Automated Vehicles Can't Save Cities | Hacker News Reader

Automated Vehicles Can't Save Cities

nytimes.com

16 pointsochang24 comments

I get the argument, but my quality of life will be improved dramatically without the constant road rage-inducing craziness of my 23 minute commute.

It's quite likely that your commute will get longer than 23 minutes as autonomous vehicles remove the barriers to driving and encourage more people to drive, thus increasing congestion.

Yeah, but you’ll be able to use all that wait time consuming ads!

What I think the author fails to touch on well is the fact that transit is not sexy or at least not sexy yet, at least in the United States.

Have you ever noticed that most car commercials capture the essence of a confident person in control of their own destiny? I know it sounds like b* but they all do it.

The reality is drivers are in control of their own destiny if they were driving on a road by themselves.

The United States has to figure out a way to make mass transit sexy sooner rather than later,otherwise it will never work.

The hilarious thing is investing in High-Speed Rail maybe one of the best things that the US can do because not only will it make people happier if they run as efficiently as they do in Japan but the cost of goods could severely go down therefore eliminating some poverty which the u.s. census has reported that transportation or rather lack of access to it has been linked to poverty.

Sorry, the figure of 1600 cars per hour is complete and utter bullshit. If just 5 cars get through a signal on a 30 second cycle, that’s 600 cars per hour. For a single intersection. How many intersections are there in a city?

A well designed intersection can easily get 20 cars through per cycle.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of bus lanes and really a fan of light rail. But I really hate this type of hype where basic assumptions don’t pass the smell test.

And if you want to get into some real economics, a system like the LA Metro Authority operates at about 20% Fare Box Recovery. That means for every $1 of fare collected, a subsidy of $4 is required to keep the system running. At least when someone drives their own car, they are actually paying their own way.

The numbers appear to be for how much traffic can pass in a single lane's worth of space. Their numbers make sense for a single traffic lane[1], one subway line[2] and one 2.5 meter (a bit narrower than a standard traffic lane) bike path[3], all of which take up pretty close to the same amount of space.

[1] http://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-engineer-...

[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/passenger-capacity-of-transit-2798...

[3] https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5_Zhou-Xu-Wang-...

A single lane does not tell the traffic story for an entire city.

It would be nonsensical to state numbers for the total number of people can who move through an entire city because it is heavily dependent on how much space is dedicated to each mode of travel. They are making a comparison of how many people who can move through a given amount of space depending on what mode of transportation they are using.

The figure of 25,000 people/hour in buses makes sense to me in a city like L.A. This is where I'm taking issue with the whole article, their basis for analysis is apples-to-oranges.

If you look at the sources I linked they give the estimates of 1900 vehicles per hour as the theoretical maximum capacity for a lane of traffic, 30k people per hour as the maximum capacity for a single subway line and 10k people per hour as the maximum capacity for a 2.5 meter bike path.

Those are all pretty close to the numbers they gave for each mode of transit, so it seems reasonable to assume that they are basing their numbers on something similar to that. That is an apples-to-apples comparison because each of those things takes up very close to the same amount of space.

I read your sources. Your source, in particular the 1900 cars/lane/hour specifically illustrates the poor quality of this article, where the author tries to take us into an alternate universe where the theoretical maximum flow of passenger vehicles is 1600/CITY/hour.

The author never stated 1600/city/hour. That is an inference you are making.

> At least when someone drives their own car, they are actually paying their own way.

Do they? The sheer amount of infrastructure for cars and parking make me question that statement.

Taxes

That doesn’t really answer the question.

How does it not? People pay their taxes, income, sales and use tax, gasoline, whatever form their local government uses to fund roads, and their fair share of the road use comes out of their pocket. So, yes, driving your own car IS actually paying your own way.

Do people not pay their taxes for public transport too?

You had quite specific numbers for the amount of the journey cost that the user pays for public transport, what are the equivalent numbers for drivers?

My intuition is road and parking projects are so spectacularly expensive I doubt drivers are paying their full costs via petrol excise and registration fees.

Obviously it's different in every city, but if we're going to have a conversation about the merits of subsidizing (or not) public transport then we should probably have figures for comparison on privately driven cars.

"taxes" doesn't cut it.

I can't vouch for the quality of this post, but it illustrates my thinking: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/05/debunking-the...

Perhaps you have better figures.

This was some weak ass logic.

I was thinking that. Even the title implies cites need saving whereas in reality they are growing merrily - it's the isolated small towns that need saving if anything.

I think we can all agree that cities should be “humans first”, not “car first”.

cities don't exist in a vacuum. Many towns die because something essential like a coal mine was removed from the economy, just like removing cars (no matter how noble) could kill some cities too.

I wasn't able to read the article. It was completely blank in my browser.

Could you say who is saying that we should remove cars from a city, even to the point that it would kill the city?

Because I've not heard anyone propose that. I've heard of car-free regions of a city, and cities like Venice which effectively had no private cars, and bans on some cars (like gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles in favor of electric).

But never to the point that it would kill a city.

You have to physically click the page on it in order for it to load. The page is interactive even though the it doesn't explicitly say so. The New York Times assumes you know.

Interesting. It's acting different now than yesterday, so perhaps they fixed something?

Thanks for pointing it out.

Clicking on a bajillion one-sentence pages might win a design award but it's awful to read. I didn't.

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