Let's built a future with 300mph self-driving supercars and mach 20 spaceplanes -- addressing the actual desires and wants of most users (mobility, convenience) rather than imposing personal ethics of asceticism (mass transit, anti-urbanization). The author brings up a lot of valid problems with contemporary car travel (and notably none of its revolutionary advantages), but most of these orthogonal to the personal-vs.-mass transport issue he argues, e.g.
* 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.
I like high speed trains myself. They can run off the power grid, which means they can run off wind/solar/nuclear/hydro, and they are actually in some ways more convenient than cars.
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.
I don't see the anti-car position as asceticism. Rather, I see it as a recognition of the basic fact that peoples' expressed preferences are hard to separate from government policy in this particular domain.
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.
Yes, I came in here to comment of this. Let's cure the ills of a device that is massively useful. Sure - cities should look more like NYC and less like Houston - I'll give the car haters that, but I'm with uvdiv, that I'd far prefer fast, clean versions that drove themselves.
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"?
I agree with you. One thing that I have a problem with making everyone move to public transit is my IBS. I loath driving the way it is because of that, but I can at least pull over to a McDonald's or a gas station. It would be horrific to have to hold it on even the cleanest, fastest bus.
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.
To me, what would be interesting about a world without cars (or even with cars, but vastly more attractive public transport) is that it would partly reverse a sad isolationist trend that's come along with the power and control given to us by modern technology.
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.
Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease.
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).
You've done a great job of summing up one of the reasons that public transit in the US is as bad as it is.
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.
If you're truly introspective you can live in a building and never say hello to your neighbors. Everyone is in the same place but minding their business, listening their favorite music, etc.
Man has traditionally (going back 10 thousands of years) not had the type of interaction that you mention. Civilization brought man close together in this modern era. Tract housing, public transportation, ETC.
History shows us that is more in mans nature to be largely isolated except for a small group of people. Even when living amongst other people - traditionally people were much more spread out than now and did not interact with those outside of their small group very often
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.
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." --Ayn Rand
The article falls flat on its face in the first two paragraphs when he says that car technology has not advanced in the last 126 years. That just being ignorant of how cars work if he believes that. And to call them a stupid technology is purely idiotic.
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.
It's always important to consider the dark side. We didn't do much of that when we built car culture in the first place, so let's do it now.
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?
Livable, walkable, affordable cities are dense. That is the primary factor in whether or not you can afford to live within walking/biking/subway distance. The rich people that want to live close to work are going to get first dibs on usable housing, and unless you build more than that, middle class residents don't stand a chance.
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.
The cost of real estate is a problem in certain walkable cities (New York, San Francisco) but not so much in others (Chicago, Portland, etc).
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.
To get rid of cars, you need cities designed for people, not cars: otherwise everything is so far away that nothing gets ever done. We won't get rid of cars until oil is ridiculously expensive and we must give up. That will also leave much of the recent (since 1950's) development to decay, and new cities will emerge where there are new concentrations of people.
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.
I've been wondering how much of the difference between old-world and new-world cities has to do with the simple fact that new-world cities evolved from industrial-era settlements, while old-world ones resulted from agglutination of rural areas. The effect being that yours were designed for maximising production, while ours have a more emergent design, based on generations of people used to living within walking distance of everything.
Cities are still designed for people. It's just that they are choosing to live in large, cheaper houses with lawns instead of a high-rise apartment in NYC.
The "let's get rid or substantially reduce cars" crowd often is comprised of those who live in cities, and have no understanding of the indispensability of cars in rural areas. Work, shopping, some level of school, advanced medical, are often in one of the next towns 10-15 miles over, with your town having one of those as an anchor.
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.
This is a really, really good point. I live in a town in the south and like most southern towns public transit is just emerging or non-existent. From my apartment complex on an interstate to downtown where I work is around 17 miles at 60mph. The way roads and interstates are setup it's almost impossible for public transit to be possible. When I travel to SF or Boston its an odd but fun traveling experience. Back home it just doesn't work. I enjoy my Mustang and my commute to work.
Our country was built on steam trains, which were horrifically inefficient, but they got the job done. Currently we’re built on cars, which too are inefficient but practical. These things gained ground because there was a way to commercialise them, to make people say “I can’t live without that”. The question is: how can that be done with things like ultralights and bullet trains and public air? Could we really let the roads overgrow and just fly or rail everywhere? It’s an enticing prospect, but I fear that such a vision of the future neglects the many people who just can’t afford to make the switch.
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.
It really is an amazing testament to human ingenuity that something as mind-bogglingly complicated as the modern automobile could have ever become a consumer item. But their cost is profound (DanI-S sums it up here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872338). Surely, concern for people who "can't afford" expensive things would lead to adopting more public transportation, don't you think?
I love cars. I love driving them, I love working on them, I love the design language and history. They're one of the finest expressions of man's use of engineering to conquer his surroundings and go extremely fast. I'd also love a future where you don't need a car to commute, though.
I often wonder why there is such a common city style of dense commercial infrastructure (downtown) surrounded by further and further distant residential infrastructure.
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.
Let's build a future where people aren't packed together like sardines twenty-four hours a day. Urban living takes the idea of personal space and crushes it down to a bubble three inches around your head, to the point where people think it's acceptable for your neighbors to hear you through the walls, to spend an hour every day sitting in a metal box with fifty strangers you don't talk to or even acknowledge, to walk by graffiti and not take it as a personal insult to your home city and by extension yourself. If the news that someone you know got mugged doesn't badly shock you, you owe it yourself to move somewhere better.
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.
One of the main reasons for that is that it's an awful lot slower. I live about 40 miles from work at the moment, which I cover in about 50 minutes door-to-door; there is absolutely no way I could achieve that on a bike. I'd guess that might take me 3-4 hours each way, so hence the bike is unfortunately not an option, regardless of its energy efficiency or cost.
Cars address a lot of needs. It's not surprising that there are superior solutions for each of those needs, but all of those solutions are significantly worse than cars for other needs. If you try to cobble together a car equivalent from those other solutions, you end up with something signficantly more expensive/less good.
The Accountant's Falacy: Anything for which the debit doesn't appear on your balance sheet is "free".
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.
Whose vehicle wastes the fuel in the situation you described? That of the, usually one, individual who chose to incur much higher marginal costs by taking the car instead of the bus in the first place. Just like you cant't blame a cyclist for the fuel wasted by the people in cars waiting to overtake him on their 2km trip...
This article's view is a visionary one, and I applaud that: But people promote (bullet) trains, subways, etc. as revolutionary inventions when they really aren't. They've been around for 50+ years and have 'lost' to cars in the marketshare battle, in Europe, US, China, etc. I want us to focus on new technologies like the instead of continuing to push old ones like it's a 'sprawl conspiracy' keeping them down (when their use is optimized for downtowns). As uvdiv mentions, the personal vs. mass transit issue is big spectrum.
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.
This article, while well written and trying to think ahead, forgets something very important: cars are such a symbol because they appeal to one of the core aspects of human nature. The freedom of movement, the ability to choose where you go, the notion of being unrestricted and able to move about freely. Being herded on a bus is not in our nature.
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.
>> The freedom of movement, the ability to choose where you go, the notion of being unrestricted and able to move about freely. Being herded on a bus is not in our nature.
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.
Solid points. To add to your safety point regarding flying cars: as bad as people are at driving in 2 dimensions, I can't imagine how horrible we would be driving in 3.
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? :-)
I applaud the direction, but I do have one small nit to pick:
"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.
As much as I respect Peter Theil I think this whole 'where are the flying cars' thing is a dead end.
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:) )
There's a big reason I don't want to move to bay area to work. I love to live in Berlin just because I can get anywhere with a train anytime I want. And the funny thing is, in Berlin it is allowed to drink beer in the trains and subways and still I don't feel afraid at all, people behave. Trains work, are fast, safe and reliable most of the time.
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.
Flying "cars" are far from real, The Martin Jetpack which the author has mentioned is noisy, expensive and only has 30 minutes (31.5 miles max) operating time. However, there's much room to improve current transportation system, new technology and government regulations are constantly pushing fuel efficiency. Mass production air-based vehicles aren't viable unless energy production becomes cheap enough.
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.
In the world and people that I currently see in front of me, any mode of transportation that requires a helmet is not viable for most people, whether that be bicycles, motorcycles or jetpacks.
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.
[+] [-] uvdiv|14 years ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] api|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nickpinkston|14 years ago|reply
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"?
[+] [-] m0nty|14 years ago|reply
I must have missed the bit where he said that. I thought he was saying that we could find better solutions.
[+] [-] virmundi|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sgentle|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] enjo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donw|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] swah|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goggles99|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wissler|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loso|14 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] api|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] oconnore|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yason|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anonymous|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exue|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gordianknot|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Derbasti|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kfcm|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshmlewis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evincarofautumn|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fiddly_bits|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaiju|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grannyg00se|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] twomills|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismealy|14 years ago|reply
http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/whats-the-worlds-most-energy...
[+] [-] read_wharf|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] uvdiv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archangel_one|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamgopal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anamax|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjkundert|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] konstruktor|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exue|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yaix|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kposehn|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 7952|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] enobrev|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DennisP|14 years ago|reply
What about driverless flying cars?
[+] [-] kposehn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|14 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] brownbat|14 years ago|reply
"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...
[+] [-] rowanwernham|14 years ago|reply
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:) )
[+] [-] pimeys|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] oliverchen|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] read_wharf|14 years ago|reply
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.