71–80 of 223 posts
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> The High Cost of Free Parking convince me that 800 pages is worth it (reviews so far haven't).
They're not worth it. You should spend the time that it would take you to read this book doing some high yield activity instead, like trading stocks or growth hacking your startup. Anything less than that just isn't worth the trouble.
This post is a rant backed up with only anecdotal evidence and an enraged author with a penchant for catchy headlines. No solutions are offered because no problem is properly presented.
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Yeah, I don't really understand why people figure that self-driving cars/taxis/Uber/ZipCar would ever be cheaper per mile. They pay to operate their vehicles same as you do, except they also need to have some profit on top.
High fixed costs and economies of scale. Cars are high fixed cost capital goods. A taxi will be driven far more over the course of its lifetime than a personal car, so the fixed cost per mile is much lower. Also, economies of scale make purchases and maintenance and repair cheaper. These are two reasons to believe taxis should be cheaper than personal ownership. Finally, let me point to airplanes. It makes far more s…
No they aren't. Many people need a car every day. Almost nobody needs a plane every day.
FYI, the author of that post address self-driving cars in his next post: http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/self-driv...
That betrays the basic attitude of these anti-car folks. It's not the cars, but the freedom to live where you want that they detest.
If self-driving cars become a reality, it is interesting to think of what happens to all this space & infrastructure. If the model is that we don't own cars, but rather share them like taxis, then there is no need for parking: the car will just drop you and go to its next trip. If the model is that we own our self-driving cars, it may be that they can be parked at much greater distances (10+ miles) from where we spen…
- Self-driving cars will still need to park at off-peak times. Unless they just keep driving in circles. - Having your car park 10 miles away from you after every trip adds some forty miles of travel per commute. That's forty miles of fuel and forty miles of maintenance, every day. - I'm also not thrilled about the prospect of already-dense cities shrinking streets to one lane. We call them concrete jungles now - can…
The post is right, and even more so for developing world cities that emerged before cars were around. However the post is also naive. Cars are usually much faster, provide much better shelter from the weather, and are much less tiring than trying to lug bags from one place to another on buses or other public transport. They also place far fewer constraints on when you can travel. Of course it's possible to structure…
Everybody knows this is true, of course. I live three miles from work. To get here this morning I could have walked 3 blocks to the light rail station near my apartment, then another 4 or so blocks from the destination station to my office. This is pretty convenient, especially in St. Louis, where the vast, vast majority of residents don't have options nearly that good. But I didn't do it. It was 16F degrees when I l…
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They're not worth it. You should spend the time that it would take you to read this book doing some high yield activity instead, like trading stocks or growth hacking your startup. Anything less than that just isn't worth the trouble.
Your sarcasm implies that he doesn't want to put effort into reading what appears to be a bad book because it doesn't have a return, which is a crappy assumption. People have a limited amount of time, and there are far more good books than any one person could read, let alone bad books.
And... it's a book, dude. You can check it out from the library or buy it used for ten bucks and stop reading it if you don't like it; that's not going to ruin your life. If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't really understand why people figure that self-driving cars/taxis/Uber/ZipCar would ever be cheaper per mile. They pay to operate their vehicles same as you do, except they also need to have some profit on top.
High fixed costs and economies of scale. Cars are high fixed cost capital goods. A taxi will be driven far more over the course of its lifetime than a personal car, so the fixed cost per mile is much lower. Also, economies of scale make purchases and maintenance and repair cheaper. These are two reasons to believe taxis should be cheaper than personal ownership. Finally, let me point to airplanes. It makes far more s…
Well, could be. But the cabbie's wages quickly eat into those gains.
It makes far more sense to rent an airplane than buy one because almost no one travels enough to justify the purchase. Cars are analogous.
Hardly. A 737 lasts for decades and spends nearly a full half of that time in the air; of course no one flies that much. Cars on the other hand, if driven slightly over the US average- say, 20,000miles/year- will hit 200,000 miles in just 10 years, and most cars are _done_ by 200k.
Self driving cars my pick for best solution. You can have fewer cars services more people with higher efficiency. It's all wins across the board. I hope the bloggers solution ideas aren't "better public transportation". Public transportation sucks, even in Europe. A pre-requisite to good public transportation is poor infrastructure for private transportation. I view asking for better public transportation as asking f…
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Cars are convenient for an individual, but that is because you do out-source most of the negative aspects of them to the society around you. Just image how green, quiet and open streets (the space between buildings) could be without cars or with cars which deliver goods only, especially in bigger cities. The air would be a lot better too, roads need a lot of maintenance, cars need a lot of fuel, create a lot of pollu…
How do you envision goods being delivered to people then?