Submitted by mocha_sweetheart t3_zw253n in singularity
Surur t1_j1u1wty wrote
Reply to comment by Tencreed in Driverless cars and electric cars being displayed as the pinnacle of future transportation engineering is just… wrong. Car-based infrastructure is inefficient, bad for the environment and we already have better technologies in other fields that could help more. An in depth analysis by mocha_sweetheart
PT is slower, so you dont save any time and increase your inconvenience by using PT compared to a car.
> and that's time of your life you'll never get back
It makes more sense to build a city around personal transport.
Tencreed t1_j1u2q9h wrote
Dunno, I don't see a lot of trains and subways stuck in traffic jams. I leave around Paris, and used to get home quicker by tram than my colleagues living in the same area, using their cars. Now I use a bicycle, and I'm even a bit quicker, while they're still as slow as usual.
Clarkeprops t1_j1uxrg5 wrote
It’s been pretty bad in toronto lately…
Also, a bike isn’t public transport
Tencreed t1_j1v3hnf wrote
Yup, this one is mine. And it's assumed as an even worse mean of transportation than public transport by people commuting by car. But we got public bicycles available for cheap both where I live and next to the office.
Clarkeprops t1_j1vm6wq wrote
I’ve been a cyclist since I could ride, and I ride whenever I can. Personal cars can’t ever be replaced unless we have robot Rideshares that just make personal ownership financially stupid for most
Surur t1_j1u3g9d wrote
Sorry, research shows your personal assessment is wrong in most cases.
> Our results suggest that using PT takes on average 1.4–2.6 times longer than driving a car. The share of area where travel time favours PT over car use is very small: 0.62% (0.65%), 0.44% (0.48%), 1.10% (1.22%) and 1.16% (1.19%) for the daily average (and during peak hours) for São Paulo, Sydney, Stockholm, and Amsterdam, respectively.
It's also trivial to show this on google maps.
I just generated two random addresses in France.
Random address in France
Street: 1 rue du Château
City: Saint-germain-en-laye
State/province/area: Île-de-France
Phone number 01.70.25.38.45
Zip code 78100
Country calling code +33
Country France Street: 29 boulevard Albin Durand
City: Cergy
State/province/area: Île-de-France
Phone number 01.20.32.88.77
Zip code 95000
Country calling code +33
Country France
Tencreed t1_j1u5bo4 wrote
Then I must live in one of these few areas they describe where public transportation is quicker than cars, cause I definitely checked my personal case, several times, with hard data, since people tend to be quite skeptic when I tell them that. While GPS is good quality data, I would have liked to see transportation segregated between road-based and specific infradtructures. Of course public buses will be impacted by rush hour, while trains and subways much less so.
Edit : I see you exemple, and public transportation from suburbs to suburbs is notoriously inefficient, caus everything needs to go through the center. A peripheric line is being built to improve that.
Surur t1_j1u5zku wrote
> since people tend to be quite skeptic when I tell them that.
So you should be aware already that your experience is an exception, and can not be generalized to the majority as a solution.
For the majority, cars work much better. 81% of families have cars in France and 69% commute by car.
Of course in Paris most people commute by PT, but people hate it.
> A survey, carried out by French jobs website RegionsJob, has revealed that a whopping 76 percent of Parisians and people living in the Paris region are willing to take a pay cut to avoid the hassle of their daily commute.
Tencreed t1_j1u6hpr wrote
Of course, my case is an exception, France is an ultra-centralized country, with Paris reaching population densities way higher than anywhere else. The thing is I live there, people I talk to live there, so yeah, we're in an exceptional situation, where the most straightforward solution used everywhere else might not apply here. As I wrote before, cars will always be in need in some areas. Some others can do better with less of them.
IonizingKoala t1_j1wjqyf wrote
And how much more expensive is it to drive in Paris than take public transit?
The goal isn't for public transit to be lightning fast, though that would be great. The goal is for public transit to be easy, economical, and effective enough that we reduce the number of cars on the road to the essential amount, making everything more efficient.
Cars will be faster mode of transportation for decades. This is a totally normal side effect. It means those who actually need a car (ambulances, police, handicapped, running late to meetings) benefit more.
This tradeoff is fine because you can read on a train/tram/bus, you can't while driving. And if you have a chauffeur, I don't think this subject is too relevant anyways.
Surur t1_j1wlsbe wrote
> And how much more expensive is it to drive in Paris than take public transit?
Why would you assume it is more expensive to drive than to use PT.
An All Zones ticket in Paris is 17 euro. If you drive an EV your fuel costs would be much less than that.
> The goal isn't for public transit to be lightning fast, though that would be great.
I like how you casually deem people's free time valueless, despite people only having a limited number of hours to live, which should not be wasted on slow transport. An extra hour per day is 20 hours per month, wasted for nothing, that could have been spent with friends and family.
> The goal is for public transit to be easy, economical, and effective enough that we reduce the number of cars on the road to the essential amount, making everything more efficient.
That is a bit of a nonsense, isn't it? Unless you ban cars (which would make PT worse) people will always prefer the better option. People do not use PT by choice, they use it because the authorities made car travel impractical in some way.
To give you a real example - Germany recently had a 9 euro per month train ticket. It massively increased train usage, but reduced car usage by only 4%. Even if you made PT free, people would still prefer their cars.
> This tradeoff is fine because you can read on a train/tram/bus, you can't while driving. And if you have a chauffeur, I don't think this subject is too relevant anyways.
Kind of ignoring the fact that the thread is about self-driving cars, right? Are you a brigader from fuckcars?
IonizingKoala t1_j1xlgm1 wrote
-The cost of using a car is way beyond the fuel cost, it's insurance, cost of the car itself, maintenance, taxes (registration), parking, and depreciation. It's way more than the 75 euros for a monthly pass in Paris.
-Free time has value. So does working more hours to afford that car.
-Self driving cars won't come free. Tesla FSD is 15k USD and counting and that's the minimum sophistication level needed for true self driving. Stuff like Waymo is nice, though it would be way too expensive if the actual cost of mapping streets and r&d is factored in (like Tesla)
-It takes more than a year for the "invisible hand" to materialize. 4% is also pretty consequential, especially from a congestion perspective.
I'm not against cars at all; in my college town, I drive practically everywhere even though my public transportation is free. But that's because the latter is very limited in scope and reliability. In the main city I live in, I take public transit within the urban areas and only drive when going out to the suburbs.
I'm not saying to ditch cars obviously, but shaving off 30 minutes doesn't really mean that much for the average person. Money is just a way to value time, and even if you're an out of touch multimillionaire, it's easy to understand why people want a more stress-free transportation matrix.
Surur t1_j1y95m6 wrote
The average person, not millionaire, owns a car, and for the average person having a personal vehicle at their beck and call is worth much more than a few hundred euro per month extra, and enables further savings such as living further from the city where housing is cheaper.
> -Self driving cars won't come free.
This is completely irrelevant.
> -It takes more than a year for the "invisible hand" to materialize. 4% is also pretty consequential, especially from a congestion perspective.
4% is irrelevant to congestion, as quieter roads will induce more people to drive, and congested trains due to free travel will cause people to return to their own cars.
> Money is just a way to value time, and even if you're an out of touch multimillionaire, it's easy to understand why people want a more stress-free transportation matrix.
PT is a source of stress and people are willing to give up money to escape it.
> A survey, carried out by French jobs website RegionsJob, has revealed that a whopping 76 percent of Parisians and people living in the Paris region are willing to take a pay cut to avoid the hassle of their daily commute.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20180312/most-parisians-would-take-pay-cut-to-shorten-their-commute/
Tencreed t1_j1yi1ui wrote
>A survey, carried out by French jobs website RegionsJob, has revealed that a whopping 76 percent of Parisians and people living in the Paris region are willing to take a pay cut to avoid the hassle of their daily commute.
Taking a pay cut and avoid the hassle of their daily commute is simple, they just have to leave the Paris area.
Yet it's still one of the most attractive area in the whole country, even with all of its shortfalls. Go figure.
Surur t1_j1yjycv wrote
It's a zoning issue. They need to move the businesses out of the centre of the town. Obviously. Decentralize business and the people will follow.
Laying on PT into town is just feeding the cancer. The surrounding regions are the ones which need the support, but Paris is clearly greedy.
IonizingKoala t1_j1zod6i wrote
Because driving doesn't count as commuting; it's driving, the best joy ever!
Let's assume owning and using a car only costs a few hundred euros a month. Let's assume that parking/traffic is hassle-free (nevermind in Paris, lightly hitting another car's bumper while parking is considered routine as everyone parks in neutral).
I still don't understand what point you're trying to make. I recognize car commuting to be perfectly normal. I'm just under no illusions that it's somehow an efficient and effective commute method for everybody in a dense city like Manhattan/Paris/Tokyo. Tragedy of the commons will occur, and it seems you recognize that too: "quieter roads will induce more people to drive."
Also the cost of self-driving cars is relevant, because that was your response to the whole working-while-commuting point.
Surur t1_j1zszbi wrote
> Also the cost of self-driving cars is relevant, because that was your response to the whole working-while-commuting point.
Are you forgetting which sub you are on? Why is the current price of self-driving, which is not practically available yet, relevant?
> I'm just under no illusions that it's somehow an efficient and effective commute method for everybody in a dense city like Manhattan/Paris/Tokyo.
The issue is not driving, it's the density of the city. The solution is not promoting even greater and greater density by laying on denser and denser transport. It is promoting development outside of the city, so people can travel in security and comfort using personal transport. Why put people through commuter hell so they can promote the growth of Paris?
And people love driving btw (and if you think this is a biased source, read a paper all about why people love car culture here).
IonizingKoala t1_j20owrn wrote
Lower density is expensive. You're spreading out infrastructure costs to less households and businesses, increasing commute times (sure, cars are faster than the bus, but in urban areas is usually the same speed as the subway and walking and cycling), and generally taking up a larger environmental footprint.
Of course I don't want to live in Hong Kong or Singapore core, that's way too crammed. But if we look at Tokyo, which is second in urban development size only to NYC, and is the same size as the state of Connecticut, their population density is not high at all. 200-400 US cities would have higher population density than the Greater Tokyo Area.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you want is a medium density, larger urban area kinda like Greater Tokyo or NYC, with everyone free to drive wherever they want with manageable traffic.
This exists in reality, except car ownership is pretty low for Tokyo, and in NYC's car ownership is mostly centred in the suburbs. https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars
So when people are free to choose, only 10-40% of households in your ideal metro area (can't say city cause it's too sparse) choose car ownership. That's not out of poverty, Tokyo and NYC are among the highest earning cities in the world.
What makes those two cities livable and world-class is the public transit that connects the various boroughs together. NYC needs to improve in this regard because they don't have a ring line yet, but Tokyo is pretty good at it. I also picked two random spots in Tokyo, and though car is faster by 10 minutes when it's quiet, it's an hour slower if there's traffic.
The Greater Toronto Area is an example of what happens when you have a medium density, large metro area without good inter-borough public transit (and mediocre intra-borough PT outside of Toronto proper). You have all the high costs of urban living (you gotta pay for each borough's budgets as a separate city, as well as the huge road infrastructure costs) with few of the benefits (suburbs are isolated, you get this very Americanized feel of restrictive zoning and stroads, etc).
You can't pick and choose what aspects of our reality to address; the current price of Self-Driving (nevermind it's not SAE Level 5 yet) matters because it's real life. Just because the topic is Singularitarianism doesn't mean we are allowed to toss money and resource scarcity out the window. Or else I can say hey, singularity, cities won't be necessary anymore because we can live in underground pods and interact in Web 5.0.
Surur t1_j217966 wrote
> Or else I can say hey, singularity, cities won't be necessary anymore because we can live in underground pods and interact in Web 5.0.
Obviously - the person who brought this topic here was an idiot obviously.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you want is a medium density, larger urban area kinda like Greater Tokyo or NYC, with everyone free to drive wherever they want with manageable traffic.
No one would call Tokyo on NYC medium density. NYC has the highest PT use in USA. Its obviously a terrible example of a livable city, as is Tokyo, famous for its PT crush.
Polycentric development is what's needed to give people the room they need to breathe.
In the future we will need less farmland, and we should reclaim that for living space.
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