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Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

pandodaily.com

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Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#51

Post by exue »

yason wrote: post #9

To get rid of cars, you need cities designed for people, not cars: otherwise everything is so far away that nothing gets ever done. We won't get rid of cars until oil is ridiculously expensive and we must give up. That will also leave much of the recent (since 1950's) development to decay, and new cities will emerge where there are new concentrations of people. So, we will get a future without cars at some point, it'…

Cities are still designed for people. It's just that they are choosing to live in large, cheaper houses with lawns instead of a high-rise apartment in NYC.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#52

Post by read_wharf »

oliverchen wrote: post #47

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 viab…

In the world and people that I currently see in front of me, any mode of transportation that requires a helmet is not viable for most people, whether that be bicycles, motorcycles or jetpacks.

However, I also think people are more flexible than I give them credit for. I see a lot of bicycles parked outside bars, and probably a fair number of those are DUI "graduates." I think I see some of those people riding to work.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#53

Post by exue »

DanI-S wrote: post #34
fennecfoxen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like trains and commuting by train too. I can't stand traffic either. But cars remain awesomely effective, because they can go from point to point, and they're so competitive that trains are only really competitive if: * you're going to be traveling for very long distances (but not long enough for airports to be faster), or * traffic is going to be utterly miserable, or * the train is RIGHT THERE and very convenien…

Knowing that the median household income in the US is $44k, I am continually shocked at the amount of money spent on cars. "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 unim…

So you just choose one industry that's 20% of the economy to demolish and expect no side effects?

Get rid of the car industry, and the flying jetpack, massive underground subway, or whatever industry will come in to fill the gap. Economics isn't that simple.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#54

Post by read_wharf »

cpt1138 wrote: post #22
read_wharf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those are your measures. But a car can very easily beat a bicycle on time efficiency, assuming you're going more than half a mile. A car can also beat a bicycle on opportunity exposure. Both statements are illustrated by mine and many others' commutes. I drive 40 minutes each way, because I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there. I'd love to have found a job here, but at the moment my job is there.…

Hmm, you spend 40 minutes driving. How much time do you spend in the gym? What if you rode a bicycle for 1.5 hours and skipped both the driving and the gym? The problem with a car in your situation is contextual. 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. The context of where you are driv…

"How much time do you spend in the gym?"

I used to spend an hour a day, three days a week at a CrossFit gym, and a car made that possible. :)

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#55

Post by sliverstorm »

sgentle wrote: post #40

To me, what would be interesting about a world without cars (or even with cars, but vastly more attractive public transport) is that it would partly reverse a sad isolationist trend that's come along with the power and control given to us by modern technology. 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. L…

Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease.

Bah, that isn't the fear of the unknown vs. the fear of the known. It is immediate, physical fear (in thirty seconds those gang members are going to mug me) vs. eventual, abstract fear (in twenty years, something might go wrong inside me).

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#56

Post by loso »

The article falls flat on its face in the first two paragraphs when he says that car technology has not advanced in the last 126 years. That just being ignorant of how cars work if he believes that. And to call them a stupid technology is purely idiotic.

I love cars but I wouldn't mind if a better technology came around to replace them. The keyword being better and not just different. People are always going to want a way to independently travel. I live in NYC and while PT is convenient it is still a pain in the ass overall. Getting to places too late or too early because of the train schedule. Being forced to deal with the different weirdos of the city. Delays and breakdowns that happen more often than they should. There is a reason why there is still so much traffic in the city. People, for the most part, who can afford to take Taxis or have their own car still do.

Even if you have Jet packs or any other alternative travel tech that we know about now there are still going to be infrastructure problems. Clearing skyways for the jetpacks, knocking down structures which impede these skyways. And the results of a malfunctioned jetpack would probably lead to a more instant death than the normal car accident.

This paragraph alone "We sacrifice ourselves and our environment to these death traps, health hazards, planet killers, money sucks; these land-grabbers, respiratory rapists, and insidious isolation engines. And for what? The pleasure and convenience of rapid movement? That’s a problem we can solve in other ways." makes me not take the article or the author seriously.

I welcome advances in technology that allow us to travel more cleanly and efficiently. But we have to remember that cars serve a number of different purposes for different people. So until we can find one technology that is better & not hodge podge of different tech that replaces the car I wouldn't hold my breath about people willingly giving them up.

-edit misspelled "of"

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#57

Post by exue »

This article's view is a visionary one, and I applaud that: But people promote (bullet) trains, subways, etc. as revolutionary inventions when they really aren't. They've been around for 50+ years and have 'lost' to cars in the marketshare battle, in Europe, US, China, etc. I want us to focus on new technologies like the instead of continuing to push old ones like it's a 'sprawl conspiracy' keeping them down (when their use is optimized for downtowns). As uvdiv mentions, the personal vs. mass transit issue is big spectrum.

Things like the mag-lev pod transport system, flyways, etc. are awesome. We should develop all of them and try to make them the best we can. But it's a gigantic mistake to discount the car - we have something to learn from their success: People like freedom, people like privacy, not everyone wants to live in a dense city.

That's why I say better/self driving cars are the practical solution to the future, but we could easily see something else revolutionize the situation by 2060. And as for over-crowded roads, The current road network is way more than sufficient to handle traffic with self-driving cars: You can put 5-10x the number of cars on a highway and not jam it if computers are driving. Jetpacks, after all, will have the collision problem too.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#58

Post by leovinci »

> Silicon Valley focusing too much on 140 characters and not enough on flying cars

Nonsense.

1. Silicon Valley moves in the direction that generates money and it generates it now. Fortunately, given that the mean IQ of the population of earth is low, Silicon Valley is having fun manipulating these a few billions low IQ creatures to spend their lives on their 'apps'. Sometimes this app is that '140 chars' thingy, sometimes it's an app that takes your photo, changes its colours and shares it (how innovative, useful, and indeed what remarkable contribution this will have on curing cancer).

2. Flying cars need many years of strong academic research investigations. Silicon Valley is no where close to academics, it's pure (soft) industry.

3. Just because you can do 'cool' css 3 animations in Silicon Valley, it doesn't mean that you can make flying cars merely because it's 'cool'. Silicon Valley is software with enough hardware to drive the software.

Your'e overestimating this. Calm down dear, calm down.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#59

Post by prof_hobart »

cpt1138 wrote: post #22
read_wharf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those are your measures. But a car can very easily beat a bicycle on time efficiency, assuming you're going more than half a mile. A car can also beat a bicycle on opportunity exposure. Both statements are illustrated by mine and many others' commutes. I drive 40 minutes each way, because I couldn't find a job here, but I could find a job there. I'd love to have found a job here, but at the moment my job is there.…

Hmm, you spend 40 minutes driving. How much time do you spend in the gym? What if you rode a bicycle for 1.5 hours and skipped both the driving and the gym? The problem with a car in your situation is contextual. 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. The context of where you are driv…

>You are supposed to spend that 40 minutes of driving concentrating on driving.

If you're cycling in an urban area, you're going to be doing a hell of a lot more concentrating than the average car driver does on the equivalent journey, or you're not going to be alive for very long.

Re: Let’s Build a Future Without Cars

#60

Post by anonymous »

yason wrote: post #9

To get rid of cars, you need cities designed for people, not cars: otherwise everything is so far away that nothing gets ever done. We won't get rid of cars until oil is ridiculously expensive and we must give up. That will also leave much of the recent (since 1950's) development to decay, and new cities will emerge where there are new concentrations of people. So, we will get a future without cars at some point, it'…

I've been wondering how much of the difference between old-world and new-world cities has to do with the simple fact that new-world cities evolved from industrial-era settlements, while old-world ones resulted from agglutination of rural areas. The effect being that yours were designed for maximising production, while ours have a more emergent design, based on generations of people used to living within walking distance of everything.
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