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American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

usa.streetsblog.org

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Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#301

Post by stretchwithme »

dsnuh wrote: post #273
stretchwithme wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can keep your minivan. Or you just hire a vehicle that has the room you need only when you need it. Uber already is pretty fast. I just used it in upstate New York north of Albany and there was hardly any wait. Any wait that exists will go down once robotic vehicles becomes dominant. And pricing will also be important to make that happen. People who want less than 5 minutes wait can pay more, but that will be pre…

I agree that this will be the case, I thought you were arguing that private car ownership will virtually disappear. We are already in the situation you described. Sure, maybe use of public transportation and Uber type services will go up some, but I can't see anyone who has a private car in their driveway using Uber or public transit in anything other than unusual circumstances (need to go to airport, need a designat…

Eventually, it will happen. Teenagers will be able to cheaply go anywhere they want without learning how to drive. When they get their first apartment and the one without a garage or parking spot is several hundred dollars cheaper, they'll probably not bother getting a car.

Sure, many people are set in their ways. In the long run, that doesn't matter.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#302

Post by stretchwithme »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #282
dsnuh wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that I don't think many people would take that option even if it were available. I know I wouldn't, unless the costs to own and operate a private car went up drastically, and even then, I see it as more of an augmentation than a replacement, i.e. maybe I own a single car instead of two, and use cabs for most trips. There are some realities I think get overlooked. For example, I have a family of six, plus…

A family of six or more is quite unusual. 62% of households are two people or less, 78% are three or less and 91% are four are less. Your use case does not need to get solved for there to be a huge reduction in the number of privately owned cars.

That's true.

But that use case will be solved too. Automated vehicles will come in all sizes. Families aren't the only groups that like to travel together.

If there is a market for such vehicles, somebody will offer it.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#303

Post by [deleted] »

tajen wrote: post #293
xapata wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're so wrong. Sorry, just had to throw it back at you to emphasize how silly it sounds. I'm guessing you're referring to people that want to date their co-workers? Otherwise, it's hard to think of who else might worry about litigation when considering a romantic overture.

Ever heard of this taxi driver in Israel who got hit by a rape accusation, but was able to show the camera records to prove that it was a false complaint and the girl only got upset because the taxi driver told her to stop smoking in the car? Ever heard of so many false accusations from women, that are only used to fire a coworker, a CEO, a boss? Ever heard of couch promotions, where the girl shows her [redacted], on…

[deleted]

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#304

Post by Fnoord »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #16
angarg12 wrote: post #2

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spac…

This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations. This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Softwa…

"Car As A Service" is essentially rented cars: taxis, and Uber & friends. Problem in USA is bicycles and cargo bikes are not widespread. Hence the roads aren't build for bicyclists and people don't expect them while bicyclists wear helmets (in The Netherlands the latter is rare but roads are build with bicyclists taken into account).

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#305

Post by sctb »

tajen wrote: post #116
narrator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Rela…

Re: Tinder. The #metoo campaign has helped a lot too, frightening men into never doing real-life courting. “There’s a place to do such things!”, we’ve heard, namely (paid) clubs, Tinder and other commercial places.

We've asked you before not to take into flamewar hell with these ideological tangents, so we've banned the account.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#306

Post by dsnuh »

stretchwithme wrote: post #302
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A family of six or more is quite unusual. 62% of households are two people or less, 78% are three or less and 91% are four are less. Your use case does not need to get solved for there to be a huge reduction in the number of privately owned cars.

That's true. But that use case will be solved too. Automated vehicles will come in all sizes. Families aren't the only groups that like to travel together. If there is a market for such vehicles, somebody will offer it.

I'm not arguing that these vehicles and markets won't exist, merely that I don't think they will eliminate or become even the majority mode of transportation in America. I feel like there are many unrealistic techno-utopian assumptions that have to be made to get to a future where private car ownership in America is for collectors and edge cases.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#307

Post by dsnuh »

stretchwithme wrote: post #299
cozzyd wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But buses will be much cheaper to operate too, so they wouldn't be standing room only. A city that had only buses and no private cars would have a very fast and efficient transportation network.

Buses suck. Their fixed routes suck. Their infrequent schedules suck. Stopping at every stop sucks. Having to put up with what other people do on them sucks. Not being able to sleep because you're not by yourself sucks. There really is no way buses win.

Yeah, even if buses were free, I don't see it ever becoming the main form of transportation.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#308

Post by chimeracoder »

blt wrote: post #174
chimeracoder wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs. No matter how autonomous the vehicle, a tunnel of cars will never have the the same throughput capacity as a subway. For supporting the kind of dense cities that we need to in order to have a somewhat sustainable society in the long-term, that's crucial. Unless you're talking about fully autonomous subway systems, in which case t…

The NYC subway system is not autonomous. Every train has a driver. Autonomous subways do exist though.

> The NYC subway system is not autonomous. Every train has a driver.

The L train is actually fully self-driving and self-operating. The TWU has a contract with the MTA that requires them to hire someone to sit around and press a keepalive button every so often, though that doesn't make the train any less autonomous.

(The TWU has a history of striking these sorts of "deals" with the MTA - typically, they take the form of requiring the MTA to pay for the cost of any jobs that are eliminated due to technological advancements. In other words, it becomes more expensive for the MTA to introduce technology - even technology that's already been standard practice for decades elsewhere in the world - than to keep using older and more expensive systems.)

So at this point, we're talking about political barriers to self-driving trains, rather than technological ones, and "repurposing subways for self-driving car tunnels" has all of those same barriers, on top of being a dramatically less efficient way of moving people around.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#309

Post by stretchwithme »

cozzyd wrote: post #297
dsnuh wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will buses be much cheaper than they are now? Because they are driverless? I think that's one small part of the calculation that goes into fare prices.

Labor is usually the dominant cost of running buses in rich countries. You'd still presumably have to hire inspectors to make sure people pay the fare but you only need a small multiplier of those two buses.

The dominant costs for USING the bus is the wasted time, lost convenience and lost comfort. And it's the total cost that people consider, not just the fare.

You wouldn't need inspectors to make sure fares are paid. A lot of trains already don't have them.

But eventually it will be very easy to tell electronically if someone boarding a bus has paid the fare. You could even keep track of who doesn't and collect a fine later.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#310

Post by fiter »

gok wrote: post #228
fiter wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will still be a sour deal. What a waste of urban space to just leave empty parking spots due to the fees for repurposing them.

Presumably as the market for parking goes away the owners of it will find a more profitable use for the space.

The owner of the spots are the city but the owner of the parking meters are this corporation. The city will owe fees if they decide to change usage. So this is a sour deal because now they'll either have to leave them as open spots (waste) or pay this company for lost revenues if they change them (waste).
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