Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, "Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND."
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
1395 points (94.3% liked)
Fuck Cars
9642 readers
293 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.
Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.
Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.
Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.
With Uber and other ride hailing services it became clear that cheap point to point transport replaces trips that are otherwise being made with public transportation like buses, and thereby increasing traffic. There were also more trips in total done because of the convenience than were done before, thus also increasing traffic. It's the classic Jevons paradox.
Self driving taxis could certainly have the same effect or more if they are cheaper than ride hailing. The increase in usage can easily be greater than the number of private cars it replaces.
Self-driving cars also have an added benefit, if they are exclusively on the road, in that they could eliminate traffic. But they won't have exclusive access to the road, because people like driving cars. Interconnected compiters planning everyone's trips could eliminate the need for stop signs, stop lights, or the slinky effect on highways, because it turns out comouters can be better drivers than the typical human driver. They just need to stop hitting pedestrians....
That's the question. Let's say the roads are now exclusively self driving cars and they are so efficient they double the throughput of roads. Meanwhile commuters bought houses that are twice as far away from the city because those houses are cheaper, and now they can sleep and work in the car anyway, so twice as much traffic. Or all schoolkids not taking the schoolbus anymore and all going by individual autonomous car and all pensioners getting their robo-taxi to squeeze through rush hour every morning so they're first at the supermarket for the freshest produce. It remains to be seen how that works out.
That's complete bullshit. The reason why there is congestion is because there are too many vehicles on the roadway. Changing the timing of the vehicles doesn't eliminate the vehicles or the congestion. It's a geometry problem.
I bet you think we should be teaching kids abstinence only sex ed, too.
Uh excuse me wtf does that have to do anything.
And no, I don't think that. Just the complete polar opposite in fact.
Because rather than fixing the problem, you think we can avoid it entirely with a completely unreasonable elimination of cars.
Traffic exists because people are inefficient drivers. Congestion happens everywhere people live in sufficient densities, and it's not the density you're imagining.
Fully automated driving is also unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, because people like driving. But it could happen eventually, because the variety of benefits over other forms of transportation. One of those benefits is reducing traffic.
What? I don't think we can eliminate cars. Must have me confused with someone else.
I totally agree with your points and I apology for the confusion or poor communication.