That is an important point and is not limited to cars.
When you build motorways, ultimately you build traffic jams. That is for cars. But when you build public transport, ultimately you build usage over full capacity as well. We have that problem in some European cities, where the very efficient mass transport systems we are proud of simply become unusable because they are more than full. Often, one can’t board the trains or even reach the platform without waiting. Asia is similar.
Note that I am still in favour of mass transport systems, the objective of my post is not to say we should not build more of them. On the contrary, we should.
What I am saying that usage of any commodity will grow until it matches a limiting factor. For transportation, that limiting factor is the traffic jam. If we want to solve that problem without traffic jams, we need to build in another limiting factor.
Singapore, a tiny country where inhabitants pile up in 20 stories buildings, solved its automotive traffic jam problem (compared to other Asian cities) by making it very difficult and very expensive to own a car. As an alternative, they have first-rate public transport (which can be quite overcorwded… see above) and cheap taxis. Then, Singapore is not really a democracy, so the governement can take unpopular measures to limit car ownership.
Not quite. It works best when commutes come in predictable bulks, but having one big bulk is more costly than a few smaller ones. Poitiers improved the working of its transit system, years ago, by asking its universities to offset their schedules from common working hours, so that their students and teachers commuted at different times than the bulk of workers. It improved both the comfort and the efficiency of public transit at constant means.
Most transformative emergent technologies are aimed at the wealthy. By their natures they are not yet efficient enough for mass market. Familiar with the phrase “early adopter”?
If a private company builds a for-profit infrastructure, it cost the public nothing, and reduces the likelihood it’s a boondoggle. A corporation not spending public money would never tolerate the nonsense cited in the subway article. It would never build a “bridge to nowhere”. I’m not all going all Objectivist, there’s things only govt can do, but letting someone risk their own money on new infrastructure seems like a “why not?”
I don’t see how it’s so, especially when it comes to urban planning. Even Galbraith’s theories about money as a source of information hit practical limits in this domain, because urban planning isn’t just about handling things as they are, but also anticipating and sometimes inciting development. A purely private deployment of infrastructure incurs the risk of privileging places where wealth already is.
It’s almost guaranteed to! At least at first. No one will build a country club where there’s no one who can afford it. What is the great distinction you make between privately built infrastructure and an Apple Watch? Where’s the “Social Justice” in a iPhone? Prior to WW2 most transportation infrastructure was privately built, as was almost everything. Railroads and turnpikes were privately owned. Government was MUCH smaller.
Yes, that’s what I mean, as opposed to the most efficient use of private autonomous vehicles, which would be commute times that are completely spread out across the day, so you can re-use the same vehicle as many times as possible.
Oh, you were speaking of the USA. That wasn’t quite clear. Elsewhere, public transport infrastructures went just fine with government development or public/private partnerships.
I fail to see any evidence that a purely private deployment is more efficient at anything but maximizing profit, which isn’t a pertinent measurement.
It seems like I click the link, and a larger, perhaps more nuanced conversation appears for a brief unreadable moment, then condenses down to a single tweet of “you’re an idiot”.
So I don’t know what was really said or meant. Maybe my browser is just acting up. But it’s a fantastic metaphor for twitter as a whole, really.
EDIT: I hacked at it a little and found the whole discussion. Jarrett Walker starts out by stating that Musk has a hatred of strangers that he is pathologically projecting on others. Musk replies by calling him an idiot. Again, this does seems like the level of discourse twitter is designed to enable…
Yes, Twitter works badly for stuff like that. And people like Musk and Trump can’t work with it, because they are both unwilling not to engage and to check what a thread is really about.
That said, I fail to see why Jarrett Walker felt he had to page Elon Musk in his tweet. The only rational reason I can think of is that by this way his name gets exposed to another 14.4 million readers. Is there a way to check if Mr. Walker gained noticeably more followers after being called an idiot?
You do have a point with cars, aircraft and cellphones. But I would posit that, first, boring tunnels is not an emergent technology, and that Musk basically has no idea what he’s talking about (same link as given by @GagHalfrunt above, but I think it is worth repeating, because it does add some meat to the discussion). Second, the economies of scale that worked so well to reduce the costs of cars, aircraft and cellphones, will be available to a much, much lesser degree in tunnel boring (a tunnel is not an easily tradeable commodity) - and maybe we’ve already harnessed them (compare boring tunnels using a TBM with shoveling by hand or manual drilling and blasting). Third, commodities like cars, aircraft and cellphones are actually very energy- / carbon-intensive, and their proliferation hinges crucially on the availability of cheap fossil resources. And that availability is about to end. In the not-so-far future, we will just not have all that energy to spend.
You made some good points, but this basket is not one of them. Cellphones are not nearly as energy intensive to make or operate as vehicles, and arguably save many times their cost and carbon footprint in travel avoided by easy communications, same can be said of computer networks in general. I can send a drawing to someone with the push of a button that 30 years ago would be rolled up and transported physically. Fedex was originally mostly about sending massive amounts of printed 8.5x11 paper.
the biggest by product of the RCC drilling so far has just been tons and tons of rock, which they have amassed in a huge mountain where the 710 (unfinished) starts in pasadena. as far as diesel emissions from the TBMs i dont know, i havent heard anything about that.
speaking of the 710, i have heard some chatter in public works about them tunneling under south pasadena to finally finish that. i doubt that it will ever happen though
fit into the greater shape of things to come?
