Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

If you're curious about this stuff, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High, and Ryan Avent's The Gated City, all of which discuss contemporary urban life and how restrictions on building height lead to suburban sprawl. In particular, based on their readings, I'm not sure this is true: "There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city." Some parts of cities scale sub-linearly and others don't; see here: http://www.creativeclass.com/_v3/creative_class/2007/05/26/c...:

Quantities related to a city’s infrastructure, such as the number of gas stations and the length of paved roads, did scale "sublinearly", meaning that the larger the city, the less of these were required per capita. But measures of economic output and innovation – the number of patents, total wages, GDP, even the pace of walking – scaled "superlinearly", showing increasing returns with size (see Graphs). "The scaling laws say that on average, as a city grows you can predict its output and input, its energy consumption, its wealth creation, its level of crime," says Bettencourt.

Livable, walkable, affordable cities are dense. That is the primary factor in whether or not you can afford to live within walking/biking/subway distance. The rich people that want to live close to work are going to get first dibs on usable housing, and unless you build more than that, middle class residents don't stand a chance.

So much of that "hyper inflated city real estate" is not especially dense. So you get lots of rich people living in 4-6 floor, beautiful, historic buildings near the center of the city. That type of housing does not lead to livable, walkable cities.

If you want real estate prices to drop, and you want cities to be livable, you have to build an excess of dense housing. Right now it is near impossible to increase population density in the city, due to zoning restrictions, existing tenants, etc.

I don't know a solution to that, but I think it's the root of the problem.

There actually are showers at work, and a little gym, and an outdoor exercise station park. There's nothing stopping me from using all that except my interlocking schedule and my current physical issues. But mostly time.

My commute is in the "good" direction. My average speed is probably 40 or 45 mph, mostly freeway, and the opposite direction is often at a standstill. So it's a fair distance.

I'm all for finding jobs near home, and I moved where I am because there are a lot of jobs in the area. But circumstances put me there for now, not here. When I used to work here I would walk 40 minutes to work, and I liked that a lot.

"You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes ... driving." I used to bike to work when I lived in Seattle, and Port Orchard before that, and I can definitely understand the wish of any biker that drivers would hang up the cheeseburger and just DRIVE. :)

Flying "cars" are far from real, The Martin Jetpack which the author has mentioned is noisy, expensive and only has 30 minutes (31.5 miles max) operating time. However, there's much room to improve current transportation system, new technology and government regulations are constantly pushing fuel efficiency. Mass production air-based vehicles aren't viable unless energy production becomes cheap enough.

The next viable transportation system may be vacuum maglev train. The world already have Superconducting and normal conducting Maglev technology (JRC and Transrapid respectively) and mankind have built countless tunnels and bridges and concrete structures.

Problem 1: This article is a giant anti-car rant with a few points of rational debate baked in that might help public policy. It's no more objectively helpful than reading a spiel from BimmerForums or ClubWRX on why they love their 300hp sports cars and would never give them up to be herded in a big, crowded, smelly bus.

Problem 2: Cars are currently the best solution to the problems we have. That's why they are #1 in the US. Not because they are horrible inventions, not because there is some conspiracy to keep them in their cars (Americans CHOOSE to live in suburbs with large lawns and lots of open space, since not everyone lives in a big city with subway systems and whatnot). Building lots of parking lots is still cheaper than figuring a way to shuttle people around in rural areas. America is big, land is cheap.

America doesn't look like Manhattan, NYC everywhere. For these people, cars are the best solution. And the next stage is not going to be a jetpack. It's going to be a self-driving car. The fact that average people put up with all the problems and headaches of cars that only car enthusiasts love (maintenance, repairs, buying, etc.) shows us that there are a LOT of advantages from cars that we need to match with new forms of technology. My take is: Improve cars, rather than trying to destroy them. Because 100 years of innovation of automobiles aren't for nothing.

My take: The near future is efficient hybrids (2025), electric or fuel-cell cars (2035), then self-driving cars (2060). People will continue to talk about completely changing the infrastructure of the US, having everyone take buses and subways to work, but cars will continue to be over 75% of commute options for the forseeable future. Why?

The problem with all public transport technologies right now is it doesn't solve the density problem. The majority of new population in the US is growing not in really dense cities, but in medium dense suburbs. Everyone talks about moving people into "livable, healthy, walkable cities", yet Americans largely choose to migrate out of those ciites into new suburbs. I wonder why. Maybe they don't like the crowds, the crime, etc. It's human nature.

Problem 3: Finally, here are some things that cars have solved that are unresolved problems in other forms of transport:

Freedom of movement. Go wherever you want, whenever you want, with no one telling you what to do.

Speed. Choose a random American's home and a random American's office. Driving by car, even in traffic, probably beats all other modes in terms of speed. That's why even in the Bay Area at most 20% of commuters go by public transport where over 70% drive.

Efficiency. Cars are actually quite efficient and getting more so, especially with hybrid technology. The average car beats the average city bus in terms of energy efficiency. And we are quite likely to get 50+MPG Cars and electric cars in the near future.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

Price. Compared to jet packs or flying cars...