Where do you live exactly that going more than 100 miles is uncommon? West of the Mississippi that’s not particularly uncommon. Here in Texas, pretty much anything outside of your immediate city is at least 45-50 miles away, and in most cases is closer to 100 or some multiple of that. Example- the Dallas/Houston/San Antonio triangle has legs of 240 miles (Dallas-Houston), 274 miles (Dallas-San Antonio), and about 200 miles (Houston-San Antonio).
I’m all for electric cars, but I also think that they need to have a good range (~300 miles per charge, and not have huge charging times. It’s not unreasonable to expect to be able to drive from Dallas to Houston and back in one day without having to stay overnight to charge the car. An hour or so is reasonable, but past that, and people won’t willingly give up gasoline/diesel powered cars.
Perhaps I missed the broader discussion on that topic, but I agree it’s foolish to say simply that autonomous drives can replace plane rides. I think it’s quite reasonable to say that autonomous car rides can replace SOME plane rides.
A flight to St Louis is ~75 minutes gate to gate. But when you factor in the commute to Midway or O’Hare and subsequent commute from Lambert, figure minimum 30 minutes on each end, and the airport security and “get their early just in case” for an extra ~60-75 minutes you’re looking at a total time investment of 3.5 hrs minimum.
An autonomous car ride in a dedicated lane would pretty easily beat that time straight up if you’re topping 100 mph, it would be cheaper and it would be entirely on your own schedule. Way less stress and you could bring 4 friends. Same math would work in a lot of places. I don’t see Chicago to LA or NY to Miami happening of course.
I’m convinced that this autonomous car caravan approach will eventually become the default travel mode for most of us in our lifetimes.
When I pointed out that, to replace a 3-hour flight in a 6-hour drive, you’d be talking about a car being capable of driving well over 200mph, Sam said, “Okay, nit-picker. Call it a two hour flight.” Which would still require a car capable of at least 150mph.
New Jersey!
I’m just betting that the average person in any part of the US isn’t taking 100 mile round trips to; get to work*, take the kids to school, buy groceries, etc, normal everyday stuff.
*I know there are people with stupid long commutes but I just doubt they’re not outliers.
A fast and dirty Google says, According to ABC News, the average American drives 16 miles to work each way …
Having driven both US highways and the autobahn at length, believe me when I say the autobahn is infinitely more prepared for those kinds of speeds. Even the highways out west in the US, which have very high or no speed limits, still aren’t great for 125+.
“Carbon” is kind of a complex issue, though. In the OP’s premise and subsequent posts, he advocates self-driving EV limo service in lieu of more or faster rail. But shifting that load would require some non-small improvements to highway infrastructure that is far from carbon-neutral both in construction and in just lying there in the sun. And tires themselves produce a significant amount of particulate pollution (dust), considerably more than steel-on-steel (IIUC).
Rails take up quite a bit less space than a highway and have less of an environmental footprint than pavement. The OP is indirectly advocating for the worse infrastructure approach, in the name of convenience. Convenience is wonderful for market-based solutions, but we may be reaching the point where we will have to jettison some of it just to keep above the hole in the seat in that shack outside.
Well thank you for informing me of this. Ignorance fought. I guess I will have to figure out what those non-horizontal parts of the trips I have been on actually were. Illusions, I guess.
I think these statements are far more subjective than you imply. The highways are already there and we’re not removing them. They already require upkeep. It’s unknown how many additional lanes or reconstruction is required to support these autonomous vehicles. Some projections say that autonomous EVs could have 3X-4X increase in the efficiency of road use - basically eliminating the need for safe following distances and human factors that cause most congestion. So a mostly EV future could mean existing roads are mostly adequate.
Trains are not flexible. People will not choose them en masse if they only serve a single point to point route. EVs can go anywhere. There’s no practical approach where can magically make people give up choice.
I’ve driven it quite a bit, actually. I’ve driven across the country multiple times. There are lots and lots of miles with straightaways and shallow curves.
The biggest difference is that Germans know how to drive on fast roads; you better keep your slow ass in the right lane, even if you’re stuck behind a truck.
There’s a similar curve in Providence, RI. The number of yellow signs posted along the curve almost hurts the eyes. The autobahn has similar, though. You can be hurtling along at 90 mph and two minutes later weaving slowly between 500-year-old houses. I think the speed limit is max 90 kph when going through all cities (which is how I got my speeding ticket).
Are you talking about interstates? Or just highways in general? I don’t recall there being any interstates outside of cities that generally don’t support high speeds. Rt 95 south of NYC isn’t very good and I’m sure there are stretches here and there. I lived in Utah for a while and all the interstates supported high speeds, which the locals proved often. The biggest danger was people falling asleep.
Wait, what? You’re aware that there are faster ways to charge an electric car than a 110V outlet in your driveway, right? With current technology, a Tesla can put on 200-250 miles in one hour of charging at a Level 3 DC charger.
Interstates. Admittedly, most of my experience is in the eastern part of the US (draw a line up from Dallas and then take a right at any point), but in addition to interstates having curves that are too tight, road repair isn’t a top priority in this direction. I guess mileage may indeed vary out west.
Most of the freeways, outside urban areas, in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana are marked 80. I was a bit startled on 84 just north of Utah to see a curve sign marked “speed 75”. I have done 90 on the state highway between Farson and Lander because Wyoming tends to mostly be a live-&-let-live place and the road, though it was approaching the divide, was straight.
Still, those speeds are far below what the premise of a 2-hour flight vs a 6-hour drive would call for. And higher speeds do put more wear (from flex) on roads than lower speeds, not to mention more wear on batteries due to the increase in charge cycles and the extra stress that level-3 charging imposes.
Also, to be able to sustain 100+ mph speeds over long distances for large numbers of trips without littering roads with corpses, autonomous vehicles would have to be REALLY safe. More effective safety protocols, on the other hand, could noticeably reduce average speed:
The faster a car is going, the less likely it is that its passengers will survive a crash. So if we’re expecting self-driving cars to replace air travel to a significant extent by providing extremely high-speed long-distance travel, there will have to be quite revolutionary improvements in the safety technology.
ISTM that the situation is somewhat akin to the classic two-out-of-three options for “Good, Fast and Cheap”, where you can get any two but not all three. In the long-distance transit world, you’ve got, say, the five options of Speed, Safety, Economy, Convenience, and Capacity (i.e., the ability to shift large numbers of people on a routine basis). You can generally get three of those options together but struggle to add a fourth, and all five is an unrealistic expectation.
Air travel, for example, is unparalleled for Speed and Safety on average, with some variable points for Capacity and Economy, but is highly inconvenient. The autonomous car wins on Convenience and (for those people who already own one at the time of their trip) Economy, but is low on Capacity and still quite an unknown quantity in the Speed/Safety trade-off. Trains provide Capacity, Economy and Safety, with variable potential for Speed, but low Convenience compared to personal cars. And so on; and that’s not even taking into account the Environmental Sustainability option.
To be clear, you guys are making a mountain out of a poorly chosen example. Electric cars are not replacement for aircraft. The point I was clumsily trying to make is that if cars become autonomous, that will extend the distance people are willing to drive, or be driven. It will cut into the use case for trains at the lower end, just as the lowering price of air travel cut into trains on the high end. Train travel has been getting squeezed from both ends for a long time. Indon’t see much in the way of air travel cutting into trains on the long distance side (sorry, flying cars), but cars are another matter.
But the biggest threat to trains might be telecommuting. As we grt more and more comfortable with remote meetings and working from home, the need for business travel will fall. That’s going to hurt every other transporation option. It already has.
Now, some of that will come back after Covid, but a number of companies have already divested themselves of office space and have announced that work from home is permanent. And as we continue to tax fuel more, aircraft and train travel both will get more expensive, while at the same time high speed, low latency internet is becoming more widely available.
Trains are old industrial tech in an electrified and digitized world. They are needed for freight for sure, and efficiency in freight is critical.
That may well be, from the standpoint of auto travel being less stressful and attention-demanding than it is now. I’m not yet convinced that it will be tremendously faster than human-controlled driving is now, without significant upgrades (and more regular maintenance) to major highways.
Autonomous cars or not, we, as a country, have done a crap job of maintaining all of our transportation infrastructure over the past few decades, and that includes roads.
It’s true that simply staying home is always going to be both the cheapest and the most environmentally friendly travel option. Where it will really have the biggest impact, environmentally speaking, is in enabling individuals to avoid owning underutilized cars in the first place. E.g., multi-person households being able to get by with just one car instead of two or three, and so on.
Maybe, but I don’t think it is anywhere near as clearcut as you seem to imagine. The freedom of being able to stand up, walk around, and take a restroom break whenever I feel like it, versus the freedom to do so when the autonomous car can find an opening at a highway rest area or other suitable venue, is a big deal to some of us. (You know, I assume, that the big open spaces out west where the cars can really move don’t have clean restrooms at every milepost.)
Also remember that people don’t drive (or take trains/planes/buses/bicycles/etc) just for commuting to work. Visiting family/friends, shopping, getting health care, etc., actually add up to a lot more time and miles. For example, the 2017 National Household Travel Survey reported just fifteen percent of daily trips were for commuting to work.