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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

People obviously prefer SOVs to standing on trains. Why not give people what they want if we can develop technology to do it?

The entire conversation surrounding city planning, whether the specific topic is transportation, zoning, or utilities, has take on a weird ascetic moralizing tone, where the subtext is that the modes of existence people choose for themselves is somehow "bad", that we need to accept limits, and that the accommodations and compromises consequently made are good for us.

I don't share that mindset. To borrow an old phrase, better living through technology really is possible.

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Well, a city is about living together in a community. "Bad" lifestyle choices certainly exist, such as littering - it's something that can be helpful to the individual but have a negative impact on the community. Planning a city is as much about shaping cultural values as it is about adapting to existing ones.

> Planning a city is as much about shaping cultural values as it is about adapting to existing ones.

No it isn't, and city planners employed by the people shouldn't try to use their influence to shape culture.

There is no realistic apportioning of resources, or set of plausible new technologies, that will give safe and effective cars the >7 billion people on this planet in the next century. At least not without drastic downsides. Cars work great for the wealthy, and are tolerated by the less-wealthy for lack of better options, but are not in any circumstances an egalitarian option. (And, btw, that's likely why you feel like the arguments against cars have an "ascetic moralizing tone"- use of single-person cars is a taken-for-granted habit into which is built deep inequality.)

I don't think you're right about car technology scaling, but let's suppose you're right. Why it would follow from cars being infeasible for seven billion people that the citizens of a rich first-world country should have their car use discouraged?

Radical egalitarianism is an intensely political position, and city planners shouldn't be pushing it on the population at large by artificially discouraging certain modes of transportation. They should focus on the preferences of the populations they actually serve, not on some Utopian ideal.

I personally have no problems with people taking their SOVs into the cities, but you do have to acknowledge that taking up excessive space obligates you to have to pay extra costs for taking up that space. In practice, many people who want to commute via SOV often take great umbrage anytime a city takes steps to make them pay the true cost of that decision.

There's nothing particularly "radical" about it; if you weight everyone's utility equally when you design, e.g. a city, then the result is one that is definitionally egalitarian. And that is precisely what it means for governments to, as you say, "focus on the preferences of the populations they actually serve." Egalitarianism is only "radical" in the sense that, in most real contexts, some the desires of some subset of people are considered more important- for instance, the people who can pay more, or are a more effective voter bloc.

Not that I think the above is the decisive factor against wider adoption of public transportation. The bigger issue is an activation energy problem- public transit is only bearable and useful when a substantial portion of public funds are allocated to them, but the bulk of the public isn't currently inclined to have that happen since they don't presently use the (unbearable and useless) public transit option. Cars are a fairly vicious local maxima.

> There is no realistic apportioning of resources, or set of plausible new technologies, that will give safe and effective cars the >7 billion people on this planet in the next century. At least not without drastic downsides.

What are you basing this on, and why would you say it as if it is obvious? This is exactly the sort of weird fatalism the GP is talking about.

There are already a billion cars on the planet, which is enough for 7 billion people with autonomous self-driving. 90% of US households own a car and the rest of the world will catch up with US wealth within a century. Even current-day-tech electric cars and nuclear power could be used to power them without carbon (at large expense but one that could be afforded after a century of economic growth).

Where good public transport systems exist, people use the hell out of them. It is so much nicer to travel by train from point-to-point and not have to worry about parking.

What if parking is done by the car via self driving technology? Would you still prefer the train?

In rush hour in plenty of cities, trains will almost always be quicker, because they can move more people per hour than the road network can. (If you look at some metro systems, you can get up to 60,000 passengers per hour on a single track; for a highway, 2,000 cars per lane per hour is considered good: if you're all in SOVs, you're talking 30 lanes in each direction to be comparable with a single train line.)

What if the 'train' picks you up at the door and gets to your destination exactly when expected? would you still prefer to park autonomously blocks away?

At least where I live, parking is sparse and therefore expensive. That's a good thing, because parking space is a waste of land that could be put to a more productive use.

So yes I still prefer the train. Buses are cool too!

I prefer solitude. Give me a compartment on that train and I'll reconsider my preference for automobile transportation.

put on some headphones and a blindfold then, cars really don't work in high-density environments. if you want to be alone, try living somewhere with less people where cars actually make sense.

> People obviously prefer SOVs to standing on trains. Why not give people what they want if we can develop technology to do it?

SOVs just take up so much space, about 20× that of normal standing density. In cities were even the mass transit is oversubscribed, there is no possible way to fit in SOV. Even burrowing in tunnels doesn't work--you'd still have to somehow squeeze the access ramps in. Cities that try to be SOV-centric instead of transit-centric end up having really large sprawl and lose the benefits of being close to anything.

To give you a sharp visual statement of the difference in space. When trains disgorged their passengers at Union Station in Toronto, people would often stream across the surrounding streets without particularly regard for crosswalks. When traffic was waiting at the light on Simcoe St, there was more people walking between the cars than there was sitting in the cars waiting for the light to change.

In places like London, a major problem with the underground system is that even space to surface vents for aircon etc. is restricted enough for it to be a problem. Fitting access ramps would be a massive problem.

The lack of space for aircon vents has gotten to the point where the clay surrounding the underground tunnels are permanently 5+ degrees warmer than it was when the system was built, because not enough heat is pumped back out, and it soaks up less and less of the waste heat. Most of central London is basically sitting on top of a giant clay heatsink.

Building down also doesn't add all that much when trains run frequently enough that junctions/intersections are not viable without delays or sacrificing speed. As well as when depth changes need to be very gradual...

The irony is that building more tunnels is by far easiest in cities too small to need the capacity - if you have long intervals between trains, for example, junctions become a far more manageable problem, leaving far more trajectories free to use.

A lot of human activity has positive and negative consequences that have to be balanced. We have a democratic system that gives some of that responsibility to government.

With this kind of debate you will hear a stream of fact based arguments about the correct thing to do. Arguments that are put in opposition to one another. Is it more important to reduce journey times or save a particular habitat? Is the view out of your window more important than reducing emissions by building wind farms. These kind of questions are impossible to answer in an objective way because it is so ridiculous to create such dichotomies.

The facts do matter, but in the end it always comes down to a moral judgement. That is how humans balance complex conflicting issues. And this applies just as much to technology as anything else. By believing in the promise of technology you are making a moral judgement. But it is far too complex to really understand fully. That is why you make a gut decision.

People don't know what they want, that is why advertising is consumer farming.

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