The new york city subway is often faster than driving. Many cities in the Netherlands have faster transit or cycling times than driving due to careful planning and priority. Japan has high speed rail connecting many of its cities, most trains going faste than highway speeds, some doubling or even tripling highway speeds.
Also north america was founded on trains. If we could build trains 100 years ago we can build better ones now.
All of those issues could be fixed by building around transit being the prioirty instead of the car. Some cities actually have transit that is faster than a car because transit gets priority at intersections and can take a more direct route.
The majority of trips people make are within their own city/local region. Thats where transit should be implemented first. Your country is not “too big” for transit
If your country is too big for transit, it is certainly too big for all sorts of sensors and such in the roads to assist autonmous driving.
Or just buld a tram that rides on rails. More effecient and no need to over engineer an autopilot system
I don’t want to waste any more tax money trying to make one of the least effecient modes of transport more autonomous. Just build an electricrfied tram if thats what you want.
All the “self driving” cars are trying to evolve into proper trams and railways
Ive used mine before because the rad was too big to fit internally.
The same problem could be fixed with electrified transit and walkability. Transit would also be even more environmentally friendly.
Plus we could still develop self driving cars but do a lot more testing before we set the public as the guinea pigs to see if they are safe.
Id also argue that we cannot claim this is the worst self driving will get since self driving cars are only used in a few areas right now.
There are greener, more energy effecient and more socially fair ways to get the same results than selling everybody a high tech steel box.
Driving while inebriated is illegal, self driving is not.
Traffics jams and erreactic behaviour could be fixed if everyone is in a self driving car, but at that point it woild be far more energy effecient, environmentally friendly and cheaper for society to build electrified transit instead.
If you prioritize the street so that only self driving cars are on it and they need wireless communications to function, how do other road users like cyclists and pedeatrians safely use the street?
Self driving cars are not here to make your life better, they are here to make a handful of people rich.
I don’t think public deaths is a valid cost for creating self driving cars. We could be builidng safer and more effecient transportation systems. Some billionaire is going to make even more money because they were allowed to use the general public and city streets as a testing ground for their product. This is not fair to the family or the people who are injured or killed by self driving cars.
I think much of north america is dug so deep into car centric planning that making drivers pay the full cost would be too expensive for a significant portion of the population and workforce. I think the alternatives need to exist before the taxation because many people are constrained to their car being their only reliable way to get to work.
Making that cost more could put huge financial stress on a family whereas building the rail before the taxation could provide a cheaper alternative before the taxation even begins.
Yes and i agree with that sentiment. 20 years down the line we will realize our cities are just as unwalkable and unable to be served by transit if we build them to exclussively serve the car. We should build cities so walking, cycling, transit and driving are all realistic options. For most north American cities we only prioiritize the car.
The only reason people in urban centers do not have transit is because governments neglected to build it. If they can build a 6 lane highway through your city, they could build transit.
We shouldnt use rural and spread out areas as an excuse to not build our cities and denser areas better and service them with transit.
The vast majority of people who are anti car are anti car centric urban environments. Noboby is expecting a small town of 300 people to build a tram, we are expecting places with congested highways to build transit instead of “adding one more lane to solve traffic forever”
We should defintely still make EVs, overall they are going to be better than ICE. We just shouldn’t force/subsidize everyone to have to buy and drive an EV like we did with ICE cars.
Here is my reasonable argument against EVs. EVs only really solve the emissions part of the equation. They dont solve the massive amounts of paved surface, private ownership of thousands of pounds of steel and plastic, they still use massive amounts of energy to move that steel and plastic and building cities for cars is largely ineffecient and expensive to maintain.
We could do a lot more for the environment than EVs. Id rather see their subsidies go to things like electrified transit, cycling infrastructure or walkability improvements.
Electric cars aren’t going to fix climate change
Does this breed tend to be calmer/more interested in water? or do you have to bath train them as kittens? I could not imagine giving weekly baths or covering ears/head on the average cat being a pleasant experience.
Which is a big part of the problem. But not all Netherlands cities are super dense, many have suburbs serviced by transit and with cycling paths. When they were built they considered transit and cycling access when they built them.
There is also the issue of land use. Many of those cities have looser zoning laws than the states which makes it easier for stores to open near peoples homes and scattered throughout the city rather than having to go to a massive commercial district with walmart and 5 other big box stores in a wasteland of parking.
No one is saying a tiny farming town of 500 people needs high speed rail but cities into the 100s of thousands of people can certainly support a transit network, and many did before their trams were ripped out and their right of way given to cars.