Comment by cyberax 2 days ago
> For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom.
So, like transit?
I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle. And I'm 100% sure that there'll be an upmarket segment with slightly more expensive cars that are kept more clean than the rest.
Actually this is untrue. The congestion improvement comes from cooperation between vehicles. Basic control theory applied to cooperative vehicles found 5% of cars participating can eliminate stop and go traffic conditions, and in general as you approach 100% penetration all traffic moves at maximum rate effectively like a self assembling mass transit system. Only if you effectively replaced human drivers as adversarial agents with AI adversarial agents would things stay the same. Even at lower levels of 30% penetration you see most congestion resolve even in urban roads.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09680...
If you built a lightrail where only 3 people could be in each section, that would be a close equivilant to driver density. At anything close to rush hour, you couldn't put enough trains on the line to keep up with demand, because trying to transport that many people, at that low density, all to the same area just doesn't work. It is so crazy to me the lengths people will go to justify car culture over walkability and public transit.
> because trying to transport that many people, at that low density, all to the same area just doesn't work.
This is being solved (to the chagrin of urbanists) by companies moving out of downtown high rises and into suburban office parks. Remote work has helped as well.
> It is so crazy to me the lengths people will go to justify car culture over walkability and public transit.
You aren’t going to make the entirety of the LA metro area walkable and connected by public transit. Sure you can make a neighborhood a little more walkable and you can connect some denser areas with light rail but that just doesn’t solve the problem that you seem to have issue with.
This is true. Public spaces require conformity. If the US wants a hyper-individualistic society, then the end result is everybody living in their own isolated pocket dimension simulation.
You make it sound like a bad thing that I can avoid sharing space with people who smoke on the train, people who blast music on the train, people who do gymnastics on the train, people who make death threats on the train, people on the train who accost my girlfriend, people in the JetBlue security line who don’t know how to expediently unpack their luggage at the security line (got around this with precheck), and so forth
All of these were actual situations I encountered in NYC. The only reasons I don’t move somewhere car dependent are because I enjoy cycling and I hate parking even more than sharing space with the dregs of society.
Before anyone gets on their high horse about taking care of the lowest members of society, I pay enough taxes to completely absolve myself of any additional responsibility to them (NYC spends around 60000/annum/homeless person).
> It’ll continue to be a one-flesh-body-per-2-tonne vehicle utilization
My personal vehicle can fuck off to a distant parking lot way more conveniently than me taking a shuttle there.
> prevent space sharing between the ~2-3 social groups where intermingling means friction and fear.
The issue is not space sharing between social groups. I'm happy to share space with people of any ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation, political leanings, dress code, economic status, educational level or "social cohorts". The issue is civil, polite people being forced to share space with rude, entitled, violent individuals.
Nah. Transit is already a bankrupt transportation mode, cars and a good city design are already superior to transit.
The US is far ahead of the curve, it has not fucked itself like Europe with insane housing density. This is clearly seen in the birth rates. Compare the US, Europe, and Japan.
> I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle.
The self-driving car ”utopia” (or rather moderate improvement) very much hinges on the space savings on roadways and parking, to increase utilization, reduce congestion and allow dead space to be reclaimed. If people think like you (no value judgment, I suspect this might be the future norm), then you’ll see almost no change to the urban landscape as a whole. It’ll continue to be a one-flesh-body-per-2-tonne vehicle utilization, a ~5:1 provisioning of parking spaces, 25-50% of urban areas being roadways+parking, and a double-digit productivity loss from commuting and running simple errands.
That leaves you with an individual comfort improvement (allowing you to be on your phone while in the car) for a premium price, and increased surveillance tech on personal vehicles. (And, to be fair, it can still be huge for drunk driving deaths, access for elderly & disabled, once costs come down). Overall, very mediocre imo.
Controversial take: the US has painted itself into a corner, where by ignoring the well being of people in their own communities, they need so many workarounds to prevent space sharing between the ~2-3 social groups where intermingling means friction and fear. There are very real logistical challenges to a gated community segmentation of the physical world. This paints the resistance to public transit in a different light: it’s not so much about being public, but rather being shared with strangers, especially of different social cohorts. It also explains the sacred status of air travel which mainly has been left outside the debate: imo because of the higher socio-economic average clientele. Now that cost has come down and low-cost airlines like Spirit share the same airports, the friction has come there as well.