This is key. I’d suggest that use of mass transit (where available) could be encouraged by increasing fare subsidies, and increasing gasoline taxes and other commuter related fees.
I’ve lived and worked in the Chicago area most of the past 30 years. For the first 25 of them, I took the train into Chicago every day to work. During that time, I lived in 2 different homes, each less than a mile from the station - which I walked daily.
You have a choice of where to live. I chose to live where I could use mass transit. My personal preference would be to encourage/subsidize the siting of housing and workplaces such that mass transit was practical.
But choice of where to live is limited by, on one end of the scale, expense of housing, and on the other end, quality (crime, bad schools). Between those, there may not a that many choices near transit. The nice neighborhoods with transit stops become even more popular and expensive. So a big part of the solution is assuring that enough people can have access to transit to keep them from having to flee to cheaper homes out in the suburbs.
I think so. Uber and Lyft are commodity services at this point. They are more or less the exact same thing and compete almost exclusively on price. The big barrier to entry for a third competitor is getting the critical mass of drivers and users. With driveless cars the first problem goes away. Anyone with enough capital can simply buy the cars. Users is more tricky, but certainly Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon can do that. Look, for example, at how easily Google established Google Play’s music streaming service.
For some bizarre reason you decided to cut out the part of most excepting places with enough population density to justify subways or trains and then argue the point. I clearly said that subways will their place, but for the majority of places in the US they’re impractical.
I think buses will definitely go away because the cost difference isn’t there and they don’t run any faster than cars. Say we have a driverless car going for a 10 mile journey. That’s maybe a dollar’s worth of gas and some small amount of amortized maintenance and capital cost. Give them a 50% profit margin and we’re talking in the range of three dollars for the ride. Split that between two people and we’re talking $1.50. Even if the bus was free, most people are going to pay the money for the convenience and comfort.
My take is it depends on where you are and where you are going. I grew up in outer Queens. The car was great for going to the supermarket or to a department store. But going into the city it was much better walking three blocks to a bus stop which would take me to the subway.
Where I live now I drive to work because even if I could figure out how to take public transportation it would take twice as long with multiple changes. But I live near the start of BART, and it is far superior for going into San Francisco. And I much prefer public transportation from airports when I travel to a city. I try to fly into Reagan when I go to DC just for that.
And again, not really. Driverless cars and ride sharing will do a lot to unclog our roads. Driverless cars will increase the capacity of the roadways because computers are (or will be) better drivers than humans. We will have fewer accidents, less traffic caused by inattentive drivers, and increased car density because computers don’t need as much time to react.
Ride sharing could dramatically reduce the number of cars on the road as well. Most cars during rush hour have a single person in that. Make that average two and half your volume goes away.
Could you tell me more about this? Is it some more-sophisticated company car-pool?
For example, I leave for work at 7:40 and get there at about 7:55. No one else at my office comes to work at that time from that direction. Am I just not a candidate for ride-sharing?
They have it now. Uber calls theirs Uber Pool and Lyft is Lyft Line. It looks for other riders that are going in the same direction as you and diverts the driver to pick them up. So you probably won’t go start to finish with someone. You’d pick them up a few minutes into your route and they’d be dropped off somewhere else after it stops at your office.
I live in Atlanta and use mass transit almost exclusively for getting to and fro work, as well as other things in the city (well, as long as it is close to a MARTA stop… and if not, well I have to think about whether I really want to be going). I drive for groceries and going out to restaurants and whatnot. However, I am very thankful I don’t have to sit in Atlanta traffic to go to work and I can simply stand on a train and read a book. The trains also come in handy when going to a festival, as traffic and parking can be quite insane going to them.
This sounds like the usual overly optimistic futurist stuff. For this to work everyone has to be in driverless cars and all the driverless cars have to share the same compatible network so they can synchronize with each other and “drive perfectly”. Then that network has to have perfect 100 percent reliability (or else people will die) and the software has to be 100 percent bug free and never crash.
Yeah right. In reality every car manufacturer will have different incompatible communication protocols, cars will have to keep minimum safe distances in case of computer failure just like now, and periodic network crashes will cause chaos on roads as all the cars have to drop back to ‘safe mode’ where they lose synchronisation with each other and drive much slower and further apart.
If you want a bunch of people to move safely in the same direction at high speed, you do it with a physically rigid body keeping them all moving in the same direction… Which looks a lot like, a bus, or a train.
Yes, it is - at that point of the journey. But the system as a whole would combine both mass transit and personal transit (using the same rolling stock, and without requiring passengers to transfer, which are the novel and attractive features).
You are wrong. Right now I live in Perth, which is about as low-density a city as you can imagine, but for most of my life I lived in Europe and, yes, as I have said repeatedly in this thread in large high-density cities (I instanced New York, but Europe affords many examples) mass transit as we currently know it has great advantages, and will not be much affected by googlecars. But there are many urban areas where this is not so much the case (Perth, for example!) and I think existing mass transit systems in those areas will be significantly challenged by the advent of googlecars.
There’s no arguing the Skytrain isn’t a godsend. I remember the bad old days before it started running in 1999. You were pretty much limited to going only one place per day, because the journey there and back took up half the day.
It’s not extensive though, not like NYC or Tokyo. They’re expanding it, which is good, but the wife and I still rely on taxis a lot, because we’re not close to a station. But the Skytrain does connect most of the major shopping malls and all the red-light districts, so it’s a boon.
The subway seems mostly for commuters rather than tourists. It doesn’t go that many places tourists would want to see.
MRT is useful for getting to China town and to Lad Phrao for Immigration. And theres additional lines / stations for both the MRT and Skytrain due to open next year 2017 and continuous plans for expansion up until 2029!
I do the BoI office in Chamchuri Square for Immigration, although there is a subway stop there too. However, I still go there by taxi, because the cost of a taxi to Chamchuri Square and the cost of a taxi to a subway station and then the subway to Chamchuri Square would not be much different.
I’m curious about the Lat Phrao subway stop though. I know where the Immigration office is out there, and it’s far back on the grounds of the Government Complex. That has to be too far to walk. Do you take a motorcycle taxi?
Just like you need to buy tires specially designed for your type of car, and go to a gas station with pumps that will fit your car. Oh wait.
Car manufacturers are good with standards, like SAE ones. Computer and electronics makers are good with IEEE standards. There is like zero chance you will see incompatible protocols in the long run, though it is possible the very first examples will be before the standards bodies decide on one.
Naw, they just need to be better than humans. Most traffic starts because someone brakes suddenly or there’s a hill or someone cuts someone off. Computer drivers won’t screw up in this way. They will maintain a constant speed and won’t do stupid shit.