What I find most interesting in this pushback against cars and suburbs is just how temporary the criticisms of them are.
We are on the verge of having self driving electric cars and most of the complaints about suburb life will seem silly.
We are on the verge of having self driving electric cars and most of the complaints about suburb life will seem silly.
With robot cars, in the year 2015, the imagination must jump even further, because there is no robot car industry yet; all we have are prototypes. Maybe those prototypes will become real products and maybe they won't; maybe those products will make it through all the non-technical hurdles necessary to make them a success, and maybe they won't.
In any case, the people expecting robot cars to have a significant effect on our transportation infrastructure in a mere ten or fifteen years are being wildly optimistic, and the people who claim that we can stop investing in trains and buses because ubiquitous googlemobiles are just around the corner are... well, I'll be polite and stop talking about them.
Take into account the economic bifurcation of the country, we have no shortage of (wasted) potential really cheap human drivers.
A world where a cab driver is a middle class job is probably too expensive to take a cab everywhere unless you're in the higher upper class. But if there's only 100M jobs for 300M+ hungry people, no problem creating a permanent underclass living in misery to drive the few remaining middle class to work, until their jobs go away too.
The only difference is that the single people in the cars can look at their phone instead of looking at the bumper infant of them.
The four-lane alternative to work has two lanes set aside for parking. In that case, I suspect they'll put light rail down the middle and retain two lanes each side.
I think price and convenience will mean that more people car-pool in automated ride-sharing services too.
More seriously, am I really the only person who can't stare at a phone in stop-and-go traffic without starting to feel motion-sick? Every time the robot car fantasy comes up people talk about how great it will be to sit around reading the whole time, and I just think - no, I'll be sitting there with nothing to do, and that sounds awful.
Are you sure? It seems like it would definitely have a decent impact on traffic in certain situations, like those traffic jams that are only caused by people slowing down too early and speeding up too late, compressing the traffic.
I believe a lot of problems of traffic could be fixed with self-driving cars, especially if they worked together.
Certainly you'll never make certain cities free of traffic congestion, but I think a lot could be done in smaller cities and suburbs.