Let’s Build a Future Without Cars
pandodaily.com
pandodaily.com
* Health dangers from emissions -- an issue of (certain implementations of) internal combustion, not the form factor of the vehicle: personal auto vs. bus or train
* Health dangers/obnoxiousness of long commutes -- likewise, a complicated thing which doesn't immediately suggest "ban cars" as the obvious solution. (If anything -- everything else being the same -- self-driving supercars should result in the shortest commutes: point-to-point (last mile), no waiting, no traffic congestion (from AI)
* Infrastructure NIMBY (roads, sprawling parking lots): rail lines have the same issues, with the tradeoff that the sparser your mass transit ugliness is, the more excruciating inconvenience the last-mile segment of a commute is (try living 10m walk from a subway stop). Flying "cars" are almost certainly infinitely worse, because of their extreme noise
None of these are arguments against private transport; they are arguments against specific implementations of private transport, and don't at all imply the conclusions the author derives.
When I lived in a big city, I enjoyed train commuting. I could just get on the train and not think about it. I used to hate daily commuting by car. Now that I live in a smaller town, I picked a walkable one where I can walk to work. (Yeah, not everyone can do that.)
I do like cars for vacationing. I consider a car a recreational vehicle, but can't stand them for routine commuting.
But cars remain awesomely effective, because they can go from point to point, and they're so competitive that trains are only really competitive if: * you're going to be traveling for very long distances (but not long enough for airports to be faster), or * traffic is going to be utterly miserable, or * the train is RIGHT THERE and very convenient or, ideally, some combination of the three. (Driving to the commuter rail and having your office be Right There is an acceptable incarnation of point three).
Notice where trains are most effective: the northeast corridor (really dense population, traffic problems, city centers with workplaces served by train/metro), big cities on the west coast (e.g. SF, Seattle).
There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city. "A future without cars" looks like some of those cities and those city's problems - in particular, really expensive housing, especially if you want to raise a family and have multiple bedrooms (or, God forbid, a yard). Remember that median household income in the US is only $44k. If you're reading Hacker News I'll guesstimate you're probably making double that, maybe triple.
Anyway. Gas prices and the relative prices of train commuting/car commuting/real estate may change the dynamic of transportation in the future, but I don't think the densification that it entails is an unabashed good for the common man or that my preference for trains is a substitute for comprehensive realistic transportation policies. And if we must go down that road (so to speak) we're going to need to do a better job of making effective, useful, cost-efficient transportation projects than we have over the past few years.
"Slightly less than one-third of households said they had one personal vehicle1 available for use in 2001. A little more than one-third of households (40 million out of 107 million households) had 2 vehicles and slightly less than one-quarter had 3 or more vehicles available."[0]
This is an unimaginable number of cars. Given that a car costs, on average, $28,400[1] - and lasts around 8 years[2] - holy shit.
That doesn't even take into account the cost of running and fueling a car. At an average of ~15k miles per year, the total cost PER CAR is around $8,776 per year.[3] To our 'median household', which is more likely than not to have one or two cars, that's either 20% or 40% of their income. Since average spending on housing is 30%, that doesn't leave a whole lot left. No wonder we're all in so much debt.
The worst part is, US urban planning means that people are likely unable to work without access to a car.
Imagine a 20% increase in income tax, with the money being used to subsidize an outdated and damaging industry. That's what this is. It is holding back the US economy.
[0]http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_an... [1]http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/autos/aut11.shtm [2]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_ne... [3]http://www.boston.com/cars/newsandreviews/overdrive/2011/04/...
By American standards these are tiny but for EU commuting / shopping / city driving they're fine.
Fiat even has a two cylinder car on the market.
Get rid of the car industry, and the flying jetpack, massive underground subway, or whatever industry will come in to fill the gap. Economics isn't that simple.
NYC would be a lot cheaper if you could buy up some old brownstones, give the tenants end of lease + 6 months to find a new place, tear them down and build an apartment building. It would be very simple to fit a lot more people on manhattan if we just built taller buildings.
It's politics that makes dense cities expensive, not something intrinsic to the cities themselves.
Quantities related to a city’s infrastructure, such as the number of gas stations and the length of paved roads, did scale "sublinearly", meaning that the larger the city, the less of these were required per capita. But measures of economic output and innovation – the number of patents, total wages, GDP, even the pace of walking – scaled "superlinearly", showing increasing returns with size (see Graphs). "The scaling laws say that on average, as a city grows you can predict its output and input, its energy consumption, its wealth creation, its level of crime," says Bettencourt.
I have always thought the future would have personalized self driving subway cars. But, it's all about what you value.
The current state of affairs is not an expression of how people really want to live. It's an expression of the enormous subsidies we have given to a particular lifestyle. Our governments fund suburban schools much better than urban ones. They spend enormous amount of money on constant road construction and barely spend anything improving public transit. We allow the huge costs incurred by fossil fuel use to be externalized, making car use seem much cheaper than it actually is. We penalize renters and subsidize home owners by allowing tax deductions for mortgage interest. Police spend large amounts of money, on a per capita basis, enforcing uniquely suburban concerns like drunk driving, compared to how much is spent on run of the mill urban crime fighting.
It is almost certain that without these massive explicit and implicit subsidies, peoples' expressed "desires and wants" would look very different than what we have now.
The great part of high-speed rail, etc. is that you can relax while they do the driving and you arrive close to your destination. However, driverless cars give you the best of both of those worlds, and other than wind-resistance (which drafting largely solves) you have similar efficiency.
PS - Does anyone find "driverless car" to be the 21st century equivalent of "horseless carriage"?
Yes, I love high-speed trains, because they're on a track, and while this obviously does not guarantee safety, it certainly makes it feel much safer to me.
Compare to air travel. Even with the meticulous maintenance and regulatory requirements, a significant fraction of the population is scared of flying (to some degree). Driverless cars are better in one aspect (operates at ground level), worse in others (proximity to other vehicles), just different in some ways (computer versus human pilot), and complete unknowns, so far, in others (regulation).
Even if the actual crash/injury/fatality rate of driverless cars is nil, how do you design a 300mph computer-controlled car to not be scary for passengers? I want it to work, as I recognize the advantages, but it seems like the social problems will be even tougher than the technical problems, and I'm definitely not going to be an early adopter.
The best words I've read all week.
I must have missed the bit where he said that. I thought he was saying that we could find better solutions.
I don't even drive non-family member to a local lunch because of my problem. So I really would be a shut in if I had to go places by bus.
On the plus side, there could be a new client for an eco-friendly home food delivery service if they moved to such a system.
I used to catch a bus every day through the city, and there were a lot of strange people on those trips. Gangs of 9 year old gangster kids drunk up the back. Little old ladies muttering racist slurs at asian students. A guy who hadn't showered in so long his clothes had gone partially transparent from the grease. I don't think I was ever in any danger, but it sure was uncomfortable sometimes. I work pretty close to home now (in fact, mostly at home), so it's not really an issue anymore. But strangely, I find myself missing that chance to interact with people who I didn't choose to interact with.
It seems like every time we get more power (like by inventing an engine that can move us around) we use it to get more control (now I can encase myself in a metal shield that prevents any accidental congress with the outside world).
A bunch of technology has gone the same way. Efficient worldwide shipping and postage means you don't need to go outside to shop. Communication moving online means you can block people you don't like rather than have to deal with them. OKCupid means you can pre-screen your dates to avoid accidentally meeting someone unpalatable. You can GPS track your kids so they won't ever end up lost or at the wrong sort of party.
And those are all good things that give you more control over your environment. But they also isolate you. Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease. Like every generation before us, we strike out against danger with the power of our tools. But our dangers are, at this point, largely invented. We're getting to a point where instead of being safe, we'll just be cocooned in a real-world filter bubble, where we never have to fear the unknown, uncontrollable, unsanitised real world that gets forced on us when we get on a bus or walk around a city. I suspect, for all our newfound safety, we'll just feel a bit unsatisfied.
I guess I've just argued myself out of believing that the future without cars is ever really going to happen. Maybe there'll be a virtual bus MMO.
Bah, that isn't the fear of the unknown vs. the fear of the known. It is immediate, physical fear (in thirty seconds those gang members are going to mug me) vs. eventual, abstract fear (in twenty years, something might go wrong inside me).
(I survived an ascending aortic dissection in Aug 09.)
To be clear, when I say "abstract threats" I mean things we cannot properly think about. We know what it feels like to get punched, and we have some idea what it feels like to be stabbed, but we have no idea how to assign fear to something like chemotherapy until it happens to us. We know it is Bad(tm), but not the same way we know getting cut with a knife is bad.
My goal is to safely get from Point A to Point B, and I don't want to spend a lot of time waiting around at Point A, or sitting and waiting on the way to Point B.
We have three goals here, in order of importance. Let's call them safety, convenience, and speed.
Taking a bus with a bunch of drunken hooligans doesn't help much with that first, and most important, goal. I want my transportation to be safe, and the high crime rates on public transportation in the US speak for themselves.
Interesting experiences are great. Getting mugged isn't, and while I'm not a prime target (muggers don't usually pick on two-hundred-pound guys that spend a lot of time in the gym), five loud, drunk people in a gang is not the sort of situation I want to be around regularly.
Especially if I'm carrying a $1500 laptop and a $600 smartphone.
Convenience, at least here in SF, is also pretty miserable. I have not once had a bus arrive on-time. The trains are usually on-schedule, but conveniently frequent only during peak hours, and they only cover a small portion of the greater Bay Area. Don't even get me started on CalTrain.
If I want to meet somebody and I need to take a bus, I need to add an extra half-hour window around my journey. If you assume a normal tech-person salary, that lost half-hour makes it cheaper to take a taxi for most journeys.
Speed is good for trains; busses, on the other hand, live at the whim of traffic.
Japan gets all of these right in its major cities. I have never once felt threatened on a train, and delays are few and far between.
The tradeoff they make is in manpower -- station employees are everywhere. We tend to not like hiring lots of people in the US, and so public transit stations might have one or two visible employees, and certainly not visible, uniformed personnel at every platform.
This is why cars are as popular as they are. In SF, if I want to go from Pacific Heights to the Inner Sunset, a journey by bus-and-train pushes about an hour. By car, it's about fifteen minutes.
In my car, I have a stereo, air conditioning, and a clean, comfortable seat. Public transit, on the other hand, is pretty filthy here in SF, and for some odd reason they jack the heat up enough so that I need to do a little striptease whenever I get on a train.
All minor inconveniences, sure, but it adds up quickly, and what do I get in return? I'm late, have lost money in the long run, and arrive more often than not in a worse mood than when I started.
I really want working public transit here in the US, but the way things are going, I don't see that happening for at least another decade.
As well, transit is only good for getting you around in the cities. Once you get out to "inaka", a car is all but a requirement, much like in North America.
This "world without cars" is a nice pipe dream, but the reality is that no matter how good your transit system, it's still a huge time sink to use it. The only time it becomes faster than a car is if you live in a dense city with poor traffic flow, and that accounts for a tiny percentage of the world population. That's also why it's only the pampered urbanites who dream of a carless world.
That's false. Most of the world's population now lives in cities. Deciding what percentage of those fall below the threshold of "poor" traffic-flow wise is difficult, but it's not "tiny". (http://www.gizmag.com/go/7613/)
Cars beget cars. The reason people need cars in a lot of the US is because they moved somewhere that they need a car to get to. People talk about the amount of time that things take without a car forgetting that said problem was created by cars in the first place. In places where most folks don't have cars you have a small grocery store every few blocks rather than a large one every few miles. The demographics of public transit differ from society at large because the well-off drive cars.
I grew up in American suburbia and have lived in Europe for the last decade. The amount of time required to say, go shopping, or commute to work has remained broadly similar in the half-dozen areas I've lived in, though the distances have not.
Progressively moving away from cars is largely a cultural rather than technological problem. Some well-done urban planning (including structuring energy prices to favor more efficient means) and a few decades to execute it could drastically shift the balance to where we have far fewer cars.
Cars are used because they are versatile. Every other form of transport has far more narrow use cases.
According to http://www.transit-safety.volpe.dot.gov/publications/sso/CRS... , commuter rail kills .09 people per 10 million passenger miles.
According to http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx , cars kill 1.14 people per 100 million passenger miles - or .114 people per 10 million passenger miles.
That's not a huge difference - I actually wonder if the more direct routing and door-to-door service allowed by cars could make up that difference entirely.
The non-suicide number is quite a bit lower, though, by (probably) an order of magnitude. Pedestrians on the tracks in an area they aren't supposed to be, who are struck and killed by trains, are classified in the bucket category of "trespasser" fatalities. Unless they left a note or something it's usually impossible to conclusively say that they were suicides, but the assumption is that the vast majority of trespasser fatalities are suicides, because the number of people struck while trying to steal things or take illegal shortcuts is relatively small. And, trespasser fatalities account for 88% of total commuter-rail fatalities (p. 13 in that report). All other commuter-rail fatalities (passengers, collisions with automobiles, etc.) add up to 0.011 people per 10 million passenger miles.
I'm not sure it matters. The automobile statistics seem to include various methods of suicide involving cars. If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.
I'm not sure they include them equally, though. The most obvious way of killing yourself on train tracks is standing in front of a train, but the most obvious way of killing yourself on a road usually does not involve a car, but involves jumping from a bridge (which doesn't get counted as an automobile fatality).
> If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.
I'm not too sure about that one. If there are a significant number of people who, absent trains, wouldn't kill themselves, that would be significant. But I would guess a larger proportion are just choosing a suicide modality, and if it weren't trains, it'd be jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, taking pills, etc. It's hard to come up with any real data for that counterfactual, though. I suppose a blunt correlational approach would be to see if there's any correlation between availability of commuter rail and suicide rates, after controlling for other confounding variables. I would guess that there isn't one, but could be wrong.
http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/safety/tdreport_final.pdf
is a Federal Railroad Administration report that breaks down the cause of trespasser fatalities. This isn't 100% comparable to the previous report, but it does claim that 23% of trespasser fatalities are suicides.
Appendix H breaks down the reported fatalities - it looks like walking and sleeping (drunk?) on tracks each claim more lives than suicide.
One really interesting story is the massive increase in car safety. Deaths per 100M vehicle miles have dropped from 1.73 in 1994 to about 1.09 in 2010.
Fundamentally, I'm not sure any of this matters. We're talking a very small difference in safety - to the point where convenience is probably more important to most people.
This isn't because riding on a shared, public vehicle turns people into hooligans. If you catch public transport in the US, you see a cross-section of people who are too young, old, poor or mentally ill to own a car. Naturally, there will be more crime.
On public transport, you can read the news, write mails, write docs, read a book, do other things as you please, while still arriving at the location you want to go to, albeit probably a little slower (as you have to wait for the train/bus/tram and possibly have to walk to/from the station etc.).
I have never been to the US, so i cannot comment on the comparative part, though.
We've put up with crime for so long in the USA we've forgotten places actually exist without most of it. We've gotten so used to it we think it's normal to "avoid dark alleys" to "pull out your car stereo and don't leave anything visible, even a jacket or risk getting your car broken into" to "don't go to those parts of town"
None of those apply to certain countries.
now watch the defensive replies :(
in japan, i've been to plenty of dark alleys during night time, visibly carrying cameras etc. and i've yet to be encounter anything bad. i think it is fairly safe to say, that japan is a LOT saver than most parts of the world.
It is clear that man prefers to travel with privacy or cars would never have succeeded where alternatives exist. The convenience factor is huge too.
I prefer the freedom to go wherever, whenever and without some crazy person screaming at me on some bus or subway somewhere.
I love cars but I wouldn't mind if a better technology came around to replace them. The keyword being better and not just different. People are always going to want a way to independently travel. I live in NYC and while PT is convenient it is still a pain in the ass overall. Getting to places too late or too early because of the train schedule. Being forced to deal with the different weirdos of the city. Delays and breakdowns that happen more often than they should. There is a reason why there is still so much traffic in the city. People, for the most part, who can afford to take Taxis or have their own car still do.
Even if you have Jet packs or any other alternative travel tech that we know about now there are still going to be infrastructure problems. Clearing skyways for the jetpacks, knocking down structures which impede these skyways. And the results of a malfunctioned jetpack would probably lead to a more instant death than the normal car accident.
This paragraph alone "We sacrifice ourselves and our environment to these death traps, health hazards, planet killers, money sucks; these land-grabbers, respiratory rapists, and insidious isolation engines. And for what? The pleasure and convenience of rapid movement? That’s a problem we can solve in other ways." makes me not take the article or the author seriously.
I welcome advances in technology that allow us to travel more cleanly and efficiently. But we have to remember that cars serve a number of different purposes for different people. So until we can find one technology that is better & not hodge podge of different tech that replaces the car I wouldn't hold my breath about people willingly giving them up.
-edit misspelled "of"
So try:
"Let's build an unaffordable future where the super-rich live in hyper-inflated city real estate and the poor are consigned to unreachable rural pockets of cultural stagnation or to over-crowded ghettoes."
How will we create livable walkable cities where real estate does not hyper inflate?
So much of that "hyper inflated city real estate" is not especially dense. So you get lots of rich people living in 4-6 floor, beautiful, historic buildings near the center of the city. That type of housing does not lead to livable, walkable cities.
If you want real estate prices to drop, and you want cities to be livable, you have to build an excess of dense housing. Right now it is near impossible to increase population density in the city, due to zoning restrictions, existing tenants, etc.
I don't know a solution to that, but I think it's the root of the problem.
Or telecommuting of course.
The trick is strong community areas. Chicago reached its current level of density 100 years ago, when walking was a common mode of transportation. So the city naturally organized such that every neighborhood has its own "downtown" area, and every residence is within walking distance of such an area.
The primary function of the bus and trains system is to move people among these community areas. For example, I worked downtown in the Loop, so I took the train. But grocery shopping, going to the library, post office, hardware store, etc. were all easily done on foot. All this in an area where everyone lived in beautiful, historic 2-3 floor buildings.
And no, we weren't rich. It was largely a blue collar immigrant neighborhood.
The other issue is that a lot of the price advantage of living outside the city is fictional, being the result of government policy. If government wasn't out there building highways to these suburban outreaches, subsidizing home ownership, preferentially funding suburban schools, keeping car use artificially cheap by allowing externalization of the costs of fossil fuels, the cost-benefit balance would look quite different than it does now.
Case in point: Just about all of Europe.
Some of the motivation is more like the reason some American suburbs ban rental, more than price control, though: a desire to have long-term residents with a stake in the building as your neighbors (what George W. Bush called the "ownership society").
So, we will get a future without cars at some point, it's just not going to be a nice convenient continuum to something else.
And notice I said "one of the next towns over". Stuff isn't necessarily concentrated in an "economic zone" like it is in cities. Work could be 8 miles east, the high school in your town, and the elementary school 10 miles north. Mass transit just wouldn't cut it.
Oh, and the nitpick of the day:
“We are the descendents [sic] of chimps…”
We have a common ancestor with chimpanzees (and bonobos); we’re not descended from them.
Why don't we construct buildings that have both residential floors and commercial floors, for instance? At least then you'd have more options for living very close to where you work.
Houston sort of does this via very relaxed zoning, which allows office buildings and stores to be placed right next to houses and apartments. It works better than you'd expect and it's usually not hard to live close to work, especially since housing is so cheap.
I'm in NYC now, and enjoy not needing a car, but the difference in rent comes to more than a new car every year.
http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/whats-the-worlds-most-energy...
But a car can very easily beat a bicycle on time efficiency, assuming you're going more than half a mile.
A car can also beat a bicycle on opportunity exposure.
Both statements are illustrated by mine and many others' commutes. I drive 40 minutes each way, because I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there. I'd love to have found a job here, but at the moment my job is there. The job there would have been unthinkable without a car. Yes, I could ride the bus - train - bus, but it would take hours. For me, a bicycle would never get me there.
One of the many things that's holding back a national economic recovery is that some people can find jobs but can't sell their house to move to the new job. There's not enough movement and flexibility.
In my metro area, I have the opportunity to take any job that I can find, from ten to sixty minutes car radius. That means I eat. That comes from flexibility.
The problem with a car in your situation is contextual. You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes of driving concentrating on driving. Not talking on cell phones, not texting, not talking, not even listening to music but DRIVING. The context of where you are driving "probably" changes too, highway vs. city but I'm guessing that sometimes switching your driving patterns lags a bit after you get off that highway offramp.
On a bicycle or public transportation, the context is completely different.
At the very least on a bicycle you are exercising (we can get into the difficulties later of urban riding). But there are other things, how great you feel, the fantastic views, the feelings of elation, the feelings of extreme accomplishments before the day even starts.
On public transportation you can read, operate your computer, talk to your commute neighbor or get other things done.
FWIW, I draw a 20 mile radius around my house and only look for jobs in that circle. I can figure out how to bike 40 miles a day.
Bikes and public transport are great when it works, and I'd love to take the bus or train, but the metro region and jobs and me are laid out the way they are, and that's (all but) that.
I will use my commute since i know more of the details. Its close to the OP of your reply....
I travel 50 miles per day to work, round trip. This takes me about 65 minutes total on average. That is an average speed o 54 mph.
If i were to bike that with an average speed of 16mph it would take me 3.125 hours.
If i workout for an hour a day, which is a very considerable workout to do daily that puts me at 2.08 hours per day with driving verses 3.125 hours per day for biking. So by driving instead of biking i can still get plenty of exercise to stay healthy and save an hour per day to do other things i enjoy. Family time, cooking, programming, reading, etc.
At this point i would say i will stick to driving. Don't get me wrong, i can't wait for driverless car technology... would love to have yet another hour back per day. the train and bus stuff doesn't work out well in rural pennsylvania. cars are pretty convenient here. the economics of cars works, and has for a long time, and in a capitalist based society, thats a large part of the equation. a lot depends on your measuring stick.
If you're cycling in an urban area, you're going to be doing a hell of a lot more concentrating than the average car driver does on the equivalent journey, or you're not going to be alive for very long.
Also: "I drive 40 minutes each way" 1hr20min of driving is not going to translate into 1hr30min of biking, with the only possible exception being if you spent the entire car ride in gridlock or parking lots.
And: "I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there". That you can find a job within 20 miles does not help him.
"You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes of driving concentrating on driving. Not talking on cell phones, not texting, not talking, not even listening to music but DRIVING."
Yeah, and I'm not supposed to eat pizza or drink so much...
My commute is in the "good" direction. My average speed is probably 40 or 45 mph, mostly freeway, and the opposite direction is often at a standstill. So it's a fair distance.
I'm all for finding jobs near home, and I moved where I am because there are a lot of jobs in the area. But circumstances put me there for now, not here. When I used to work here I would walk 40 minutes to work, and I liked that a lot.
"You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes ... driving." I used to bike to work when I lived in Seattle, and Port Orchard before that, and I can definitely understand the wish of any biker that drivers would hang up the cheeseburger and just DRIVE. :)
In reality once you get fit you don't sweat much (I get far sweatier on the tube than cycling), and if you're overheating you can always slow down slightly.
* Shower before leaving then you get rid of the dirt + bacteria that makes the sweat smell.
* Wear clean lycra - this wicks sweat away before it has a chance to start smelling.
In London my cycling commute of 1hr would take over 2hrs by car, and 1hr15min by train. Cycling is often the quickest way. You also combine exercise and commuting time which leads to a significant overall time saving. I don't feel the need to do a lot of other exercise after cycling 200 miles a week.
And major cities are major outliers in cycle commuting.
I used to spend an hour a day, three days a week at a CrossFit gym, and a car made that possible. :)
Of course, housing prices are atrocious, but that's an entirely separate discussion.
Follow busses in traffic for a while, and add up the total fuel, time wasted, etc. in all the traffic impeded by the less then 1/2 full (on average) bus. There is no branch of mathematics that could be used to argue that busses save the civilization money.
Consider if everyone was not disallowed by law(1) from carpooling for compensation. Roughly doubles the aggregate person-mile per hour bandwidth of the existing traffic system...
Bus driver unions and taxi owner associations are the net gainers of the lobbyist-written laws impeding transportation innovation; everyone else loses.
1) you can carpool all you want informally. You cannot set up publicly accessible systems which compete with taxis.
Things like the mag-lev pod transport system, flyways, etc. are awesome. We should develop all of them and try to make them the best we can. But it's a gigantic mistake to discount the car - we have something to learn from their success: People like freedom, people like privacy, not everyone wants to live in a dense city.
That's why I say better/self driving cars are the practical solution to the future, but we could easily see something else revolutionize the situation by 2060. And as for over-crowded roads, The current road network is way more than sufficient to handle traffic with self-driving cars: You can put 5-10x the number of cars on a highway and not jam it if computers are driving. Jetpacks, after all, will have the collision problem too.
The problem is not the car, its city planning.
Don't make the roads wider and wider, build good and fast bike paths.
Have the train station in the city center where all the shops and malls are.
Build supermarkets and workplaces close to where people live. Suburbs far away from everything are bad in many ways.
There are many more things that could be improved, if city plaing wasn't run by the car lobby.
Furthermore, to some degree, cars are actually more efficient from a personal perspective as an individual. If you live in the typical USA sprawl, you don't really want to take a bus somewhere. For example, one of my co-founders had to take the bus home from his office yesterday. The commute is normal about 20 minutes in traffic...the bus took almost two hours.
The issue facing the US is that our space utilization is far less compact in most places, which makes public transport highly inefficient. I'm all for more railroads and other means of getting people around, but the only cities with truly effective public transport are:
- NYC area
- Chicago
- Pittsburgh
...I'm trying to think of others, but I'm drawing a blank. Also, bear in mind I'm distinguishing between places that have transport vs. where it is effective.
As for flying cars and all those goodies, they won't happen. The reason is quite simple: if something fails, they fall and you die. The average joe is not able to properly handle a flying craft with that level of risk - and if it falls, it may land on someone.
The most promising advance so far is driverless cars. I do believe they will become commonplace soon as technology advances and they become able to handle regular driving. I personally wouldn't use them, but they would make the rest of the driving public much happier and I do expect that to be the next car revolution.
Sadly, in the US at least, public transport and flying cars are not in our future.
This feeling is becoming less and less possible in a lot of places. You end up having to herd millions of cars causing massive inconvenience to people who don't have cars; who in turn have to buy cars to make life liveable. If you want a constant sense of freedom buy a bicycle.
What about driverless flying cars?
Can we just build two in the US? One in California and one in the North East where there's a clear need? We don't have any bullet trains in the US. It's starting to get embarrassing that we can't get our act together. Maybe we can get ours in red, like in Italy? :-)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57417703-1/italy-to-laun...
"there really hasn’t been much advance in car technology in the intervening 126 years"
You can drive all day every day for fifty years [1] and never use the biggest feature we've been researching for cars, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a breakthrough.
"Between 1970 and 2010, the number of fatalities decreased by 38% and the number of injury crashes by 13%. In the same period, the number of vehicles and the distance travelled more than doubled."
Many of those gains are due to the parade of safety technologies over the last several decades. Electronic stability control, airbags, crumple zones. If we go all the way back to Benz, then we should talk about seatbelts and shatter proof glass too.
Cars haven't exactly been stagnant, we've just had a subtler priority. Those safety advances will lay an important foundation, and hopefully be extended as we shoot for a "crash proof" personal flying vehicle.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2012/01/30/146075552/ups-driver-honored-f...
[2] http://www.internationaltransportforum.org/irtadpublic/pdf/1...
Its essentially a futuristic projection of the 1950's, a time when no-one had any idea things like the internet would exist.
Imagining a society around transportation needs is redundant. Commuting is rooted in an era where cities grew around industrial activity that made the environment unpleasant (as opposed to the country / suburbs) hence the desire to travel between the two.
Vehicle emissions aside this isn't so true anymore.
Communications technology changes the way we think about distance, its much less necessary for most workers to group in the same space.
I think the future is about local communities / neighborhoods, remote working via the internet (from home or from mixed co-working spaces), and better public transport between districts and nodes such as airports.
The internet is going to continue to radically transform our society in ways we can barely imagine - and I don't really see why flying cars need to be part of that future (although recreational jetpacks would be fun:) )
When I visited in Berkeley I was horrified how bad the public transportation was in there. BART trains were most of the time fully packed, had only a few trains in an hour and traveling from the stations to home was slow and annoying. The bus transportation was horror. Most of the time they were late or not arriving at all.
I may have an European mindset, but living in the USA is just out of the question. Manhattan would be better, but then again paying above 1000 dollars per month from your apartment is kind of silly.
The next viable transportation system may be vacuum maglev train. The world already have Superconducting and normal conducting Maglev technology (JRC and Transrapid respectively) and mankind have built countless tunnels and bridges and concrete structures.
However, I also think people are more flexible than I give them credit for. I see a lot of bicycles parked outside bars, and probably a fair number of those are DUI "graduates." I think I see some of those people riding to work.
So far, most of the innovations in transport, be it high speed railroads, autobahns or moon missions, have all been done by government. That's simply because it's very hard to build a viable commercial model around infrastructure projects, especially if you expect to see a return within 50 years. If someone does find a way that would be great, of course, and in that case there's a good chance this person would from Silicon Valley.
The Earth's axial supercontent, Eurasia, is ideally suited to train transport. China has ambitious and innovative plans to build a Eurasian rail network capable of transporting people from Beijing to London in two days:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7397846...
Consider this scenario for a 20 mile commute: 1) Bike or walk one mile to local air strip ( a converted road) 2) 18 mile electric flight to destination town. 3) Bike or walk one mile to office from landing strip.
Takeoff and landing must be silent and fast. See http://electrictakeoff.com for an example.
The other problem I see is that most people appear to be irrationally scared of cycling in cities/urban areas, even though most city cycling occurs at really slow speeds. I have been a cyclist in San Francisco for five years with only a few minor incidents. Whenever I talk to people who aren't cyclists about commuting in the city, they often respond as if I have an impending death clock over my head.
For people who think cycling is a major health boon: it really isn't unless you're commuting >5mi/each way or doing a lot of climbs. It's not that hard most of the time. I get way more out of a 30-40minute/run or squats in the gym.
Problem 2: Cars are currently the best solution to the problems we have. That's why they are #1 in the US. Not because they are horrible inventions, not because there is some conspiracy to keep them in their cars (Americans CHOOSE to live in suburbs with large lawns and lots of open space, since not everyone lives in a big city with subway systems and whatnot). Building lots of parking lots is still cheaper than figuring a way to shuttle people around in rural areas. America is big, land is cheap.
America doesn't look like Manhattan, NYC everywhere. For these people, cars are the best solution. And the next stage is not going to be a jetpack. It's going to be a self-driving car. The fact that average people put up with all the problems and headaches of cars that only car enthusiasts love (maintenance, repairs, buying, etc.) shows us that there are a LOT of advantages from cars that we need to match with new forms of technology. My take is: Improve cars, rather than trying to destroy them. Because 100 years of innovation of automobiles aren't for nothing.
My take: The near future is efficient hybrids (2025), electric or fuel-cell cars (2035), then self-driving cars (2060). People will continue to talk about completely changing the infrastructure of the US, having everyone take buses and subways to work, but cars will continue to be over 75% of commute options for the forseeable future. Why?
The problem with all public transport technologies right now is it doesn't solve the density problem. The majority of new population in the US is growing not in really dense cities, but in medium dense suburbs. Everyone talks about moving people into "livable, healthy, walkable cities", yet Americans largely choose to migrate out of those ciites into new suburbs. I wonder why. Maybe they don't like the crowds, the crime, etc. It's human nature.
Problem 3: Finally, here are some things that cars have solved that are unresolved problems in other forms of transport:
Freedom of movement. Go wherever you want, whenever you want, with no one telling you what to do.
Speed. Choose a random American's home and a random American's office. Driving by car, even in traffic, probably beats all other modes in terms of speed. That's why even in the Bay Area at most 20% of commuters go by public transport where over 70% drive.
Efficiency. Cars are actually quite efficient and getting more so, especially with hybrid technology. The average car beats the average city bus in terms of energy efficiency. And we are quite likely to get 50+MPG Cars and electric cars in the near future.
http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
Price. Compared to jet packs or flying cars...
Granted -- so long as you take the legislative and tax situation into account. That's part of the "problem" to which cars are currently the best solution for most people, but it's not unchangeable.
Or from a different perspective, you could say: the "problem" is that people want to live in places (like suburbs) to which there is no great transportation solution yet, so part of the "solution" has to include a tax system that hides the true cost of the most acceptable solution.
Would cars still be so appealing if the true costs were not hidden? People seem to complain a lot about $4+/gal gasoline, but the tax on it doesn't come close to covering the maintenance needs of the roads they drive on. Couldn't almost any technology be the "best", given the right financial incentive?
I agree that for the next 10 years, hybrid electric cars are the solid bet. They have the ear of the lawmakers, it seems, and so not only are they 'cool', but they've got massive tax incentives helping them. I'm completely in favor of more efficient cars, of course, but it does seem odd to offer so many benefits based not on efficiency, but on one particular technology used to achieve efficiency.
I am a strong proponent of the model where all roads and road maintenance should be paid for by gas and use taxes. It works well in states where this is a reality and a couple of studies have shown that they tend to produce better quality roads in addition to being more cost efficient than states where roads are funded out of the general budget.
The lack of a politically guaranteed budget forces a measure of long-term fiscal conservativeness and cost control on the government organizations that maintain the roads. There is a concept of long-term ROI; if doing a better, somewhat more expensive job today significantly reduces costs a few years down the road, it is worth it because it is effectively like increasing the DoT's budget via investment in future years.If they waste money, they can't go back to the taxpayers and ask for more. It provides a bit of negative feedback to the government decision process that is often sorely needed.
Roads definitely have subsidies, but according to the document above, much less than urban transit or rail - if people pay the full costs of cars, they should pay the full costs of transit (not your typical $1.50 bus fare). In urban areas like the Bay Area or LA County, car trips are about 80% of commute trips, with transit at 10-15% but local/state transit funding is WAY above 10-15%, with a lot of gas taxes being funneled to transit projects. I believe that first off, we are 'paying' the true costs of cars, as people have voted for a government that pays for highways through income income taxes as well as gas taxes.
You could argue the same way about incentives for public vs. private transportation - people get advantages for buying hybrid cars the same way the public transport is heavily pushed onto cities. I don't think the solution to suburbs is to make them all into cities, or that the solution to cars as they are today is to replace them with public transport - cars have succeeded in capturing a huge % of marketshare so we should learn from their success and improve private transportation rather than trying to change human nature.
Not like you have that freedom now. Yeah, maybe in some rural area compared to hoofing it for 30 miles :-), but we're not talking about that -- you'll still use cars there. It's not true in suburbia. That's why we have malls and big box stores with huge parking lots built next to highways. You are unnaturally constrained to the highways and roads that have been built -- the freedom is illusory.
Speed. Well, you're attempting to compare Caltrain to the alternatives. In no way does Caltrain compare to Metro north or NJTransit -- the reason people choose to drive is not because cars are intrinsically faster in those areas, but because the mass transit in the bay area sucks. It's like saying in 1997 that "people have chosen rationally" not to use a phone as a web browser. Yes, they have, very rationally in fact, but it says nothing about the intrinsic ability of a phone-like device to be a web browser.
Efficiency is a red herring. Even the post you linked to is inconclusive in that regard. If you step out of the box and consider that the same improvements to cars could be made to buses or trains, then apply the economy of scale a massive investment in transit would mean -- it comes out a little differently. In the same post, there is a comparison to transit in other countries -- the comparison gets a little weak at that point.
"As of 2006–2007, the total energy cost of London’s trains was 15 kWh per 100 p-km, about 5 times better than a personal car.[45] For busing in London, it was 32 kWh per 100 p-km, or about 2.5 times that of a personal car.[45] This includes lighting, depots, inefficiencies due to capacity (i.e., the train or bus may not be operating at full capacity at all times), and other inefficiencies. Efficiencies of transport in Japan in 1999 were 68 kWh per 100 p-km for a personal car, 19 kWh per 100 p-km for a bus, 6 kWh per 100 p-km for rail, 51 kWh per 100 p-km for air, and 57 kWh per 100 p-km for sea."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport#Environmental originally here: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c20/page_12...
That templetons transit myht too states that "it is generally the green move for any individual to take existing mass transit over their car"
My solution would be to get rid of cars all together an use only electrical trains driven by few professionals who are less likely to cause accidents; with fixed schedules (and speed) time management would be easier for everyone. And for short distances encourage the use of bicycles (witch also helps to the obesity issues)
"A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of." ... "Of course, urban civilization was not buried in manure. The great crisis vanished when millions of horses were replaced by motor vehicles. "
IMNSHO, Your comment is imbued with a moral view and assumptions about what cars have to be that makes it hard to advance the discussion.
You can solve most of the problems of cars if you have small lightweight automatic cars that are optionally drivable (outside certain areas/roads)