#15charactersofyup
The neighborhood next to mine has some really bad/spotty sidewalks. I would like to share a bit.
Check out this one.
Or this ADA monstrosity.
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The rare “good ad”.
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Cars take up lots of room
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We can not definitively say what the reason(s) for this are. But the simplest explanation that comes to mind is that with fewer cars on the road, the remaining cars were driving faster. Traffic was the one thing keeping cars from going fast, and actually increased safety. If that explanation is accurate, we must redesign the roads to make cars go slower, regardless of traffic levels. Speed limit signs and enforcement don’t get the job done. Roads and streets that are less straight and less wide are key.
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There was a Not Just Cars video on street design recently, that pointed this out and specifically points out the particular road designs that they think caused this coivd increase in car fatalities.
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How interesting that you would bring up trains just now.
Imagine if we efficiently produced the right amount of cars such that they were on average in use even just 12 hours a day each instead of 1. The amount of space that would free up, the amount of environmental destruction that wouldn’t have been done. Capitalism strikes again as the market optimizes for selling the most cars, and not overall efficiency.
I don’t disagree with the idea that we could use cars more efficiently. I’m certain that everyone can figure out why this is however.
We require everyone to get to work at the same time, to the same places, from the same places. We would need to coordinate a whole lot of people and a ton of activities to tighten that situation up.
Even with self driving cars that acted more like taxis would only go so far in reliving this specific complaint.
Hell, even commuter trains/busses have a similar issues with people going to work from the suburbs to the urban centers, if everyone needs to get from a to b with in an hour and it takes >30 minutes to get from a to b then you won’t be able to realistically reuse any of those trains/busses.
I know we’re all on board for the solutions that would obliviate the needs for all of this, denser urban development, getting rid of the suburbs, more urban mass transit.
So in at least some companies where parking and traffic is an issue they actually do tend to spread out the schedules a bit. Last place I worked you could pick a start time between 6am and 8am. A huge number of people chose 6am specifically to secure parking so it was still a massive rush then, but by 7:30 I could drive pretty much right to the auxiliary lot and catch a shuttle bus without traffic. I would assume that as more people work from home and the concept of everyone showing up to the office to start at the same time starts to erode, the ability for some kind of communal self-driving car fleet to do multiple runs per day of commuters would be possible.
That in addition to if they ARE self driving then they don’t need to stay in a city with limited parking. My workshop is in a business park near the town’s School Bus depot which in some ways is analogous to this. If there were tons of cars out there just to handle peak traffic times, with the eventual significant reduction in actual vehicles to park I could see some existing parking lots staying on as basically commuter lots, for vehicles that are dormant during lull periods. With the various maintenance and charging needs of the vehicles it’s likely that cars might go through a rotation so that cars might only sit in their reserve lots for a few hours to charge, be cleaned, etc before going back in and relieving other vehicles that were on shift. Then at peak times everyone is out of the pens and taking passengers around.
Obviously I’m not saying this is a perfect solution but it seems that it’d be manageable without significant wasted time.
Also from the capitalism standpoiint these vehicles will all be owned by big companies that invest in them like capital equipment. Like buying CNC machines or taxi cabs. They will be expensive vehicles. But individuals will all be on subscription service plans with miles instead of minutes. The car companies just switch to lower volume at much higher margins so they win out; and the consumers probably basically break even but many might end up ahead on the quality of experience.
I, for one, would much rather pay what I do now for a shitty Corolla as I would to just have a car for the 30-50 min a day I need to be on the roads getting from one place to another. And once I was in that mindset, there would be times when I’d just as soon take a bus or train.
The one industry that would be crushed is the car loan industry; unless they pivot quick and push it.
“As for the driver, 26 year-old Jose Angel Hernandez remains hospitalized under guard and charged with Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon.
Police say the cyclist who shot him had a concealed handgun license, which would be required to carry a gun when you ride, and the Harris County DA office declined to charge him.”
My guess: these cyclists were white people.
Knowing what I know about Houston though the cost of living (I.E Rent and taxes) is infinitely cheaper.
Sure, but imagine Houston where you don’t need to have a car. So cheap!