What about shared self driving cars + dedicated express bus lanes? The idea being we tax cars for usage of the road and the buses become effectively free (and faster) while self driving shared ubers are $2/ride.
Making roads better and taxing them right (so we can do dynamic pricing) seems so much better than huge chunky capital costs of digging tunnels and installing subway infrastructure.
We already have roads, people get to go door to door, and deploying a usage based tax model on roads is just software. Seems so much better than decade long projects.
There's a lot of added value for the community in mass transport. It costs less per fare than car systems you can think about (even ridesharing & co), consume/pollute less, but more importantl it allows lower-class and middle-class citizen to move around the city. All the cleaning personel, food, assistance personel can afford coming to the city to provide for high-value-added workers. All high-value-added can afford to live farther away along the lines, in better appartments than the constricted downtown space. And the new density created by gathering more people in the same place during the day allow the collaboration of more people.
There seems to be unlimited appetite for high-rise apartments at luxury to extreme luxury prices. Particularly from people who will never live in them.
Is there any evidence that high rise apartments (say more than 10 stories) affordable at middle incomes can exist or ever have existed?
I wonder about this a lot in major cities -- whether the seemingly massive number of apartments in luxury high-rises are actually occupied full-time by those with high incomes, or are they actually more affordable than I suspect? Or are most of them empty, and just used to park monetary value?
>In a three-block stretch of Midtown, from East 56th Street to East 59th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, 57 percent, or 285 of 496 apartments, including co-ops and condos, are vacant at least 10 months a year. From East 59th Street to East 63rd Street, 628 of 1,261 homes, or almost 50 percent, are vacant the majority of the time, according to data from the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey. [0]
I'm going with "used to park value."
It's been mentioned elsewhere that real estate is the last place you can easily park a literal suitcase full of cash without being subject to any KYC rules.
Doesn't really matter which end of spectrum you build housing at---any housing built is good: if you don't build luxury housing, the rich will just bid up less glamorous units.
To avoid empty apartments, a land value tax works fairly well.
I'm imagining buses that go down major arteries like Geary. They'd come often and there would be a lot of them and they'd have dedicated lanes. Seems so much more flexible than fixed infrastructure.
Public transit doesn't need to be flexible though. Individuals might change their routines every day but when you average the traffic for the whole city the throughtput of the major arteries is very predictable. The biggest priority in these situations is making the transport be cheap and efficient and make it scale to demand.
And just because a mode of transportation is on wheels doesn't mean it flexible. If you look at a Bus Repid Transit system[1] you would notice that the buses are specialized for driving in separate lanes that go in a straight line and the bus stops are custom built (and are less frequent than a regular bus).
Making roads better and taxing them right (so we can do dynamic pricing) seems so much better than huge chunky capital costs of digging tunnels and installing subway infrastructure.
We already have roads, people get to go door to door, and deploying a usage based tax model on roads is just software. Seems so much better than decade long projects.