11–20 of 146 posts
Given a safe, flat road you can't beat a bicycle for energy efficiency and cost: http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/whats-the-worlds-most-energy...
And Given a sufficient long journey, Jets are more efficient.
Given a safe, flat road you can't beat a bicycle for energy efficiency and cost: http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/whats-the-worlds-most-energy...
But a car can very easily beat a bicycle on time efficiency, assuming you're going more than half a mile.
A car can also beat a bicycle on opportunity exposure.
Both statements are illustrated by mine and many others' commutes. I drive 40 minutes each way, because I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there. I'd love to have found a job here, but at the moment my job is there. The job there would have been unthinkable without a car. Yes, I could ride the bus - train - bus, but it would take hours. For me, a bicycle would never get me there.
One of the many things that's holding back a national economic recovery is that some people can find jobs but can't sell their house to move to the new job. There's not enough movement and flexibility.
In my metro area, I have the opportunity to take any job that I can find, from ten to sixty minutes car radius. That means I eat. That comes from flexibility.
* Health dangers from emissions -- an issue of (certain implementations of) internal combustion, not the form factor of the vehicle: personal auto vs. bus or train
* Health dangers/obnoxiousness of long commutes -- likewise, a complicated thing which doesn't immediately suggest "ban cars" as the obvious solution. (If anything -- everything else being the same -- self-driving supercars should result in the shortest commutes: point-to-point (last mile), no waiting, no traffic congestion (from AI)
* Infrastructure NIMBY (roads, sprawling parking lots): rail lines have the same issues, with the tradeoff that the sparser your mass transit ugliness is, the more excruciating inconvenience the last-mile segment of a commute is (try living 10m walk from a subway stop). Flying "cars" are almost certainly infinitely worse, because of their extreme noise
None of these are arguments against private transport; they are arguments against specific implementations of private transport, and don't at all imply the conclusions the author derives.
Can we just build two in the US? One in California and one in the North East where there's a clear need? We don't have any bullet trains in the US. It's starting to get embarrassing that we can't get our act together. Maybe we can get ours in red, like in Italy? :-)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57417703-1/italy-to-laun...
So try:
"Let's build an unaffordable future where the super-rich live in hyper-inflated city real estate and the poor are consigned to unreachable rural pockets of cultural stagnation or to over-crowded ghettoes."
How will we create livable walkable cities where real estate does not hyper inflate?
Given a safe, flat road you can't beat a bicycle for energy efficiency and cost: http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/whats-the-worlds-most-energy...
Let's built a future with 300mph self-driving supercars and mach 20 spaceplanes -- addressing the actual desires and wants of most users (mobility, convenience) rather than imposing personal ethics of asceticism (mass transit, anti-urbanization). The author brings up a lot of valid problems with contemporary car travel (and notably none of its revolutionary advantages), but most of these orthogonal to the personal-vs…
When I lived in a big city, I enjoyed train commuting. I could just get on the train and not think about it. I used to hate daily commuting by car. Now that I live in a smaller town, I picked a walkable one where I can walk to work. (Yeah, not everyone can do that.)
I do like cars for vacationing. I consider a car a recreational vehicle, but can't stand them for routine commuting.
Let's built a future with 300mph self-driving supercars and mach 20 spaceplanes -- addressing the actual desires and wants of most users (mobility, convenience) rather than imposing personal ethics of asceticism (mass transit, anti-urbanization). The author brings up a lot of valid problems with contemporary car travel (and notably none of its revolutionary advantages), but most of these orthogonal to the personal-vs…
I must have missed the bit where he said that. I thought he was saying that we could find better solutions.
It's always important to consider the dark side. We didn't do much of that when we built car culture in the first place, so let's do it now. So try: "Let's build an unaffordable future where the super-rich live in hyper-inflated city real estate and the poor are consigned to unreachable rural pockets of cultural stagnation or to over-crowded ghettoes." How will we create livable walkable cities where real estate does…
It's always important to consider the dark side. We didn't do much of that when we built car culture in the first place, so let's do it now. So try: "Let's build an unaffordable future where the super-rich live in hyper-inflated city real estate and the poor are consigned to unreachable rural pockets of cultural stagnation or to over-crowded ghettoes." How will we create livable walkable cities where real estate does…
Remove land ownership as a form of investment? U own it and live in it or u don't.
Some of the motivation is more like the reason some American suburbs ban rental, more than price control, though: a desire to have long-term residents with a stake in the building as your neighbors (what George W. Bush called the "ownership society").