Automated cars will make this kind of commute a lot more practical and enjoyable. A warm, comfortable and clean Uber will pick you up and drive you directly to your destination while you start your work day.
”The train leaves at 4:43 a.m. and Cherry, 60 years old and a couple of years away from retirement, rides it all the way to the final stop, more than two hours away. That’s Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Scheduled arrival time: 7:05.”
If we change the policies that ruin the cities and design them around the human and not the car, we can make transit work more.
Trains manage to do that in most countries, given a few minutes walk to and from a station.
I don't commute now but I used to commute two hours in the UK, and I walked 3 minutes to a train station, and then took a couple of trains all the way, and then a 3 minute walk at the other end to my office. And I lived in a small village not a major area.
Why can't they do it in the US?
Take just the Northern California region, then, around the same size as the UK. Now there's no argument about size difference. The population is around a third of the UK, so while that's less and so lower density, it isn't a crazy difference and the major areas of population themselves where you need the stations are high density.
I can go from any city in the UK, to any other city in the UK, via a couple of trains pretty effortlessly. Why couldn't that be replicated in an area of the same size and more of less the same population, in California?
Why can't it be replicated just in the Bay Area even! Why aren't there lots of trains there?!
1.) The Bay Area is made up of 100 cities and towns and several counties. There is not a single “Bay Area government.” Every single transit project has to be approved by several levels of government and funded by the state and federal government. Moreover, that funding and consent has to last for decades to keep the project on track. It rarely does. Every train line in the Bay Area was the result of a fight.
2.) Trains require density to be feasible. Density increases the supply of housing, driving down the value of existing single family homes. Owners of single family homes store a significant amount of their net worth in the equity of those homes. Municipalities rely on the property taxes from those high value homes.
3.) The Bay Area is not zoned for density. Trains will not catch on here because 60 odd years ago the people who designed the highway system did not consider the possibility that many people would need to live close together to make the place affordable. No one was thinking of affordable housing then.
But the density of even the wider Bay Area region (the CSA) is higher than the entire UK! How come that's dense enough for lots of trains in the UK but not dense enough for trains around the Bay Area?
Well yea, density is what enables a transit-centric, and American having an intense phobia of density is part of what makes them so car-centric.
And then comes these patronising messages "This [Chrismas|Easter|Weekend|Holiday] I am working for you." I saw those messages for 5 years and still saw services going downhill.
One funny anecdote probably illustrates their lethargy. Station I used to board from was upgraded and platform extended to allow boarding from 10 carriages. This happened long before I started living their. But announcement always said only 9 carriages will open. I lived their for two years and same message was played everyday.
[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/a-year-of-excuses-to-rail-ag... [2] https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/check-before-y...
Blaming transit workers for system performance is also pretty controversial; most would probably attribute that to incompetent management or stingy taxpayers?
It's not legal to camp in your car in a parking place but with a self-driving car, people can just sleep in the back while the vehicle drives aimlessly around.
If this process makes traffic go very slowly, so much the better - less gas spent and a gentler ride.
I was being a bit facetious above and aiming to show the multiple contradictions that seem to be in play in the idea that self-driving cars could solve the interlocked high-rent/absurd-commute problems.
I mean, sure, maybe the final absurdity is going to be a mass of people telecomuting from the back of their self-driving RVs as these inch along in some random location but maybe the complex will fall to pieces before this.
B. Such a claim would require all current cars off the road. How well do you think anyone could manage that? In any car-using nation, including Asia, there's a huge investment in current cars and ending that would be harder than simply introducing self-driving carts.
C. Even 2-3x the capacity can be used up quickly if people are willing to waste it and self-driving cars have much less incentive for not sitting in rush hour traffic than regular cars - which already spend a lot of time in rush hour traffic.
B. See autocratic country claim. China has done this before with certain cars in certain cities (e.g. breadbox vans). Japan deprecates all cars after around 5 years to make them basically unusable. Singapore has that $60k car plate thing going on that I think only lasts five years.
C. People told me LA traffic was bad. When I moved there from Beijing, I thought I was in paradise. Same with Seattle, the USA does not have traffic problems, at least relative to China; the problems are just at different scales. Also, taxi ridership is much much larger in these countries (it isn’t unusual that every other car on the road is a taxi). Enforcing self driving only on the ring roads would already be a huge win; capacity is easily controlled already by plate lotteries.
That would require some central control for whatever resources the transport system use (road, car position, etc).
Just about all the profit centers for cars and transport today hinge on entities that just control some parts of transport - so prying loose their hold would be quite a challenge. We shall see.
Self-driving car can't beat physics. In case of an accident everything inside will fly continuing direction of movement. Including the passenger. There will be no two couches facing a table. Because in case of an accident the face of a passenger sitting facing the back of the car will be hit with: his book, his hot coffee and opposite sitting passenger's laptop.
And then another data miner will discover the bulk of the traffic time is spent on traffic, so they will buy land to create a right-of-way lane to optimise the commute times.
Finally, the Ouroboros eats his own tail by creating a private subway system.
Commuter train cars generally weigh about a ton per 3 passenger seats, but packed-full cars are considered uncomfortable. So a pod weighing 600 kg would be equal in weight per passenger to a train car where everyone sits alone on a double-seat place. Which is a pretty reasonable comfort standard. An EV pod could also be charged in the train during the journey, so you would have its full range available at both ends of the train journey.
With the disclaimer that this was just a fantasy and probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.