which is better than an internal combustion-propelled lawn mower, which requires frequent maintenance, is orders of magnitudes more expensive, and makes you fat and lazy. Yet how many people use scythes? Laziness. Convenience.
"Especially when you're likely carrying an iPhone"
You can power down (or remove the battery if possible) from your phone.
And yes the risk is more that city and state governments will use it. And since many have been caught using and abusing stuff like stingrays and license plate readers it's not a stretch by any means to assume. Who wants to live in cities that are under a microscope like London.
Your right though, nobody is trying to force me. Now I'm going to go turn on my robot mower. Enjoy cutting grass with your scythe. Watch your legs! And have fun cleaning up all the clippings. I'll be with my family, being fat and "lazy"
1. 5 minutes to drive anywhere in the suburbs---bwahahaha, you must be joking. When everyone lives in the suburbs, it's all sprawl, and some left turn lights take 5 minutes. You know, if I had to sum up one reason why I left the suburbs, it's the left turn lights in Silicon Valley: the roads are so large, they don't trust people to yield on left turns, so they make you wait for a left turn arrow whether there is traffic or not.
2. License plate recognition is much simpler and more reliable than face recognition. And it's already deployed. Just sayin'.
2 license plate readers traffic cams etc, are all things that are bolted on top of the road/car system. People can and are fighting them. But trains are the perfect transportation system for surveillance. All the data is there built in. While getting rid of surveillance on the road will be hard, pigs will fly before they remove cameras and anonymize payments on trains.
But to point out the obvious it's not just about what you do/say while you are driving but also where you go, when, and with who to name a few things.
For example, It's very different to argue that since I am in public I don't have the right to not be photographed compared to arguing that I don't have the right to not be tracked. These public transit systems have tracking built in from the start. At least stuff like traffic cams that are just bolted on to infrastructure can be fought
You can see how this sort of system could result in the richest transit customers being skimmed off to uber. Public transit is left with less customers, and with only the poorest and most marginalized ones. In such a state it is easy for public transit to be increasingly discredited and defunded, which continues the downward spiral further.
San Francisco, of course, is different - public transit is so terrible that many those who can afford other choices are already pursuing other options after multiple failed reform attempts. Further changes run into political backlashes. So the worry seems wrongheaded here, too.
The idea is that if you make better-off people take public transit then they will help fix it. This only works if everyone else also wants it fixed (often untrue) and the same people cannot opt out in another way (also often untrue).
With that last point in mind, diverting funding to some other parallel but not equal system simply muddles things. It decreases the amount of available funding for public transit and makes it harder to accomplish the main task of making public transit really good.
The majority of people in middle America whose lives are organized without any regard whatsoever for public transit are not interested in funding it "really well". They're accustomed to zipping across town in their car, directly to their destination. They pay, at most, $300-$400 out-of-pocket a month for a high degree of personal autonomy and a guarantee of never being panhandled or sexually assaulted as they transit to work and back, knowing that no matter how late they are out they can get home in a reasonable amount of time.
Those are the people to whom public transit advocates must appeal. These are the affluent consumers that need to be attracted. These are the people to whom, in most of middle America, public transit sounds like hell.
Once upon a time I lived in San Antonio, Texas. I figured I could get by without a car. There was a bus system. There was a stop right next to my place. It was reasonable, right? After a month of spending a minimum of three hours a day on the buses for twenty minutes of driving, I gave up and got a car so I could have all those hours of my life back.
That's what results look like when things are "really well" funded. The city is too geographically sprawling for any remotely cost-effective public transit system to be competitive. In smaller towns, it's so much worse. It's difficult to conceive of any public transit system that can offer cost-effective and offer competitive service at a population density of 40 per square km.
For most of these people, a parallel system can hardly be less useful than the buses they have.
Stop running the buses, pass laws to require Uber to serve persons with disabilities, then give poor people a monthly pass with credits.
On the one hand there does seem to be an opportunity for more efficient shared transportation in (somewhat) spread-out areas. I know that near where I live, there's a "regional" small bus service but I assume pretty much no one uses it besides the infirm and poor. (Because anyone who can owns a car.) In general, I've seen more casual and lower overhead small busses in places like Russia than in the US.
That said, I also appreciate the concerns raised in the article that if you create something better for the top 50% case, you may make the bottom 50% case totally untenable--however marginally usable it is today.
ok, so small municipality runs a bus service for the elderly, disabled and indigent. as one might expect given the need and tax base, its pretty threadbare.
so instead we have a ridesharing service whose drivers are local, whose customers are local, and whose costs are partially paid for out of the limited local tax base.
now I'm sure that the municipality would do a lousy job of running that service on their own. it doesn't seem completely corrupt, but it also doesn't sound quite right to be underwriting uber's business with local tax income either.
The article brings up a serious shortcoming with the Uber approach, however, and that's access for people lacking the technological means to hail an Uber or with physical disabilities that make traveling in a regular passenger car difficult. The smartphone issue can be addressed in a pretty low-tech way: a phone number that someone can call and an operator can arrange for the pickup. As for folks with disabilities, I'm afraid that the best solution would be to have at least one van or small bus with a wheelchair lift that can be dispatched.
I think that the future of municipal mass transit will probably include traditional buses in most places, that don't follow a set route but instead pick up and drop people off as necessary, supplemented by cars with private drivers that provide extra capacity in peak times and possibly provide 24 hour service.
Not sure how well it works, though I see a lot of their vehicles from my Bike. Apparently they operate in Washington and Kansas City.
There is also in Boston public transport (The Ride) for those with disabilites that does something similar point to point transit
IIRC, at least one of these public transit / Uber partnerships includes a standard phone number that people can call to order an Uber.