Every fucking climate scientist on the planet was getting it right since the 60s. This idea that climate change was only mainstream science after 2005 or whatever is nonsense.
Much like tobacco and sugar, the producers KNEW the consequences long before the general public, and worked against the public’s comprehension. Not nothing; we’ve been doing propaganda!
it really depends on how it’s done, if they get free passes and they are reliable good. but if they are anything like my bus system, and non free this is awful.
Yeah, these strange ladies made me nervous because they were distributing swords, claiming possession of which was the basis for a system of government. If you ask me, supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Oh, and then one of these strange ladies took me in and made me breakfast.
The Japanese one would be fun for use in New York City. LOL. Easy parking, easy to navigate double-parked clowns. It just needs a bed cover to lock down anything purchased.
In the United States, I don’t know how you’d accomplish this. It would be impossible for almost all rural neighborhoods unless we’re going to build a grocery store within walking distance of most homes.
This is one of those liberal (I rarely leave my home) notions whose heart is in the right place but is ultimately stupid.
Note the picture says “urban”, not rural neighborhoods. There’s no reason to think we can’t have train infrastructure connecting to rural areas though. The point would be to make our infrastructure human centered and supplement it with appropriate public transportation based on density. It can be done by rethinking how we zone and getting away from designing everything with cars and space for cars in mind. Not saying we do away with cars because they definitely serve a purpose the way we have things now, but gradually build up the non-car infrastructure so that cars are less needed over time. If we can imagine it in a way that works, we can accomplish it.
Yeah, but am I incorrect that the Netherlands is a fairly temperate place, if not on the cooler side? I don’t think you’ll convince most people to bike to work in the south, in the country, in 95+ degrees fahrenheit heat.
Ebikes can work wonders for that, in my experience. I’ve biked to work in 95 and humid weather and wasn’t super sweaty by the end (office job). The ebike allows you to pedal less and get more breeze going past you, which makes a MASSIVE difference in how hot and sweaty you get, especially on hills.
I would not have even considered that with a non-electric bike.
Ooh well in fact millions of people do ride bicycles for transportation every single day.
In Japan, like many other countries, women ride bikes for everyday transportation. They are so ubiquitous they are called “mamacharis” which loosely translates to ‘Mom-chariots.’
Every train station, shopping center and school in Japan has hundreds of not thousands of bicycle parking racks, similar to what you would find in the Netherlands.
My wife bought a bike in Japan for $400 and rode everyday, even in the countryside you see riding everyday. It’s totally normal. You see it all over in Asia. So people do ride, even when it’s hot and humid. Often with 1-2 kids on top of groceries, which weigh upwards of 50+ pounds of weight.
They can, but it’s a multi trillion dollar century plus endeavor that well require eminent domain millions of properties in order to make enough space for the conversion. Infrastructure still needs to go some place, and you need to replace millions of sfh with apartments. My city doesn’t even have any land left to build more train lines. It’s just 30 miles of gridded small lots.
Further, policy-wise, we don’t need eminent domain. We don’t need to forcefully destroy everything. We just need to abolish the restrictive zoning and parking minimums that are stopping the invisible hand of the free market from providing us with density, walkability, and transit-oriented development.
That’s not going to fly today. Today, citizens can sue the jurisdiction and actually win, unlike the 1950s or '70s. And cities aren’t going to be able to target minority dominated neighborhoods like they did in the past, or they’re going to be in a real shitstorm both politically and legally.
You actually should have a grocery store in walking distance. And a pharmacy, a dentist, a doctor, bars and restaurants, a kindergarten,… That’s how you get wrid of cars, indeed.
You could just put yourself in a coma and get fed by a tube. But yes, you can order from online stores. And if we all confine ourself to Amazon and then in the near future they would be governing us because they would be talking care of our basic needs.
You need small businesses. They are a cornerstone of society. Your food that is gron locally has to be sold locally. Otherwise you lose efficiency.
That’s a valid point. And I don’t see any problem with that. You live further form the city? You pay more for drinking water, electricity, etc… Because society has to invest more to bring those basic needs out there. I also feel like road taxes are supposed to be calculated on the distance you travel yearly.
I live in a very densely populated country and to live isolated is quite uncommon but people that build houses more rural are obliged to make some extra investments.
Gas heating is common over here and not so long ago the goal was to provide every house with gas. They changed that and now you have to be mor e self sufficient if you decide to build a house away outside of city limits. Same for sewage. You’ll have to invest in your own filtration. And so on…
Depends on the level of city service, but probably a good thing.
When I was in Ottawa, highschool students got city bus passes instead of yellow bus service. This allowed students to use passes at any time greatly increasing their freedom of movement. It let them go places without someone driving them, or a car of their own.
The OCTranspo also ran specials according to school hours and demand, these routes would be adjusted based on local demand each season to relieve pressure on normal routes.
This was at least 20 years ago, someone may have more recent information.
Well in the UK, considering that a return ticket to London for commuting hours costs me £140, no, it is not the future here. I could drive most of the way from home into London, pay the ULEZ charge, park in an expensive train station car park and get a short distance train for a third of that, including fuel.
If you aren’t willing to put your money where your mouth is, you’re just putting on a show. It’s a performative belief. Don’t criticize someone for a spending decision when you’re not willing to make it either.
The cost of commuting to London via train every day would be more than my entire salary lmao, what are you on about. I work remotely for the most part anyway, which is better for the environment than taking the train every day.
But that’s an issue with capitalism, not the technology itself. Roads and high(motor)ways are very heavily subsidized and tax funded, while rail in the UK is largely privatized. It’s just a sign of what is being prioritized by government and/or society, which is cars in this case. There are plenty of places where public transit is free or at least the definitive cheapest way to travel, also due to government funding.
Trains are directly linked to capitalism, not sure what you are getting at here. They require incredible amounts of capital to build, and incredible amounts of money to operate. They enabled the industrialization.
Communist countries also, in fact, received their trains from capitalist countries. Russia had hardly any before the US started supplying them during the industrialization process by Albert Kahn and associates.
The most train centric countries in the world are also the most capitalist. Whether that’s state run capitalism or private, state run generally provides more passenger rail service. However, Japan is an exception there with its JR Rail.
“The most train centric countries in the world are also the most capitalist.”
That’s because most countries in the world are capitalist mate.
Also, if you acknowledge that JR Rail is not capitalist, even if China is defined as a state capitalist country you still have to acknowledge that the rail system itself is not capitalist (it is also state owned like JR rail).
The fact is once profit is prioritised in something like mass public transportation, it starts to go to shit. That’s why American rail is so shit, that’s why every place in the UK has shit public transportation after privitisation bar a few cities like Nottingham, London and Manchester, and why it’s so expensive to get from city to city. Countries with largely state owned public transport tend to do better with their public transport.
No, I was actually pointing out that JR rail is not a state run passenger rail corporation, unlike Amtrak in the United States, DB in Germany and SNCF in France. It’s fully private and is only profitable due to Japan’s extreme population density and narrow shinkansen corridor between Tokyo and Osaka.
Same here. Trains are only cost effective in the SF area only if you don’t own a car. If you have a car, even traveling alone, almost every trip is cheaper even with $5 gasoline. For me I’d have to hit about $8/gal and pretend my time is free to have parity with a train. If I could not own a car, I would, but I don’t hate myself that much. And since I have a car, I only use public transit within the SF core (mission->north beach range)…which is funny because more often than not I just walk to my destination since SF is so fucking tiny.
given the talk of expensive trains, a resident would infer i live on the peninsula. bart is awful but not that pricy.
Berkeley is part of the core urban area on the other side, although as long as you don’t want to cross the bridge I’d argue east bay’s public transit has almost no value given the ubiquity of parking and abundance of freeways.
I tried transit up to berkeley once and it took 2 hours, so now i drive and my worst case time frame is 55 minutes. Bridge costs make it roughly the same as transit but at least twice as fast.
no shit about the bay bridge, though. I’ve not driven across that hellhole since 2018.
In Japan a train ticket on an express train to central Tokyo from the suburbs 50 miles away would cost you around $30. The local trains would be around $10-$15.
$110 will get you about 300 km by high speed shinkansen, say Tokyo to Nagoya.
Tinier city have a really good tramway system too. Saint Etienne, Tours, Montpellier and many others have a great tramway system that is as good as a metro.
Rennes' actual population is more like 220k, but that still is enough to be number 10 or 11 in France. It's the urban area that comes to around 360k, though there also is the metropolitan area with around 750k. But the city itself is 220k. By any of these means, it's not a megacity, but there are many, many much, much tinier places in the region, regardless of how you define "region".
On the other side of the Atlantic, any human, horse, bike, motorised mobility aid etc. is justified to use the roads here (except highways unless it’s an emergency) even if there’s a perfectly good sidewalk. Just double-checked and the only suggestion is to wear something reflective or hivis if you choose to walk in the road.
Reminder that jaywalking was invented by car companies because they kept killing people who were trying to use the shared public spaces that were roads back then
Yah, a lot of people on this site are always posting links to reddit, I would not be surprised if we find out the developer of the site works for reddit. No other reason why linking to POS reddit is allowed and not blocked in site code from that URL from being posted.
The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.
Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.
Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.
Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.
While zoning does interfere in many cases, even without zoning, the businesses aren’t interested. Our city has started mandating mixed use for every new residential, and the retail and office space end up mostly empty.
Now that companies are used to consolidating people from miles around, it’s not appealing to go back to the old days of having a store per neighborhood.
There are indeed suburbs that make use of transportation, but they… look a bit different than the sprawling, disconnected single family detached with a lawn and a backyard style suburbs. I peraonally believe with a few changes the suburbs could make use of public transport in busses. The suburbs are actually inconvenient for cars, they are poorly connected and have many stop signs and generally no lines or other features. The scale is best with a vehicle rather than on foot, but it’s not the end of the world either.
Personally, my anti-car dream only applies to me. I wanna live in a city where I’m at zero inconvenience without one and the risk of being hit by one is significantly lower, too.
With Uber and other ride hailing services it became clear that cheap point to point transport replaces trips that are otherwise being made with public transportation like buses, and thereby increasing traffic. There were also more trips in total done because of the convenience than were done before, thus also increasing traffic. It’s the classic Jevons paradox.
Self driving taxis could certainly have the same effect or more if they are cheaper than ride hailing. The increase in usage can easily be greater than the number of private cars it replaces.
Self-driving cars also have an added benefit, if they are exclusively on the road, in that they could eliminate traffic. But they won’t have exclusive access to the road, because people like driving cars. Interconnected compiters planning everyone’s trips could eliminate the need for stop signs, stop lights, or the slinky effect on highways, because it turns out comouters can be better drivers than the typical human driver. They just need to stop hitting pedestrians…
That’s the question. Let’s say the roads are now exclusively self driving cars and they are so efficient they double the throughput of roads. Meanwhile commuters bought houses that are twice as far away from the city because those houses are cheaper, and now they can sleep and work in the car anyway, so twice as much traffic. Or all schoolkids not taking the schoolbus anymore and all going by individual autonomous car and all pensioners getting their robo-taxi to squeeze through rush hour every morning so they’re first at the supermarket for the freshest produce. It remains to be seen how that works out.
That’s complete bullshit. The reason why there is congestion is because there are too many vehicles on the roadway. Changing the timing of the vehicles doesn’t eliminate the vehicles or the congestion. It’s a geometry problem.
Because rather than fixing the problem, you think we can avoid it entirely with a completely unreasonable elimination of cars.
Traffic exists because people are inefficient drivers. Congestion happens everywhere people live in sufficient densities, and it’s not the density you’re imagining.
Fully automated driving is also unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, because people like driving. But it could happen eventually, because the variety of benefits over other forms of transportation. One of those benefits is reducing traffic.
The argument that we will get rid of all cars on the planet is just silly. Prior to the automobile, people had wagons and carriages for thousands of years. They had the same problem as cars due today - they cause pollution from horse poop, and they caused massive congestion.
I don’t think there is a single major city on the planet today that doesn’t use cars in some level of the transportation system.
What’s really funny I said a bus is just a really large car. And a taxi is just a car that somebody else drives for you. So saying that mass transit and taxis or a solution to cars is ignoring the fact that they’re basically the same thing.
Well Los Angeles used to have an extensive streetcar system like Toronto. It was bulldozed in the 1950s and that was that. So LA isn’t inherently anti-transit, but that was a result of deliberate planning. I could be converted back, however it’s density is quite low and it could stand to have some urban centers linked by high-capacity mass transit.
The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.
New suburbs get built and they can be built differently. Not to mention that the current suburbs in the US aren’t made to last the next hundred years, like stone houses in Europe are. They can, have to and will change.
The Work from home trend for example is a huge change. If you work from home and do not have to drive to work and back, you do not want to drive the same amount anyway just for grocery shopping. You want to use the free time won, by stepping outside of your home and go on a walk, sit in a café and meet people in your suburb.
Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car?
If a human makes a mistake while driving, we call for self-driving cars.
If a self-driving car causes an accident, we call for the road to be more catered to self-driving cars. Self-driving car is still too many cars rotting on the road, unused most of the day, heating up cities and taking up space and resources, when a bus can replace hundreds of them.
A self-driving car is still a car, and it can’t do what humans can do: People make billions of good decisions every day that help avoid accidents. We just don’t recognise them because we focus on the bad decisions that cause accidents. Self-driving cars will never be able to make those good decisions, so having lots of them will only work if the roads are designed more for them. Then we will have roads that are like train tracks with all the negative characteristics of today’s cars on top, when we could just have trains and busses all the benefits that come with them.
10 or 20 years from now when you’re taking a nap or jerking off or eating fried chicken or playing Call of Duty while a self-driving car (you can call it an “automated transportation pod” if the word “car” triggers you) takes your extremely drunk self right to your front door you’ll think it’s fine.
I live in a 15-minute city. I take the bus home, now and in 20 years time when I am 77 years old, only with the help of a walking aid, but luckily our buses already have low entrances to allow disabled people to get on. I also stay with friends when I drink and come home the next day, and I do not need or want to eat or play games on the way home, and I especially do not want to masturbate in a car, automated or not, I want a nice and comfortable place for that. I prefer to look out of the window and experience the journey and stop and eat something. That you seem to basically live in your car, maybe except when you need to shit, is car brain thinking for me. A car is not a place to live, it’s a means of transport with a lot of flaws, I’d love to see your face when you’re jerking off in your automated car while it decides to drive you right into fresh concrete, onto train tracks or into the nearest river.
I do not own a car and never have, and I have survived well. If the world doesn’t recover from car brain, we won’t survive as a species. Automated transport is the future for buses and trains, not individual transport, which will always be worse in every way, only topped by flying taxis, which are even dumber.
Funny side note: Saudi Arabia has started building the most idiotic “city of the future” you can build: The Line, but they also killed the car, because even they realised that cars, automated or not, are not the future and you can only get around in this futuristic place by walking or by train.
The problem is most people don’t live in 15 minute cities and it’s impossible to turn the suburbs into 15 minute cities as most things are just physically too far apart.
If you live in a gigantic McMansion neighborhood that takes 5 minutes to get out of by car and then your job is an additional 20 miles away there is no bus or train solution - you’ll have to have a car.
Funny you should mention living in your car. I used to have a 40 mi commute from my suburban town, each way, to work. I lived slightly north of Baltimore and commuted to just outside of DC. I would spend an hour minimum each way driving. When traffic was bad easy 2 hours. I did this for 4 years and it was soul destroying, but it was an extremely lucrative job.
Then I found a job in my little suburb that pays about the same amount of money and it’s close enough I can ride my bike to, which I do sometimes when it’s not hot, by car it’s only about 5 minutes. The extra time I’ve gotten back has been amazing and looking back I would have taken 20% pay cut to not have to do that horrible commute.
That is not a solution for everyone as there aren’t enough jobs in the suburbs to support the population. They’re called bedroom communities for a reason.
I’m really not pro or anti car. I just think you have to be realistic. The realistic part is the suburbs are just too spaced out and too far from jobs to have a functioning mass transit system.
Further, we only have suburban sprawl because of government mandates. For example, thanks to restrictive zoning, it is literally illegal to build anything but detached single-family houses on the vast majority of urban land in this country.
And also the matter that most cities in America had incredibly extensive streetcar networks, before they were literally torn up. It’s no accident that the city in the world with the largest tram network – Melbourne, Australia – is also the only city that left its historic streetcar intact.
The beautiful thing about fixing all this malarkey is we don’t have to demolish and displace millions of people from their homes like we already did once only ~60 years ago. We just have to abolish those restrictive, Euclidean zoning laws and parking minimums and setback requirements and so forth. Let the invisible hand of the free market provide us with the density and walkability and transit-oriented development it’s trying to provide us with!
The primary thing that needs demolishing is parking lots, and absolutely no one will miss those, I guarantee it.
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