You have to add "redesigned cities" to that list. Electric vehicles are almost as much a patch for ICE cities as they are a replacement for internal combustion.
Some cities in mainland Europe are like this already. They make cars unnecessary. Even bikes, as you can walk everywhere.
I'm talking about midsized cities (100-300k inhabitants) that are really compact thanks to 4-8 levels in every apartment block and ubiquitous use of lifts.
Lifts are the disruptive technology. They make energetically efficient cities possible and cheap.
I also find these cities much more nice to live in. Nice parks, avenues and shopping streets. I guess they are the heirs of the Hellenic tradition of valuing meeting squares a lot.
In contrast, as much as I like other aspects of Anglo-Saxon societies, their terraced or detached house model is energetically unsustainable, and yields both liveless suburbs and downtowns.
>Lifts are the disruptive technology. They make energetically efficient cities possible and cheap.
Are lifts really as efficient as escalators? An escalator is constantly moving (unless it's malfunctioning), so there is no wait to continue moving. An elevator on the other hand is not. Maybe it depends on the number of floors? I can see an elevator being faster going from ground to floor 40 rather than zig zagging floors from ground to 40. Does anybody use "express" escalators that skip floors allowing for faster transit to higher floors?
> An escalator is constantly moving (unless it's malfunctioning), so there is no wait to continue moving.
That wastes energy but makes it time efficient for users (in terms of latency). OTOH, escalators are slow compared to most lifts/elevators, which means total trip time efficiency isn't good unless you are only going a floor or two or are competing with an elevator that stops a lot, where the latency gain may still beat the loss of vertical speed. Which is why escalators tend to get used where you've got lots of traffic volume but they aren't going up/down lots of floors.
I used to work in an office building with escalators that are powered off at night -- there was some sort of motion sensor about 10 feet before the escalator that would power it on when someone approached, you'd have to be running to reach the escalator before it reached normal speed.
So on-demand escalators are possible, just rare.
In the daytime either they kept them on all the time, or maybe there was enough constant demand to keep them running as I never saw one powered off during the day.
They're more efficient because of reduced frictional losses, the contact point of an elevator is a pulley at the top of shaft and a couple guide rails. The guide rails are mostly there to provide lateral support. As for latency you can design around it, modern tall buildings will usually have multiple elevator banks that service different floors. A lot of engineering can go into designing the dispatching for elevators.
Our hospital used to have lifts that didn't stop at floors. The had no doors, you just jump on them and get off. They were intended for staff only, to quickly get between floors so slightly out of view of the public. They were replaced a few years ago though. Mabe too many accidents?
Much is made of the "self-driving" part of autonomous vehicles, but I think "self-parking" could end up being just as significant. Imagine if there was no longer any reason to mandate parking capacity for planning and zoning purposes; you drive to your destination, and your car goes and parks itself (paying/negotiating automatically if needed), and returns when summoned via phone.
This sounds like high amounts of traffic: a bunch of people being dropped off and being picked up at arbitrary locations with the cars then having to go to and come back from various other bottlenecked hotspots.
You open up a lot of free space if you can take away street parking, which could also significantly alleviate traffic, for example with dedicated lanes for small-personal battery powered bikes, scooters, etc.
It’s also not necessary for vehicles to travel several miles to find parking. Typical urban parking is designed so the average person is walking maybe a couple hundred feet maximum? That’s a lot of localized parking. If the car was traveling just a few thousand feet on average to find a lot, that’s not a lot of extra parking-miles traveled, but still a paradigm shift in parking process.
Also, you eliminate the issue of people circling the block trying to find parking, which is adding slow traffic in dense areas.
Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.
At the most optimized, there are pickup and drop off points at every block where someone gets out, and immediately someone else gets in, and off the vehicle goes to the next stop.
> Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.
Yeah, a managed fleet system could have very different congestion characteristics, but the proposal was specifically that self-parking might be a game changer on its own. At that point it's basically valet parking, and you still have to stash the cars somewhere, and they still have to go back and forth between that somewhere and wherever the passengers got out.
You get rid of the circling but I don't think you get rid of queuing and grid backups.
> Typical urban parking is designed so the average person is walking maybe a couple hundred feet maximum? That’s a lot of localized parking.
Typical urban parking outside of car-centric US cities is "your car takes up as much space as your apartment/hotel room/office cubicle, where the hell do we have space to put it?" For someplace as crammed as Manhattan, the parking isn't "around the block", it's on the other side of the traffic choke points.
> Finally, it’s likely the vehicle is not going to park, but rather off to pick up its next ride.
I don't buy that. Traffic patterns in large cities end up showing a distinct bimodal pattern: there is a large influx of people into the central business district in the morning, and then a large outflux of people in the afternoon. If I'm commuting by self-driving car, and I get in at 8:45-ish, there's going to be no demand for my car since everyone who needs to be in work by 9:00 is on the way.
You can see this in systems that are already optimized to move people en masse to/from cities: commuter rail and bus systems. Large city railroad stations often have rail yards for train storage near their downtown hubs simply to store the trains during the day.
You can also see this with bike and scooter shares. Bikes and scooters clump up at hubs that enter the transit system in the morning and empty out in the evening commute.
It would be a lot of traffic, but circling the block to find a parking spot is already such a huge contributor to traffic that it might still be a net win
I don't think most actual cities would need to be wholesale redesigned; plenty of urban planners have proposed plenty of incremental ways to successfully re-tool cities to favor humans over automobiles. And it has successfully happened in the past - see Amsterdam, for example, or (admittedly to a lesser extent) Montréal.
I would love to see a city in the Western parts of the US accomplish this mainly because of how difficult of a task it would be. The majority of people live >15 miles from downtown areas. Mass transpo can only be generously described as an after thought. I've played SimCity, and if you did not place your subway/train/bus stops efficiently, the citizens did not use them. That plays out in real life as well, except it is much more difficult in real life to just break out the bulldozer to re-engineer the city to make it more mass transpo friendly.
"Simple" things like good bike lanes and traffic calming enable cities to redesign gradually, and of course this is largely already happening (perhaps too slowly) in many cities.
