17% of the US's Infrastructure & Jobs Act goes to transit. 67% goes to conventional highway programs
Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Imagine seeing 69 random strangers walking down the street, densely packed in like that, for no reason. Just comin at you.
Finland: Oh look, tourists.
Are you saying that you DON'T walk that close to other pedestrians?
Isn't it how it works in New-York ?
Average day in Mumbai railway stations
"Quick, say hello in Latin!"
Salvete!
You've never been outside your tiny town, have you?
A lot of those "highway programs" include things like removing barriers to aquatic organism passage, reducing congestion and emissions from the movement of cargo, and other things that don't suck. It's still weighed too heavily in favor of cars and highways for sure, but there's more getting funded by the IIJA & IRA than just, like, freeways.
Reducing congestion is mostly attempted by building and expanding highways, which is proven not to reduce congestion. The vast majority of the budget is spent on building and expending highways.
A lot
or two fifths of fuck all
Are you not into trains trams?
Does that make him tramsphobic?
We can't be all trampholic (wait, why not?)
That's WRONG! That's not how autonomous cars work!! They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!
They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!
Cruiseâs robotaxis created a traffic jam in Austin, hereâs what went wrong
According to the team at Cruise, the fleet ended up in a high-demand area, which also brought with it a slew of pedestrian and passenger vehicle traffic. As you can see in the video, one of the Cruise vehicles got stuck in an intersection while committing to a turn, thus further congesting traffic in three different directions.
Unfortunately, more and more Cruise robotaxis flooded the narrow Austin street to meet the peak demand, only to join in the traffic jam. But why were there so many robotaxis in this one specific area? Cruise states that at the time, there were limited routes going north and south through the city, and a detour from an alternative route led the EVs to the same doomed parkway.
Unfortunately, Cruise could not manually reroute the vehicles quickly enough, so there was nowhere for them to go.
Unfortunately, what you end up with automation is often more of a thing than what you actually need, as surplus saturates the market even when it isn't desired. Rather than a single dedicated lane operating at maximum available capacity on a predictable schedule, you get a flood of functionally independent actors all congregating within a small area in an effort to maximize individual revenue.
Autonomous means you get more cars than there are people all contributing to the traffic that the people are looking to escape.
You mean have twice as many cars as necessary! Let's do it!
You actually need about half the cars if they are public.
People wouldn't need a personal car if those autonomous cars were like taxis. Just tap a button and the nearest car will pick you up and deliver you exactly where you need to go, 24/7 from everywhere to everywhere.
It would be considered public transport.
I disagree. If you look again at the pictures, you will see that the subject is not car owners and their cars but rather people trying to move independently from their mode of transportation. If everyone is entitle to access an autonomous vehicle, then at any given point, you will need as much car as there is people. Despite the fact that some of the same people are not in a car but waiting for one. With personal car when the car is not used, it is kept away of the passage. Where an autonomous car, especially when use as public transport, will roam around town, clogging its arteries while empty.
You can reduce the problem by having the car stop for new people until its full (some countries taxies does that) but that's not how the solution is sold to us. Self-driving car is sold as a way to keep moving in a five-seated vehicle even when along and having the vehicle kept driving even when fully empty.
TBF US highways are undermaintained and a collapse could endanger lives.
I'd rather have a railway expansion but we still gotta maintain whats been built.
While I'm a strong proponent of reducing and possibly eliminating car use, this image is disingenuous. They neatly packed 69 (nice) people into a medium bus, sure. But when showing cars, it's almost 1 persons per car (I counted 15 cars in a row and there are 4 rows, so 60 cars). You can definitely use cars more efficiently than that.
Assuming that actually autonomous self-driving cars exist, they could be extremely efficient. Especially if you treat them like ride sharing taxis. In other words, a lot of people could share the same car and that would reduce the amount of owned cars. They also never waste space being parked. So I can see how when we make a real self-driving car, it can potentially reduce traffic. Especially for all those cases where public transportation doesn't work.
And what the heck is a "connected car"?
Two facts:
- The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
- Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars.
And what is the average occupancy of a bus in your North American city?
Regarding your 1st point, yes, it is a problem that cars are underutilized. So I think that in addition to promoting public transport, for the time being, we could also promote proper usage of cars. Here in Europe, we don't have much problems with cars compared to US, but oh boy you guys overseas need to tame your F-150 owners.
Regarding the 2nd point, it's not a fact but an opinion. With which I don't really agree. I believe that true self-driving cars will eventually surpass the capabilities of meatbags, but I will look up the literature. Solely based on what you said, it seems to me that the "dead heading" problem is just a logistical issue that can be solved using science/technology (if the fleet of cars is algorithmically dispersed enough, they will always pick up a nearby passenger, as a hypothetical solution).
But yes, the corporations remain an issue and they will surely find a way to mess everything up. That is a separate problem that also needs solving, capitalism and overconsumption.
Regarding your first point, I'm aware that that is the unfortunate truth. That IS the issue with cars when it comes to efficiency. If you load the car with 3-5 passengers it easily beats busses in efficiency, according to my calculations. But that's not gonna happen.
Regarding your second point, the core of the issue is just capitalism, not self-driving cars or privately owned cars.
Cars don't have to drive around empty if they are some sort of shared transport that can pick up the nearest passenger.
If companies aren't gonna cause unnecessary car purchases only those who need them anyway will own them.
Basically, the problem with cars is not cars themselves as a concept, it's the overuse and misuse. But unfortunately, that isn't changing anytime soon.
You can use cars more efficiently but by and large they aren't.
Also, you think people are gonna share a car? Fat chance. People would need to work out shared upkeep, time slots to have it, etc.
We simply need to stop subsidizing cars which is the whole point here.
Doesn't Lyft work sorta like that? Idk, it doesn't operate in my country, but from what I've seen online, it's several strangers sharing one ride.
But after giving it more thought, I tend to agree with you on this. Except...
After posting my comment I got curious and decided to calculate the efficiency of cars vs busses. I always assumed that they were way more efficient than cars (cause lugging around 2 tons of steel just to move 1 or a couple 70kg hairlines apes is stupid). But it turns out that busses only win if we compare it to cars with only one passengers. So basically, at half load, both are about equally efficient (about 10%). And on average a bus is only half full. Turns out, busses are really heavy... there's of course the density, and busses win if you give each passenger their own car, but if we pack cars fully, they will be significantly more efficient. Not to mention if you use smaller European cars that carry basically their own weight in passengers.
So my conclusion is, to maximize efficiency in the future we should try to implement a system of highly packed smaller sized transportation devices.
Edit: I did some more calculations and now disagree with my own conclusion. Busses still win even when cars are reasonable utilized, not to mention the usual utilization, which is 1.2 passengers.
More details in this comment.
In my country, the most popular taxi app(yandex) has an option to allow hitchhikers. If you and other person order a ride with this option on and a similar route, it will pick one of you then the other, and then drop each other off. Currently, the savings are not as good as I would expect, roughly 15-20% off for both, and there are hard limits like 2 minute wait time with no paid waiting, non-refundable order fee, only one person, no baggage, and this option only shows up if you're either taking a long ride or if someone's already riding one that somewhat coincides with yours. Sometimes, no second is found and the company, but mostly the driver, just have to eat the discount they gave you for enabling it. But, already as is, taxis are wrecking public transit and car ownership by utilizing cheaper immigrant labor. With scale they can potentially be filled more consistently and with more than 2 riders, and with autonomous cars there's no need to pay the driver, even further reducing the cost. Also, never parking could massively increase throughput on some of the streets where there are entire lanes are filled with parked cars. At least in my city, this has enormous potential. The only problem is that competition is lacking, therefore reduced cost won't necessarily result in lower prices.
Every panel is flawed
People don't walk that closely together
People don't bike that closely together
Only a double decker bus could fit that many people without cramming people in like sardines
Moving cars should obey a safe following distance, so unless traffic is gridlocked, they shouldn't be that close either
Bikes even if not packed as closely massively decrease the total volume. Even if they were all riding all after one another on a bike lane it would be miles shorter than cars on a road.
And as for the bus... I have been on busses that full. You clearly have not travelled peak hour traffic on a busy route. Just look at any Japanese or Indian train to see how space efficient they are able to transport petiole
Things being close together isn't really an issue here because it's just meant to visualize the volume. They are not trying to paint a realistic scenario, I don't think.
I'd argue against that.
The concept of robot taxi sounds nice, but it devolves into an unsustainable mess. Ride sharing isn't simple, especially when we talk about uncertain way points. Meaningfully matching cases where people can share a robot car with completely random drop off is a logistical nightmare. I used to work at a Ride hailing company as an analyst, and people being unhappy with the duration of the shared ride was the biggest issue for that category (removing for generic cases like payment issues).
Additionally, I'm sure it's going to be a safety factor. I'm unlikely to get into a car with a random stranger when there's literally no one else in the car. Miss me with trusting some corporate with safety in such cases.
Iâve done ride shares a few times with Uber and it went pretty well. Basically it only worked from downtown to the airport, as the only scenarios with similar routes. Maybe a sporting or music event would be the same, I donât know
Thank you, that is a very interesting insight. But besides sharing cars in parallel (multiple passengers at once) there can also be sequential sharing, which is, I understand, a regular taxi without a driver. But I think that high availability of cars like that, which are cheap, would still reduce the amount of car owners, and consequently increase public transportation utilization.
The solution would be autonomous single seat cars, similar to the podbike. They would only be like ~1m wide (3 feet) and could use mostly bicycle transmission hardware and be extremely aerodynamic at commuting speeds.
Without needing steering you could also do two seaters with seats that face each other, so could also be low to the ground and narrow for aerodynamics.
The majority should still be bus or tram or train but autonomous cars could unlock a lot of possibilities because they fill the gaps. We just haven't seen the "correct" design for autonomous robo taxies yet.
The solution would be autonomous single seat cars, similar to the podbike.
Interesting proposal. I think that a single-seat vehicle will inherently be too inefficient cause you need to have all the infrastructure, but you carry only 1 person. 2-4 passenger vehicles would probably still be most optimal.
But yes, I do believe that autonomous cars will unlock possibilities that humans can tap into. Eventually, robo-car will not be equal to a taxi, it will be more than that. But I hope that it's publicly owned and not corporate.
You're correct sir, this thread is nothing more than shitty propaganda. Instead of, you know, going with actual real facts.
Thinking of riding a bicycle so close to others at any speed scares me a bit.
Doing 50 that close to other cars would also be very uncomfortable.
Stay away from the Netherlands you'd have a heart attack
I think I'd be fine if I did it every day, heh. Cyclists in Japan are fairly nuts, but cycle infrastructure isn't great here. Technically, only the young and elderly can ride on most sidewalks but there's a basically-undefined carve out for "those who feel they cannot ride safely in the street" which means that nearly everyone gets on the sidewalk and nearly take out pedestrians all the time. This got really bad when uber eats first became a thing in Tokyo.
Explain to me how you solve the mass transportation issue in non metro areas. I live in Montana, where cities are an hour or three apart by vehicle, but even in said cities, outside of the main commercial areas, people are spread out. Like, really spread out. There is a single bus stop eight blocks from my house, with exactly four scheduled pickup/dropoff times. My kids go to school with other kids who live twenty miles away. Commercial rail doesn't exist, except for a single cross-country Amtrak line with a station four hours away from here.
Images like this are illustrative, but they completely ignore the physical reality of how vast swathes of the US are laid out. You can't just flip a switch and have bus stops on every corner and rail lines connecting your major cities and residential areas. That's a massive undertaking that would cost way more in up front infrastructure than maintaining and augmenting existing highway program already does.
How do you change the culture away from cars where there is literally no realistic way to do it for 99% of people in areas like this? And how do you push for infrastructure change when there is no anti-car culture? It's a chicken and egg problem where you have no chickens and you have no eggs.
Even the most remote area has some sort of gathering points that can be concentrated into a walkable area. Basically - when you drive your car to church, you should have the option of walking to a brunch place and a grocery store, picking up your niece arriving on Greyhound, and yelling at your local councilman, before driving back. You should have the option to do more with fewer trips
You can also connect rural towns by cycling routes. Some parts of Australia are doing this by adding cycling tracks to long-abandoned rail links (would be nice if some of these were used as rail again but that's another story). Yes, not everyone is going to be willing and able to use these but it's great for tourism, and even getting a small amount of people out of their cars now and then is a win.
Oddly enough, rail served more rural communities earlier on in the 20th century than they do now. This is due to disinvestment and the prioritization of personal vehicles. So not only is transit realistic, but it was the way for many railroad towns to be connected to each other and the rest of the country. Obviously thatâs historical evidence, life is more complex now, but things can still be made to work with transit. Increasing bus frequency and coverage sounds like it would help your community.
Well you already expressed how to solve it. Issue is we have to think of a strong bus service and train service as a proper service rather than a for profit business. We can do it just we won't.
Montana is around 147k square miles large it costs $1-2 million per track. We could cover every square mile of Montana for $147 billion which is half of the aid we have sent to Israel since it's existence or 1/10 of our military budget. For $10 billion you can have train tracks every 15 square miles. For perspective there is 73k miles of public road in Montana supposedly.
If we brought all our troops back to the USA and used them as manpower and spent our military budget on infrastructure we could have 7 million miles of track laid in the last 10 years. For perspective we have 4 million miles of road in usa by quick glance.
The issue is solved at scale in cities. There is no need to change rural centers at the moment until the pressure is relieved where it will have the most effect. Maybe even freeing tax dollars for the state to help with rural areas instead of millions of intercity roads being damaged daily by large vehicles. Every dime you save in the city can be subsidized for rural areas if it is no longer needed. Or can be used to further assist struggling populations in the city. Everything that benefits people will find its way to also benefitting you in some way.
Hey fellow Montanan! Check out Big Sky Rail Authority's arguments for implementing a southern passanger rail service, or think of the benefits of increased bus service connecting the larger Montana cities. We have main travel corridors across the state that could be greatly improved by a public transportation network, linking rural communities and connecting them to larger city centers. Combine that with local bus service, walkable communities, and biking infrastructure in places where it can be supported like Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, etc can improve traffic and livability of the towns. Also, think of the improvement to traffic conditions for people coming into town from surrounding rural communities if you can divert a good portion of traffic to public options. In a rural state like ours, there's always going to be some need for personal vehicles, but there's still lots of places where having more public transportation options could improve our communities and lessen our climate impacts. Sure, it's going to look different than in other parts of the country, but still a lot of room for improvement around here.
Why are the cars spaced but the walking humans not?
Uh, they're not? The cars are in fact much closer to one another than they could possibly be while moving at speed. They would only get this close to one another during a traffic jam. On the other hand, the walkers are entirely capable of moving in exactly the way they are pictured.
You haven't seen me walk buddy...
I understand your argument but there is a clear bias here. Unless youre in an exceptionally denly populated area, people dont travel this close to one another. Most leave at least 1-2 humans gap between eachother, especially if there are wheelchairs, kids and prams involved.
Thats all my argument was, the cars are spaced out per lane (albiet bumper to bumper) but the side to side space is not consistent with the walkers. You could fit cars in between the cars with how they are spaced in that pic. I live in a victorian town where the roads force you to drive wingmirror to wingmirror
Im on the fuckcars space here, trust me I agree cars need to be phased out/down but thats no excuse for bias in data
If you've ever tried to drive a car you'll discover that you need to keep a relatively large distance between other cars, particularly when moving at high speeds in order to avoid crashes.
By contrast, when you're moving through a crowd, you can get practically on top of someone else without risk of bodily harm.
Not me. I wear a Colin Furze style carrot slicer belt at all times. Watch a motherfucker try to ope right by me. Bitch gonna get cut.
I understand your argument but there is a clear bias here. Unless youre in an exceptionally denly populated area, people dont travel this close to one another. Most leave at least 1-2 humans gap between eachother, especially if there are wheelchairs, kids and prams involved.
Thats all my argument was, the cars are spaced out per lane (albiet bumper to bumper) but the side to side space is not consistent with the walkers. You could fit cars in between the cars with how they are spaced in that pic. I live in a victorian town where the roads force you to drive wingmirror to wingmirror
Im on the fuckcars space here, trust me I agree cars need to be phased out/down but thats no excuse for bias in data
The cars and walkers are both as close as they can safely be while moving?
Not sure where you drive, but those cars aren't spaced at all- they're very close to bumper-to-bumper, which you can only do at extremely low speeds that unrealistic for travel. Meanwhile, the people that are bundled together ARE actually capable of moving like that, though the average american (who has a larger 'personal bubble' that other cultures) would probably not like it.
Moreover, the car example could actually be worse than it appears- because they're taking up all lanes of a road, so you're assuming they're coming AND going, which none of the other examples are assuming. If you did it properly, the line of cars would be two wide and twice as deep!
I understand your argument but there is a clear bias here. Unless youre in an exceptionally denly populated area, people dont travel this close to one another. Most leave at least 1-2 humans gap between eachother, especially if there are wheelchairs, kids and prams involved.
Thats all my argument was, the cars are spaced out per lane (albiet bumper to bumper) but the side to side space is not consistent with the walkers. You could fit cars in between the cars with how they are spaced in that pic. I live in a victorian town where the roads force you to drive wingmirror to wingmirror
Im on the fuckcars space here, trust me I agree cars need to be phased out/down but thats no excuse for bias in data
Clearly they are spaced compared to the bus.
The people are following this guy.
Alternatively, so they don't get struck by vehicles.
The car/bus comparison is useful, the others aren't because they travel at different speeds.
Probably walking can still move more people than cars. If walking is 5 kph and driving is 50, people need to take 10x less space to break even. They probably do, as cars need to keep distance.
Well, it's still a useful comparison for cities. Good traffic planning brings people into the city center via rail and buses, and then they make sure the city center is walkable.
That way, they can fit the most people into the city center, without it turning into a massive traffic jam.
69 people, eh?
another 20 years of progress put on pause.
aint democracy great lol
Democracy is. Capitalism isn't. And honestly people aren't either. I can trust any one person but I cannot trust all the people. But any other system other than democracy is bound to fail its people in one way or another. Haven't heard of a functional technocracy surviving very long but it may be the only viable alternative
Wheres the light rail?
It's identical to the bus, but has a very hard time moving on the tarmac.
have you ever seen normies riding bikes that close? it doesnt end well. lol
not everyone has the coordination to ride in a peleton.
have you ever seen normies riding bikes that close?
Yes. In the Netherlands. It ends fine.
...You mean the people with plenty of experience in riding bikes because they do it constantly?
I'm referring to the country named in the title of the post.
Im a 69 person.
nice
At least the last one involves far fewer parking lots.
Completely agree with your point, not trying to detract or anything, but why 69?
Because it's just a nice number
It's divisible by both 3 AND 23. Only every 69th number has that property, so you could call it kinda rare.
Hope that bus is going to 69 very separate locations some of which are at least 20 miles from the closest urban area and in opposite directions to accommodate those who cannot afford or don't want to live in a city.
What you are dong there is actually an argument against the other side of the issue. Exclusively Residential zoning plans are what create the situation you are referring to and they also account for the constant risk of bankruptcy of car centric cities. Dense, multi-use zoning allows for the creation of transit corridors where a single bus stop can serve several hundred people within a 5 minute walk, instead of serving just a handful of people within a 20 minute walk (the problem you are complaining about).
Valid and I had not considered that.
However, this post is in "fuck cars" not "fuck poor zoning laws." The solutions and complaints I see in this thread have NOTHING to do with remapping the way cities work, which would be necessary to even be able to consider saying "fuck cars" for the vast majority of suburban / rural residents.
The comments here seem entirely fixated on "solving" a symptom of a much larger problem by creating several more problems for other people because it would be more convenient for them.
And while your solution is nice for those in the city I ask again, what if someone lives 20 or 30 miles (not 20 mins walking) away because they can buy a 3 bedroom house in a neighboring city or unincorporated rural area for the price of renting a small studio apartment in the city, and have a nicer view.
Walking: Can't cover large distances quickly. Not sure why that's even included in this?
Bus: Pollution source whether it carries passengers or not. No service in rural areas. 1 crash = 69 people injured. Pathogen hotbox. You can't smash in one.
Bicycle: 1 thunderstorm = misery. Limited range and can't travel on motorways/freeways.
Car: Only pollutes when you use it. Goes anywhere you want 24/7/365. You can definitely smash in one. Carries big things like a trolley full of groceries or IKEA furniture.
E-Cars etc.: All the benefits of the car plus no pollution. Huge smugness boost.
I'm not against having a car for when I need it. I'm against pretty much requiring it to be a functional adult to do just about anything without public transit becoming my new hobby.
Work: 20min drive, 1h 20min transit, 2h bike
Groceries: 10min drive, 45min transit
This includes a bunch of walking to/from stops and half the time spent waiting since my city's public transit hub/spoke model is designed for airplanes requiring you to bounce between hubs.
There also isn't consistency. A favorable route might only come once every few hours. If one hop is running late, it can wreck the whole route.
My work route is pretty direct but it takes 12min walking, 0-20min waiting for a bus to my local hub, 0-40min waiting for the right train, and another 15min walking to the office. If they got those wait times down to like 10-20min total, I'd be more inclined to use it. Right now "something" comes every 20min, but sometimes the routes alternate so your route may come every 40min instead of 20min.
adventures in missing the point and faulty comparisons.
Also, cars are extremely wasteful when not in use. They have to be parked somewhere and that's space not used productively.
You mean you CAN smash on a bus?? Outstanding :)
Walking: a great form of transportation for short distances. However too much modern infrastructure gets in the way of walking. We should be able to walk more places than we do, even just from one store to the next. I did live in a city carlessly for a while and the combination of transit and walking was much more convenient than cars, most of the time
Bus: if you donât mind the audience âŠ.
A car pollutes as its materials are mined from the ground and smelted into metals. A car pollutes when oils are refined for its various plastics and lubricants. A car pollutes when it is retired to a scrap yard to sit leaking oil until it is crushed and recyled (polluting through that process too).
To be honest, I hadn't even noticed that I was commenting in the "Fuck Cars" group cos I just responded to something that popped up in my feed. I'm not about trying to be disruptive in someone else's house. I was going for humor more than anything. Sorry.
None of this is true for busses. They're made of and run on magic
Relevant xkcd:
50 people pureed and pressed into high-protien calorie-dense tiles:
It's always relevant!
Hilarious đ€Ł!
see how efficient cars are (relative to human sized hampster balls)
https://www.xkcd.com/2684/
fun fact: it is illegal to not credit xkcd!