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Comment by iamgopal | Hacker News Reader

Lots of mindsets to overcome, but I'm sure, sooner or later we will forced to get rid of automobile and completely relay on public transport. May be in 50 to 100 years, but there isn't any alternative.

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Honesty question for everyone proposing bicycling and public transit: are these feasible in rural environments? (Especially WRT cycling if you have a disability or young children and/or have to commute long distances in very cold or very hot weather)

I continued cycling with a young child, though less often and usually only solo trips. Bicycle trailers can help but it's still more work than putting the kids in a car, and with kids there is already less time for everything to be done.

Not everybody can use a car either. There's always exceptions to every proposal.

But I don't think bicycles and mass transit will take over ultimately. But self driving electric vehicles a bit larger than a bicycle could do it.

These will only need one seat and minimal storage. They'll go directly from home to work without stopping at every bus stop or train station along the way. And they'll be 1/4 the cost of today's car.

And, yes, they won't work for everybody and every situation, just like everything else.

Bicycling and transit doesn't have to be feasible for everyone, it just has to be made an option for trips where it makes sense, which is most trips. Nearly half of trips in the US were under 3 miles, 72% of those where done in a car. 60% of trips under a mile were made in a car or truck (!). Accommodating all those trips requires a ton of pavement, parking, gas stations to be built.

https://www.bikeleague.org/content/national-household-travel...

The vast majority of people making those trips are able-bodied people in urbanized areas (80% of the US lived in an urbanized area as of 2010).

https://www.icip.iastate.edu/tables/population/urban-pct-sta...

So if you can get bike infrastructure to where people are living, you've attacked a big chunk of the auto problem.

Per your second point, yes, it can be feasible. The modern rural US is very sprawling in terms of the built environment but it wasn't always that way. Rural areas in the US used to revolve around small villages and points of density that service a wide area, complete with transit connections. Many German rural villages are extremely bikeable and have regular transit through their regions and to larger cities.

You still can accommodate people who need vehicles, just the demand on infrastructure (parking, number of lane miles, subsidies and costs) would be greatly reduced. As it is now, the children, the disabled, and frequently the poor can't drive themselves and rely on other people driving them. Cycling can be done by almost anyone, is much cheaper and therefore much more accessible than driving.

The UN thinks 68% of the global population will live in urban areas by 2050 so it makes sense to focus on urban areas - rural areas could probably be the exception to the rule and still use cars, etc?

https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-...

Not at all. You cannot exist in the vast majority of the US without personal transportation.

Government sponsored automatic car is also public transport.

I don't think you should be sure of anything at a 50 or 100 years horizon.

Self-driving cars will blur and in the long run, possibly invalidate the distinction between "private" and "public" transport.

I strongly disagree with this idea.

While not having to park, consuming electricity, and more efficient road usage will make cars much much better, this future car will still be significantly less efficient than modern trains in several key metrics. Examples include efficient land usage, efficient energy usage, maintenance requirements, raw resource requirements, max speed.

As the process of urbanization continues trains are the most logical next step in transportation for our cities. While side driving cars will play a role in less traveled routes, we’ll see heavy investment in trains as cities try to find ways to allow more and more people access to their most busy business districts.

What you leave out of your calculation is the value of peoples time. Non individualized transport currently has the advantage of people being able to work instead of having to operate the vehicle. Once this goes away with self driving cars, the only advantage non individualized transport might have is price. Looking at current ticket prices, I doubt that it will be able to compete on that alone.

Sure, self driving cars will be common in a lot of places, but the most dense places will require more.

Or bicycles, which offer the personal freedom of an automobile but not the catastrophic environmental impact.

Plus the additional health benefits which come with the job of conveying self plus bike from a to b as well as the cognitive benefits of mens sana in corpore sano [1]

Bikes won't carry everything but they go a long way in solving day to day commuting problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_sana_in_corpore_sano

Yes, particularly e-bikes. That's why the Netherlands now buys more e-bikes per year than they do traditional bikes despite that e-bikes cost about twice as much.

We just need to get past the mindset that e-bikes are cheating. This is one of the big impediments for anyone that I've talked to about e-bikes, they say they would feel embarrassed riding them (since the main purpose of a bicycle that many people see is as a form of exercise, not transportation).

The answer to that, of course, is e-bikes aren't cheating, but driving a car is.

This is only true for some lifestyles. Elderly people with limited mobility, freezing climates, and rural, spread-out areas are examples of reasons cycling might not be appropriate.

As someone who cycles to work year-round, I'd love to see more bicycles and infrastructure, but I don't think bicycles are a panacea.

You’re right but bicycles + public transport could go a long way in most of the cases you mention. The other problem is also the city planning most of which were made assuming ownership of cars.

I don’t own a car all my commuting happens on a bike. I live in a city with not so good public transport so when needed I just rent a car for the weekend or so.

Probably yes for single adults in their 20s and 30s without any small kids or elderly parents to take care of who live in a small (possibly European) city with low enough population density that it allows bicycles on public transport. Doesn't describe most of the world unfortunately.

The trick is to move to Europe. Plenty of families in bakfiets, or older folks cycling.

Also you need high population density, not low.

I know families with 3 kids who don’t own a car. But of course they live walking distance to supermarket, kids school and the parents commute by bike. In case Of emergencies they don’t hesitate to take a taxi. From their point of view yearly taxi costs are lower than car ownership costs. But of course the city you live in must support bike paths etc.

This is impossible in the U.S. unless the costs of building public transportation falls by a couple of orders of magnitude.

I'd strongly suggest finding a source of predictions for the 50 to 100 year future made 50 to 100 years ago, from any source you care to look for, and enjoying the spectacle of just how completely absurd 99% of them were, then thinking much more carefully about your own predictions for anything that far ahead.The vast majority of such predictions made today, either by professional scientists, "forecasters" or laypeople all suffer from the same two core defects: 1. they're based far too much on current assumptions and worldviews. and 2. they completely fail at taking into account unknown unknowns, even if they claim not to do so. By definition they can't do otherwise anyhow.

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