Riding alone in a car is an increasingly unaffordable luxury
economist.com
economist.com
Is it "colossal?" The U.S. is a $19 trillion economy with 156 million people in the labor force. $87 billion is about $557 per person annually, about half of what people spend on coffee each year: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/american-coffee-habits-spend-coff....
That's actually much lower than I would have thought, considering that traffic is such a big fact of life. That suggests that measures to reduce traffic may not be worthwhile.
Even if we eliminated cars people still have to get to work/stores/church/school/home/etc... Mass transit options are more efficient in many ways than single occupant cars, but only occasionally are they faster.
Cars are a bare necessity due to how badly we fucked up urban planning. And we fucked it up because we planned around cars.
It's not degrading city centers, you still need trucks to stock your stores, you still need tourism.
If everyone that lived in the city centers took public transportation, the already built roads would be freed for foreign traffic.
As you say, there's nobody living in rural areas so they wouldn't have a huge impact on the roads. They can share it with the buses and trucks.
I see this kind of elitism of urban > rural a lot here.
You're generalizing people based on race, that's racism.
You need freeways to connect cities and transport goods, I don't see what that has to do with cities not properly funding public transportation.
Urban cities need rural areas for foods and goods. You're living in a bubble of your own elitism. There's more to America than your city, go travel, you'll need a car though :)
You don't see it because you aren't paying attention. In Wisconsin the people of Milwaukee had to sue the state because the state transportation agency cut funding for bus service in black, car-free Milwaukee while spending $1.7bn on an interchange to serve overwhelmingly white people from the surrounding area. It was not a meritless suit; WisDOT settled.
Like all cities, Milwaukee should get their public transportation in order.
That being said, public transportation cannot work for rural areas. It can only work in urban and possibly suburban areas.
NYC has the same problem with the MTA being controlled by the state government, despite the fact that 97% of the state's economic activity originates in NYC.
Any way, if you know anything about American history then you know about the phenomenon where a surrounding entity like a county or state arranges to extract money from a city while also starving it of services. St. Louis is probably the most notable example. Blaming such a city for its own transportation system, while also suggesting that those cities need to spend their own capital to provide parking and driving opportunities to rural citizens, just underlines how little you understand about American cities.
I get what you're saying, but according to this[1], about 46 million people live in rural areas. That's...not nobody.
I am a died-in-the-wool car loving 'Merican, but even I can agree that cities shouldn't necessarily be designed around cars. It'd make the most sense for a park & ride type situation (only one that actually works), where us rural-types can drive in close to the city, park, and take public transit in towards the town.
Edit: as another commenter pointed out, this plan wouldn't absolve the cities of needing roads, because goods still need to make it into the businesses in the city.
(That’s a big difference from Germany, where even in relatively rural areas most people live in villages that are pretty dense.)
We quickly gave up on both, and I ended driving 45 minutes each way, dropping my wife off at work in the process. The bus would just never come. Bus drivers would randomly skip stops. The train was regularly late. That was on the weekday. Once, we tried taking the bus on the weekend to the local mall. After waiting for 45 minutes (during which time three buses were supposed to have come), we went back home and got in the car.
(Another anecdote: When I was in law school, I spent a month in the Menlo Park office of the firm I was working at. Having spent the rest of the summer in the NYC office--before MTA's total collapse--I figured I'd rent something on the train line to get between San Jose and Menlo Park. Hah! A commuter train that runs only every half an hour during peak times? Are you kidding? I ended up renting a car and driving in every day.
Third anecdote--because I've really used a lot of public transit: When I first started working in DC, my wife kept working in Delaware. So we moved right next to Baltimore Penn Station, so she could take the Amtrak up and I could take MARC/Amtrak down. On paper it's under an hour for her, and about an hour and fifteen minutes for me between Amtrak and Metro. Hah! For my trip, Amtrak was routinely 10-15 minutes late, and the trip took 10 minutes more than scheduled. For her trip, Amtrak was regularly 15+ minutes late. And that was when it was almost on time. Several times a month there would be 1+ hour delays.)
That's the reality of public transit for the vast majority of the country. Chicago is basically the only place left that has public transit that runs mostly on time and has decent coverage between bus, subway, and commuter rail. Everywhere else the transit system has either completely broken down (DC, New York), or doesn't go anywhere (Baltimore, Atlanta, etc.).
At best you'll get people saying "the MTA is a corrupt money burner compared to European rail and we need to fix that" or something along those lines but that's about it. It makes sense that people aren't in a hurry to point out the flaws of what they see as a solution to a problem most don't care much about.
Well, that's too bad, because if your "solution" is full of dealbreaking flaws, people won't adopt it. And you will not solve those flaws if you decide they are best ignored while you push the "solution" around.
Mass transit improvement should be the first thing on the list for people that are fighting car use.
We ended up calling the transit center basically every time. Their response was always "they should be there soon". Tons of students echoed the same results.
We went to a town hall meeting on transit. The person at the very top of the transit org-tree claimed he had never heard of these problems before, not even once.
---
At this point, our college was looking to get out of a multi-year agreement for ride discounts in year 1, because everyone who tried to use it was experiencing the same issues. There was already a paper-trail of complaints edging towards breach of contract claims. So the only conclusion we can really see is either a truly horrifying lack of communication along the entire chain, or they wanted to run the transit system into the ground and were intentionally lying about things. For a metro area covering nearly a million people.
---
Edit: this is all of course not helped by a lack of data. Busses didn't even have position tracking (they were "considering" starting a "pilot" with embedded gps reporting location over radio "in the next few years" by the time I left), so the transit center quite possibly truly didn't know where drivers were. Or if their route changes led to any improvement at all. The closer we looked at anything around there related to transit, the more insane it became. Transit in many places goes so far beyond basic negligence, it's hard to believe.
a) you can read or watch movies
b) I walked for 5 minutes each day to get to and from stops
c) It was relaxing on a bus (driving is frustrating in busy traffic).
The benefits only worked when the bus route was convenient between home and work. At my new place the bus takes a very indirect route (slow) and requires a change (I hate time at bus interchange, I don't mind time spent on bus if it is not too much more than driving).
I did notice I still required a car: when my car was off the road for a while I became less social (too much hassle to visit friends without a car).
https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
I used to use PT religiously for many years when I was a young man. To get to work, using PT where I live means a one hour commute as opposed to a 20 minute car drive (one way). Now, having family, I prefer to save those 80 minutes every day and spend them with my kids -- however, there is hardly ever any traffic jams worth talking about where I live.
The sole reason for the longer traveling time on PT is that both my house and my work are not located in the center of the city but on the outskirts. All PT is organized in a star-like pattern, i.e., to go from my house to my work, I first have to take a bus and a train to get into the city center and then another bus to get out of it again. With the car, I never have to into the city in the first place but can drive right around it.
What I'm trying to say is: I find it very hard to imagine that even a very tight public transport net would be able to cover all individual connection needs efficiently. Where I live, a lot of people _do_ use public transport but for many people it would take a lot to make it an attractive alternative (and I'm just taking about travel time here, never mind all the other personal advantages of having your own personal space in which you travel).
Public transport is also quite costly around here, although it's already subsidized by tax money. If everybody starting using PT tomorrow and paid for it, this would create the instant funds needed to extend the connections to meet most people's needs. But it is a chicken/egg problem: as long as the system as it is is experienced as vastly inferior to someone, it will be very hard to convince them to use it. But without more substantially more people using it, the necessary funds to improve the system is missing. Government money (aka, taxes) could help but massive sums would be needed and already now there is never enough public funds to attend to all the things we expect our administration to take care of.
Also I'd feel like we'd just be exchanging time stuck in traffic to time stuck on a bus as it deals with other people's destinations first
I've had to occasionally go to our main corporate office. If I rent a car from the airport, it's about 18 minutes from airport parking lot to door. Taking public transit means the absolute fastest I can get from transit stop to door is 32 minutes (25 minutes of transit + 7 minutes of walking). Taking public transit is an additional 14 minutes added to my commute time.
I'm not against public transit. People are pretending or under the wrong assumption that getting more people onto buses and rails means that the new commute time is now equivalent to driving a car on a road without traffic. You need to factor in time waiting for transit, stops between your pickup and destination, and last mile. Dense cities suffer from less of the last mile problem, because buses can take routes all through a city with more stops. Moving to the outskirts of the city will have a larger last mile problem where few buses are patrolling.
Classic tragedy of the commons.
This is true, but there's still a layer beyond that. There are cities where the layout is built to address the last mile problem. There are hub locations that can allow you to get from point A to B and to C within 5 minutes of each other on foot. This isn't true for many Americans.
Take my example from earlier. If you didn't bring your lunch, your 5 minute walking options from the office are very limited. Expanding to 10 minutes gives more options, but the selection is still very limited. 10 minutes via car gives a much better selection, but 10 minutes via bus (due to waiting and intermediate stops) doesn't get you much further than 10 minutes on foot. Other examples include running and errand after work. If I need to grab something from a store, how much additional time is needed to add an extra stop to go 5 minutes off of my normal commute path?
Again, I'm not against public transportation. Cities need to be designed to accommodate public transportation. Otherwise we are exchanging time idling bumper-to-bumper for time waiting and time hitting intermediate stops.
Someday we'll all have flying scooters/jetpacks and be able to get anywhere point-to-point without being bottlenecked by latency or throughput, but until then, it's gonna be a matter of balancing the two.
The 10 minute difference is the waste. The 15 minutes is some acceptable transit time you agree we must have. This discussion is centered around the waste.
Claiming there is some essential traffic time is a straw man argument
Yeah, but the difference there is that when people spend money on coffee, they're getting a cup of coffee out of the deal. When we spend money on traffic, we're getting hypertension and car accidents instead.
That number is literally just time lost in traffic jams. That doesn't even factor in disutility incurred from actually being in traffic like lost sleep, road rage, traffic fatalities, etc.
That said, roads act in a similar way. If you have to pay a toll for every road, then poor people will use the roads less. If the roads are free, then poor people will use that toll money on other things.
Per the article and the issue of traffic, I guess this means that poor people have more of their time taken away from them whilst sitting in traffic as they drive further and are not being driven around by chauffers. If we got rid of this 'time tax' that is traffic congestion, it would be better for poor people. They would use their time on other things that are good for the economy or their lives.
I'm also skeptical that this 'time tax' is all that high. Emotionally, traffic is a nightmare, and well extends past my time actually spent in it. But that's a seperate issue.
If mandatory parking space regulations etc and other things that spread the price of what is an extremely private luxury on to the general public were removed, let's see how affordable driving remains then.
Sliced bread is substantially lower on the list.
The subject being discussed here is the use of single-occupancy automobiles, which not only create all this unproductive time, but also clog the roads for other uses.
Cars make roads worse, not better.
Unless we want to force everyone to live in cities, single occupancy cars are a necessity, since covering all destinations with public transportation is impractical, especially suburban/rural environments.
tbh I really don't know, but if you argue for reinforced surface + moving people with wheels and pulled by an animal, you might have "cars" before "roads".
Over 6 trillion miles were driven in 2017 in the US, the vast majority of that in single occupancy vehicles.
Far from being “eliminated completely” or “drastically reduced”, I expect through the power of autonomous driving and EVs designed for 1,000,000 mile lifespans, that passenger-miles number will in fact double by 2030.
Roads predate cars by more than order of magnitude so that clearly is not true.
The issue with single occupancy cars is clearly different in rural vs urban settings and depends heavily on population density.
Both of the following are true:
Non-car owners in high density areas are subsidizing car owners in those areas. The lack of a need to pay for usage of those roads increases the cost of the transportation infrastructure (via increasing the attractiveness of car ownership and usage).
Dwellers in high density areas are subsidizing dwellers in low density areas. The lack of a need to pay for usage increases the attractiveness of dwelling in low density areas.
Nobody is suggesting that forcibly moving everyone to cities or taking away their cars is needed. However, perhaps people should pay the full costs of those choices in the interests of encouraging efficiency.
Strongly disagree. First off, car ownership is typically expensive in dense areas, and those with enough income to own vehicles are likely paying more in taxes toward these subsidies. Further, many, if not most subsidies for roads come from costs directly associated with ownership, like registration taxes, gas taxes, and toll fees.
Now it may be true that these fees are not enough to cover the full cost of roads in the US[1], but if you consider that both road users and non users derive additional benefits from roads beyond direct use (in the form of cheaper transportation of goods, emergency services, public transportation), and that users pay an additional share of taxes that non users don't, then this subsidy by non users is probably quite small. In any case according to [1] the overall tax burden, not considering offsets by general benefits of roads for non users, is only $597 per household.
1.https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
I'll grant there is likely a correlation between the amount of taxes paid and car ownership. However, isolating segments based on income means that within each segment, the car owners are being subsidized by the non-car owners.
> Further, many, if not most subsidies for roads come from costs directly associated with ownership, like registration taxes, gas taxes, and toll fees.
I don't think the numbers support you here, it varies significantly by state (from 5% to 80% with a mean around 50%) [2]
2. https://taxfoundation.org/road-spending-state-funded-user-ta...
> In any case according to [1] the overall tax burden, not considering offsets by general benefits of roads for non users, is only $597 per household.
That is just the construction and maintenance cost, that same document gives the following number: "Aside from gas taxes and individuals’ expenditures for their own driving, U.S. households bear on average an additional burden of more than $1,100 per year in taxes and other costs imposed by driving."
If you look at my source's prior article (which didn't include federal gas taxes) the average amount paid is closer to 30%.
So taken together (which may mix incompatible data), a rough estimate of the subsidy is an average of ~7-800 per household which I would not call "quite small". I suspect this estimate is somewhat low based on my understanding of how those two sources calculate costs.
While this makes some amount of sense, it also increases the cost , which is subsidized by everyone regardless of car ownership.
This did not include $28 billion from the Federal gas tax, so $49 billion becomes $77 billion.
Looking into the Census data, it also inexplicably doesn’t include $21 billion of “Motor vehicle license” revenue. So we’re up to $98 billion.
It also does not appear to include motor vehicle sales taxes, nor motor vehicle property taxes.
I can’t find a figure for property tax, but I did find a report that in 2013 sales taxes for new and used vehicles totaled $38.9 billion. We are now approaching 100%...
An AutoAlliance report calculates in 2013 the auto sector paid $110 billion in State taxes and $98 billion in Federal taxes. [1] Even this does not include vehicle property taxes, as the amount is not readibly calculable due to the sheer number of entries that collect this kind of tax.
By comparison, the report linked from your [2] link did include this;
> In 2010, state and local governments spent $60 billion on mass transit, ... , in turn raising $13 billion in mass transit fares, ...
Seems like it’s mass transit that’s the one which is heavily subsidized.
[1] - https://autoalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Assessme...
There are orders of magnitude more utility derived from using roads with modern vehicles which travel 6+ times faster than horses or humans on foot, such that using roads without cars would be practically useless in comparison.
If somehow we immediately ran out of gasoline to power those vehicles, our economy would suffer a major loss of efficiency. However, the roads themselves would still be fundamentally and practically useful:
They are public right-of-ways that allow foot, bicycle and other traffic access to private property.
They are established routes along which travel is easier, services are available and landmarks are available for easy navigation.
In fact, those fundamental uses of roads are sometimes improved by banning cars from them in some areas/times:
https://matadornetwork.com/read/cities-banning-cars-city-cen...
Everyone pays for the roads, and whether you have a car or not, you benefit tremendously from having them.
Whether it is trucks stocking shelves at your local stores and grocer, vans delivering your Amazon packages, Lyfts bringing you to a customer meeting, or even indirectly, cars bringing people you’ll never meet—and hence economic activity—into your city, or into your high rise.
Not having a car is a personal luxury enabled by the massive infrastructure that is built around you. That infrastructure is made possible by roads. Arguably people who don’t have cars are the ones who aren’t paying their fair share.
A high utilization Tesla Model 3 has costs per mile, including electricity, of around $0.10-$0.15/mile.
For comparison, the gas tax alone on the average vehicle was about $0.01-$0.02/mile 10 years ago. (Depends on your state and your MPG)
When that vehicle can drive itself from most Point As to most Point Bs on most days, public transit doesn’t have prayer of competing.
So new regimes will be needed to fund the roads, but roads are one of the few good things government does for me. I really like roads. Make more and make them better, make them smooth and make them smart. Make them safe and make them fast. And then we will all use them to go out every day and make money.
The good news is we won’t need a lot of new parking spaces in this rapidly approaching future. But we will need some new forms of taxing driving, and I’m mostly afraid of the privacy implications.
People who don't drive cars are unusual, if you think otherwise you're in a bubble and don't much understand the rest of the country.
> For comparison, the gas tax alone on the average vehicle was about $0.01-$0.02/mile 10 years ago. (Depends on your state and your MPG)
> When that vehicle can drive itself from most Point As to most Point Bs on most days, public transit doesn’t have prayer of competing.
Basically you're talking about a highly utilized, self-driving electric vehicle with virtually infinite range.
I believe you're describing Vancouver SkyTrain -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver)
And replace a fixed timetable schedule and massive upfront capital costs with perfectly elastic timetables and consumer subsidized capital costs (Tesla Fleet).
Double the top speed. Add a few zeros to the daily ridership. Add 4 zeros to the number of vehicles. Etc...
Putting people on rails makes no sense when the electric cars drive themselves.
Um... traffic? Road infrastructure costs? Energy efficiency?
The cost per mile is already too low. That’s the over-demand problem being discussed in TFA.
Autonomous driving technology will triple existing highway capacity by ~2050 when it becomes illegal to drive non-autonomously. That’s a lot of “free” infrastructure.
We should not invest billions in light rail that will be unprofitable its entire life and archaic in 50 years.
Higher density vehicles (like buses) increase road cost efficiency even more. For long distances, rail is far more efficient in terms of both energy and infrastructure cost.
> The cost per mile is already too low. That’s the over-demand problem being discussed in TFA.
The article doesn't really have a clear thesis and its (unsupported) title sort of contradicts that. The best I can tell is that the articles tries to argue that single-occupancy car trips should (and will) become more expensive because of no longer being subsidized.
> Autonomous driving technology will triple existing highway capacity by ~2050 when it becomes illegal to drive non-autonomously. That’s a lot of “free” infrastructure.
The wasted space of, and maintenance costs for, that infrastructure makes it far from "free".
In the short term, the degree to which autonomous cars and ride hailing make single occupancy car trips more available and affordable is going to increase the congestion and amount of needed infrastructure.
> We should not invest billions in light rail that will be unprofitable its entire life and archaic in 50 years.
The trade-offs of light rail vs. buses is complicated. I highly suspect that buses, and infrastructure to support buses is often the better choice. That is especially true given the flexibility we need in the face of a changing transportation landscape.
That doesn't justify "self-driving cars" mean mass transit "makes no sense". For some of that mass transit, rail is still the best option.
An inner-city bus ride costs $2.00 and doesn't get me door to door. The cost of getting to the bus and getting from the bus stop to my actual destination pushes that, even at minimum wage, probably closer to $5+. That's 30 miles (at cost) door to door in a hypothetical Tesla RoboTaxi! How can a bus compete with that?
Yes, a bus is a much more efficient use of space on the road, but it is not more efficient to the individual riders. Hence the negative externality. But in reality, the real-world usage (market-share) of buses and light rail is so negligible as to be almost entirely irrelevant.
"US Passenger Miles" according to the Bureau of Transportation in 2017 for Highway travel is 5,502,417. That number is in Millions. Whoa... That does include 365,220 labeled "Bus" which appears to be private charter, not public transit.
In the "Transit" section "Bus" is 19,343 and "Light rail" is 2,795, "Commuter Rail" is 12,321 million passenger miles.
That means Bus, Light, and Commuter Rail total 34,459 million passenger miles, which is ~0.6% the number of Passenger-Miles traveled by private vehicles on the highway.
By the way, for longer rail trips, Amtrak is 6,527 million passenger miles in 2017 (declining year over year) and air travel is 693,818 million passenger miles and growing year over year. Heck, lets get electrified air travel and ditch trains for passenger travel as well.
Heavy freight via train will still possibly make sense, although autonomous trucking will probably steal a lot of market share. For hazardous materials and national security purposes you probably still need the heavy freight network to be operational. It would be cooler if the really big stuff all went via dirigible though.
The alternate way of looking at is that you will be paying 3x more in maintenance and space usage then you need to. By not planning ahead for this "certainty" you have tripled the amount you need to spend on transportation infrastructure in the future.
In the intervening 30 years, you will have had to deal with spiking demand from how self-driving cars reduce the cost of car trips. To prevent having to build a bunch of infrastructure that will eventually become unneeded, mass transit is critical to avoid wasting money and space.
We need to ween ourselves off of needing all of this road capacity with usage and congestion based surge pricing. As self driving cars begin to increase usage efficiency, we can slowly lower the usage fees charged to self driving car to further incentivize the transition to self driving cars.
> An inner-city bus ride costs $2.00 and doesn't get me door to door. The cost of getting to the bus and getting from the bus stop to my actual destination pushes that, even at minimum wage, probably closer to $5+. How can a bus compete with that?
By charging a usage fee to push riders to more space and energy efficient forms of transit.
There are also other improvements that can be made to improve last-mile transit options. My skateboard does a very good job of this and I expect to see more scooters.
I also think that autonomous vehicles have a large role to play in helping with these last-mile trips in less dense areas where the "last-mile" may be several miles or more and space is at less of a premium.
> the real-world usage (market-share) of buses and light rail is so negligible as to be almost entirely irrelevant.
The good thing is that this give us a lot of space to compensate for the increased demand for transit that self-driving cars will bring.
Why would the road infrastructure ever become unneeded? It's more needed than ever with the rise of incredibly cheap, extremely convenient, on-demand private transportation. The availability of which increases productivity and drives overall GDP growth and prosperity.
I don't see why it follows that we need to ween ourselves off of roads. Roads are the backbone of our economy, and more efficient use of roads provides huge economic benefit. More availability of on-demand low cost private transport is an amazing benefit to low-income workers.
Usage fees for roads that are being used more efficiently than ever, to try to drive people to less efficient (for them) modes of transportation, is a recipe for suppressing growth. It's a regressive tax which disproportionately impacts the poor.
Scooters are neat. Scooters are "0.1" relative to cars "5,500,000" in the 2017 million-passenger miles table. Maybe that grows 1000x to be a "100". But in a fully autonomous future, scooters are obsolete and not worth the investment in designated travel lanes. Creative future designs for super-light autonomous personal transport will certainly not take the form of a "scooter".
Yes, lowering the costs (in time, money, energy and space) of transit increases the efficiency of our economy. It also increases the demand for such.
> Why would the road infrastructure ever become unneeded?
You were the one who said that eliminating non-self-driving cars would triple the space efficiency (and probably increase the other efficiencies as well). Are you claiming that this would lead to a commensurate tripling of demand? Otherwise you are looking at having more road capacity than is needed.
The issue that I see is that the increase of demand spurred by self-driving cars and robot taxis will happen well BEFORE we reach the point where those self-driving cars provide increases in traffic capacity (space) efficiency.
This timing mis-match will further exacerbate traffic and parking problems in major cities (reduced time, energy and space efficiency). These costs fall directly on those who will increasingly be forced to live further away from work which will disproportionately impact the poor.
Of course, if you increase usage fees without providing effective mass transit systems, park-n-rides and last mile solutions then this also serves as a regressive tax on the poor. This is the problem with simply increasing gas taxes rather than finding ways to directly tax congestion.
> Usage fees for roads that are being used more efficiently than ever, to try to drive people to less efficient (for them) modes of transportation, is a recipe for suppressing growth. It's a regressive tax which disproportionately impacts the poor.
Without usage fees, self-driving cars will lead to roads being used less efficiently due to decreased usage of public transit and increased traffic. If you grant that mass transit is socially more efficient, then increased usage of that will lead to spurred growth.
It is the optimization of individual efficiency, with its associated externalized social costs, that will slow economic growth overall. Single occupant vehicles may be the most efficient choice for the individual, but if everyone drives, then the use of single occupant vehicles is less efficient than it would be if fewer people drove. This is the paradox of the "tragedy of the commons", it doesn't just hurt society but has a direct negative impact on your individual well being.
> Scooters are great. Scooters are "0.1" relative to cars "5,500,000" in the 2017 million-passenger miles table. Maybe that grows 1000x to be a "100".
I think you misunderstand. First I meant a "kick" scooter (or electric kick style scooter) as opposed to a "small motorcycle" scooter as I suspect you interpreted. Secondly, I am talking about their use as a "last-mile" option which you would never expect to account for a large number of passenger-miles as they are supposed to be used for very short trips and "last-mile" portions on longer trips.
Edit: As a side note, I doubt we will see the nationwide banning of person-driven vehicles in our lifetimes. Americans love their cars and I doubt you will see them taken away easily. I suspect we may see the banning of person-driven cars in city centers much sooner.
And I got the SkyTrain numbers from the provided Wikipedia link, the Tesla costs from an Autolist report on Model 3 depreciation, and the gax tax cost hand waved based on $0.35/gallon and 25mpg (US average).
I enjoy riding motorcycles because the performance per dollar has been unrivaled. However, the Model 3 Performance (heck, even the dual motor Model 3) is really incredible - it can sprint to 60 mph in ~3 seconds and it consumes very little energy per mile in regular driving.
Once used Model 3s with full self driving are available for less than $30k, I'm going to strongly consider one. The only reason I haven't bought one outright is because I may come to find it makes more sense just to use the Tesla network for when I need a car.
I run top-of-the-line tires on my motorcycle, doing so costs me around $0.06/mile, for the price of motorcycle tires I could depreciate a $60k car over 1 million miles! I imagine insurance will eventually favor the Tesla and the Tesla already costs less per mile in 'fuel'.
I'm curious to see how people solve this problem. Wealthy people can afford to move into urban centers to save money on commuting costs, but relatively poor people will be stuck in the old suburbs. I suspect motorcycle-class vehicles will begin appearing from upstart manufactures which are effectively single- or dual-seater three wheelers with closed cabins that are cheap to purchase and operate.
This was a big factor in the Ferguson riots in 2014, IMO. The city had significant budgetary pressure that they managed through for-profit policing (traffic fines a big one), which intensified the racial divide there, and this is why the budgetary pressure arose.
Tunnels, electric cars, nuclear power (or solar, if you're prepared to sacrifice people's as-yet unsatisfied needs and unsolved suffering to that).
https://peopleforbikes.org/blog/bicycles-are-instantaneous-t...
Nearly all the public transportation/cycling naysaying I read seems to be from people who didn't consider (or at least didn't prioritize) non-private automobile transportation into their housing decision, and typically, it's at great cost to them[1].
1. http://cityobservatory.org/transportation_housing_affordabil...
The relevant part is cited in this article[1]. Of course, the calculation might be off for your specific case, so YMMV (so apt).
[1]:https://www.notechmagazine.com/2010/04/the-industrialization...
Besides being fun, biking to work is good for your health and for the environment. Take a look at all the benefits of riding a bike!
Reduce air pollution: In the Bay Area, 43% of all car trips are two miles or shorter. For short trips, bicycling is an important tool to reduce air pollution: up to 70% of emissions from a 10-mile trip occur within the first mile.
Stay healthy and fit: Bicycling to work is a great way to get exercise every day. The well-documented obesity epidemic contributes to heart disease, cancer, stroke and type 2 diabetes, which together make up 40% of the leading causes of death in Oakland.
Save money: With gas prices unlikely to decline in the long-term, bicycling makes more financial sense than ever; a bike’s annual operating cost is estimated to be $120 (as opposed to. $5,000-12,000 for a car).
Ease street congestion: Twelve bicycles can fit in the space needed to park a single car.The one I am making is "If a human could eat gasoline, there would be orders of magnitude less environmental damage to do so compared to eating ordinary food"
Humans can't of course, but the guy claiming biking gets 3000 mpg equivalent is making the same comparison.
In truth if we're making atmospheric carbon loading comparisons between traveling by car of bicycle, the equivalent "miles per gallon" would be much closer to equal with cars and biking, especially if you fill yourself up with grain light, produce heavy organic diets.
I live in an area with nothing, none, nadda, no version of public transportation that can take me from anywhere near home to anywhere near work. Setting aside the unusual hours I work, my occasional need to haul stuff that is awkward on public transport (military stuff), not driving is not an option.
https://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/016/837/45...
A bit a flashback from 1940s and the urgency of arguments at that time about conserving resources.
"Driving is bad and economically unsustainable and highly subsidized. Ride hailing apps take advantage of that to make profits in their bid to displace service workers (taxi drivers) and usurp their wages. However these companies may run out of investor money before accomplishing this. A lot of municipalities are now considering congestion charges. Walking and public transit may also be an option"
I'm a bit annoyed how the article takes the angle of cheering for Uber and Lyft while barely mentioning public transit as a solution that doesn't economically exploit underprivileged people.
That's an extremely broad qualifier for a pretty particular topic. I think that the vast majority of people either absolutely have to use a car, or can pretty easily not (or in fact would be inconvenienced by using a car). I think it is a very small percentage of people who are somewhere in between those two cases, for whom there is a realistic choice to be made one way or the other.
I doubt either of those categories exist, yet alone form a dichotomy
For some of us, driving is that thing.
The bathroom is arguably the other remaining place for complete privacy, so I understand completely people that can afford huge bathrooms with magazines, TV, etc.