More likely that it will be trains between cities and AI taxis in cities. Owning a car will make less sense when you can at a moments notice just jump into a AI taxi and trains will be way faster than cars between cities. Within cities I do not see subways making much sense less a few busy routes.
It depends where you live, here in Europe a lot of trips in the cities can also be done by walking, biking or other micromobility options because a lot of the trips are small distance.
It would be possible to slowly restructure the cities in the US to enable it there. It would also make the neighbourhoods much nicer in terms of livelyness and social interactions.
Won’t ever happen that way, unless government sky rocket the cost of ownership. People are selfish and will fight that tooth and nail. Just look at the reaction to the ULEZ, and they are willing to buy the old junk from them.
You are on the right track. Trains go between cities, buses/metros/trams within a city. Cars (AI or not) will still exist, but their use will mostly be for people in rural areas to arrive near the next train station.
Traffic within a city is perfect for public transportation. It is dense enough with sufficient demand. Of course this doesn’t mean that robo taxis will (or should) be completely absent in the city, just that they should be the exception not the rule.
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…
Not on distances I’ll have to travel after we finally move to an office further away in a car-centric hellhole. 18 km (~10 miles). ½ hr on a motorcycle or a moped, twice as long on an (e-)bike. Nah, I’m not doing the latter in the morning when I can barely get out of my bed. And I’m not the only one complaining about the office moving.
You know they’re illegal? E-bikes are supposed to go 25 kph (~15 mph) max and only assist when you pedal. Not the best solution when I want to get to work quite far away in the morning without being pulled over for obvious speeding on a cycleway.
If Europeans (in general) love sleeper trains, why are there so little of those? Even in Russia, sleeper trains are still the main and preferred way of transportation between most regional centers (for the majority of travelers I would say it is “default” one), while in the EU most destinations are not even covered by a sleeper. I hope new companies like “European Sleeper” blossom because I personally prefer sleepers very much, but to say “Europeans love those” is untrue, since it is still mostly something exotic.
It’s more of a comeback moment and it takes time to reno all the old trains. I love the Nightjet but let’s be honest, the cars themselves are very funky.
I live 15 minutes walking from a European Sleeper stop and can’t wait to use it.
There were many more of these lines like 20 years ago. But these idiots abandoned these lines because for whatever reason. I’ll never understand why plane is developed and supported like it is and train is completely abandoned. Our politicians are useless shits is my best hypothesis at this point.
Europeans don't love sleeper trains. A very small subset of us do. The rest of us stay away, because being essentially trapped in a 6 berth room with unknown creeps of any gender, is the opposite of safe travel.
Europeans love travelling by train, but sleepers are used only by a small minority.
Just checked the prices for a round trip a while ago to Vienna from Amsterdam by train (Nightjet, full cabin booked) and by plane with KLM for 2 people. Prices were very similar.
My main thing now why I go for cars/planes over train right now, is train is just expensive. For where I’m at most places I’ve checked itd sadly cost more to take the Amtrak then it is for a plane ticket. If trains were cheaper then I wouldn’t mind at all.
I’ve done overnight Amtrak trips in a “Roomette”. My way of looking at it is the journey is part of the vacation whereas flying is the means to get you where you’re going. A cross country train trip can take a few days requiring multiple overnights. If you factor in what a hotel would cost plusmeals (Amtrak includes two meals a day) then that offsets the cost. Besides that you can carry on drinks and snacks plus you don’t have to pay a fee for luggage. I’ve met a lot of nice people on the train, it’s definitely a more civilized way to travel compared to the airline cattle cars. Though it won’t appeal to everyone It’s more for older people with a lot of spare time that always dreamed of driving across the US.
Amtrak is on my bucket list. I’m in Europe so I’m more familiar with international trains here.
I quite love the relaxed mode of travel, though I’m yet to experience a night train though. I might hop on one of those new lines that are opening up across Europe. The ultimate dream of course is a system like China but with fewer human rights violations.
After riding Amtrak you may feel like your human rights have been violated LOL. I joke of course, just know some routes are notorious for being late. Unlike Europe our train terminals aren’t always located in the center of town and if you miss a connecting train the next one may not be until the next day. Most people in the US don’t get much vacation time so this is another reason they avoid Amtrak.
Yeah I just came back from a US trip a few weeks ago and considered NY to Washington, but ended up with a rental car for convenience. The DC metro system seems decent though.
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.
Because they would be privatized and maintained by the cheapest ass companies and they would do a shit job of maintaining the cars and there’s no way in hell I’m sleeping in a public bed that is poorly maintained.
Interestingly, the video goes into exactly why there are so many quality sleeper train offerings in Europe compared to North America. In North America, most of the tracks are privately-owned freight rail, and the rest is a patchwork of local monopolies of passenger rail (e.g., Amtrak, Via Rail, regional/commuter rail, etc.), and none of them are being made to cooperate or allow interoperability.
Whereas in Europe, having so many countries in such close proximity, they were forced to make their systems interoperable and standardized and allowing open access (much like roads are open access to drivers or buses), so what you get is many state-run operators and private operators in a competitive market without local monopolies. The result is high competitiveness, high standardization, high interoperability, and thus high quality and availability of service for competitive prices.
Not really. The tracks can only take so many trains, so one more operator just pushes other trains off the track. Which might be fine if it meant that the trains that did run were hyper-competitive. But they’re not, because the train companies tend to get a near monopoly on a particular kind of service (fast trains vs stopping trains, for example). And if there are two companies running the same service, you’ll only have half as many trains to choose from for the return journey. It’s a ridiculous thing.
They are 100% owned by the British government. There’s nothing privatised in the UK and never was. And that’s why they suck so hard.
As for German involvement - the British government just outsourced day to day operations to Germans and others. Just like they outsource No. 10 floor wiping. That doesn’t mean that No. 10 is privatised. It’s the choice of the government and that’s how they decided to spend their budget.
I mean… it’s literally not - we obviously have some fundamental misunderstanding between us and neither of is going to get our point across to the other, so I’ll simply agree “The railways are currently shittier than they should be” :)
Not sure how there can be any misunderstanding. It’s just a fact that British railways are nationalised. It is also quite obvious that privatisation and deregulation works really well as we have a good example from the EU and Japan. Oh, speaking of EU, this privatisation and deregulation was one of the key points for many Labour voters to support Brexit.
I’m not sure either! British Rail was literally, factually privatised and sold off to a lot of different private companies, over a few years running up until 1997. It has not been re-nationalised since. I can’t understand how you wouldn’t be aware of that, unless your view on what nationalised and privatised means is different than the news/dictionary/encyclopaedia/anyone else.
The railways were nationalised between 1948 and 1997, but it’s currently 2023 - and unless you’re from a parallel universe where Neil Kinnock won, they haven’t been nationalised for two and a half decades now.
Worth taking statistics with a pinch of salt, but apparently after a couple of decades of underperforming privatised service, the UK population is overwhelmingly (across both sides of the political spectrum) in support of re-nationalising the railways.
Who owns the infrastructure? The government (through Network Rail).
Who decides which routes to run and how? The government (through Rail Delivery Group).
Who is managing the ticketing? The government (through Rail Delivery Group).
Who decides which companies to hire to run day to day operations and how much to pay them? The government (through DfT).
What is privatised exactly? Once again, British railways are 100% nationalised. This is just a fact. And this is the only reason why they are so poor. The so called “privatisation” never really happened, what happened is that the government created a scapegoat to blame all their failures on. And they stole a lot of tax payer money along the way. Just like it ALWAYS happens with nationalised industries.
Network Rail profits are at least to some extent nationalised, so have to be used for railway reinvestment instead of shareholders, yes - and therefore additionally that means indirectly, the government kind of have some representation in the Rail Delivery Group, amongst the privately owned operators that make up the rest of it.
Some of the fares (not all), or at least their rises each year, are regulated by the government, the rest are set by the individual companies.
The privatisation is the ownership of the trains, the stations, the staff, the companies that run them, and the investment of profits - now I know some of the companies have had to be individually renationalised as a “company of last resort” after they’ve failed, but that’s only in the last couple of years - there’s been over 20 years of profits going to shareholders and not being used to improve the railway - which is why at commuter hours, you still, in 2023, have 400 people trying to get onto a 35 year old, 2 carriage Sprinter - despite the billions each year paid from public money. Like with the energy companies, we’re playing “private profits and public losses”.
I sort of get how you could see regulations/guidance/controls as being a bit like “they own it all”, but I’d assume you don’t see all British pubs as nationalised, despite the fact that (local or national) government controls whether a pub is allowed to exist in that location, who is allowed to run it, what the opening hours are allowed to be, what the minimum price of an alcohol unit can be, the sizes of single servings of different types of alcoholic drink etc etc.
Anyway, if you perceive regulation as nationalisation, we’ll never agree or even reach a middle ground of understanding on that term specifically, though would both agree “What they have currently is not as good as it could be” - and I imagine we both agree that the railways are important, are an essential alternative to individual car travel and desperately need some support and investment to improve.
I don’t think I can spend any longer talking about this, but thanks - it’s been interesting to see a different point of view :)
Just like it ALWAYS happens with nationalised industries.
It was an interesting, err, “conversation” I guess, but I am starting to see that the disagreement is based in the fact that you are viewing things through a particular lens.
You’re saying it’s because people in Europe would only ever travel halfway across, whereas in the states they travel all the way from coast to coast? 😂
The opposing argument is pretty logical too though. The US being so spread out could make sleeper train rides much more attractive compared to extensive long-haul drives where you must be attentive.
It’s a complicated issue that goes beyond the geographical differences.
Car centric cities vs walkable ones. Lower fuels costs and bigger cars vs more expensive fuel and smaller cars. And in this specific comparison, an utterly terrible passenger train experience with minimal usage vs a competitive and robust system utilized by many. A bit of a chicken/egg issue there too.
Yes, but the major factor invoked by think-tanks (which admittedly only care about aviation and car industries) is always that the low-population-density makes track-laying and maintenance unprofitable outside freight, unlike in Europe or Asia, I can get you one example of such a report.
These cost calculations probably aim for optimising cost and not for CO2 emissions :/ anyway, good explanation with the decentralised and public-private mesh rail network
Valid point, especially as rail is more expensive compared to highway and air. At least on its face without emissions and other hard-to-quantify factors.
Many moving parts would have to come together for it to be more viable in the US, and there’s still no guarantee it’ll ever be cheaper. Or popular.
I used to be in a rare situation where I could actually use a light rail to commute and avoid a terrible 45 minute to hour-long drive. I really enjoyed the free time in the train compared to stress in the car. But nearly every one of my coworkers refused the train because it wasn’t massively cheaper and for other relatively-minor reasons. It was eye opening for me.
Tbh, as someone living in rural community all i want is decent public transportation of any sort. Like, it would be nice to have trains or escooters but, we don’t even have busses ( though that having been said i don’t how busses would get out here without it making tarc fare more expensive) or making bikes or scooter ( e or otherwise) a viable option in my area or making walking a more viable option. Admittedly i don’t know how they would do the last one but, the others they’ve been trying to do for awhile. I’m hoping that this not only made sense but, actually was on point.
The US (and much of europe) needs to realize that car centric planning is not the solution to mobility problems, it’s the cause! Suburbia could be more walkable if a few steps were taken during planning:
Note that the commenter said rural rather than suburban, and that’s a really whole other can of worms, but on the other hand they aren’t as frustrating to have cars. The population density is so low and the distances so large, it’s hard to figure any thing other than cars to meet those needs.
But I’m in suburbia, in fact right next to one of my cities mixed use mandate (all new housing must be dense housing and must construct retail space and office space with any housing construction). They also have very little parking for the retail space. So what has happened with those projects? The housing has filled up, but no company wants the retail space. A company could choose to open up a store there to serve that community and not much else owing to tiny parking, or they can set up 5 miles away for not much more and serve dozens of communities.
There was one successful mixed use development, but they were massive and dedicated a huge amount to multiple parking decks. People pay a lot of money to live there and it is walkable distance wise, but it’s car centric and unfortunately would have failed without accommodating cars.
Best walkable experience I’ve had was a place with trams and pedestrian bridges, as well as roads and parking decks. Businesses could count on the reach afforded by accommodating cars, and pedestrians never had to step on a car road or suffer a bus stuck in traffic. However, it was a massively expensive place to be.
These trucks suck, they have massive blind spots. I was recently crossing the street in my local area and the signal changed and I ran and fell. I was thinking at that moment if a truck were turning, I would of been crushed!
The future is as hazy as literally everything else. Do we have cars where they aren’t needed? Yes Do we have rail systems that are hot garbage? yes Do we have rural area that are sprawling making rail and micro less possible? yes
Will trains and public trans be a staple of the future just like it is today in larger cities? yes.
When I lived in Philly, I took the train everywhere but the grocery store… except when I had leisure time then I took my car… and where I went, and a train or self driving care won’t take me there.
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