I’ll take that point, it could help with safety. However, safety isn’t the only problem - it’s also a volume problem. You don’t solve the problem of backed up traffic on 285 (or whatever your local interstate equivalent is) by adding more vehicles to it, autonomous or manned.
You’re right this is a tough question and there are probably no easy answers, but building more public transit IS one of the better possible parts of the solution. I get the sense that people want a quick fix, but the transit systems we have now took decades to build and will take decades to change, and asking lots of hard questions. Most people just seem unwilling to admit that there isn’t some quick fix, technology answer for these problems.
So much of this dialog revolves around encouraging people to use mass transit that doesn’t actually exist or have enough capacity. Take another look at this graphic, most people in this country’s cities drive alone to work. The potential of ride systems to rapidly disrupt this is huge. One big way is algorithmic carpooling, where the service calculates among it’s regulars the best way to group passengers from one area to another. Door to door, but high occupancy. This doesn’t even need self driving, and especially doesn’t need government investment.
I’m not sure I’d call it “high occupancy”? Certainly helpful in general in for cutting down on some traffic (as is the case with carpooling in general), but you’re still talking about a car sized vehicle (I assume) that only has room for at the most… say 8 people, if you’re talking a large car. That can increase to 15 or so, if you’re meaning like a passenger van.
States and cities have to help solve this problem too. Private industry isn’t going to do it, because their goal isn’t the solve the problem, it’s to make a profit. And a sustained, public utility is not going to give them long-term profitability. Profit is often at odds with solving problems, I’m afraid. Public transit, funded by our tax dollars only has to be sustainable, not profitable.
That’s the term generally used for even 2-3 people in HOV lanes. Even 2 people is half the vehicles, 6 in a standard 7 passenger minivan would be quite a gain. I think there’s roles for all level of this stuff from a 2 share to trains. I don’t know why you think private industry has no role, those “Jitney buses” I mentioned clogging the roads upthread are privately run, as are a lot of the larger bus routes.
I’m all for transit, but the systemic friction to creating new rail transit is very high. It’s a classic “easier said than done”. A lot of people make unrealistic suggestions, like extending the PATH trains here under the Palisades to the neighborhoods on top, without really looking at the costs or available right of ways.
This is a good idea. Bus size would be even better, but that works less well in suburban neighborhoods.
To be fair, that’s not what I said. They can help alleviate the problem, but it really has to be in conjunction with public solutions.
Sure, but it’s not like we haven’t had public transit infrastructure build up before. We can do it again, even as it’s much tougher in the current, anti-government environment.
There will need to be compromises and not all plans are viable, but we need to have public transit as part of the solution. Otherwise, we’ll just end up with nothing but further transportation inequality.
Sadly, American urban planners have often been so bad (or powerless) that they made things worse. Although I’d think that even at it’s best, in areas that are currently built-up, there’s still a lot of waiting involved - one has to wait for fairly recently constructed buildings to be replaced. California had a great opportunity to shape its development over the last 50 years, as areas were being developed for the first time, and they totally fucked it up. Fixing things is going to be a lot harder.
Yeah, absolutely. One small advantage of autonomous vehicles is that they can help remove cars from the road (as it becomes feasible to share rather than own your own). But if people switch from carpooling and public transport to autonomous vehicles, that’s counterproductive to say the least. And car sharing only works as long as commute times are sufficiently staggered, which works contrary to the dynamics of public transportation which works best when commutes happen at the same time (closely-schedules vehicles which are still full). So it seems like there might be some conflict there…
Yeah, no question. But it does, to some degree, depend on what the public transportation is. Buses do badly in car-centric sprawl with lots of traffic. I don’t even think about the bus locally as a feasible option because I can generally walk somewhere in quite a bit less time, as I can go directly there, where the bus requires transfers and traveling at right angles to where I want to go. Driving would be even faster, so it becomes really hard to convince people to give up cars for buses which are half-empty (and therefore politically difficult to fund or even justify their continued existence).
Also a self-driving bus could be more efficient than our current model, as it could take more direct routes based on the destinations of passengers. (I.e. because you can know the destinations of the pool of potential riders, you can match those going to the same general place with a particular vehicle that will go directly there.)
You could repurpose the buildings? It doesn’t always have to be tearing down and building up (and I live in a city that kind of thrives on tear down and build new).
Agreed. Inside cities, street cars could be one solution to this. works for New Orleans anyway!
Unshared autonomous vehicles don’t do much to solve the congestion problem, it just lets the passenger do crosswords. But too large a vehicle scale and you lose the adaptability to go door to door, which is what will get people out of their own cars.
And the commute time thing depends tremendously on your infrastructure. Here, the PATH train is over capacity at rush hour, people literally can’t get on at the stops closest to Manhattan, yet they’re building tens of thousands of new homes along it, intending the new residents to use it. The nature of the Hudson tunnels is such that service cannot be expanded more than incrementally. More effective use of the vehicle tunnels would make a tremendous difference, after 9-11 non HOV were banned from the Holland Tunnel during rush, a lot of us thought that should have stayed.
Yeah, there’s the rub… but if you can use smaller autonomous vehicles to get people to locations where larger autonomous vehicles or as you mention above, trains, that’s more feasible. part of the problem in solving the problem is urban sprawl that’s happened especially since white flight in the 60s and 70s. Maybe more dense urban building is part of the long term future solution, but I think shorter term, something like this could help bridge the gap.
If Musk is so into tunnels, maybe New York and New Jersey should lay down a challenge. Have him build a new rail tunnel under the Hudson in exchange for per-train revenue and the option to build some more tunnels in the area. He’d probably go for the latter.
Which also brings us around to housing affordability. Increased density, and thus lower land costs per home,is also opposed by incumbent interests. And a large part of the opposition by those interests is concern about their street parking for their personal cars!
Yes… I do think I mention this upthread as being a critical part of these issues. These two issues were the biggest issues in the recent mayoral race here - transportation and housing.
Nonsense. Far larger cities than LA, and metropolitan areas with more square mileage than LA, have bigger mass transit systems with much higher ridership.
Maybe the metro authority for LA is adding loads of new branch lines and new stations without adding to the overall capacity of the main trunk lines. Or maybe they know that the system they have now is underutilized, and they’re trying to increase ridership. Either way, once the current system reaches capacity, it’s easy enough (not as in cheap but as in a solved problem) to add more capacity by building more trunk lines in parallel with the existing ones, or by increasing the frequency of service. You’re creating a problem out of nothing.
I’m less familiar with Hudson county than I am with Urban Planning issues. Here’s the thing about tunnels, even assuming massive technological advances you don’t get to parity. Underground seems like it would have fewer vested interests, but until you’ve had to look at figuring out ownership for mineral rights, (a massive issue in the cities of Pennsylvania and the west) rerouting a sewer main, and maybe some electrical systems, then you see what powerful vested interests look like. Even if you assume zero cost for the tunnel construction aspect, Musk’s strategy isn’t efficient. Because any tunnel tech that can fit a private car will always be better utilized by something like a subway train. The Robert Moses thing is particularly on point because a lot of the damage Moses did was through his obsession with ensuring the movement of private cars. My problem with Musk isn’t the tunnel, it is pretending that a tunnel filled with private cars will do much good. We already know about induced demand. The best case scenario for Musk’s tunnels is effectively a road. Adding a road almost never helps traffic. Creating alternatives to private cars does.
The idea that LA has too many people for public transit is almost the exact opposite of true. Mass transit thrives on high population and high density, while allowing cities to achieve both. Tokyo, New York, and Mexico city all have functioning public transit systems. It also isn’t the mountains (look at Hong Kong or Pittsburgh) or the density (the LA metro is high density by US standards). LA’s bus system is broken because of perverse spending priorities which famously landed the system in federal court.
I disagree, I view it as a variation on “multimodal” freight, more like loading cars on a train. The density of this kind of controlled tube can, or should, be much higher than a road. But let me reiterate my position, no govt should invest in this, let it succeed or fail on it’s merits. As an observer of our failure to build Hudson crossings, (the Port Authority of NY & NJ was created to build a freight crossing in 1919 and still hasn’t) any new ideas on how to cost effectively tunnel are welcome. The Holland Tunnel was built by private interests before being grabbed by the PA.
Autonomous shared cars wouldn’t decrease road use, they would vastly increase it. It adds an empty autonomous car trip to pick up the person. It might decrease parking, but would probably be a 25-50% increase in VMT.
But that still leaves the need for some form of either downtown railyard or incredibly long ramp systems to rejoin the surface traffic near your destination. Packing cars end to end and accelerating them to whatever speed is still going to be less efficient than packing people in the same space and accelerating them to speed. An underground car train is just a wildly inefficient subway.
