It’s Time for the Car of the Future

Great Debates
41

As others have pointed out, what we need is an America where built things in general are closer to one another, and more places you might want to go are within walking distance of your home or workplace, or within walking distance of a transit stop that is within walking distance of your home or workplace. The automobile, with its non-negotiable space requirements, naturally creates suburban sprawl and endless miles of strip malls, which erode quality of life in a lot of ways having nothing to do with the system’s expense or environmental impact or accident casualties. Invent a self-driving electric-powered car, and all those sprawl problems remain. I suggest you read some of the following:

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler (also see Kunstler’s website – especially the “Eyesore of the Month” pages and the “Clusterfuck Nation” column – rich, juicy rants you can enjoy even if you don’t agree)

Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century, by JHK

The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, by JHK (give special attention to the chapters on Atlanta and Boston)

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany

How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken, by Alex Marshall

The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, by Peter Katz

See also the Wikipedia articles (and links) on:

Transit-oriented development

The New Urbanism

Smart growth

Peter Calthorpe

42

I didn’t buy the books but I skimmed the links and…the car of the future is…no car? What a curious approach to it. You do realize, of course, that these ideas can only work in new cities; existing ones cannot be adapted excepting via the bulldoze approach. I suspect there are other problems as well, but I don’t care to read enough on it to find out if they’re real or not, so I’ll hold my tongue.

43

Begbert, you make good points. The only thing I significantly disagree with is whether a modular approach to the components of a roadway is prohibitively expensive or difficult. I’m imaging a rail system suspended from pylons with the components mostly bolted together. It doesn’t seem to me that the pieces are that difficult or expensive to transport – no more than anything else, in other words. Hell, you could ship most of them by rail, which would make BrainGlutton happy.

Speaking of which, I don’t disagree that “Invent a self-driving electric-powered car, and all those sprawl problems remain.” What I’m proposing is certainly no panacea. It addresses a limited set of the problems inherent with our main form of transportation, but by no means all of them. But if you ask me, it’s easier to revolutionize our transportation system than it is to revolutionize the average American.

44

No, fewer cars. A future where personal automobile ownership is a convenience rather than a necessity, and national-aggregate miles driven per year significantly lower than now, because other practical alternatives are available. See post #38.

Bear in mind that it is only since WWII that we have been building everything around the assumption that everyone will have their own car; anything older than that is built to a pedestrian-and/or-streetcar scale. But yes, that is the big problem: How to retrofit a postwar suburban PUD pod into something more walkable without bulldozing the site and starting over. I don’t know if any New Urbanist has ever even explored an approach.

45

Well, a (non-powered) rail is a lot easier to deal with than a pipe; I actually gave some thought to a suspended rail system, but you run into problems of strength; by the time this thing can handle triple-trailer trucks racing along it at ninety miles an hour without vibrating apart or merely collapsing, you’ll have built the better part of a tunnel. Plus if something does collapse or break, you have entertaining scenario of cars shooting off the end in a graceful arc ending in a massive flaming pileup…if there’s one thing you can say about your average road, most of the ways it falls apart don’t result in guaranteed fatalities.

And yeah, good luck changing people’s behavior; you’re much better off changing the cars. (I still maintain that the road exhibits a certain elegant simplicty that’s hard to beat.)

Actually I think that “horse and carriage” rules were nearly identical to car rules, and that therefore you had roads and road systems several hundred years before the invention of the automobile. We just slapped the asphalt down over the existing buggy lanes.

46

Not so. All such buggy lanes have been paved by now, I suppose, but a great many more roads have been built to new specifications. Autocentric development has a very different physical layout, because automobiles (1) can go farther than horses faster and (2) can be economically provided to the masses, so that much more parking space and wider roads are required. (There was a time when “setting up your carriage” meant you had Arrived as an established gentleman, because it was so expensive – not the carriage itself, but you needed a team of horses, plus stables and pasture for them, plus full-time live-in servants to drive your carriage and groom, feed and exercise the horses when you’re not using them.) Just compare the scale of some really old town with that of any postwar suburb or exurb.

47

If you look at where the weight is in cars (and trucks), it’s in the engine, in the drivetrain, and in safety features for the inhabitants. My car of the future would be quite significantly lighter, maybe 75%. For trucking, the weight of course depends on the cargo. But maybe, since you’re talking about autopiloted vehicles, breaking up loads into smaller and lighter lots would confer no big economic penalty.

I’m no engineer, but the difficulties don’t seem insurmountable, either from an engineering or cost perspective.

48

Okay, I can see your point there. (I’ve been mostly involving myself with the economics of wholly replacing one system with another here, and projected that onto the ‘start of the automobile age’ situation.)

So, how do these little microcosm communities hold up in areas where there tend to be large families (which I think would be reluctant to shovel the brood onto a subway) or bitter cold in winter (where ‘from here to the car’ seems plenty far enough to walk)? Has that been studied or remarked upon?

I would also think, in materialistic America anyway, you’re going to find people who just like owning their own car, for the sake of possession and ‘freedom’ and whatnot, and who would be resistant to giving it up. I mean, sometimes it’s just really handy to own your own truck.

49

Um, I’m not thinking you’re going to run powered rails across the country and back. That’s economically infeasable. So, you’ll still need the engines for that. Additionally, keep in mind that these vehicles are going to have to pull off the rails and into parking lots and be backing up to warehouses; everything will still have an engine, drivetrain, and driver safety features, regardless.

It just occurred to me that these rails may not work so well with the modular house business. Not to mention that one of the motivating factors behind the US interstate system in the first place was so that the military could have a place to drive tanks and land planes if needed…

50

I am an engineer (the mechanical sort) and the cost and difficulty of making such a system world seem enormous to me. Other people have already made all the points against such a system, but the benefit of the automobile is, again, that it allows very flexible transport even in sparsely populated areas with minimal infrastructure. Laying tubes all over the place is going to be hideously expensive, and networking traffic so it can transition from one tube to another is an unenviable task. And once single malfunction is going to tie up the tube.

With regard to the internal combusion engine: there are, in fact, more efficient designs in both theory and practice; specifically the Sterling cycle engine, which uses an external heat source. The problem is driving the thing with a high enough thermal difference; if we ever have portable fusion generators, you can bet that this, or something like it, will entirely replace the Otto or Diesel cycle as the heat engine of choice. But currently, the gasoline engine is, despite its detractions, the most effective method of portable locomotion, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Maglev? Outrageously expensive, only justifable with regular high speed transport, at least until someone comes up with an inexpensive room temperature superconductor.

Ditto for other methods which drive transports via a centralized energy source; power line losses alone (not to mention the many-fold increase in electrical energy production and distribution this would require) would make it less efficient than IC engines, and of course the whole system would be dependant upon the distribution grid. A single blackout would cripple emergency services and regular transportation. Except for limited circumstances where such a system would be supplementally appropriate (high density urban areas, perhaps) it sounds like an unfeasible idea to me.

Stranger

51

In his SF novel The Gold Coast, Kim Stanley Robinson envisioned a future where everyone still has cars and they still run on paved roads as now; but every car is self-piloted by a “carbrain” and powered by an electric “track” running down the center of every lane (like a slot car). Traffic accidents are not unknown but rarer than now. The “national tracking system” would require a huge investment in infrastructure, but so did the interstate highway system. Would that be workable, Stranger? (I mean, assuming you could get a “carbrain” to work without cracking the strong-AI barrier.)

52

I’m sure Stranger will answer this later (and it will be opposite than my answer most likely :)), but here is my take FWIW.

First off, is cost not an object? Because its going to cost a ton. Also, what kind of time factor are we talking here? Its going to take decades to fully power even the major highways…so until then, the cut over to this new system will be partial at best (as I said above, a niche item until its widely distributed). Finally, whats going to power it? Will you ensure the neo-hippies and eco-facist types will get their ass out of the way so we can build a shit load of new nuclear power plants? Because running such a system is going to take a LOT of power…probably double or even tripple our current power capacity (maybe more who knows?).

Leave the self driving AI brain and just concentrating on solely on the new power grid, I’d say its possible…but highly improbable that you could get anyone to fund such a beast (and I have serious doubts those neo-hippies and eco-facist types are going to get out of the way of a massive new nuclear power grid). The costs alone would be staggering…and the political costs would be astronomical to any pol foolish enough to even suggest such a thing.

Thats my take, FWIW.

-XT

53

OK, here’s the long-term solution for intercity personal transport: not flying vehicles per se but levitating ones that are artificially limited to an altitude of a few feet, and horizontal speeds roughly those of current highway vehicles (mainly to ensure energy management in the occasional crash). Actual roads aren’t needed, simply cleared flyways that could be surfaced in grass or other low-lying native vegetation, like a golf fairway. You would need to grade the route somewhat, and reflective signs or strips would be needed to mark the borders, but that’s about it. Bridges, probably not necessary for crossing rivers or other transport routes unless one needed vertical clearance for shipping or vehicular traffic.

The only hitch is that the levitation method can’t be magnetic because that would require a powered strip in the flyway: too much infrastructure. And the cars can’t use fan- or hovercraft-type lifting mechanisms because that would produce far too much noise and consume far too much energy, not to mention the great difficulty in turning and stopping such machines. Nope, gotta be some sort of vectored antigrav mechanism. Aside from that minor little engineering detail, no worries.

Whenever y’all are ready to start sending me royalties, let me know.

54

(Another of) my two bits: deliberately ignoring that bit about electrifying the track, wouldn’t a system like this be unable to accomodate changing lanes?

And while staying in lanes might be viable, you’de going to need a decent AI to avoid smashing into the first thing that’s overhanging the curb a little too far. Still, not impossible. (Ignoring that bit about electrifying the track.)
As for flying cars: who cares about environmental impact; by having low-level flying cars you avoid snow hazard and road wear. That’s worth the cost of the atomic piles right there. (Well, maybe not.) And if you had the cars flying, oh, ten feet up, then you could even allow pedestrians to traverse beneath them. Of course one hopes that these hoverunits are very reliable…

55

One limitation on the number of people who can use one city practically, unless it has great public transport like NYC or European cities, is the number of cars that can get into and out of downtown at the beginning and end of the work day.

In the downtowns, of course, there’s no room for more roads; everything’s already roads, buildings, waterways, or whatnot. My idea would be to squeeze more people into the same roads by:

**4. Building cars that are one person wide, rather than two. ** Then you can have nearly twice as many lanes on the same roads.

Such cars could be one-person cars, or they could have a back seat to allow for a passenger. For safety, the passenger compartment would have front, rear, and side airbags, since there’d be less protective metal.

This should be simple enough to create; we already have an unenclosed vehicle of this sort, called the motorcycle. Most people would rather be enclosed and have four wheels, though.

56

  1. In that particular novel (as opposed to the other two in the trilogy), no.

  2. Eco-fascist? :dubious:

57

No. Even the electric storage batteries we have now could accommodate that.

Environmental impact is the least of the objections to flying cars! The main objections are (1) consumer cost, (2) fuel consumption, and (3) safety/air traffic control. See the thread linked in post #35.

58

Trains can accommodate even more passengers in the space taken up by a two-lane road.

59

I’d like to go back to the idea that what we really have here are two problems - inter- and intra-city transit.

Inter-city wise, the options seem to be a communal system - trains, the linking systems for cars proposed earlier, that sort of thing - or individual vehicles. The tradeoff is efficiency vs. independence - trains can carry more people, but they can’t go everywhere, and require much more investment in infrastructure - especially the more complicated versions. Also, they have the significant disadvantage of not having your car available at your destination, which is ok if there’s a good intra-city transit system, but isn’t so good otherwise. Also, even with good intra-city transit, there is a convenience factor to cars - especially with cargo. The problems that have been raised with individuated inter-city systems are mostly efficiency things - obviously, cars have to lug around a whole lot more metal per person, especially given the proportion of people who drive a car with no passengers.

Intra-city issues have to do with complexity - even the best public transit systems can’t be omni-present, so you end up hoofing it to the bus/train stop and waiting. Which is fine if you just happen to be healthy, not have anything huge to carry, and are going somewhere on the grid. But cars, at least at the density currently existing in most American cities, take up a whole lot of space, suffer from disorganization, and definitely affect urban sprawl.

What I’d like to see is an improved public transit system combined with rental cars (or trucks) for those inconvenient moments. This is, essentially, the system in Hong Kong, with the caveat that the rental vehicles are taxis, because it’s so cheap to hire drivers. In American cities, I’ve seen a few different carshare programs that let you use one of a fleet of cars when you need it for a fee much less than owning a car. The problem being that it’s not that much less, and you have to be in a city with good PT for that to work. So, I think what needs to happen is an investment in PT from the government, possibly coupled with and financed by a series of increased taxes on private vehicles. Obviously, we Americans are way too attached to our cars for that to happen now, but I can see it in the future with gas prices going up. It’d still take an initial investment by the government in order to make PT attractive enough that people would be willing to give up their cars. At that point, as fewer people had cars, car taxes could be raised, increasing the shift. There would still be roads in cities, for rental cars and cargo vehicles (I can’t imagine that freight trains would be particularly efficient for deliveries to small shops and such) but could be reduced, and some of that space dedicated to PT, either in bus or, ideally train form. Not sure how plausible such a scenario is, politically, but I think it’d be a step in the right direction.

60

You could make it very practical with tolls that charged for use of the road by that wacko economic law, supply and demand. Lots for rush hour, not so much for 4am on a Sunday morning.
The congestion in most American cities is due to the simple fact that road use is perceived as being free. If it isn’t, you’ll start to get more rational behavior, and therefore more public transit, at first in the form of private solutions like carpooling and vans, and later with buses and trains.
Even the NYC area suffers from having “free” road use; the 59th Street Bridge, which has no toll, is always packed, it seems, as is the Lincoln Tunnel, who’s problem isn’t that it’s free but that in rush hour it might as well be, since the single-passenger cars driving into Manhattan are, statistically, far more likely to have affluent people in them for whom the toll is a nothing nuisance.
Charge what the traffic (no pun intended) will bear, and suddenly you’ll get all kinds of innovations, and people will actually be able to get from point a to point b in a decent amount of time.