The article's idea of a "elite" is a person who relies on a car to get around. I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility. Thus, "more transit" is itself the elite projection, as it supposes that what's good for the urban elite, must be good for everyone else.
It would help if you thought of transit as a continuum:
- the private single-occupancy car
- shared car
- shared mini bus
- bus
- tram (ie, n linked busses)
- subway (ie n linked trams, underground)
This is hard to see today, but autonomous cars will essentially bring this about. Everybody will be riding in autonomous vehicles. If you're well-off, you'll pay for more privacy and space and time (vehicle comes to you, goes to your destination), if you're not so well off, you'll share the vehicle with other people and will have to spend more time as the vehicles makes more stops (and each stop will be further from your desired source/destination). Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction. Trams will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to the heterogeneous-autonomous-vehicle-chain paying a premium to use a dedicated lane.
Basically, everything should be a battery skateboard riding on asphalt by way of rubber. The more you pay, the more privacy you have, the more the mobile battery goes towards your personal destinations.
The article uses transit as an example, as that is the area of expertise of the author. It is tangential at best to the idea of 'elite projection,' and yet it is far easier to make arguments about transit than to consider whether we are looking at problems from an 'elitist' POV.
I don't understand why you are suggesting that autonomous cars will make buses and trams obsolete. They are the closest to autonomous vehicles out of everything on your list (they run around on meta-organized and efficient routes, you don't drive them yourself, etc).
They are, which is why I'm suggesting that instead of thinking of "transit vs private cars" everything will essentially melt together. IE, if you take a bus with 30 riders today and replace it with 5 AV-minivans each with 6 occupants driving behind each other, is it any different? What if instead of the city, I own one of these minivans? What if I pay 6 fares and have the minivan take my family to somewhere? What if 6 passengers split a minivan, but pay extra to use a dedicated lane?
>IE, if you take a bus with 30 riders today and replace it with 5 AV-minivans each with 6 occupants driving behind each other, is it any different?
Yeah, it is different. You have five engines instead of one, and 20 tires instead of four, meaning maintenance and fuel costs are some multiple higher, and wear-and-tear on the road surface is higher, noise and air pollution are higher. Among other things.
>What if instead of the city, I own one of these minivans?
Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain lanes, etc. Among other things.
When I last did some armchair thinking about transport modes my conclusion was only a little bit removed from parent's basic hypothesis, just with one critical detail: It's not that one mode will rule them all, it's that the friction of switching modes is likely to go further and further down until we have successfully "containerized" or "packet switched" transit.
So, instead of envisioning it as "5 minivans vs 1 bus", it's a system that smoothly transfers you from street to car to bus to train to plane and back. You get the "now" of low latency, and then you transfer up a step to get speed and efficiency.
Right now we have very primitive notions of multi-mode: every transfer is time consuming and difficult on the psyche, often involving new fare systems, security checks, navigating transfer points, delays, tolls, parking, and so on. This is a big factor in our tendency to bias towards a single mode and overbuild infrastructure for that mode.
Portable electrics are a big step forward in moving up the baseline: they're roughly person-sized without too much additional weight. An imagined standard for docking them in a larger vehicle or running them in a convoy is not too far-fetched, but will probably still take a lifetime to be realized with all the involved political factors.
But while ganging or docking is nice, you don't really need it to get most of the benefits; low-friction transfers by eliminating the huge parking lots that you half to walk from at the interface of small personal last-mile (or last-few-miles) transport with larger long-distance transport gets you much of the way to the kind of network you seem to want, and only really takes autonomous on-demand vehicles and integrated payment and reservation systems, not ganging/docking. You've got some buffering at transfer points still, but much less friction than in the status quo.
Valet parking is labor intensive, doesn't scale on-demand easily, (because it is labor intensive), ands a lot more latency on both ends than autonomous (or chauffered, but that's also labor intensive) drop off/pickup even if the labor is provisioned optimally (and gets worse very fast with slightly underprovisioned labor.)
It's decent for providing an up-charged lower-latency option for an elite, higher paying subset of customers, or optimizing parking density with less concern for latency for a larger customer base, but it's not nearly as good as on-demand last-mile transport for reducing endpoint transfer latency.
Your objections are actually based on ICE car assumptions. ICE cars are going away soon, they're irrelevant when talking about the future of transportation.
There are few, if any efficiency gains in one vs many electric motors. They don't produce noise or air pollution. Wear and tear on road surface is actually much worse for heavy busses than cars, they actually deform the asphalt and can cause accidents: https://www.thestar.com/news/2007/07/05/road_ridges_made_by_...
> Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain lanes, etc. Among other things.
I already have parking for my 1/n-th of a bus. Running an exchange would be a much more valuable use of a city's resources rather than operating bus depots, etc.
> You have five engines instead of one, and 20 tires instead of four, meaning maintenance and fuel costs are some multiple higher, and wear-and-tear on the road surface is higher, noise and air pollution are higher.
Road wear and tear per vehicle-mile scales with something like the fourth power of vehicle weight, so many small vehicles actually have less impact that one large vehicle even with the fact that they tend to be heavier per passenger.
OTOH, land use impacts are higher since you need more lane capacity for many small vehicles than one large one.
They have the huge disadvantage of not always taking you to your exact destination and not doing so on your schedule. Neither is really necessary in the world of computerized autonomous transport and small electric motors, since computerized transport could easily get you from your destination to a moving transporter without it having to slow down.
I'm totally sympathetic to the cause. But I also agree with the author, we can't ignore the fundamental of transit, or we will just build something even worse.
Assuming everyone could have a single passenger autonomous vehicle, ideally as small as possible, while still spacious enough to satisfy our elitism desires. And it were to pick you up and drop you off at your exact destinations.
How would traffic jams not be as huge an issue as they are today? If not more, assuming you got rid of mass transit?
Are we suggesting to massively increase the size of roads, or tunnel roads and layer them, but still, there's gonna be point of contention within the network, causing traffic again.
I feel that's pretty much the author's claim. That unless a radical idea to this problem is figured out, which I guess hasn't, then its just foolish to think we can all be picked up and dropped off wherever, riding solo at that. It won't scale. That's why its elites projection. From the problem itself, you can show it can only work for a small number of individual. But if you are that individual, you might think, I can just give this to everyone else, and problem will be solved. Forgetting the main purpose of why mass transit exists in the first place. Which isn't affordability of a car. But scale of efficiently moving large number of people around in limited space.
You're still assuming a human driver. Most of the carrying capacity of roads is dictated by human reaction times.
A human takes 150-250ms to perceive a change in the environment and react to it. A car travels about 15 feet/second for every 10 mph of speed. Hence the rule of thumb to stay one car length apart for every 10 mph of speed; that gives you about a second of reaction time, a safety factor of 4. It would be suicidal to drive one foot away from the car in front of you at 60 mph, as a human.
It takes a computer maybe 10ms to detect and react to a change in front of it, and that's assuming fancy computer-vision algorithms (it's much easier if you just put a laser beacon on all vehicles that rapidly flashes an encoded representation of the vehicle's ID, velocity, and acceleration). And computers are much better at measuring velocity, acceleration, and position with the help of a LIDAR or doppler radar. In 10ms, the vehicle will move roughly 2 inches per 10mph of speed. Suddenly it's reasonable to drive 60mph with 2-3 feet of separation between vehicles.
At that range, though, you might as well just put down a hook and latch the vehicles together. And I think that's what the OP means by cars <=> buses <=> trams <=> trains existing on a continuum, and autonomous vehicles making this clear. We'll likely get something that works like a scooter for last-mile transit, and works like a train for long-distance trips. As it enters a main road, the computers will automatically adjust speed so that they can "dock", and we'll fit an order of magnitude more vehicles onto the road.
Such an idea sounds like it would be pretty easy to simulate, and know its capacity. I'm still not convinced until I see data. You're optimizing the road network to its maximum, but that might still not be enough to prevent traffic given a point to point system. But, maybe it is, I think we'd need to see data. Also, I'm not sure all the assumptions make sense, I'd be surprised if safety was all about reaction time, there seems to be an upper cap here, where even if you had instantaneous reaction times, you still need a good distance between the vehicles to avoid a collision.
>> as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility.
Clearly we don't ride the same bus. A lot of the urban elites on my bus route are heading down to service jobs in hotels, restaurants, and perhaps day-care centers.
There are a lot of places where trains (above or below ground) and trams will still make sense. It's going to be nearly impossible to automate past the fundamental limits of street space in cities like New York for automated cars to surpass the sheer volume of people serviced by the subway.
Well, you always have to take in account sunk costs. Places like NY already have tunnels and trans and tracks, so it will likely never make economic sense to replace those with something new.
But think about what a tram is - typically, several linked cars attached to a wire running on tracks. Why are they linked? Because you need a driver to keep costs low, otherwise you'd unlink those cars and have more frequent service. Why are they attached to a wire? Because batteries are expensive. Why are they on a track? A bit cheaper, but in many places (Lyon, Montreal) they are not.
What is changing is the price of battery and soon, the price of driver. Trams are built on assumptions that are changing, so would they not as well?
Yeah they certainly benefit from already having the infrastructure already in place, but most large cities are only going to get more dense as time goes on and adding additional roads to urban cores is always going to be very hard. After a certain point the only way to provide enough transportation is to go underground just to avoid tearing up the existing city.
Autonomous vehicles don't solve the problem of there not actually being enough space on the road (a bus takes up less space than a fleet of cars with the same number of passengers). See another article by the same author: https://humantransit.org/2016/07/elon-musk-doesnt-understand...
"Basically, everything should be a battery skateboard riding on asphalt by way of rubber." What a wildly narrow view on transportation.
Latency and efficiency matter.
Take two extremes. Air vs rail. Air (chopper) is wildly inefficient (maintenance and energy). Rail has twice the efficiency of a hybrid car.
If you make everything a "car" you end up with a world where the ambulance and the big rig are both stuck in rush hour traffic.
>> as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility.
Clearly we don't ride the same bus. A lot of the urban elites on my bus route are heading downtown to service jobs in hotels, restaurants, and perhaps day-care centers.
More likely you two just don't live in the same city.
FWIW, my home city's bus service (Charlotte NC) is exactly like the commenter above describes. There is a city-wide bus service that runs about every hour or half-hour if you're lucky, but it's terrible (unreliable, slow, poorly maintained) and mostly used by people too poor to own a car or those who can't drive due to disability or DUI.
Then there's the nice "commuter" bus for a buck more, which only runs during peak commute times, only picks up from park-and-rides in the suburbs, and is mostly occupied by people who work nice office jobs in the big high-rises downtown.
The middle-of-the road workers all pretty much have to drive everywhere.
My suburban city is the same and I drive, walk or bike everywhere. Estimated travel time for going by bus here is .. identical to that of walking, according to Google.
But that makes the "transit is for the rich" argument rather, uh, rich. Transit is for the rich ... now. Make a decent bus service and it wouldn't be.
For sure, but it's a matter of investment priorities too. Operating fleets of buses, especially if you need enough to cover a city that sprawls all over like Charlotte does, is expensive. And it's not like much of that expense will be recouped in fares if we want it to be priced reasonably. Meanwhile car ownership is still relatively affordable - even people working on minimum wage usually have a car. And once people are already paying for that car, they aren't going to want to spend extra money on a bus, no matter how nice they make bus service.
The new light rail service though is starting to change things though. I've noticed more young professionals and college students who are open to using the light rail and ride shares for their travels, regardless of whether they already own a car, due to convenience and it's ability to get through traffic faster.
> I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility
So everyone not living in a big city center in the US are now considered the poor. And everyone living in a big city center with a car is now the Elite?
I'd love to see autonomous "pods" with docking behavior. You'd take one of the appropriate size, i.e. there could be scooter-sized pods for the solo commuter, cart-sized pods for when you've got luggage or groceries, family pods, sleeper pods for long trips. They would drive autonomously for the last mile (perhaps even being able to dock into elevators and take you directly to your destination), but could also merge onto arterials and dock with larger pod-carriers, the modern equivalent of buses. Thus, you'd maintain your privacy and last-mile flexibility, but still get the economies of scale of better aerodynamics and powerful engines for longer trips. You could even dock onto airplanes, i.e. instead of needing to drive an hour to the airport and wait 2 hours at the gate, your pods arrives at your apartment door an hour beforehand, whizzes you through town, docks into a bus for the trip to the airport, and rolls you onto the tarmac and into the plane. No need to manage baggage (it all comes with you), the pod scans you for security during the commute, and you maintain your privacy on the plane.
My reading was different, in that the article uses "elite" for the kinds of decision-makers in positions of power whose exceptional attainment and status makes them some of the least likely to be consumers of the transit anyway.
I think both you and the author would agree that in the absence of a reliable, versatile mass transit network, many people with access to cars will use cars instead. But you and the author appear to disagree on the viability and transformative power of self-driving cars and whether they serve as a meaningful instrument of mobility for all with the kind and amount of transport infrastructure available to us now.
I believe that the form factor of a 2-to-7 person car common today isn't sufficiently dense to provide appropriate amounts of throughput to high traffic routes to completely replace something like a subway, commuter rail, or the like. Although the experience of the (figurative) first and last mile would be superior, the sheer number of such vehicles would clog the arterial roads and freeways where the point-to-point routing converges, the same way this happens with cars today.
But the form factor of the 2-to-7 person car changes significantly with the shift to autonomous electric vehicles.
With computer control, you eliminate the gap needed between cars - just hook it directly to the car in front, let them draft for better aerodynamics, and detach when you need to make a turn, saving 70-100 feet of road space. With electric motors, you eliminate the hood, engine, and transmission, saving another 5 feet or so - independent electric motors can go directly onto the wheels. In an urban environment, electrify the streets (as with trolleys) and eliminate the battery pack - that's another 4 feet and 1200 pounds or so. Once everything moves to car services and people don't own their own cars, you can eliminate the trunk, saving another 4-5 feet - in the majority of trips you aren't carrying anything big, and you can hail a different model pod for those road trips or grocery runs where you need the cargo space (or just summon the groceries and forget about driving it yourself). For trips without the kids, eliminate the other seats as well - you can just summon a different vehicle when you need to take a family trip.
Pretty soon the vehicle is just a thin shell around its occupant, taking up no more room than the personal space they would've taken up on a bus.
That may be true if you can eliminate human drivers from the picture. I'd be shocked, though, to see numbers that support this being feasible at that kind of scale on public access roads. And that just brings you back to needing some sort of separate right of way for transit -- sure it's potentially interesting and useful, but it's just another alternative form factor for transit as it exists today.
This analysis ignores the fact that the two modes (bus and AVs) load and discharge passengers very differently. The problem is not only the physical space AVs take when in motion on the road. See, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-b...
“How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80”
Door-to-door transit simply cannot achieve the throughput of buses! Which is not to say door-to-door would not be profitable or even have a role in a mass system. It's probably an improvement over the current dominant mode (although my suspicion is that it's simply a slightly less bad local minimum).
But the point of the original article is to argue that certain groups of people (decision makers in cities, mostly), should not extrapolate from their own needs and preferences when designing a system designed for mass use, because they're by definition unusual and they're each N=1
That whole Atlantic article is predicated on the main cost of a ride being the driver's time. Get rid of the driver and you get rid of that cost. Get rid of the internal combustion engine (which has large economies of scale - one big engine works more efficiently than many small ones) and you lose the fuel advantage - many small electric engines are just as efficient as one big one.
The boarding issue in the article is mostly in reference to the driver's time, but there's a simple solution for the rider: docking, not board. Board a pod once, at your door, and travel inside it until you reach your destination. If you need to switch modalities - like latching a number of pods together into a train for long road trips, or putting them on an aircraft - you load the pods onto the plane, you don't transfer the people between pods. It's like intermodal containers for passengers, with the nice benefit that you can continue working on your laptop or watching a movie or sleeping throughout modality switches.
>With computer control, you eliminate the gap needed between cars - just hook it directly to the car in front, let them draft for better aerodynamics, and detach when you need to make a turn, saving 70-100 feet of road space
You will still need a way to turn off at speed, leaving you with interchanges at each potential detachment point taking up a lot of space.
Grand Central Terminal in NYC has 44 platforms in 48 acres. Tens of Thousands of people per hour can switch between subway, regional rail, and bus lines, as well as access the surrounding city on foot, and access the on-site amenities and offices above. 700,000 people pass through daily. 10,000 people visit each day just to have lunch there. It works because the most space-efficient way to route people is to have them get out and walk. A tiny person-carrying vehicle will always need more space and supporting infrastructure than a person walking.
>The article's idea of a "elite" is a person who relies on a car to get around. I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility.
Well, if we look at an example, like the NYC metro area, we see that car-owners have a higher annual income on average than non-car-owners, regardless of whether they live in Manhattan, the outer boroughs, or the suburbs:
I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility. Thus, "more transit" is itself the elite projection, as it supposes that what's good for the urban elite, must be good for everyone else.
This is kind of bizarre reasoning. Suppose there's mass starvation in a nation and I were to say "I find it unintentionally funny to call for more food, as people who are able to eat regularly are the urban elites. Thus, 'more food' is itself the elite projection, as it supposes that what's good for the urban elite, must be good for everyone else."
Sure, suburban transit is terrible but that's argument for "transit only matters to people who already have."
Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction.
"My imaginary solution is obviously better than something that's been tried and with proper planning and funding work now".
"Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction."
This is not an opinion any experts on mass transit share (including those who are bullish on autonomous vehicles).
“How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80”
“No, of course, the driverless car people will say, no, cars will fit closer together and they’ll be smaller and so we’ll fit more of them over the bridge but that’s a linear solution to an exponential problem. The other dimension of this problem that you must keep in mind is the problem of what we, in the business, call induced demand. And induced demand is the very simply idea that when you make something easier, people are more likely to do it and this is why, for example, when you widen a motorway, the traffic gets worse or it fills up to the same level of congestion that you had before. It’s because when you actually create new capacity, people use the capacity and you end up back in the same point.”
> I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility.
In cities such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, Aachen, and various others it is very difficult or expensive to park your car. Using your car in such cities is therefore elitist, but because most people just use bicycle and public transport it is of high quality (due to high demand, becoming a circular reasoning).
Few sparse thoughts: élites I may know have mostly a marginal interest in public transportation witch is making money through it. If it's not profitable is of no interest.
At least European élites, with the notable but marginal exception of very few politics or other VIPs move on private transport not public one.
Interest in public transport have political and military interest for both reduce/control ability of individual to move and possible vulnerabilities in case of war scenarios but again "efficient public transportation for the masses" is not really in any bullshit-free agenda's. The sole political/military push toward "personal car free" society, concentrated in megacities serve the purpose to easier control people:
- control a city require few manpower than a vast area, more in detail to control a city you need only a fraction of human inside on your side, to control a vast area you need more human on your side than the "target"/"enemy";
- control a city is easier simply because a city consume food, energy, water etc but do not produce most of it nor it can so cutting supply means cutting city off;
- a city is a nice and easy target: you can shoot and being sure to create significant damage;
- public transportation is nice: lock it (it's easier than lock many individual's vehicles, especially if they are not connected so not easy to disable en masse from remote) and anyone will be on foot.
I do not really see other interest. Maybe there are economical interest from the enterprises that can gain big money on creation and maintenance of public transport network...
Yes, control is always a nice side-effect for the statists when they busy-body around looking for a crisis to fix and solve by limiting something or another that those evil humans (not enlightened like himself) are doing.
> The sole political/military push toward "personal car free" society, concentrated in megacities serve the purpose to easier control people:
People being concentrated in larger cities is mostly an outcome that comes from the free market. Higher population levels helps bring about higher levels of economic productivity, and people go where there are jobs.
Having decent public transit -- and walk and bike options, for that matter -- in urban areas is just good policy. No conspiracies necessary, it's just good to have more options, especially more geometrically efficient ones when space is at a premium.
Trying to ignore transit just gets you to LA's position, where they built mountains of freeways and got the worst traffic in the country in return, with poor options to bypass that traffic for most of the local population.
Without conspiracy can you tell the name of a sustainable and evolvable magacity? I found exactly NO one, not only of existing one's but also hypothetical in some architect's published ideas.
The first and most important reason is space: a city can't evolve because the lack of space. While it might be possible in theory grow the city and after have people moving from the old part to a new one to demolish and rebuild the new one no city I know of have ever being able to do so in practice. I do not know big not-crowded not polluted cities. I do not know any "safe" city in terms of various kind of possible events from floods to earthquake to terrorist attack to military attacks...
I do not want to say that's there are conspiracy-like factors to push towards megacities but I only see a big prevalence of negative things than positive, so no reason to push nor want to be in even small cities...
> Without conspiracy can you tell the name of a sustainable and evolvable magacity?
What does this even mean?
> so no reason to push nor want to be in even small cities...
Well it's easy, cities are way more economically productive than rural areas, so they create more jobs. Creating effective businesses benefits from a larger local market both in terms of hiring specialists of various sorts, and also in terms of targeting customers (for local businesses like restaurants).
If this wasn't true, you'd see more companies like Google dumping their HQ's into rural areas with cheap housing and cheap wages. They don't though, because their workers don't want to live out there.
My English is poor so sometimes I write convoluted sentences since I do not know how to construct them, sorry, I mean did you know ANY sustainable reasonably big city? I do not know any.
Cities might seems to be more productive since our developed countries switch from production to tertiary sector but that's thanks to the rest of productive world that's now in easter Europe, Asia, Africa, South America etc. So in general cities are not more economically productive, it only offer more options per land area since there is more concentration but with the exception of tertiary sector you simply can't have industry, agriculture, breeding, ... in cities and well... We all need to eat, we all use industry-made product from bottom up.
The problem of "countryside" is the concentration of alternatives per land area, you may have nearby a sole productive and attractive activity, if something happen to it you might have to go far away to found another option. In cities being concentrated you normally have more options nearby. However this is most a matter of economic organization that's still do not understand to much how to use territory than a mere thing from being in the countryside itself. Perhaps the most sustainable model we actually have in place is the Riviera one's with enough space to evolve and enough concentration of opportunities.
Google HQ is a tertiary sector activity and require hi-speed connections so a city is a nice place for it, however did you know where most data centers are? Did you know where we produce electricity for them? Concrete, Steel, Plastic, ... that is needed for them? That's a big point that many today forget but in case of real crisis that's represent a real and dangerous problem because if producer are not anymore in your country and are not anymore willing to work/commerce with you, you are TFU.
That's a thing USA and even more UK should have learned from China, we western Europeans should have learned from Easter EU...
> I mean did you know ANY sustainable reasonably big city?
Big cities are more sustainable than suburban or rural areas, not less. Per capita energy usage in those cities is lower.
> in general cities are not more economically productive
Yes, they are. You can't just handwave away that their economic output is higher because you don't like the particular sectors that are more popular in cities.
> Per capita energy usage in those cities is lower.
Oh, sure and where in a city you produce food? Industrial product? I know for sure that an apartment consume less energy than a single house to be heated/cooled. It consume more to being built and maintained though and more important it can't be really used without non urban area... That's the real problem.
On economic productivity it's the same: more money turn, but they turn because suburb exists, without them it's like the ancient I think Sioux Chief that say "when you finish fish what you count to do? Eat dollars?"...
This is the real sustainability I talk about.
Without counting the amount of prime matter and energy needed to build big architecture vs small distributed ones.
> It consume more to being built and maintained though
No, it doesn't. Not on a per capita basis.
> it can't be really used without non urban area... That's the real problem.
The number of people that have to be farmers and living on-site on a farm is very small in a developed country. There are way more people living in rural or exurban/low density areas than are necessary to make food.
> more money turn, but they turn because suburb exists
Not really, or at least you don't need American-style, super low density suburbs. Medium density suburbs are popular in Europe and work fine.
It's hard to compute but only try to estimate the cost of build a subway train with it's relatives stations, depots etc and the energy it consume. If you compute well enough you'll that it require far more resources than private vehicle in a countryside are. Even if you compute "CEP" (a french index that means primary (non renewable) energy/resources consumption, I do not know correspondent metric in English) of a a groups of single family's houses, with micropoles foundations screwed on ground and the rest in wood, glass and plastic/aluminum/... built with medium/high quality and proper insulation vs a single tall building for the same number of people and similar construction quality you still see that you consume more non-renewable/recyclable resources to build the single tall building than the many individual houses and if those are really well designed and built (so they can be heated and cooled with little non-renewable energy) you'll see that even energy consumption is better in individual houses. Simply because they have enough place for solar-thermal panels, efficient double-flux VMC at today's tech and cost are far more efficient, airtightness can cheaply be superior etc.
Many do not think that simply because do not know how modern houses are built nor how modern tall building are built and do not even see the mass of steel and foundation they have.
On living: you automatically agree that cities are not sustainable by themselves so we need to be low density and in nature, of course we can discuss density and it's variation depending on natural resources place per place but that's the point. We can automatize as we want but we need nature, we can't live for now in isolated artificial environments nor cities nor boats/submarine/starships. And that's probably will remain true for centuries to came.
My personal opinion is that a low density Riviera model is the best for now, where low density means low enough to been able to "survive" with local natural resources but no more so we still need commerce and cooperation but we can life in a not-so-comfortable and not-so-terrible way without. For my actual place (French alps) it means something around 8-10 humans per square km maximum in medium. Moderately concentrated like "USA dream" (single houses with a bit of private garden around, like 5/10 time the ground occupation of the house itself) in good place with place for nature around.
You may counter-arguments that a capillary, well maintained roads network is not cheap however being Italian I see the difference on roads between few countries and french's one are definitively cheaper than many other and even cheaper than highways. We still need some kind of ground high speed network but in a Riviera scenario with enough "local" economy that need is far less important than inter-urban networks.
> It's hard to compute but only try to estimate the cost of build a subway train with it's relatives stations, depots etc and the energy it consume. If you compute well enough you'll that it require far more resources than private vehicle in a countryside are.
No, it won't. A subway train is obviously fairly resource intensive to build and operate, no argument there, but compared to the resources to build rural highways for an equivalent number of people? There's no comparison.
A single subway line somewhere like NYC may serve the daily needs of a couple hundred thousand people. Enough highways to serve a couple hundred thousand people scattered throughout, say, several different counties would be far more resource intensive in the long run (building the subway might take more up front since you're underground, but you don't need as much deep maintenance and repair because there's fewer weather issues).
> you still see that you consume more non-renewable/recyclable resources to build the single tall building than the many individual houses and if those are really well designed and built (so they can be heated and cooled with little non-renewable energy) you'll see that even energy consumption is better in individual houses.
I doubt this. I mean, I could maybe see it for skyscrapers, because building materials and standards for those are really intense. But if you compare single family homes for 100 people to a 5 story apartment block for 100 people, the apartment block is going to massively win in efficiency. And most major cities just don't need -- or have -- many skyscrapers. Even in NYC and Tokyo, a very small % of land is actually occupied by skyscrapers. Take a look on Google Maps 3D view if you don't believe me.
> you automatically agree that cities are not sustainable by themselves
Cities take less energy. Fact. Yes, a few people would need to live in more rural areas, but a) the point is that 2% rural + 98% urban would be vastly more energy efficient than whatever distribution we have now, and b) even many people in rural areas could live in denser forms. For example, small towns in Germany have way more apartments and the like than small towns in the US, and they're not as car dependent too.
> My personal opinion is that a low density Riviera model is the best for now, where low density means low enough to been able to "survive" with local natural resources but no more so we still need commerce and cooperation but we can life in a not-so-comfortable and not-so-terrible way without.
This is completely insane. Spreading people out that much from cities where they currently live would absolutely devastate nature. You'd have to clear cut giant swathes of forests and build on prairies all over the world to hit 8-10 people per sq km or even close to that.
If the global population was a few hundred million people, that level of density could probably work, but it's not. We have far too many people to have that level of impact on the planet per person.
Honestly, you just sound so dead set on loving super low density living that you're completely unwilling to listen to any facts. It's a fact that living in urban areas takes less energy than suburban or rural areas. It's a fact that the impact on the environment is far less that way. It's a fact that only a handful of people need to live somewhere to farm, and this number continues to drop over time.
No, highways are not more efficient than subways(1). No, single family homes are not more efficient than apartments. You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts, sorry.
(1) - "Heavy rail transit such as subways and metros produce on average 76% lower greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than an average single-occupancy vehicle (SOV). Light rail systems produce 62% less and bus transit produces 33% less (Public Transportation’s Role in Responding to Climate Change (PDF))." And this is in ...
Reminds me of the constant inclusion of stock market values in political discourse. Stock market up in 2017? Trump takes credit. Stock market correction in December 2018? Everyone blame Trump for your investments taking a hit.
Thing is, there's a whole lot of people out there with no money in the stock market at all (or only in a 401k, not in an account that can be liquid in the short term). It seems fair that the fixation with the stock market is another example of elite projection.
Sure, the market matters and market trends are correlated with more concrete figures like employment rates and wage growth, but it's just that, a correlation.
Average wage growth and employment rates across a country are irrelevant for, well, almost anyone that's not specifically studying them.
Even on a more local level - the median income in London, say, is not interesting to a shop worker, and neither is it to a lawyer. It's just another Statistic(tm).
I don't know of anyone else (in real life) who even knows what the median income is, and about the only thing I've ever used median incomes for is to determine that the median person in my city is a serf (you'd require about double that to buy a small apartment).
By contrast, the stock market is at least interesting to anyone who has any savings (because market return is your baseline expectation for an investment). It should also be interesting to those who aspire to have savings (which, at least rationally, should be most people).
That latter point specifically is important because most people believe in, or at least desire, upward mobility. I (a person below the retirement age) expect that in ten years' time I'll have more than I do now. It would be odd for me to expect otherwise; that would imply that I should just sack off working and enjoy myself whilst I can.
I agree that linking it with things like presidencies is silly, though.
>Average wage growth and employment rates across a country are irrelevant for, well, almost anyone that's not specifically studying them.
True, it doesn't directly address any single person's wallet but it paints a picture that actually includes every single person with an income. I don't know, maybe there's a better metric, but specifically the point I'm trying to make is this:
>By contrast, the stock market is at least interesting to anyone who has any savings (because market return is your baseline expectation for an investment).
This is exactly the "elite projection" the article is talking about. For most people, "savings" refers to a checking account or savings account that can be withdrawn from on a rainy day. These will always have a negligible return rate. I believe that around 13 percent of families own stocks directly, less than that for other major types of non-retirement investments, and 53 percent a retirement account ( see https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf table 3 on page 18 ).
I mean, the stock market IS interesting in it's own right, and I can see why the news reports on a big correction and what not. But it's interesting in the same way that currency conversion rates can be interesting - because it holds some kind of macroeconomic significance. Not because a large percentage of Americans regularly move a large amount of cash between countries.
I don't disagree that most individuals aren't directly invested in the stock market.
I'm specifically addressing your comment regarding median wage and unemployment - these figures are completely useless for anyone who isn't an economist (whether for professional reasons or otherwise).
It's vaguely useful to know that median wage hasn't doubled or that unemployment isn't at 50%, that's about it.
There is no possible metric that would be useful to an average, because the average person is in a bad situation, and any individual's best course of action is to aim to get out of that situation.
this elite projection describes the common phenomenon of outsiders (and even local elites) disparaging LA for having no/crappy public transportation, which is odd to me as an multimodal angeleno who gave up my car years ago.
this admission was refreshing and identifiable:
> "And since I’m one of these elites — not at all in wealth but certainly in education and other kinds of good fortune — it’s sometimes my work as well."
but this is probably of most interest here, with all the talk of autonomous vehicles:
> "Now, the same mistake powers the endless vague promises of tech disruption in transit, especially the mathematically absurd notion that transit that comes to your door when you call it will scale to the entire population of a dense city."
basically he says we don't have enough (road) space for every person to be taken directly from point to point in a vehicle. currently this is (partially) solved by having people walk the last mile.
let's have electric scooters/bikes at every train and bus stop--they can solve the point-to-point first/last mile problem while being relatively dense. not everyone will use them, but with critical mass, it will reduce overall congestion.
> this elite projection describes the common phenomenon of outsiders (and even local elites) disparaging LA for having no/crappy public transportation, which is odd to me as an multimodal angeleno who gave up my car years ago.
Los Angeles has a transit mode share of only 5%, which is extremely low for a principal city with a metro population of 13 million. This is a good indicator that its public transportation is indeed very weak.
To be sure, though, they've been steadily improving it.
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Here's an archive link that works:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190102183318/https://humantran...
Now this is real life immersion.
Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0sKpw3...
It would help if you thought of transit as a continuum:
- the private single-occupancy car
- shared car
- shared mini bus
- bus
- tram (ie, n linked busses)
- subway (ie n linked trams, underground)
This is hard to see today, but autonomous cars will essentially bring this about. Everybody will be riding in autonomous vehicles. If you're well-off, you'll pay for more privacy and space and time (vehicle comes to you, goes to your destination), if you're not so well off, you'll share the vehicle with other people and will have to spend more time as the vehicles makes more stops (and each stop will be further from your desired source/destination). Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction. Trams will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to the heterogeneous-autonomous-vehicle-chain paying a premium to use a dedicated lane.
Basically, everything should be a battery skateboard riding on asphalt by way of rubber. The more you pay, the more privacy you have, the more the mobile battery goes towards your personal destinations.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
He makes the argument the reason that doesn't work is geometry and utilisation of limited city space.
Yeah, it is different. You have five engines instead of one, and 20 tires instead of four, meaning maintenance and fuel costs are some multiple higher, and wear-and-tear on the road surface is higher, noise and air pollution are higher. Among other things.
>What if instead of the city, I own one of these minivans?
Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain lanes, etc. Among other things.
So, instead of envisioning it as "5 minivans vs 1 bus", it's a system that smoothly transfers you from street to car to bus to train to plane and back. You get the "now" of low latency, and then you transfer up a step to get speed and efficiency.
Right now we have very primitive notions of multi-mode: every transfer is time consuming and difficult on the psyche, often involving new fare systems, security checks, navigating transfer points, delays, tolls, parking, and so on. This is a big factor in our tendency to bias towards a single mode and overbuild infrastructure for that mode.
Portable electrics are a big step forward in moving up the baseline: they're roughly person-sized without too much additional weight. An imagined standard for docking them in a larger vehicle or running them in a convoy is not too far-fetched, but will probably still take a lifetime to be realized with all the involved political factors.
We don't need autonomous vehicles to do that. Valet parking exists.
Yes, we do.
> Valet parking exists.
Valet parking is labor intensive, doesn't scale on-demand easily, (because it is labor intensive), ands a lot more latency on both ends than autonomous (or chauffered, but that's also labor intensive) drop off/pickup even if the labor is provisioned optimally (and gets worse very fast with slightly underprovisioned labor.)
It's decent for providing an up-charged lower-latency option for an elite, higher paying subset of customers, or optimizing parking density with less concern for latency for a larger customer base, but it's not nearly as good as on-demand last-mile transport for reducing endpoint transfer latency.
There are few, if any efficiency gains in one vs many electric motors. They don't produce noise or air pollution. Wear and tear on road surface is actually much worse for heavy busses than cars, they actually deform the asphalt and can cause accidents: https://www.thestar.com/news/2007/07/05/road_ridges_made_by_...
> Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain lanes, etc. Among other things.
I already have parking for my 1/n-th of a bus. Running an exchange would be a much more valuable use of a city's resources rather than operating bus depots, etc.
Road wear and tear per vehicle-mile scales with something like the fourth power of vehicle weight, so many small vehicles actually have less impact that one large vehicle even with the fact that they tend to be heavier per passenger.
OTOH, land use impacts are higher since you need more lane capacity for many small vehicles than one large one.
I'm totally sympathetic to the cause. But I also agree with the author, we can't ignore the fundamental of transit, or we will just build something even worse.
Assuming everyone could have a single passenger autonomous vehicle, ideally as small as possible, while still spacious enough to satisfy our elitism desires. And it were to pick you up and drop you off at your exact destinations.
How would traffic jams not be as huge an issue as they are today? If not more, assuming you got rid of mass transit?
Are we suggesting to massively increase the size of roads, or tunnel roads and layer them, but still, there's gonna be point of contention within the network, causing traffic again.
I feel that's pretty much the author's claim. That unless a radical idea to this problem is figured out, which I guess hasn't, then its just foolish to think we can all be picked up and dropped off wherever, riding solo at that. It won't scale. That's why its elites projection. From the problem itself, you can show it can only work for a small number of individual. But if you are that individual, you might think, I can just give this to everyone else, and problem will be solved. Forgetting the main purpose of why mass transit exists in the first place. Which isn't affordability of a car. But scale of efficiently moving large number of people around in limited space.
A human takes 150-250ms to perceive a change in the environment and react to it. A car travels about 15 feet/second for every 10 mph of speed. Hence the rule of thumb to stay one car length apart for every 10 mph of speed; that gives you about a second of reaction time, a safety factor of 4. It would be suicidal to drive one foot away from the car in front of you at 60 mph, as a human.
It takes a computer maybe 10ms to detect and react to a change in front of it, and that's assuming fancy computer-vision algorithms (it's much easier if you just put a laser beacon on all vehicles that rapidly flashes an encoded representation of the vehicle's ID, velocity, and acceleration). And computers are much better at measuring velocity, acceleration, and position with the help of a LIDAR or doppler radar. In 10ms, the vehicle will move roughly 2 inches per 10mph of speed. Suddenly it's reasonable to drive 60mph with 2-3 feet of separation between vehicles.
At that range, though, you might as well just put down a hook and latch the vehicles together. And I think that's what the OP means by cars <=> buses <=> trams <=> trains existing on a continuum, and autonomous vehicles making this clear. We'll likely get something that works like a scooter for last-mile transit, and works like a train for long-distance trips. As it enters a main road, the computers will automatically adjust speed so that they can "dock", and we'll fit an order of magnitude more vehicles onto the road.
Clearly we don't ride the same bus. A lot of the urban elites on my bus route are heading down to service jobs in hotels, restaurants, and perhaps day-care centers.
But think about what a tram is - typically, several linked cars attached to a wire running on tracks. Why are they linked? Because you need a driver to keep costs low, otherwise you'd unlink those cars and have more frequent service. Why are they attached to a wire? Because batteries are expensive. Why are they on a track? A bit cheaper, but in many places (Lyon, Montreal) they are not.
What is changing is the price of battery and soon, the price of driver. Trams are built on assumptions that are changing, so would they not as well?
Latency and efficiency matter. Take two extremes. Air vs rail. Air (chopper) is wildly inefficient (maintenance and energy). Rail has twice the efficiency of a hybrid car.
If you make everything a "car" you end up with a world where the ambulance and the big rig are both stuck in rush hour traffic.
Maintenance of vehicle? Doubt it. Especially if its an electric train.
Land acquisition for lane? Doubt it. The dedicated lanes also have full station stops.
Energy usage? Doubt it. Electric trains dont have round trip energy loss in batteries.
Operations? Doubt it. Its an electric train is usually autonomous.
Flexibility? Ya its far more flexible than a train that requires rails. Also you can reroute buses.
Clearly we don't ride the same bus. A lot of the urban elites on my bus route are heading downtown to service jobs in hotels, restaurants, and perhaps day-care centers.
FWIW, my home city's bus service (Charlotte NC) is exactly like the commenter above describes. There is a city-wide bus service that runs about every hour or half-hour if you're lucky, but it's terrible (unreliable, slow, poorly maintained) and mostly used by people too poor to own a car or those who can't drive due to disability or DUI.
Then there's the nice "commuter" bus for a buck more, which only runs during peak commute times, only picks up from park-and-rides in the suburbs, and is mostly occupied by people who work nice office jobs in the big high-rises downtown.
The middle-of-the road workers all pretty much have to drive everywhere.
But that makes the "transit is for the rich" argument rather, uh, rich. Transit is for the rich ... now. Make a decent bus service and it wouldn't be.
The new light rail service though is starting to change things though. I've noticed more young professionals and college students who are open to using the light rail and ride shares for their travels, regardless of whether they already own a car, due to convenience and it's ability to get through traffic faster.
So everyone not living in a big city center in the US are now considered the poor. And everyone living in a big city center with a car is now the Elite?
I think both you and the author would agree that in the absence of a reliable, versatile mass transit network, many people with access to cars will use cars instead. But you and the author appear to disagree on the viability and transformative power of self-driving cars and whether they serve as a meaningful instrument of mobility for all with the kind and amount of transport infrastructure available to us now.
I believe that the form factor of a 2-to-7 person car common today isn't sufficiently dense to provide appropriate amounts of throughput to high traffic routes to completely replace something like a subway, commuter rail, or the like. Although the experience of the (figurative) first and last mile would be superior, the sheer number of such vehicles would clog the arterial roads and freeways where the point-to-point routing converges, the same way this happens with cars today.
With computer control, you eliminate the gap needed between cars - just hook it directly to the car in front, let them draft for better aerodynamics, and detach when you need to make a turn, saving 70-100 feet of road space. With electric motors, you eliminate the hood, engine, and transmission, saving another 5 feet or so - independent electric motors can go directly onto the wheels. In an urban environment, electrify the streets (as with trolleys) and eliminate the battery pack - that's another 4 feet and 1200 pounds or so. Once everything moves to car services and people don't own their own cars, you can eliminate the trunk, saving another 4-5 feet - in the majority of trips you aren't carrying anything big, and you can hail a different model pod for those road trips or grocery runs where you need the cargo space (or just summon the groceries and forget about driving it yourself). For trips without the kids, eliminate the other seats as well - you can just summon a different vehicle when you need to take a family trip.
Pretty soon the vehicle is just a thin shell around its occupant, taking up no more room than the personal space they would've taken up on a bus.
“How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80”
Door-to-door transit simply cannot achieve the throughput of buses! Which is not to say door-to-door would not be profitable or even have a role in a mass system. It's probably an improvement over the current dominant mode (although my suspicion is that it's simply a slightly less bad local minimum).
But the point of the original article is to argue that certain groups of people (decision makers in cities, mostly), should not extrapolate from their own needs and preferences when designing a system designed for mass use, because they're by definition unusual and they're each N=1
The boarding issue in the article is mostly in reference to the driver's time, but there's a simple solution for the rider: docking, not board. Board a pod once, at your door, and travel inside it until you reach your destination. If you need to switch modalities - like latching a number of pods together into a train for long road trips, or putting them on an aircraft - you load the pods onto the plane, you don't transfer the people between pods. It's like intermodal containers for passengers, with the nice benefit that you can continue working on your laptop or watching a movie or sleeping throughout modality switches.
You will still need a way to turn off at speed, leaving you with interchanges at each potential detachment point taking up a lot of space.
Grand Central Terminal in NYC has 44 platforms in 48 acres. Tens of Thousands of people per hour can switch between subway, regional rail, and bus lines, as well as access the surrounding city on foot, and access the on-site amenities and offices above. 700,000 people pass through daily. 10,000 people visit each day just to have lunch there. It works because the most space-efficient way to route people is to have them get out and walk. A tiny person-carrying vehicle will always need more space and supporting infrastructure than a person walking.
What city are you talking about?
Well, if we look at an example, like the NYC metro area, we see that car-owners have a higher annual income on average than non-car-owners, regardless of whether they live in Manhattan, the outer boroughs, or the suburbs:
http://www.tstc.org/reports/cpfactsheets.php
This is kind of bizarre reasoning. Suppose there's mass starvation in a nation and I were to say "I find it unintentionally funny to call for more food, as people who are able to eat regularly are the urban elites. Thus, 'more food' is itself the elite projection, as it supposes that what's good for the urban elite, must be good for everyone else."
Sure, suburban transit is terrible but that's argument for "transit only matters to people who already have."
Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction.
"My imaginary solution is obviously better than something that's been tried and with proper planning and funding work now".
This is not an opinion any experts on mass transit share (including those who are bullish on autonomous vehicles).
For an outline of just one of the arguments why this is a naive view (at best!), please read the author's "The Bus Is Still The Best" (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-b...) and an interview with him in the Financial Times "A conversation about how public transport really works" (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/01/26/2198114/a-conversatio..., free FT account required, but not paywalled).
Some relevant quotes from those articles:
“How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80”
“No, of course, the driverless car people will say, no, cars will fit closer together and they’ll be smaller and so we’ll fit more of them over the bridge but that’s a linear solution to an exponential problem. The other dimension of this problem that you must keep in mind is the problem of what we, in the business, call induced demand. And induced demand is the very simply idea that when you make something easier, people are more likely to do it and this is why, for example, when you widen a motorway, the traffic gets worse or it fills up to the same level of congestion that you had before. It’s because when you actually create new capacity, people use the capacity and you end up back in the same point.”
In cities such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, Aachen, and various others it is very difficult or expensive to park your car. Using your car in such cities is therefore elitist, but because most people just use bicycle and public transport it is of high quality (due to high demand, becoming a circular reasoning).
Few sparse thoughts: élites I may know have mostly a marginal interest in public transportation witch is making money through it. If it's not profitable is of no interest.
At least European élites, with the notable but marginal exception of very few politics or other VIPs move on private transport not public one.
Interest in public transport have political and military interest for both reduce/control ability of individual to move and possible vulnerabilities in case of war scenarios but again "efficient public transportation for the masses" is not really in any bullshit-free agenda's. The sole political/military push toward "personal car free" society, concentrated in megacities serve the purpose to easier control people:
- control a city require few manpower than a vast area, more in detail to control a city you need only a fraction of human inside on your side, to control a vast area you need more human on your side than the "target"/"enemy";
- control a city is easier simply because a city consume food, energy, water etc but do not produce most of it nor it can so cutting supply means cutting city off;
- a city is a nice and easy target: you can shoot and being sure to create significant damage;
- public transportation is nice: lock it (it's easier than lock many individual's vehicles, especially if they are not connected so not easy to disable en masse from remote) and anyone will be on foot.
I do not really see other interest. Maybe there are economical interest from the enterprises that can gain big money on creation and maintenance of public transport network...
People being concentrated in larger cities is mostly an outcome that comes from the free market. Higher population levels helps bring about higher levels of economic productivity, and people go where there are jobs.
Having decent public transit -- and walk and bike options, for that matter -- in urban areas is just good policy. No conspiracies necessary, it's just good to have more options, especially more geometrically efficient ones when space is at a premium.
Trying to ignore transit just gets you to LA's position, where they built mountains of freeways and got the worst traffic in the country in return, with poor options to bypass that traffic for most of the local population.
The first and most important reason is space: a city can't evolve because the lack of space. While it might be possible in theory grow the city and after have people moving from the old part to a new one to demolish and rebuild the new one no city I know of have ever being able to do so in practice. I do not know big not-crowded not polluted cities. I do not know any "safe" city in terms of various kind of possible events from floods to earthquake to terrorist attack to military attacks...
I do not want to say that's there are conspiracy-like factors to push towards megacities but I only see a big prevalence of negative things than positive, so no reason to push nor want to be in even small cities...
What does this even mean?
> so no reason to push nor want to be in even small cities...
Well it's easy, cities are way more economically productive than rural areas, so they create more jobs. Creating effective businesses benefits from a larger local market both in terms of hiring specialists of various sorts, and also in terms of targeting customers (for local businesses like restaurants).
If this wasn't true, you'd see more companies like Google dumping their HQ's into rural areas with cheap housing and cheap wages. They don't though, because their workers don't want to live out there.
Cities might seems to be more productive since our developed countries switch from production to tertiary sector but that's thanks to the rest of productive world that's now in easter Europe, Asia, Africa, South America etc. So in general cities are not more economically productive, it only offer more options per land area since there is more concentration but with the exception of tertiary sector you simply can't have industry, agriculture, breeding, ... in cities and well... We all need to eat, we all use industry-made product from bottom up.
The problem of "countryside" is the concentration of alternatives per land area, you may have nearby a sole productive and attractive activity, if something happen to it you might have to go far away to found another option. In cities being concentrated you normally have more options nearby. However this is most a matter of economic organization that's still do not understand to much how to use territory than a mere thing from being in the countryside itself. Perhaps the most sustainable model we actually have in place is the Riviera one's with enough space to evolve and enough concentration of opportunities.
Google HQ is a tertiary sector activity and require hi-speed connections so a city is a nice place for it, however did you know where most data centers are? Did you know where we produce electricity for them? Concrete, Steel, Plastic, ... that is needed for them? That's a big point that many today forget but in case of real crisis that's represent a real and dangerous problem because if producer are not anymore in your country and are not anymore willing to work/commerce with you, you are TFU.
That's a thing USA and even more UK should have learned from China, we western Europeans should have learned from Easter EU...
Big cities are more sustainable than suburban or rural areas, not less. Per capita energy usage in those cities is lower.
> in general cities are not more economically productive
Yes, they are. You can't just handwave away that their economic output is higher because you don't like the particular sectors that are more popular in cities.
Oh, sure and where in a city you produce food? Industrial product? I know for sure that an apartment consume less energy than a single house to be heated/cooled. It consume more to being built and maintained though and more important it can't be really used without non urban area... That's the real problem.
On economic productivity it's the same: more money turn, but they turn because suburb exists, without them it's like the ancient I think Sioux Chief that say "when you finish fish what you count to do? Eat dollars?"...
This is the real sustainability I talk about.
Without counting the amount of prime matter and energy needed to build big architecture vs small distributed ones.
No, it doesn't. Not on a per capita basis.
> it can't be really used without non urban area... That's the real problem.
The number of people that have to be farmers and living on-site on a farm is very small in a developed country. There are way more people living in rural or exurban/low density areas than are necessary to make food.
> more money turn, but they turn because suburb exists
Not really, or at least you don't need American-style, super low density suburbs. Medium density suburbs are popular in Europe and work fine.
Many do not think that simply because do not know how modern houses are built nor how modern tall building are built and do not even see the mass of steel and foundation they have.
On living: you automatically agree that cities are not sustainable by themselves so we need to be low density and in nature, of course we can discuss density and it's variation depending on natural resources place per place but that's the point. We can automatize as we want but we need nature, we can't live for now in isolated artificial environments nor cities nor boats/submarine/starships. And that's probably will remain true for centuries to came.
My personal opinion is that a low density Riviera model is the best for now, where low density means low enough to been able to "survive" with local natural resources but no more so we still need commerce and cooperation but we can life in a not-so-comfortable and not-so-terrible way without. For my actual place (French alps) it means something around 8-10 humans per square km maximum in medium. Moderately concentrated like "USA dream" (single houses with a bit of private garden around, like 5/10 time the ground occupation of the house itself) in good place with place for nature around.
You may counter-arguments that a capillary, well maintained roads network is not cheap however being Italian I see the difference on roads between few countries and french's one are definitively cheaper than many other and even cheaper than highways. We still need some kind of ground high speed network but in a Riviera scenario with enough "local" economy that need is far less important than inter-urban networks.
No, it won't. A subway train is obviously fairly resource intensive to build and operate, no argument there, but compared to the resources to build rural highways for an equivalent number of people? There's no comparison.
A single subway line somewhere like NYC may serve the daily needs of a couple hundred thousand people. Enough highways to serve a couple hundred thousand people scattered throughout, say, several different counties would be far more resource intensive in the long run (building the subway might take more up front since you're underground, but you don't need as much deep maintenance and repair because there's fewer weather issues).
> you still see that you consume more non-renewable/recyclable resources to build the single tall building than the many individual houses and if those are really well designed and built (so they can be heated and cooled with little non-renewable energy) you'll see that even energy consumption is better in individual houses.
I doubt this. I mean, I could maybe see it for skyscrapers, because building materials and standards for those are really intense. But if you compare single family homes for 100 people to a 5 story apartment block for 100 people, the apartment block is going to massively win in efficiency. And most major cities just don't need -- or have -- many skyscrapers. Even in NYC and Tokyo, a very small % of land is actually occupied by skyscrapers. Take a look on Google Maps 3D view if you don't believe me.
> you automatically agree that cities are not sustainable by themselves
Cities take less energy. Fact. Yes, a few people would need to live in more rural areas, but a) the point is that 2% rural + 98% urban would be vastly more energy efficient than whatever distribution we have now, and b) even many people in rural areas could live in denser forms. For example, small towns in Germany have way more apartments and the like than small towns in the US, and they're not as car dependent too.
> My personal opinion is that a low density Riviera model is the best for now, where low density means low enough to been able to "survive" with local natural resources but no more so we still need commerce and cooperation but we can life in a not-so-comfortable and not-so-terrible way without.
This is completely insane. Spreading people out that much from cities where they currently live would absolutely devastate nature. You'd have to clear cut giant swathes of forests and build on prairies all over the world to hit 8-10 people per sq km or even close to that.
If the global population was a few hundred million people, that level of density could probably work, but it's not. We have far too many people to have that level of impact on the planet per person.
Honestly, you just sound so dead set on loving super low density living that you're completely unwilling to listen to any facts. It's a fact that living in urban areas takes less energy than suburban or rural areas. It's a fact that the impact on the environment is far less that way. It's a fact that only a handful of people need to live somewhere to farm, and this number continues to drop over time.
No, highways are not more efficient than subways(1). No, single family homes are not more efficient than apartments. You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts, sorry.
(1) - "Heavy rail transit such as subways and metros produce on average 76% lower greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than an average single-occupancy vehicle (SOV). Light rail systems produce 62% less and bus transit produces 33% less (Public Transportation’s Role in Responding to Climate Change (PDF))." And this is in ...
Thing is, there's a whole lot of people out there with no money in the stock market at all (or only in a 401k, not in an account that can be liquid in the short term). It seems fair that the fixation with the stock market is another example of elite projection.
Sure, the market matters and market trends are correlated with more concrete figures like employment rates and wage growth, but it's just that, a correlation.
Even on a more local level - the median income in London, say, is not interesting to a shop worker, and neither is it to a lawyer. It's just another Statistic(tm).
I don't know of anyone else (in real life) who even knows what the median income is, and about the only thing I've ever used median incomes for is to determine that the median person in my city is a serf (you'd require about double that to buy a small apartment).
By contrast, the stock market is at least interesting to anyone who has any savings (because market return is your baseline expectation for an investment). It should also be interesting to those who aspire to have savings (which, at least rationally, should be most people).
That latter point specifically is important because most people believe in, or at least desire, upward mobility. I (a person below the retirement age) expect that in ten years' time I'll have more than I do now. It would be odd for me to expect otherwise; that would imply that I should just sack off working and enjoy myself whilst I can.
I agree that linking it with things like presidencies is silly, though.
True, it doesn't directly address any single person's wallet but it paints a picture that actually includes every single person with an income. I don't know, maybe there's a better metric, but specifically the point I'm trying to make is this:
>By contrast, the stock market is at least interesting to anyone who has any savings (because market return is your baseline expectation for an investment).
This is exactly the "elite projection" the article is talking about. For most people, "savings" refers to a checking account or savings account that can be withdrawn from on a rainy day. These will always have a negligible return rate. I believe that around 13 percent of families own stocks directly, less than that for other major types of non-retirement investments, and 53 percent a retirement account ( see https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf table 3 on page 18 ).
I mean, the stock market IS interesting in it's own right, and I can see why the news reports on a big correction and what not. But it's interesting in the same way that currency conversion rates can be interesting - because it holds some kind of macroeconomic significance. Not because a large percentage of Americans regularly move a large amount of cash between countries.
I'm specifically addressing your comment regarding median wage and unemployment - these figures are completely useless for anyone who isn't an economist (whether for professional reasons or otherwise).
It's vaguely useful to know that median wage hasn't doubled or that unemployment isn't at 50%, that's about it.
There is no possible metric that would be useful to an average, because the average person is in a bad situation, and any individual's best course of action is to aim to get out of that situation.
this admission was refreshing and identifiable:
> "And since I’m one of these elites — not at all in wealth but certainly in education and other kinds of good fortune — it’s sometimes my work as well."
but this is probably of most interest here, with all the talk of autonomous vehicles:
> "Now, the same mistake powers the endless vague promises of tech disruption in transit, especially the mathematically absurd notion that transit that comes to your door when you call it will scale to the entire population of a dense city."
basically he says we don't have enough (road) space for every person to be taken directly from point to point in a vehicle. currently this is (partially) solved by having people walk the last mile.
let's have electric scooters/bikes at every train and bus stop--they can solve the point-to-point first/last mile problem while being relatively dense. not everyone will use them, but with critical mass, it will reduce overall congestion.
Los Angeles has a transit mode share of only 5%, which is extremely low for a principal city with a metro population of 13 million. This is a good indicator that its public transportation is indeed very weak.
To be sure, though, they've been steadily improving it.
i’m certainly not trying to say LA is a beacon of transit, but it’s not all cars here. it’s quite possible to get around without driving.