451–460 of 545 posts
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Unless you live in a very small community the downside of this is horrible traffic.
That is based on the assumption that jobs MUST be downtown, thus all traffic converging towards that area.
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> 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…
You don’t seem to able to wrap your ahead around the fact that driving appears to give you more freedoms only because you live in a city that was designed around cars, not because cars are inherently faster or more convenient. The convenience of the car is an artifact of city planning decisions, not a universal truth. Example: do you realize how preposterous the idea of driving several miles to get groceries is to so…
I'd seen the idea of using street-furniture, such as lamp-posts - but can't help seeing visions of coils of cable looping all over the pavement/sidewalk (in the UK at least, lamp posts tend not to be on the road side of the pavement). Plus, if this isn't new-build, whatever's powering those lamps isn't going to charge your car. Well.. it might charge one or two, but once you've got 20 cars, all wanting to be charged…
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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.
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion right away. 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 hund…
Typical urban parking outside of car-centric US cities is "your car takes up as much space as your apartment/hotel room/office cubicle, where the hell do we have space to put it?" For someplace as crammed as Manhattan, the parking isn't "around the block", it's on the other side of the traffic choke points.
> Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.
I don't buy that. Traffic patterns in large cities end up showing a distinct bimodal pattern: there is a large influx of people into the central business district in the morning, and then a large outflux of people in the afternoon. If I'm commuting by self-driving car, and I get in at 8:45-ish, there's going to be no demand for my car since everyone who needs to be in work by 9:00 is on the way.
You can see this in systems that are already optimized to move people en masse to/from cities: commuter rail and bus systems. Large city railroad stations often have rail yards for train storage near their downtown hubs simply to store the trains during the day.
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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.
I'm not sure how any of this contradicts my comment. Or were you agreeing?
Yet another reason the real answer to the climate crisis isn't EVs - it's public transit, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, e-scooters, walking, etc. All these other modes are much lower impact on the environment than purchasing and operating an EV, much less an ICE.
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Personal contribution to the environment?
You are aware that much of your electricity is generated from carbon-emitting power stations?
I own a condo with a garage, yet I can't put in a charge station. I need to convince most of my neighbors to have the HOA do it. The garage is a separate shared structure and is only wired for lighting and the electric garage door. The only way they could put in EV chargers would be to trench though 30 feet of asphalt from the electrical vault (assuming that vault has sufficient capacity), then wire up the garage. I'…
I had to trench about thirty feet to install a charger in my back alley. It was expensive (about $1500) but I looked at it as a long-term investment that would pay off over a decade. If I could have shared that cost with, say, 10 neighbors it would have been pretty modest. My state also has a reimbursement program that will cover a portion of the installation costs. These capital costs are problematic but not really…
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You don’t seem to able to wrap your ahead around the fact that driving appears to give you more freedoms only because you live in a city that was designed around cars, not because cars are inherently faster or more convenient. The convenience of the car is an artifact of city planning decisions, not a universal truth. Example: do you realize how preposterous the idea of driving several miles to get groceries is to so…
Many, probably most, people don't want to live in density as high as that. They value greenery or simply the space to not have a neighbor breathing down their neck. What you consider preposterous is a tradeoff with other goals in mind.
Also, density is what enables greenery. Endless rows of detached single story houses with a lawn is what kills natural landscapes.
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I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion right away. 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 hund…
> Typical urban parking is designed so the average person is walking maybe a couple hundred feet maximum? That’s a lot of localized parking. Typical urban parking outside of car-centric US cities is "your car takes up as much space as your apartment/hotel room/office cubicle, where the hell do we have space to put it?" For someplace as crammed as Manhattan, the parking isn't "around the block", it's on the other side…