So your conclusion for my food analogy is:
“To stop people from being overweight and have bad cholesterol, they need to stop eat all food completely.”
Well done. Way to miss the point completely.
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“If my car can drive itself I can set it to pick up groceries at 2 AM when the grocer opens, or set a recurring gas refill at 1 AM. If people are able to stagger trips like that to times when they don’t need to be available, the average traffic amount per hour would increase, but I think you would smooth out high traffic times.”
So when your groceries arrive at 3am in the morning, are you going to wake up to put the food in the fridge and freezer so it doesn’t go off?
Are all the old people going to take wine tasting trips to Nappa at 2am?
The idea that VMT will be spread out over TIME rather than LANES of traffic is directly addressed in the article and study. It’s called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand. It’s been shown time and time again that traffic will increase to fill the space available, and this study shows that happens with time too.
“Referencing this study as a counter to the BS claims people in self-driving tech make is useful, but I wouldn’t rely on it as data for policy or infrastructure”
The conclusion of this study’s authors is the opposite. They say that even if the results aren’t exactly correct, policy and infrastructure decisions need to be made NOW, before people get used to the freedom of self driving cars, not after when it’s much more difficult to take that lifestyle away.
I hate to also “miss your point entirely” but cities aren’t people. Your analogy makes me smile but it’s also not representative of reality. If a person stops eating entirely, you end up with a corpse. If a city stops with cars entirely* you end up better city in almost every possible way.
There’s a world where self driving cars are a part of the solution and not an increase of the problem but this is earth, not that world.
Self driving cars are like the slimfast of your analogy. If the city went on a diet of slimfast and only consumed it as recommended on the bottle, that’d be a good first step towards the city being able to tighten it’s belt a bit. However instead of doing that, our cities will just start drinking slimfast in addition to their current diet and just start packing on the pounds.
*with obvious exceptions for the disabled and last mile shipping (I personally prefer it when my stores have food in them to buy)
Okay, well done to ignore the fact that analogies are not one-to-one matches to the actual thing, because then they wouldn’t be analogies, and I’d be talking about a city instead of a body.
But let’s put that aside for now, and work with your extension of the analogy.
People crave personal freedom of movement with privacy and comfort. In my analogy, this is the car. You can’t replace the car with bicycles because then you don’t have the same range (of freedom) and certainly don’t have the same comfort. You can’t replace cars with public transport, because you don’t have the same privacy (public is right there in the name) and you also don’t have the same freedom of movement.
In my analogy, people crave sweet things and fatty things and salty things and tasty things.
Slimfast isn’t something people crave. You can’t say “hey, you know you like tasty food and fatty food and sweet food and salty food? This slimfast is all that!” It just isn’t!
Slimfast is something you eat for two meals a day, and then get your fill of tasty/salty/fatty/sugary for one meal per day.
"The SlimFast Diet is a partial meal replacement plan that involves eating two meal replacements per day, in addition to three snacks.
You make one meal on your own, although there are guidelines for what foods to include and how many calories it should contain."
So slimfast isn’t a “replace all food” diet, and it has instructions and recommendations.
Self driving cars do not have instructions or recommendations. There are no laws or regulations on their possible uses just yet.
That article is asking “what are the recommendations for self driving cars?” or “what if there are no recommendations?”
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I guess I disagree with your fundamental premise. People don’t crave freedom of movement with privacy and comfort. At least they don’t crave them in equal parts.
People crave freedom of movement the way you say they do but privacy and comfort are nice to haves.
To keep in in the analogy, freedom of movement is like… all food. Privacy and comfort is the sweet/fatty/salty stuff. Take away one and people are sad, take the other and people either riot or die.
As my evidence I’ll point to the heavily policed border to Mexico’s north, where freedom of movement is restricted. Despite increasingly draconian enforcement people do what they have to do to have their freedom of movement, comfort and privacy be damned.
So given that we see freedom of movement > all else. We should focus on providing that in the best way possible. Now we can argue all day about how to define “best”. You may think it’s with privacy and comfort and I may think it’s in the least environmentally destructive way possible but at the end of the day, the only thing we should be perusing is freedom of movement.
Food first, salt and fat second.
You are taking “freedom of movement” in the wrong way. I’m not talking about authoritarian governments or border crossing policies.
My analogy was based on the fact that the cheapest foods now available are the ones with the most calories. It used to be the cheapest foods had the least calories.
It used to be that being fat was a sign of wealth. Now being thin and healthy-looking is a sign of wealth. It used to be being thin was a sign of lack-of-wealth. Now the levels of obesity in lower income homes is higher.
Right… now let’s apply that to poor cities. Poor cities don’t have lots of public transit systems and good cycling infrastructure, do they? No, they rely on “cheap” cars. Of course cars aren’t cheap in terms of actual costs, but they are the “poverty” option.
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So… Yes, other than the fact I don’t think I’m taking freedom of movement the wrong way. I agree with everything you just said. Cars are the ‘cheap’ or ‘poverty’ option. Yes.
So where do self drivers fit into this?
I imagine self driving cars will be seen as the new bourgeois/thin option and so what happens to poor cities?
Even more interestingly what happens to rich cities? Will Utrecht tear down their bikelanes in due time to make room for all the self driving car infrastructure they’ll need when cars become the new thing for rich folk?
I’m actually asking. This isn’t meant as hostility, I’ve genuinely never looked at this this way.
Utrecht will be fine. Everyone has accepted that cars take up too much space in city centers. That’s the domain of bikes.
The Netherlands has loads of cars. Everyone has cars. They are perfect for getting between places that aren’t in city centers. The road layouts in all towns and cities make it almost impossible to drive from one part of the town to another quicker and easier than biking. There just aren’t road connections. You have to drive out to a ring road, drive all the way round, then drive in again. There are no huge freeways in the hearts of these towns or cities.
Self driving cars in the Netherlands will be fine, as they won’t be any better or easier than current cars are for commuting. Commuting means cycling one of your bikes to a train station, taking the train, then taking your other bike at the other end.
Things like the new speed limit will keep people commuting that way between towns. Cars will still be used for non-work inter city driving.
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Just about every time I take photos on the streets of NYC, there are cars in the way. Just the other day I was photographing some murals on the street. If I’m on the sidewalk I’m so close I have to use a very wide angle lens. If I go any further, there are parked cars, so I can’t stand there. I go further, and now the cars are between me and the mural.
I’m pretty sure the technique this photographer used was to first do some panorama stitching, perhaps even HDR panoramas. Then they took several exposures of each area such that even though there was a car in one shot, the car wasn’t there in another shot. Then the could just use layers and compositing and time consuming labor to only show the areas of each image where there were no cars or people. I’ve done this before, but only to erase like, a single person, not on such a large scale.
The point is, the negative impact of cars goes far beyond the things we normally think about like the environment, traffic, noise, an crashes. It even extends into the art world.
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I face the issue of cars getting in the way almost continually with my internation juggler videos. It’s crazy how many good views and interesting buildings are encrudded by cars in the shot. I have to work around it all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qitWBzqPPeg
I don’t want to comment too much on the photos in that blog post though, as I feel it’s all very shoddy work in terms of photo manipulation. I dislike it when someone works on a concept first and badly, because it discourages someone else from doing the same concept but actually competently.
Yeah, I’m not commenting on the quality of their work, just the concept. Forgetting their technique, I personally would have left in the people and only removed the cars. I wouldn’t remove any other non-car vehicles either. They even went so far as to remove things like street food carts and such. I would want to show life without cars, not the city without life.
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Yup. The concept is “show the beauty of New York architecture without people or cars” but they left in all kinds of crap. Like crappy signs and badly done building modifications. There’s nothing beautiful about what’s left… just dead.
And then on the flatiron picture he left in… a trash truck? What?
Street signs are also a plague. And most of those signs would also be removed if there were no cars!
I can understand why all those things were left in, though. You can’t remove them with the compositing trick because the objects never move. Unless you got lucky and maintenance workers took a lamppost down or something, it’s going to be in every single shot you take. To erase it you would have to draw, paint, content-aware fill, or use another technique. That area of the photograph would be manufactured.
I can understand the flatiron shot even more. They must have taken those shots from a nearby building. That probably means they weren’t able to get as many exposures as on the street where they have more time. They couldn’t erase that dumpster or whatever it is because it never moved during the time they were taking photos. If it doesn’t move, they can’t erase it.
You can also get this effect automated-ish by taking many photos and stacking them up with a median filter, or a neutral density filter on the camera and long exposure time.
This strikes me as a pretty poor outlook, and I don’t think the logic follows either. Why discourage people from making stuff? And why would a person be discouraged by someone else’s first (maybe bad) attempt at something? They just as easily might say “screw that, I’ll do it better!”
And isn’t this… pretty much the way all creative stuff goes anyway? Someone has an idea, produces something. Other people see it, it gets improved on, remixed, etc etc. Seems crazy to demand people always come out of the gate with something super polished.
If one thing goes viral, no matter if it is good or bad, it’s less likely the same concept will go viral again. Maybe when enough time has passed, but the novelty factor of a new idea needs to be re-established.
Remember the survey about crowd-sourcing answers to the trolley problem for self-driving car research? It was a garbage survey. But people out in thousands and thousands of answers. If someone actually did a good job with that survey, it’s now just more difficult to get the same traction. People will say “didn’t I already do that?”
Anyway, I’m not talking theoretically. This stuff happens all the time. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad quality, people still feel discouraged from putting out similar work on a too-close topic.
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Why give a shit about “going viral”? Are we even sure it makes another less likely?
I wonder on balance if more people get inspired or discouraged by this kind of thing anyway.
Why are you even arguing with me about this? This is what people feel, including me, this feeling has a real impact on their output, and this is something that annoys me. End of story.
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Alright. You do you. I think it’s a pretty grinchy attitude, because people should be encouraged to make stuff, even if it’s not awesome.
Of course. Make as much as you want. Put out all you want.
It’s totally fine for me to have standards higher than the people putting out the work. And even more so to have higher standards than the people choosing artists for a gallery.
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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-why-is-it-okay-that-cars-kill/
Plus, reducing emissions is another life-and-death issue. In related silliness, BBC ran a story last month singling out a type of asthma inhaler for its heavy carbon footprint, as though respiratory problems are a cause, not an effect, of the carbon problem. Somehow, the ripple effects of a societal addiction to motor vehicles have become the fault of those suffering preventable illnesses, or even death.
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