we don't have to couple exercise with transport. We don't say planes are bad because it reduces the number of cross country hiking trips people take.
On filling a bus, I think its a fundamental shortcoming of having fixed routes that they'll never be as efficient as point to point transport, especially electrified transport. i'm not really making a political argument.
I agree with the second point but given as 80% of city transports post-covid is back to being fixed commutes along fixed routes, I'm happy optimizing that along transit ways. I don't really care what happens with the remaining 20%.
Right now, nearly 100% of travel is with "personal cocoons", totally unnecessary (other than for political reasons) and creating immense downward pressure on health and social outcomes. In terms of levers the government has on health and social outcomes, transitway design is a big one, and it should use it.
The fact that its done badly in America is a political problem, and if you have any political power it should be expended fixing that, not rolling back public transit.
I think if these cocoons costed $2.50 a trip you might think differently. I think driverless cars + some iteration on the vehicles themselves gets us there (without subsidies!).
People love the equity argument for public transit. Non personally owned, ubiquitous, driverless, cheap, efficient and most importantly convenient cocoons would increase equity a whole hell of a lot more than the traditional definition of public transit imo
What is this solution we already have that you speak of? It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles in SF using public transit, between two popular destination pairs.
Fleets of driverless cars lets you do traffic shaping in time and space. Plus the marginal energy cost is basically nothing. It's basically all fixed cost BUT it's not like a transit project in the sense that you don't have to allocate a bunch of capital ahead of time and wait 10 years and then maybe get what you wanted (or not). Driverless cars are helpful the moment the first $200K car hits the road.
It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles using a car too at most peak times. It’s obviously not fair to compare a perfect autonomous transportation method with the current imperfect state of public transit.
As the population grows the driving times will get worse much faster than in transit because again, spatially, it just doesn’t scale well.
If you take 20-30% of everyone on a BART train and put em in autonomous cars with human drivers in the mix (like in the marginal $200K case tomorrow), what you have is abject chaos on the streets.
Every negative you mention about public transit is a political problem (ex: other first world countries can deliver public transit project in a matter of a 1-2 years and at a fraction of the cost).
no. i literally compared a common route on google maps for bus vs car, no transfers on the bus. car was 20 mins, bus was 40 mins when you factor in walking to the stop and waiting and walknig to your destination. to be fair, didn't consider time to get parking but its still less than 20 mins.
population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? we have very slow population growth and we can scale our way out of it with existing infra. more driverless cars = less parking = two more lanes on most streets. that can double throughput.
yes public transit is a huge political problem - so whats your solution? because the tech for public transit has existed forever so why isnt it better in the US? You cant just blame politics and then do nothing. You also cant say "we just need to advocate!" because, well, if it were that easy it would have already happened. Driverless cars are a good solution precisely because it uses existing infra and I think the political hurdle can be much much lower.
"population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? "
well then you can definitely put away your dreams of a magical $2.50 pod travel. You need people, more people, young people to build all that. And if we're saying flat and low population growth that dream is over, all conversation can stop.
But if we can turn things around on population, public transit is the only way things scale. Personal travel pods/cars are a current stopgap that only kind of works for our current population levels. Please re-measure car travel times at 5:30pm on a Wednesday evening when 80% of all trips happen, like I've mentioned, the remaining 20% are highly inconsequential to overall transportation design.
On filling a bus, I think its a fundamental shortcoming of having fixed routes that they'll never be as efficient as point to point transport, especially electrified transport. i'm not really making a political argument.