Explain how trains solve the last mile problem? The thing that roads already solve?
Took a long time to realize that next to one of the buildings in town was a train station. And twenty years ago there were buses, too.
Anyway, solve the last mile by funding transit and rebuilding trains. We had them before, we should have them again.
What if we had a publicly funded self driving car network?
No more drunk drivers mowing down children, no more gigantic parking lots everywhere (like uber, you wouldn't likely get in the same car that took you there).
It would also almost certainly reduce traffic fatalities to near zero.
In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT spending X hours of your own mental bandwidth and focus worrying about crashing a deadly vehicle. You could spend that time reading/learning, relaxing watching a movie, or any number of activities other than driving your metal coffin around.
Obviously there are a lot of hurdles to get there, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Maybe in the future it’ll suddenly go from bad technology to good, but in my mind it’s like betting on generalized AI or small-scale cold-fusion nuclear: it could happen, but not a great idea to bet the farm on it.
Second. Car form factor is inefficient. Are we doing 1-seaters? 4 seaters with 3 empty seats usually? So every car has four wheels, its own computer, its own engine, and so on? In intersections, even with self-driving technology that does not exist currently and is showing no signs of existing any time soon - even with that technology, you’re still threading individual cars through each intersection? It’s not great.
Third. I’ve seen no evidence that the people talking about self-driving cars as a shared or car share-like resource actually believe in it. Remember Musk talking about how public transit is gross because other people breathe on you? Or the tendency of Americans to treat their cars as sacred property, so much that they’ll get in a fistfight with anyone who touches them? Transforming self-driving cars to some sort of public-ish transit requires just as much worldview shifting as actually using public transit, but none of the benefits.
So: if self-driving cars suddenly exist, sure. But right now, there is no baby. There is only bathwater.
I don't see any harm in trying though, or continuing to try and improve them. If we had said that a boom-box sized car phone wasn't useful enough, so why bother trying, where would phones be now?
Besides, you can probably point to any number of people in history that said that humans would never fly, that computers were unwieldy room-sized devices that consumers would never use, that the internet would never be anything more than communication between universities.
It's also just fun to think about the possibilities! :)
The problem is when folks - and I’m not saying just like this thread, but this is a phenomenon in some governance - when folks say that self-driving cars mean that we should reduce public transit or rail investment now, because those problems will be solved, right around the corner, as soon as the cars work.
If/when self-driving cars happen, sure, that’ll be great! People who are skeptical about the technology aren’t going to stop Tesla or Waymo from forging ahead. But car-centric planning does, currently, reduce public transit investment, and self-driving car hype does reduce the political will to build rail.
Cars are inefficient. It has nothing to do with the operators, ride-sharing, time-sharing, clever routing, the powertrain, energy storage, emissions, etc. The form-factor itself is horrendously inefficient for moving people. In terms of traffic density cars are virtually the worst mode of transportation we have.[1]
It's not an argument against automation, it's an argument against cars. (Particularly in America: where people seem to want the largest, heaviest vehicles they're allowed to operate w/ a typical license. On a daily basis I see multiple vans or trucks, most weighing in excess of 4,000 lbs now, transporting a lone individual.)
>In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT spending X hours of your own mental bandwidth and focus worrying about crashing a deadly vehicle.
You can get that, right now, without investing another cent in self-driving cars. There is plenty of time (and space!) to curl up with a good book on a train, for instance.
the suburbs are hell. everything's far. walking is dangerous and unpleasant. the city's sprawled, so everyone commutes to a diffuse cloud of points between the cities.
I hate living in the suburbs because I'm a wheelchair user, and walkable places are safer and more accessible. so I like your idea, I just think the burbs are beyond saving.
“Modern” car dependent suburbs are beyond saving. We should save the towns we can and resist this suburb-style development in and around cities.
1. exists concept of linear city, and exists few implementations, most known:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd
2. In linear city, possible to create just one line of train, and station every mile, and all other transport muscular, or something like pneumatic-mail and open conveyors.
In some cases, could be effective to make rectangular network of train lines.
Sure, for old cities with lot of legacy, only train transport in many cases impractical, because usually their logistic network is not linear and even not rectangular. And train largest problem, is large radius of turn.
Currently in most large cities exists underground train or light city train, in different countries named tube, metro, underground.
EDIT: or just drive, as you do now.
No. The comment you're replying to specifically said "walk", while the comment at top of thread specifically mentioned that building trains "requires a move towards high-density housing". High density housing, trains, and walking is a solved transportation solution for cities with much higher/denser populations than we have in North America.
Getting there from here is not such a solved solution, but the general process many places are working on goes:
build train (with park and ride at outskirts for current ridership) --> build high density mixed use near stations (which now doesn't need parking for each unit) --> rinse and repeat until city is more sustainable without blowing $$$,$$$,$$$ on road capital projects every year to deal with ever-increasing traffic
As I said, "the general process many places are working on". Look up cities in Can/US/Aus currently building light rail systems and you'll see who is working on it (with greater or lesser degrees of commitment, which will have corresponding outcomes in a decade or so).
North American cities successfully built themselves to be car dependent when no one else ever had, now they just need to work in reverse. The problems aren't functionally different whether it's cars jammed in stop-and-go on an interstate, trains overcrowded on a regional rail, horse and carriages clogging a bridge in medieval england (eg like discussed in the historical fiction World Without End), or individual people jamming the gates at Mecca or a large concert entrance/exit.
The root problem is vehicle lanes can only accomodate a few thousands of vehicles per hour at most (1800 at 2s following distance), while trains can easily accomodate tens of thousands of passengers in the same right of way. Even a sidewalk can (but generally don't) accomodate more users than single occupant vehicles on a highway lane.
But I think this is mostly because there high density of population, so they long time ago faced problem of transport large number of people, before appear large city buses.