Overall I liked this article. It describes an interesting though simple core principle. I have three criticisms:
1. The article is scientific enough that using "grew exponentially" in the colloquial sense of just "grew a lot" is grating.
2. The article gives the impression that Boston is an American city on a grid where elevated trains preceded subways and dominated the transportation system. In reality the core of the city was not at all a grid, subways came first, and subways have been more prevalent than elevated trains.
3. "the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity" This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking, including space that is already part of roadways.
> This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking
How so? If you mean because of more car sharing, I don't think that's going to happen. Most people would still want their own car. If you mean because of being able to let the car park itself outside the city, or even drive home: That would drive up cost for the owner and reduce convenience (having to "order" it 30 minutes ahead of time). In addition, it would worsen congestion on streets due to cars moving more.
I don't think that's a given. The car is typically someone's second largest or largest expense, yet has only a 5% utilization rate. It will become much cheaper to pay by the ride rather than own both because the owner can get a significantly larger utilization rate and because monopsony, or at least fleet buying will reduce purchase and maintenance costs (part uniformity, wear leveling etc).
There will be transitional effects of course, as people currently 30-60 yo will have the hardest time "letting go" but the economic value released will be significant.
I can imagine NYC with 1/10th the private cars and 4x the shared/rental/taxi cars, and traffic flowing much better than today owing to the additional bandwidth freed up by the 70-80% reduction in street-side parking space need.
As an NYC resident, I would much prefer to just have 1/10th the private cars, twice the number of trains (or whatever is necessary), and a massive reduction in the number of cars sitting around unused, with the resulting extra space being converted to green space, pedestrian-only areas, and bike lanes. Self-driving cars and the infrastructure they necessitate would make NYC more hostile to people, not less.
Train infrastructure is simply not economical by comparison to buses. You could have a bus system as good as, say, Buenos Aires, if you were willing to let it be run by the private sector. Cars are not entirely replaceable by trains and buses. But if you replace N privately-owned, mostly unused cars with N/10 privately-owned _shared_/rental/taxi cars whose utilization is much more than 10x that of the average privately-owned non-shared/rental/taxi car in the city, then you win big even if you also improve buses and even trains.
I would be happy with more buses or trams or any other kind of mass transit option. As long as the space taken up by private cars is drastically reduced and the resulting space repurposed for actual public use. Public space is currently completely wasted by being disproportionately allocated for cars, many of them completely unused and taking up space for free.
Buses and trains may not completely serve all the needs which cars can, but almost all of the remaining transit needs can be easily taken care of by bicycles, which should also be a much higher priority in the city. Either way, it really is a no-brainer that we must de-prioritise cars.
As a non-NYC resident, I would love to see the same thing in my town.
I don't want to piss away $40,000 + another $80,000 on maintenance and insurance and parking fees and bridge tolls on a self-driving car that will stand idle in my garage, or my employer's parking space for 23 hours of the day. I want better rail. I want more buses. I want to be able to ride a bike, without putting my life in the hands of lunatics who in any sane world, should not have been licensed to drive.
Surely, we could deliver all that for the money we are currently wasting on automobiles?
I doubt you could deliver better rail for that money. Rail is fantastically expensive, and if you get the routes wrong, that's a forever mistake. Buses are another story, but even NYC, which has the density to support a fantastic bus system... has a crap bus system.
Owning a car in a metro area is ~$8,000/year. There's 1.3 cars/household, so we're looking at ~$10,000/year/household.
My metro area's per-household budget is ~$17,000/year. ~$4,000/year on that is spent on transportation, including public transit, roadway, and highway maintenance and construction.
Tripling the transportation budget, at the expense of personal automobiles would absolutely deliver many of those things.
NYC has a crap bus system, because they have to share roadways with automobiles, which are the cause of NYC gridlock. If buses had the right of way, they would work much better. And it doesn't take being Nostradamus to figure out at least a couple of good, new train routes - in any metro area.
I'm sure you could find me some examples of train routes that were built, and then turned out to be under-utilized... But I feel that they would be the exceptions that prove the rule. Every major metro area is seeing population growth, so it's not like people will suddenly move away from the train lines. Not to mention that every line of rail tracks has the throughput of a super-highway[1], at much smaller footprint and cost (If you take into account the full cost of vehicle ownership.)
[1] In Vancouver, any one of the three SkyTrain lines has a throughput of ~14 lanes of highway, during peak hour...
I wouldn't exactly say that rail is fantastically expensive. Acquiring dedicated right-of-way for any form of transportation (rail, bus, car) through a developed area is fantastically expensive. But metal rails and overhead wires cost about the same as 12 feet of asphalt. And in terms of capacity, one track of rail moves +10k people per hour, while a lane of highway with personal cars moves about 2k to 3k [1]. Bus Rapid Transit is a nice middle ground because it has a little less capacity than trains but can be installed in existing right-of-way - like a road with 2 lanes in each direction or a lane of parking. So to me, better bus networks are about optimizing existing infrastructure. However cities still need to engage in new infrastructure projects as they grow, and it's often hard to beat the cost per capacity of rail in a new project: A line in each direction get's you the capacity of a multi-lane highway in a fraction of the real estate.
And in terms routing railways - it's really not that big of a deal. If you create a fast and economical route between two places, market forces tend to move people along that route eventually. Now you might have decades of an unprofitable line before you build up enough density to really take advantage of all that capacity, but it will happen... assuming it maintains support from politicians.
Rail is not a short-term solution, but it's a great investment in the long-term health of many cities.
Self-driving cars will not go outside of the city to park if it is more time and fuel-efficient to just circle within the city to avoid paying for parking.
Self-driving cars will get smart and avoid circling; they will park illegally as they please, so to speak, and then move when someone shows up to ticket or tow them away.
> This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking, including space that is already part of roadways.
Except that if a car isn’t in a car park then it’s on a street moving (circling, going to pick up a passenger, etc) and contributing to congestion (maybe more so for that reason as some other articles have speculated). So basic geometry of road capacity still applies.
If a car that would otherwise be parked for 8 hours in the city can instead drive 30 minutes back to the suburbs, park for 7 hours, then drive back in, we can trade 1 car-hour of freeway and 7 car-hours of suburban parking to regain 8 car-hours of city parking. And maybe we think that suburban parking is 'free' because it would have otherwise been sitting empty.
Obviously within the constraints of that model it's still debatable whether that's a good deal, between the emissions and the doubling of near-rush-hour freeway traffic.
And beyond that simple model, how cars performing pick-ups will impact congestion and whether people are willing to summon their cars 30 minutes in advance is also debatable.
If every car did two daily round trip commutes into the city center instead of one, that would double congestion. I just don't see this being workable at all.
I don't like the idea, but I've noticed that in my city, if you're heading into the city centre you're absolutely out of luck as far as traffic is concerned, but if you're heading the other way, it's extremely light. So you wouldn't so much be "doubling" congestion as just applying it to both in and out flow equally. I don't know if that would actually cause more difficulties or not.
Not everybody is going to the exact same spot downtown, and there's also some actual reverse commuting, so there will be some overlap between the to-work and from-work trips, especially where there's the most congestion (I e. Downtown).
Except that on the departure trip after dropping off and the arrival trip before picking up does not have to take congested routes and instead take paths that could reduce congestion. It's not like the car has somewhere to be during non-peak hours.
I think "growing exponentially" is technically correct. Anything that grows at a rate proportional to its size is growing exponentially.
The transportation innovations allowed cities to keep doing that, i.e. growing at X% per year instead of hitting some limit where population growth would force out-migration.
OK yes there's a reasonable use of the term early in the article that I overlooked. It was the "streetcars and bicycles" section where it grated on me.
This may be one of the rare usages of 'exponential' in the popular press that I can allow. The exponential aspect of urban growth may be apt -- the premise that the number of people who can find a reason to relocate to a city will vary in direct proportion to the number of people who are already there might hold with acceptable accuracy over some range, and departures may be negligible during some periods of rapid growth.
> The best option is to densify our cities. This is hard, too
Leveling off or lowering the human population through lower birth rates works better. I'm not saying it's simple or even possible since so many people jump to conclusions about eugenics etc, but reducing overpopulation makes a lot of problems easier. If we don't figure out how on our own, nature will do it for us so we might as well figure out how in a peaceful, fair way.
Overpopulation is a myth, and a short-sighted one at that. The fact is we don't use the space we're given (Planet Earth) in an effective way for the technology of our time. Some people are forced to live in cities in a box that's too small, while others are forced to live on farms in a box that's too big. We don't need less births, we need a better and more efficient way of handling the births that we have, and the ability to handle more.
You can see an example of population shrinking in Japan, and yet urban centers are getting denser, so I don't think reduction in population is a solution.
But this doesn't really solve the city/urban problem as the vast majority of economic growth occurs in cities and the continual migration of rural to urban happens even when total population is shrinking.
The primary cause of population growth today is not birth rate, but rather death rate - people benefiting from modern society are living 10-20 years longer (or more) than their ancestors did just a generation or three earlier. The birth rate is at or near (or below) replacement in the vast majority of countries, and rapidly heading that direction in most of the rest.
If you really want population control, you don't need eugenics - you need Logan's Run.
Death rate stabilizes once good infant care and lifetime medicine are introduced. Folks live around 74 years, worldwide. So its contributing a constant factor by now, most places.
It takes multiple generations for this to cause an impact. What matters isn't the people living longer who are born today - it's the ones living longer who were born in the 1950s-1970s. And it's taken additional decades for most of the poorer countries to catch up to the "first world", in terms of birth rates and lifespans.
Consider, say, Iran. In 1980, its birthrate was around 6. Now, it's 1.4, lower than Europe, and lifespans shot up at the same time - but only for those born during the health revolution there. So those people are still less than 40 years old. Iran is just now starting to feel the impact of increased lifespans, and it'll take another 50 years for that to truly stabilize.
It’s not actually lifespan that matters but the percentage of people surviving to adulthood and having children. That’s a much much much higher number now.
You also wind up with fewer able-bodied working-age adults, which brings with it its own problems. Specifically, with retiree standards of living; these are proportional to the retiree-to-worker ratio, average worker income, and the combined tax and savings rate on workers. Having fewer children means that when those children would be adults, people need to retire poorer and/or later.
While that may be true, I think it doesn't change the traffic factor much: "home office" users still need to sell their wares (their clientele must be able their house) or they need access to a local market. Similarly, people need market access to buy groceries and such.
The typical "commuters" in those days were probably farmers, who traveled from outside to the city markets. But that wasn't a daily commute, probably once or twice a week.
> the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity
I'm not so sure about this. I've generally been someone with a lower tolerance for a long commute than the average person. Usually I've lived within a 20 minutes walk from my job. My wife and I have had flatmates for 4 out of our 5 years or marriage. I decided 2½ months ago that it was worth moving farther out in order for my wife and I to get more privacy. A big reason for this was that a friend who lived in the area told me that he usually got a seat on the line into central London. Indeed, having figured out an ethical way to always get a seat, my commute is significantly improved by my newfound ability to get into a writing habit.
If driverless cars or driverless double-decker busses become widely available and many people have the ability to get one-shot commutes, then I suspect that more people will ride them.
This agrees with my experience. I grew up in the centre of Madrid and I would always estimate around 30 minutes to get to any other part of the city by public transport.
For a while, I have occasionally considered the idea of turning the shopping mall inside-out. Rather than one building in the center, with a vast expanse of parking lot all around the perimeter, put the parking structure (and auto-service businesses) in the center, and place the shopping, offices, and restaurants around the edges. Then use elevators and horizontal transport systems to move people around quickly without needing their cars. Access from the outside would be by pickup/dropoff cars, public transport, and pedestrians, and building facades would be immediately adjacent to the street.
I don't think you can go straight from an everyone-in-a-car culture to a walkable+public transit culture in one step. So first you get people to put their cars in places that are less in the way, by driving past their destination and parking on the other side of it from the main transit network connections. This allows things to be closer together for pedestrians and the vehicles that do not park.
Imagine the degenerate case, where a worker in an office park wants to visit a store in the mall next door. When the office is surrounded by parking, and the mall is surrounded by parking, a direct walk requires traversal of two large parking lots, and the worker has an incentive to drive, from a parking space near their entrance to the office building, to a parking space near the mall entrance nearest their store. Turning the shops and offices inside-out, in the best case, puts the office and the shop directly across the street from one another, and the worker can cross on a pedestrian overpass faster than they can reach their car. In the worst case, the worker rides two ring-avators and two elevators, once to get to an office-mall adjacency point, down to street level, walk across, back up, and then ringwise again to get to the shop. To drive, the worker would have to walk into parking to reach their car, drive out to the exit, drive in to the mall parking, and walk out again to the shop. That's not entirely eliminated, and would likely occur when the offic and mall are further separated, but it does make walking directly slightly more attractive.
I liked the article, but I did wonder if the author understood what self-driving vehicles would allow for, providing that they had maybe 7-8 nines in reliability and safety (if that is even possible).
People have already mentioned the idea of "sending the car back home to park" and "being able to do something else in the car while commuting". But there are other things the cars could do:
1. Trains of cars - convoys - drafting each other, reducing energy use, while also increasing road density (bumper-to-bumper traffic - but at highway speeds).
2. No more "traffic waves" on the freeway, nor "rubber necking" at accidents, both of which likely contribute to the congestion issue.
3. No-stop intersections - again at high-speeds - because cars could coordinate/negotiate their speeds and lanes to allow for "collision-free" operation (unfortunately, there will still probably be collisions - and they wouldn't be pretty).
All of these options - and possibly others I haven't thought of - rely on things that self-driving vehicles don't yet have - mainly car-to-car communication - so all cars know where other cars are (even if they aren't within sight-lines of the sensors) and how fast they are moving. Basically a form of swarm robotics, with constraints on motion vectors.
Of course, #3 (and maybe the other two) might not come about unless the chance of an accident drops to infinitesimally small values - perhaps it may not even be possible. Better safety systems for the occupants would likely need to be developed as well (for that "impossible" chance it would be needed). Such cars might also need to be "trained" on "how to crash to protect occupants" and/or how to coordinate a collision with another vehicle(s) in real-time as the collision unfolds, to minimize occupant danger - this again, would require a standardized mesh network and coding to be able to take advantage of all the sensor data that would flood in (and out - as sensors and actuators become disabled by the accident unfolding - maybe the other cars involved - or not involved - could share their information "from the outside" to allow the disabled car to take better actions or whatnot). It's actually a fascinating problem when I think about it - extremely complex, lots of parameters and such; I wonder if anyone is working on it? If not - they should...
> We must make do mostly with building up and densifying the urban areas we already have. As transportation goes, so go our cities.
If we make transportation better, our cities can be less dense. So can't we make transportation better?
What causes congestion? Car traffic. Why does car traffic cause congestion? It's an inefficient use of roads. What are some alternatives?
1) Build more roads. Sure, except it's expensive, time consuming, and you quickly run out of land, and would have to build them one on top of another.
2) Fit more people into existing roads. How? Buses, trolleys, trains, subways, vans. Build out the mass transit to the suburban enclaves.
But all this supposes an urban center is also the only answer. What do people need to congregate in one place for? Usually to work in one place. But why work in one place?
Due to division of labor, most of us don't do things with multiple completely different people on multiple completely different subjects; we're just not that collaborative. But you may need to transport your work to another group in a company. At a bank, all this is paper; in a car manufacturing plant, this is car parts. The former is done digitally now, and the latter could be done, again, by increased transportation efficiency.
All the other things we use are already decentralized outside the city; schools, churches, supermarkets, health care, water, power, recreation. It's really just business, and the ability to work decentralized, that constricts where and how we live. Transportation will make it easier to decentralize. And we can start by giving up our cars.
The other aspect of work decentralization I've already seen at a rental car facility. A computerized kiosk displayed a remote worker on screen, who processed my driver's license, credit card and rental information and directed me to my rental car. It was surprisingly trouble-free and pleasant, and only one of us needed to be there.
There are many classes of jobs that you must be physically present for. You must be physically there to make food, to build, to repair, to be security, to treat patients, to drive a bus, to build a boat. Things walk off of shelves if you don't have employees manning checkout stations. These all legitimately require your physical presence.
A lot of those things are already automated. Machines that create pizzas, burgers, cocktails, robots that weld, security robots, remote medical care, driverless transportation.
The rental car place had people there... two to move cars and clean them, and one to sit in an exit booth to check IDs against contracts and lower the tire-ripping thing. But they didn't need three people idling behind desks waiting to process people's policies.
1. The article is scientific enough that using "grew exponentially" in the colloquial sense of just "grew a lot" is grating.
2. The article gives the impression that Boston is an American city on a grid where elevated trains preceded subways and dominated the transportation system. In reality the core of the city was not at all a grid, subways came first, and subways have been more prevalent than elevated trains.
3. "the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity" This ignores the potential drastic reduction of space allocated for parking, including space that is already part of roadways.