Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

Furthermore, to some degree, cars are actually more efficient from a personal perspective as an individual. If you live in the typical USA sprawl, you don't really want to take a bus somewhere. For example, one of my co-founders had to take the bus home from his office yesterday. The commute is normal about 20 minutes in traffic...the bus took almost two hours.

The issue facing the US is that our space utilization is far less compact in most places, which makes public transport highly inefficient. I'm all for more railroads and other means of getting people around, but the only cities with truly effective public transport are:

- NYC area

- Chicago

- Pittsburgh

...I'm trying to think of others, but I'm drawing a blank. Also, bear in mind I'm distinguishing between places that have transport vs. where it is effective.

As for flying cars and all those goodies, they won't happen. The reason is quite simple: if something fails, they fall and you die. The average joe is not able to properly handle a flying craft with that level of risk - and if it falls, it may land on someone.

The most promising advance so far is driverless cars. I do believe they will become commonplace soon as technology advances and they become able to handle regular driving. I personally wouldn't use them, but they would make the rest of the driving public much happier and I do expect that to be the next car revolution.

Sadly, in the US at least, public transport and flying cars are not in our future.

"Slightly less than one-third of households said they had one personal vehicle1 available for use in 2001. A little more than one-third of households (40 million out of 107 million households) had 2 vehicles and slightly less than one-quarter had 3 or more vehicles available."[0]

This is an unimaginable number of cars. Given that a car costs, on average, $28,400[1] - and lasts around 8 years[2] - holy shit.

That doesn't even take into account the cost of running and fueling a car. At an average of ~15k miles per year, the total cost PER CAR is around $8,776 per year.[3] To our 'median household', which is more likely than not to have one or two cars, that's either 20% or 40% of their income. Since average spending on housing is 30%, that doesn't leave a whole lot left. No wonder we're all in so much debt.

The worst part is, US urban planning means that people are likely unable to work without access to a car.

Imagine a 20% increase in income tax, with the money being used to subsidize an outdated and damaging industry. That's what this is. It is holding back the US economy.

[0]http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_an... [1]http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/autos/aut11.shtm [2]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_ne... [3]http://www.boston.com/cars/newsandreviews/overdrive/2011/04/...

Also: "I drive 40 minutes each way" 1hr20min of driving is not going to translate into 1hr30min of biking, with the only possible exception being if you spent the entire car ride in gridlock or parking lots.

And: "I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there". That you can find a job within 20 miles does not help him.

"You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes of driving concentrating on driving. Not talking on cell phones, not texting, not talking, not even listening to music but DRIVING."

Yeah, and I'm not supposed to eat pizza or drink so much...

NYC would be a lot cheaper if you could buy up some old brownstones, give the tenants end of lease + 6 months to find a new place, tear them down and build an apartment building. It would be very simple to fit a lot more people on manhattan if we just built taller buildings.

It's politics that makes dense cities expensive, not something intrinsic to the cities themselves.

I used to catch a bus every day through the city, and there were a lot of strange people on those trips. Gangs of 9 year old gangster kids drunk up the back. Little old ladies muttering racist slurs at asian students. A guy who hadn't showered in so long his clothes had gone partially transparent from the grease. I don't think I was ever in any danger, but it sure was uncomfortable sometimes. I work pretty close to home now (in fact, mostly at home), so it's not really an issue anymore. But strangely, I find myself missing that chance to interact with people who I didn't choose to interact with.

It seems like every time we get more power (like by inventing an engine that can move us around) we use it to get more control (now I can encase myself in a metal shield that prevents any accidental congress with the outside world).

A bunch of technology has gone the same way. Efficient worldwide shipping and postage means you don't need to go outside to shop. Communication moving online means you can block people you don't like rather than have to deal with them. OKCupid means you can pre-screen your dates to avoid accidentally meeting someone unpalatable. You can GPS track your kids so they won't ever end up lost or at the wrong sort of party.

And those are all good things that give you more control over your environment. But they also isolate you. Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease. Like every generation before us, we strike out against danger with the power of our tools. But our dangers are, at this point, largely invented. We're getting to a point where instead of being safe, we'll just be cocooned in a real-world filter bubble, where we never have to fear the unknown, uncontrollable, unsanitised real world that gets forced on us when we get on a bus or walk around a city. I suspect, for all our newfound safety, we'll just feel a bit unsatisfied.

I guess I've just argued myself out of believing that the future without cars is ever really going to happen. Maybe there'll be a virtual bus MMO.