But the privately funded NYC subway routes are a terrible example of how to build a transit system. Many of the routes are in direct competition with each other for the most popular corridors.
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If your drive is 5 minutes, I suspect you are not in an urban area.
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Hey I’m an elite! Niiiice!
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A tall building with multiple elevator shafts in something akin to a vertical on-demand subway system.
Then you get the jerk on the penthouse who wants his own private shaft. So all that space and material is used just so he can get from his private entrance to his private apartment and not have to mingle with the common filth.
Eventually the guy who lives on the floor below will say he’s entitled to the same privacy. Do they take an elevator shaft away from common use and now there’s TWO private shafts, or is he ‘forced’ to use the one existing private shaft?
How does Mr.Top Floor feel about that… imagine having to share the ride with a guy who couldn’t cough up the extra $5 million for the TOP floor, the awkward silence on the ride up, the added time while it stops to let the wannabe out.
No, this will not do. So, after a matter of privilege is raised with the building managers, one of the common shafts is dedicated to Mr.NotQuiteTopFloor , and the dregs living on the rest of the floors now jam into the few overcapacity elevators left.
Whats this? The douche living 2 floors before the Penthouse wants a private ride too?
Let the slum dwellers use the stairs, the exercise will be good for them, the Lucky Ducks !
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Famine would achieve that end as well. Which is more plausible?
This is why I scoff when people call Elon Musk a genius. He’s so blind to the obvious. And also why I get annoyed when people claim that any attempts to build/maintain public transportation infrastructure (high speed rail, subways, buses) are somehow going to be made obsolete because we’re all going to be traveling in self-driving cars in the future, only. No. We. Are. Not. Obviously.
That. I do think autonomous vehicles will revolutionize public transportation - but not by replacing it, but by being the above (although maybe not so much with fixed stops). That seems so obvious to me. I guess Musk and his ilk will eventually get around to realizing that - scaling up their “revolutionary” new approaches to transportation until they’re identical to existing mass transit (which, by that point, will be smarter).
The ridiculousness of Musk’s plans are that he claims somehow building entirely novel infrastructure (that can’t make use of existing parts and economies of scale), that require the same land and planning processes, etc. and carry fewer passengers will somehow be cheaper than existing mass transportation. When really, the absurdly high per-passenger costs make the whole thing infeasible.
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All I hope is they can use the boring tech to finish the goddamed 710 freeway and just tunnel that shit under Pasadena.
Other than that it’s all a bit silly.
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Techno-utopians always forget to account for Jevon’s Paradox. Increase the efficiency of consuming a commodity, and overall usage goes up, because it’s cheaper now.
Driving in traffic is terrible. It is a cost. If people can be napping or reading or watching TV or playing video games or fucking during their commute, they will be willing to drive more than they are in the current equilibrium. Autonomous cars – even in the most optimistic of versions, where we can increase the throughput of freeways by having them drive far closer together than humans can safely manage, and they’re a distributed ride-sharing service, and somehow they work in urban areas even though pedestrians will quickly learn they can just step out in front of them safely and ignore crosswalks – will result in more and worse traffic. I see absolutely no way around this.
(I mean, I’m still in favor of them. They will radically lower road deaths, and that’s certainly a good thing. And they might free up a lot of real estate in the form of parking garages that will be very hard to retrofit for most purposes but could provide me with the bitchin’ urban metalshop space of my dreams. I just expect a lot more traffic and a new explosion of exurbian sprawl to come with them.)
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Yet that is exactly why it’s so utilized, not only did they saturate the core area of Manhattan with transit, but the transit lines they extended to the outer boroughs in search of riders brought even more density in a feedback loop creating 4 of the 5 densest counties in the nation. Note that chart I linked, nowhere is even close to the mass transit usage of NYC.
Solid bedrock will do that to your cost structure
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Related belief: Placing the onus of energy efficiency and zero emissions on public transportation. Sure, it’s great when your bus line is electric. Where such technology is plausible, you end up with lower maintenance costs and less carbon in the air.
But public transportation is already better at energy efficiency and low emissions than private cars are. Look out your windows: See any buses creating traffic congestion and polluting the air?
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Did you read the article? They accounted for substrate differences, and placed most of the blame on the fact that the “cost plus” contractors with no incentives to save money negotiated with labor unions that didn’t have one either. One anecdote had an off-leash accountant find that 200 of the 900 employees didn’t even have job descriptions, and they were fired. That still left many employees whose sole job was to watch automated machinery that didn’t actually need watching, like having an attendant in an automated elevator.
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Yes, all the time. There’s 2 lane streets here with tons of “jitney buses” that clog traffic, stopping wherever they want without pulling over. The city buses don’t pull over into the bus stops either, I think they should just get rid of them and let people park there. I’m not saying buses aren’t better than everyone in their own cars, but they are not without costs.
It’s almost as if 95% of what Musk says is just crass marketing and shameless self promotion, rather than some sort of deep, utopic thinking. One gets the impression that he is mostly interested in maintaining the perception of having big ideas just to solicit investment in his mostly unprofitable business ventures…
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Is it time to dunk on Elon again?
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That seems like an untested assumption at this point, honestly. And our technologies inevitably have blowback that we’ve not accounted for. I’d be more for walkable cities, more telecommuting, intown transit like street cars, more subway systems, and regional transit systems that connect suburbs to urban cores… and we need to deal with the cost of living issues, so it’s more cost effective for folks to live in cities, instead of being pushed to the margins where a car is more necessary.
I think some people are just assuming autonomous cars will just fix the traffic issue, but as you point out, it’s still a volume problem. There are larger policy issues that need to be addressed. I always find the notion that all we need to do to fix our problems utterly frustrating, as none of this is an easy fix.
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NAH! Can’t be! He’s a visionary and genius! /s
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Fair! I guess I have trouble imagining anything to be as bad as humans there.
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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary business model depends upon his not understanding it.” –Upton Sinclair
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Here in this city, the topography is the main hurdle that keeps traffic at a standstill. We have a few mountain passes, that either go through valleys (cahuenga pass) or over the top (laurel canyon, stadium way, coldwater canyon) but for the most part the hills and mountains in the area are just in the way.
If you want to get to nearby palmdale you have to contend with either a slow, plodding track around an entire mountain side, or take the angeles crest highway over the entire mountain, which is filled with hairpin turns and suicidal local drivers going 80mph and driving on the wrong side of the road to pass people.
If we had a backup series of tunnel highways we could alleviate a lot of the traffic on the highways and main arterials (which are clogged with big rigs and thousands of uber and lyft drivers). The drawback to tunnel highways would be risks like fires, earthquakes and homeless encampments. We are far from Switzerland levels of roadway perfection and they even have fatalities and accidents in their nearly perfect tunnel systems
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