431–440 of 545 posts
Yeah that is what we need traffic / coordinating who parks at these gathering spots.....but just to change.
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Instead of constructing your life around a bike you construct it around a car. You can't commute to work any other way, if it breaks down you are bound to mostly Uber as a backup strategy to get anywhere. Except those car-centric environments you live and work in are a more effective gate to keep the poor out than the grandest gated community. Almost no where else on the planet is the idea of a city being a tiny urba…
> construct it around a car I don't, actually - it's that a car is far more useful than a bike. I drive 25 minutes to work; I haul (5 bike-ride-loads of) groceries several miles to my house; I visit friends anywhere from 1-5 hours away; I casually drive into the city and back. Even if I felt like riding 10 miles each way, rain or shine, or using public transit, it takes so much less time to drive my car, and I have t…
Example: do you realize how preposterous the idea of driving several miles to get groceries is to someone who lives in a real city? If I want to get groceries I walk to the grocery store two blocks away. If I don’t like that grocery store I walk to the other one four blocks away. Or the other other one five blocks away. It takes me less time to walk to the grocery store than it takes you to drive to yours. The counterfactual to a 10 mile drive is not a 10 mile public transit ride, because without car-induced sprawl everything would be much closer and you would have to travel much shorter distances to have access to the same amenities and see your friends.
Public transit is also not slower than driving in a city with proper transit. I don’t own a car and almost every single journey I take is either short enough to walk, or faster on transit than in a car. It takes me 10 minutes to get to work on the train, the same drive would take half an hour due to traffic.
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Somehow people figured out how to make gasoline fueling infrastructure, which is amazing in itself. Extracting fuel out of the ground, transporting to refinery, transporting to destination holes scattered nearly everywhere around the world and pumping refined fuel back in, and then pumping back out of the ground into little fuel tanks in cars for it to be burned. If someone described that to me as a plan for internal…
I know, it's amazing how it seems like it should be a relatively simple problem to solve, and yet it remains unsolved in real life. Hence my question: How do you propose to make that happen?
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Or build out infrastructure in those areas too. In suburbs, there's plenty of room for separate bike paths and trains. It doesn't require everyone to move into Soviet-style superblocks and towers.
Not everyone can ride bikes, and trains just take you from one place where you don't want to be to another place where you don't want to be.
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You have to add "redesigned cities" to that list. Electric vehicles are almost as much a patch for ICE cities as they are a replacement for internal combustion.
Much is made of the "self-driving" part of autonomous vehicles, but I think "self-parking" could end up being just as significant. Imagine if there was no longer any reason to mandate parking capacity for planning and zoning purposes; you drive to your destination, and your car goes and parks itself (paying/negotiating automatically if needed), and returns when summoned via phone.
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And yet, public transportation is not the same. Americans love their cars because we are a very independent people who appreciate the ability to go where we want, when we want. An EV could at least conceivably be a replacement, though that will be difficult until they can charge in a time comparable to that of a gas station fueling and go as long or longer. I don't want to have to plan around some schedule set by a c…
Public transportation takes a lot of time. It doesn't necessarily lead to an efficient workforce. The hour of commute time saved by driving could probably be translated into percentage points of GNP for a country.
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A German guy told me that was a German expression. Which one of you is right?
Sounds like Dutch humour and phrasing to me, but I've heard Germans use "There's no such thing as poor weather, only poor preparation"
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A little longer? What am I going to do at a gas station for an hour? I am already bored when I am there for 3 minutes with an ICE car...
Exactly. I simply don't get this. All of that effort when it's (for lack of a better way to put it) 'not ready for prime time'. Other comments include running an electric extension cord out the window and other hacks. A cord out the window be serious. Imagine for a second of what compensating good could be done for the world if people put the same time, thought or effort into something else with more immediate (and u…
Also, from a selfish perspective, EVs are almost infinitely more fun to drive. Don’t even get me started (as someone who has a parking spot with a charger) about this ridiculous historical idea of going to buy my fuel at some “gas station” instead of having it delivered to my house while I sleep.
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It's been entertaining to read the discussions (below) about how to make this practical. So far, it looks like the only way to make this work is to a) live in a city, or rebuild your suburbia into a city, and b) construct your entire life around riding that bike - choose a job with a tolerant boss, spend extra hours every day showering and changing clothes after biking, etc. I'd rather drive an air-conditioned car, s…
Instead of constructing your life around a bike you construct it around a car. You can't commute to work any other way, if it breaks down you are bound to mostly Uber as a backup strategy to get anywhere. Except those car-centric environments you live and work in are a more effective gate to keep the poor out than the grandest gated community. Almost no where else on the planet is the idea of a city being a tiny urba…
The car is the currently most convenient way of enabling the detached home, but I think you'd have an easier fight of providing transportation alternativers there than of convincing everyone to give up the yard and privacy and everything else there.
It's not the only possible way, and most vehicle trips are still relatively short (https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips) so I sure hope we can do it with last mile + transit vs self-driving cars.
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Much is made of the "self-driving" part of autonomous vehicles, but I think "self-parking" could end up being just as significant. Imagine if there was no longer any reason to mandate parking capacity for planning and zoning purposes; you drive to your destination, and your car goes and parks itself (paying/negotiating automatically if needed), and returns when summoned via phone.
This sounds like high amounts of traffic: a bunch of people being dropped off and being picked up at arbitrary locations with the cars then having to go to and come back from various other bottlenecked hotspots.
You open up a lot of free space if you can take away street parking, which could also significantly alleviate traffic, for example with dedicated lanes for small-personal battery powered bikes, scooters, etc.
It’s also not necessary for vehicles to travel several miles to find parking. Typical urban parking is designed so the average person is walking maybe a couple hundred feet maximum? That’s a lot of localized parking. If the car was traveling just a few thousand feet on average to find a lot, that’s not a lot of extra parking-miles traveled, but still a paradigm shift in parking process.
Also, you eliminate the issue of people circling the block trying to find parking, which is adding slow traffic in dense areas.
Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.
At the most optimized, there are pickup and drop off points at every block where someone gets out, and immediately someone else gets in, and off the vehicle goes to the next stop.