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Escaping the Ogallala Trap

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11–15 of 15 posts

Re: Escaping the Ogallala Trap

#11

Oh I don’t care about all that. When the highway I can see out my balcony is gridlocked everything is quiet. When there’s high speed it’s noisy. When the roads are gridlocked I can bicycle by quite easily. When they’re going by at 45 mph that’s a lot more risky. When the cars in the line are autonomous they won’t turn into me randomly because they lost their temper. Honestly, you’re making this outcome seem like para…

How are you getting around personally? Especially if demand shifts further to cars—now with fewer downsides—and further hinders availability and development of public transit, much like the post-WWII original car ownership boom did (and not just in the US!).

I have electric bike. For me and family. Gridlock is best for that because cars not moving.

Re: Escaping the Ogallala Trap

#13

So making cars public, letting people just summon one at will to bring them where they want to go, cars that rides in coordinated, self-scheduling fleets, cars that pick up other people going the same way etc. etc. will lead to MORE cars on the road ? Nope, not buying it.

For a shared car that you can summon, any road-mile it spends between a drop-off and a pick-up is a new road-mile created by swapping 2 parked cars with 1 moving shared car. These have to exist by necessity as well since trip demands are very uneven.

I wouldn't bank on ride-sharing either. Only a fraction of ride-calls are shared, and ride-calls are of course on a fraction of road traffic compared to private vehicles. Ride-sharing is probably going to be less popular in autonomous cars since you don't have the driver to act as a buffer with whatever weird stranger you can end up with, and the financial pressure to share a car is lower when you have no driver to pay for.

Re: Escaping the Ogallala Trap

#14

This post makes the assumption that people choose not to drive because it’s annoying or that they can’t multitask (the latter, unfortunately, seems not to be a blocker in the Bay Area). I don’t see how this would increase demand significantly. Fleets may grow, but I doubt more people will be going on trips because now they don’t need to drive. I can get uber to pay my trip to the office, that doesn’t mean I want to g…

If you can sleep during your commute, why not live 2 hours (or more) away?

Re: Escaping the Ogallala Trap

#15
post #5

Oh I don’t care about all that. When the highway I can see out my balcony is gridlocked everything is quiet. When there’s high speed it’s noisy. When the roads are gridlocked I can bicycle by quite easily. When they’re going by at 45 mph that’s a lot more risky. When the cars in the line are autonomous they won’t turn into me randomly because they lost their temper. Honestly, you’re making this outcome seem like para…

Aren't gridlocks noisy due to honks?

My experience of travel suggests to me that honking is cultural: what's normal for Mumbai doesn't happen in London.

In the UK, the horn might be used to "wake up" a driver in front - e.g. the traffic light has gone green, the driver in front isn't paying attention, so the car behind might sound a short honk to alert the driver in front that the light has changed. There's also the annoyed "you cut in front of me" / "you did something dangerous" long blaring honk.

Those are the two main accepted uses of the horn in the UK, so there isn't much honking in UK traffic jams.

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