On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly positive about space flight was that if you were writing in the 60s and 70s you would have been looking at almost a century of dramatic improvements in travel including steam trains, submarines, cars, prop planes, jets, and then rockets to the moon. With space shuttles and similar on the drawing board. People just assumed this would continue.
What very few SF writers understood was that all of these exploited chemical energy which is very limited in terms of how much can be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well and how fast you can go once you are up there. Many SF authors arm-waved atomics or nuclear propulsion but these, in the real world, never took off, as it were. Not in any mass transit to the stars sense, at least.
Edit: In reality space travel hit a hard brick wall due to the laws of physics. Most other forms of travel have experienced massive incremental improvements in reliability, efficiency, affordability, etc, but very few cars and and planes and ships actually now go much faster than they did 50 years ago.
We needed scientists to build equipment to spy on the Russians harder than they were spying on us. That meant, among other things, winning the hearts and minds of the kinds of people who would grow up to be scientists.
"Understood?" They were writing fiction, not instruction manuals.
Infrastructure like roads were massively built or improved during this timeframe.
Nowadays things are moving fast in technology and some other sector but it's far from being the case for instance with car. They are basically the same 4 wheel petrol engine that we had 80 years ago.
I think its normal back then to guess that everything was going to keep evolving just as fast as it did. They had no way to know that the industrial revolution was ending.
Sure? Just maintaining them close to their original quality seems to be a challenge at times. Bridges that are close to coming down are another related issue.
- engine tech is now such that we no longer need one huge engine and lots of passenger to get good efficiency: many small engines works just as well.
- removing the need for everyone to stop where any one person needs to go ("bus stop") improves the experience drastically.
- the one remaining problem is density: cars would have to shrink a lot before they can reach the density of busses or trains.
So perhaps: a single-lane highway only accessible to self-driving vehicles driving in formation and where the vehicles must be below some specified size.
This gives us great last-mile experience, high throughput, and good safety.
Larger ships and planes are more efficient than smaller ones. Longer trains are more efficient than shorter ones. No matter how efficient your propulsion is, it’s always more efficient when installed in bigger vehicles. Unless we figure out free energy, I don’t think we should stop at any arbitrary “good efficiency”.
Plus modern crossovers are already very size efficient, A 2024 compact crossover like the Rav4 is pretty much already the smallest possible space that can comfortably accommodate 4 adult men in seated positions and 4 large suitcases.
The point is an alternative to today's setup, for the majority of people who need to get somewhere. Not a way to mai
No one can possibly control all variables that would cause a crash.
Funny how what you call a smallest-possible compact crossover looks like a huge disgusting waste of space to my European Škoda-driver’s eyes.
The moment a car can be described as a “crossover”, or worse, an SUV, it becomes a waste of space IMO.
With dedicated rights of way, transit doesn't compete with private or delivery vehicles for road space. Further enhancements give priority signalling to transit vehicles.
Sufficient density also means that services and functions are located nearby: school (for the kids), shopping, entertainment, healthcare, government services, and employment (assuming you still need to go to an office or similar space).
With automobiles, low-density sprawl residential, commercial, industrial, educational, and recreational developments become not only possible but largely inevitable.
The corollary is that to change land-use patterns, it is necessary to change transportation economics.
The other factor is, of course, that there is tremendous inertia in land-use patterns, and urban regions which pre-date automobiles have preserved at least some of their earlier densities. One sees this in the old cities of Europe, of the Eastern US (largely east of the Mississippi, though most notably along the Atlantic Seaboard), and in a very few of the original West Coast US cities such as San Francisco (spatially constrained by its geography) and Seattle (old town regions). Los Angeles and San Diego which both saw explosive growth after about 1920 far less so, likewise for most of the Southern US which grew following both the automobile and air conditioning.
How rapidly this works in reverse, and whether or not low-density cities, towns, and urban regions can reconsolidate is a quite interesting, and critically important, question. I suspect that it may be possible, though we'll see some strange hybrid / transitional land-use patterns initially, and there will likely be much opposition (NIMBY / landowners / pull-up-the-drawbridge types).
We're beginning to see much higher costs of automobiles as EVs hit the roads, leading in part to the increased popularity of electric bicycles and motorcycles (though to a very small extent). Point remains that it's much easier (and cheaper) to electrify small vehicles than large ones. There are congestion tax proposals, enacted in London, on hiatus in New York City. Higher fuel costs can have an impact.
I believe that simply sprinkling majyckal transit pixiey duste over urban sprawl fails miserably. I also agree that changing urban density patterns takes time. However there are existing regions with those patterns, and they may well start to see increasing appeal to those who don't wish to be car-bound. That's already part of the explanation of high housing costs in cities such as SF and NYC (though that's another complex matter and is hardly specific to those cities).
But my point remains that density and transit go together like bees and honey, utterly addressing your initial objection.
They don't suit all needs, however. The elderly, young, disabled, or ill, for example. There are circumstances in which transit fits needs better, particularly for longer-distance or high-volume commutes. Bikes need less parking space than cars, but still require parking. Bike-share or similar solutions only partially address this given high-demand peaks and low-demand troughs. Weather and geography work against bikes in many places, electrified or not.
Low-headway rail, trams, and busses are still one of the most effective means of moving large numbers of people and baggage over intermediate distances.
And again, all of these benefit from density.
Wait...
(It totally doesn't control it via the network of public roads... /s)