- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
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We won’t get railways to every door. But the title says Public Transit. So various sized rail vehicles will connect with various sized road vehicles for the last mile. Everything electric and everything autonomous.
Nobody will need to own a car in urban locations. Many places won’t allow access anyway.
We’ll all pay less for ownership. Less per mile transit. Less for goods due to reduced transport costs.
We’ll enjoy our streets as a place to socialise once the danger, noise and parked cars are gone. Multi lane highways will be replaced by parks and cycle routes.
We’ll enjoy our time not wasted sitting in traffic jams.
All this won’t stop the greed merchants peddling their lies and duping the gullible though.I read this in the voice of Adam Something.
@yogthos How about a city like NYC that bans human driven vehicles altogether and has a network of autonomous vehicles of varying sizes constantly available on the street for both cargo and passenger travel. You need to get from brooklyn to an address in midtown? You call up a ride on your phone. One immediately drops out of traffic, picks you up, and takes you where you need to go. No human behavior caused traffic jams or accidents. For less specific destinations, bus or van sized vehicles.
The practical problem with this is that individual transport is (1) horribly space-inefficient, (2) doesn’t scale well at all. Self-driving vehicles improve both slightly, but it still sucks ass compared to a light rail line. It also sucks from the environmental perspective, putting microplastics from rubber everywhere, overproducing hundreds of tons of lithium-ion batteries, etc.
There are other issues too.
You call up a ride on your phone.
What if you don’t have a phone for whatever reason? E.g. it’s dead or you’ve lost it?
With public transit, if you have some cash or a plastic card, you can board. And I’m a proponent of making public transit free (at the point of use) in cities, so you don’t need anything at all to travel.
One immediately drops out of traffic
How would a pedestrian cross this “traffic”? Do we cover everything in crosswalks and stoplights, making the system grind to a halt at rush hour (just like cars), or do we force everyone to take those pods? In any case this is just awful urbanism.
No human behavior caused traffic jams or accidents
… instead we will inevitably get much worse outages because someone hacked the control system or the internet is down. I’ll stick with human tram drivers thank you very much.
@balsoft Also, this whole system could also be free (i.e. tax funded)
You still need a phone to board. Or you have to cover the city in terminals where you can order that taxi thing. At that point might as well build the public transit stops.
@balsoft 1 - Who says public transport can’t coexist in this imagiunary world?
2 - bridges for pedestrians or tunnels for vehicles.
3 - because nobody can hack the streetlights. The internet is already everywhere. Luddites are irrelevant.
Who says public transport can’t coexist in this imagiunary world?
But that’s still not answering the main question: why do we need the system you’re proposing in the first place? If we just start building more public transport and phasing out cars alltogether, it would result in better cities with faster commute times for everyone.
bridges for pedestrians or tunnels for vehicles.
- Bridges are expensive. Tunnels are even more expensive.
- They slow down pedestrian traffic massively, while it should be encouraged at any cost because it’s the best way to make short trips.
- They break up cycle paths, while cycling should be encouraged at any cost because it’s the best way to make medium trips.
- Bridges simply don’t fit on city streets.
- Lots of people have a stroller, or are in a wheelchair, or have heavy luggage, or are old, or have some other reason they can’t climb up stairs. Adding an elevator on either side of the bridge explodes the budget.
There’s a reason why almost all crossings in cities are level crossings. And level crossings fundamentally slow down car traffic, whether it’s self driving or not is irrelevant, and at rush hour it means huge traffic jams.
because nobody can hack the streetlights. The internet is already everywhere. Luddites are irrelevant.
Hacking streetlights has very few consequences. Cities are well-lit regardless. It just makes it a bit harder to walk around. It might result in a few broken bones due to tripping on stuff, and a slight increase in instances of robbery.
But hacking the main way of transportation in a city would be disastrous. Thousands of people will literally die because of ambulances being stuck among millions of dead cars, and fire trucks not being able to make way to a fire.
Some things just don’t belong on the internet. This will become more and more clear as techbros try to stick AI and IoT everywhere. After enough deaths we will learn.
In general, what you’re proposing will not solve any problems that cities have (because it’s fundamentally just cars, which are the main problem of modern cities) and will introduce a dozen more.
@balsoft @farbel I think your imaginary city describes how the citibikes and ebikes work in NYC now - you pick one up and ride to your destination, then dock it again. This augments the transit and coexist well with pedestrians.
In terms of street level crossings and coexistence, you want to switch to the european model where cycleways and sidewalks are continuous and have priority, and cars yield to them, using roundabouts more when an intersection is necessary.
@KevinMarks @balsoft prioritizing bikes and pedestrians is all well and good when you don’t take weather into account.
@KevinMarks @balsoft I take it you bike and walk in the rain all the time?
@balsoft @farbel with properly phased lights, level crossings don’t slow down car traffic; what slows it down is too many cars being used, as they are very spatially inefficient. Congestion pricing in London, New York and other cities has increased traffic speeds by replacing car usage with transit, walking and cycling.
@KevinMarks @balsoft In Tucson, where I lived and drove most of my adult life, timed traffic signals are useless, because people are too stupid to understand how they work. All it takes is one person rushing to be first in line at the next red light to gum up the works.
thats just cars with extra steps.
good public transit does exactly this, except more efficiently.
@umbrella “good public transit does exactly this, except more efficiently.” Not really, if it is al on one electric grid. Think of it as one giant train with the cars broken up and separated.
then we would have to maintain an infinity of discrete cars, asphalt and there’s all sorts of safety implications. isn’t it cheaper to make actual trains?
now, i agree current car-centric infrastructure will make this difficult in the short and medium term, but cars exist for that and would be not problem to use in the meantime if the solution is just making them electric or self driving.
@umbrella not “just”
Why not make these cars bigger, so they can pick up and drop off a chain of multiple parties of travellers more efficiently?
Once demand’s been established, we could even do away with the phone app and just run the cars on a schedule.
This idea sounds really bussin
@Cevilia That’s why I said varying sizes of vehicles. The app would just be to enter your destination and pay, assuming there wasn’t a universal charge or tax for usage. You don’t want them to stop everywhere, just where they are needed.
If the cars ran on a schedule, you wouldn’t need to enter your destination at all. And maybe the cars could just have a little machine near the front that accepts cash or contactless payments. No smartphone required. Also, they wouldn’t have to stop everywhere. People on the street who wanted to travel could flag down a passing car, and people on board could press a button to request a stop. :)
I don’t think automated vehicles are necessarily bad, there are some trains that are autonomous that work well as far as I know, but this in no way means that autonomous cars are a good idea. Not Just Bikes has a very interesting (albeit long, but you don’t need to watch much of it to get the gist) of how autonomous cars could make cities an absolute nightmare, I recommend it!
No. That only solves some of the issues, and creates brand new ones.
You haven’t solved the inherent inefficiencies of having everyone sit in their own cars. The same bottlenecks will still exist and will still cause congestion, only with automation you can have slightly more capacity because it’s taking out the delays between one driver moving and the driver behind reacting and starting to move as well.
All the issues with tires rubbing asphalt creating micro rubber particles will stay, as will the massively cost ineffective infrastructure needed to support mass car travel like freeway interchanges, as will the fact that you need orders of magnitude more materials to manufacture enough cars to do the job of just a few hundred trains.
And having the cars autonomous will make them even more vulnerable to cyber attacks than modern cars already are.
Also, trains are even easier to automate than cars. I live in Vancouver and we’ve had autonomous trains since 1986.
@HiddenLayer555 In NYC, my example, how many more train lines do you suppose you would need? Above ground? Underground? Are you going to lay track on every street? underground? Are you sure this would be more efficient than a network of smaller vehicles? There is no need for everyone to sit in their own car if it is all electric and automated. A single person vehicle, if if even existed, could be much smaller.
Are you going to lay track on every street?
Unironically yes. Tear up all that fucking asphalt and replace with paving stone and/or grass, with tram tracks embedded. Streets would be so much nicer without all the hot black asphalt and dirty annoying loud cars.
@balsoft That would be a big improvement in the end, but filthy to accomplish.
As the Netherlands had showed us, you can do it incrementally just by repaving old streets when their time comes.
@farbel @HiddenLayer555 Not much more, PT already moves more people than private vehicles around NYC: https://a816-dohbesp.nyc.gov/IndicatorPublic/data-explorer/walking-driving-and-cycling/?id=2415#display=summary
So to get from where it is to a “no private vehicles” utopia thre isn’t that much more to do. Probably as tramways on roads that will now be closed to cars. So not that expensive. But a couple more subways for some links that need more volume would probably be needed.
Are you going to lay track on every street?
Not necessary. You can walk a few hundred meters to your end destination. It’s actually good for your health.
Not to mention, laying tons of tracks on streets for a light rail network is a thing that’s been around since before personalised cars.
Sounds good, and if you don’t own the autos personally then the space needed to store them can also be partially mitigated. But it’s so so so much more environmentally damaging (which directly translates into money, as it’s more materials, more labour, more transport, more machines, etc) than a train where the equivalent of one auto can pull several cheap cars with a ton of people. And it’s so much more complicated to get right, you don’t have a successful model to copy from. It’s not that it’s a bad idea, it’s that trains and buses are a much better idea.
@Aria Between cities, I am all about the train, and in smaller towns a trolley.
