Dashcam footage shows driverless cars clogging San Francisco
wired.com
wired.com
People would commute up to 4 hours one way, napping in their cars, maybe even longer. Delivery vehicles running all hours of the night, perhaps with no one ever in them at all. People sending the cars to go pick things up or people that they otherwise wouldn't have time in their day to do.
Even if you don't want to live in your car that the pressure will still be exerted on you because you'll be competing with people that do. Cars instructed to circle the block in areas with no parking clogging the streets. You'll need a self driving car yourself to even get a spot since you'll never defeat all the robot vultures.
People will forget how to drive entirely of course so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, people will need more self driving cars to get back the time stolen by other self driving cars.
* Cars are all electric, since the one downside major downside (a long time to charge versus gas) is reduced if they can go charge themselves. So less pollution and noise.
* The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity of roads due to faster speeds and higher density. So a city could possibly only have a couple of car accessible roads.
* Parking can also get denser, as cars can presumably park themselves and coordinate. So you could build a few massive parking garages (for example) to serve thousands of cars, or require them to park outside of the city.
Tire noise dominates at speeds above roughly 30 kph (20 mph), so on reasonably fast roads not really.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Propulsion-noise-the-tyr...
Of course, self driving cars might also mean slower cars, because the drivers are less impatient, and if that is true then noise would go down. On the flip side, self driving cars might end up meaning faster cars because they can coordinate better, increasing noise levels.
As someone who enjoys walking and biking, this strikes me a serious negative, not a positive.
This is a disease of the soul caused by reading Freakanomics which makes you think everything that's counterintuitive must actually be true.
Since they'll autopark or circle anyway, their size no longer becomes a limiting factor for most people.
There won't be any human drivers, so they will all yield to me even if I treat them like slalom poles.
This thought experiment sounds like a performance art dream. Do you remember the artist who created a Google maps traffic jam in London by filling a wagon with mobile phones and walking slowly? Ref: https://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html
Another thing: You can sabotage self-driving cars by putting traffic cones everywhere. Or sit in the middle of a major intersect with ten of your friends and read the newspaper (or pick your nose!). The passengers will be furious, and the self-driving cars won't know what to do.
Well assuming no minimum stopping distance per vehicle momentum. Might want to be sure about that first lol
8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.
Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street.
Learning to drive was never that hard.
What if that time is spent sleeping? Maybe you don't even need a house, so you'll have more money to spend on a nice car.
It's really uncanny, every time, there it is, man must submit to the technology rather than have technology submit to us. Because a self-driving car is advanced technology, therefore men must move with self-driving cars. Even if that literally includes having to live out of your car.
It's ironic how people in software don't notice it, despite the fact that our industry caused several such shifts, and we're all living with (and whining about) the consequences. Myself I didn't notice it for close to two decades since first learning to code. The realization came to me with age - I'm at the point where I have more disposable income than free time, so all the "wonderful" self-service software enabled now grates and irritates me to no end.
same
> self-service software enabled now grates and irritates me to no end.
haha yeah, devil's bargain
There are already people who live in their vans anyway, if they didn't even need to drive them anymore perhaps areas with overzealous zoning laws that circumvent supply & demand would see an influx of small moving apartments instead.
It would be like a land yacht, and economically sound so long as the price of gas is lower than the price of rent.
But you'll still want to wear a seatbelt because although self driving cars don't tend to cause accidents, they very much are the victim of them.
And consider the electricity demand of keeping your big skooli heated and cooled compared to that of a small and tight modern vehicle, you'll likely be forced into charging last thing every night and first thing every morning while on the road, while for us it is about 25% of battery on the worst nights so we can camp anywhere.
this kind of commute daily no less seems to be more of a stubborn personal choice than any economics forcing it .
All models are wrong, but some keep your hopes closer
It is certainly not because of economics of rent or house ownership or any other reasonable criteria so not sure what point such personal outliers prove in this discussion
I had a job with an effective ~4-hour round trip commute, from one major city to another in both my car and a train, but only had to do it once a month.
I only lasted a year before I went fully remote.
It’s a mix of lawyers, construction guys and others like FDNY guys.
I did have a job that was about 90 minutes door-to-door each way (train schedules were a bit better then) but even then "only" had to do it about 50% of the time. Wouldn't have been long-term sustainable.
"Even if you don't want to live in your car that the pressure will still be exerted on you because you'll be competing with people that do."
Which is why so many folks are mocking the idea.
I know this sounds nice for just a moment, but if you consider it longer, it's awful. It won't decrease congestion, it will increase it. Why?
1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby. It's not as if every car will altruistically drive to a far-off area. Since self driving cars have more patience than humans, they'll be on the road much longer searching for their parking. It may be more efficient to keep the car circling the block, which is even worse.
2. Parking availability is a major inhibitor of car trips, especially in cities. This is a good thing. If it becomes easier to "park" (ie leave your car driving on the street or send it away), that will induce more car trips, and more car trips means more congestion, until there's a new equilibrium (maybe a 7-minute parking search is eliminated, but it's replaced with 7+ minutes of traffic).
3. Pick-up and drop-off in cities is already difficult with rideshare services. If all personal vehicles are doing it as well, they'll definitely congest the curb lanes more. This is definitely a more solvable problem than the first two, but still an annoyance.
And for what it's worth, the 4-hour commute may be a bit far fetched, but it's hard to deny that many wouldn't mind an extra 20 minutes of commute time in traffic if they can relax, nap, read, watch a show, etc. People will chose that option more, adding more trips and more congestion, until an equilibrium is reached. Maybe it won't be 4-hour commute times but it will be a major increase and added congestion.
All of these extra miles traveled searching for parking, and adding extra congestion, are disastrous to cities and neighborhoods. Sure, the fossil fuel emissions alone would be awful, but suppose (charitably) that all autonomous vehicles are electric, and assume that their electricity generation is emission free (unrealistic for decades). The weight of EV batteries will dramatically increase road wear and tear, and they'll increase the pollution due to rubber tires, which are already the major source of microplastic pollution. And of course, it's a dramatic waste of energy from the power grid. And all of this is ignoring that dedicating that much road space storing to idling and parked vehicles is a no-good, terrible, awful way to utilize public space in a city or neighborhood, when it could be used by some efficient public transit, parks, and safer infrastructure for personal vehicles when necessary.
You'd then need to price the time a vehicle spends on the road without an occupant. Otherwise you're just pushing people to send their cars around the block for an hour to avoid paying market rate for parking.
But it's hard to enforce the "unoccupied vehicle" rule, so it would be much better to just charge for all road use time in high congestion areas. Maybe... congestion pricing?
Now don't get me wrong, I understand the value of a public good. Grocery stores receive food via trucks on roads, so even non-drivers get the benefit of the road. The parking subsidy, however, is insidious because it's so much less visible. It's not a government investing in a public good: the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone. It lets everybody believe that parking, and driving altogether, is much cheaper than it really is, because the (actually enormous) parking costs are hidden away and subsidized by those who don't use it.
I'm not sure how generally true that is where I live relatively nearby (Boston/Cambridge). There are some businesses that have generally fairly crowded/small parking lots. (And places like hospitals certainly do though you generally have to pay for them.) But in general you have to pay for metered parking or find a garage.
And, for instance, San Francisco has no required off-street parking, and has limits to off-street parking instead: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...
However, plenty of other places in the US are different. The rest of the Bay Area is quite sprawled, as are the areas of the Midwest I've spent time in.
The point I'd make is that mandating minimums of free parking is absurd: businesses and developers could instead decide how much parking they anticipate their business would need. They could come up with many creative solutions somewhere between the extremes of zero parking and plentiful free parking depending on the area. In most towns and cities across America, except for a few dense urban cores, we mandate one extreme and the result is higher prices for everyone (including the non-drivers, who get to help pay for all that unused parking as well).
You're not thinking with an open mind.
If I own a robot car and I know I'm going to be at dinner for 2 hours, I will send the robot car to do a few Uber rides while I'm eating. Or it will go and charge. It doesn't have to just drive around in circles like a human. It can coordinate will all the other robot cars in the area and pick a place where it won't create traffic, or they can distribute traffic among each other. Maybe it can park-share, where if there are 3 cars and 2 parking spots, the 3 cars can coordinate and rotate who goes driving around.
Maybe robot cars will be fungible, so you don't own a specific robot car, but you own a time share, so all the cars are basically like Ubers, and you can call the one closest to you.
The possibilities are endless, don't think that a robot car will just emulate a human.
You're right that I did predicate that little rant on the idea that the majority of AVs would be personally owned and not part of a fleet. I'm sure that car share will come into play to some degree, but I do think it's tough to convince people who are used to their car being a personal, (relatively) private space that they can store nearly for free on public roads, to give that up. It's especially hard to convince the automobile industry that the incredibly profitable 1-2 car per household model should be pushed aside in order to manufacture fewer, shared vehicles. Cruise (i.e. GM) will not cannibalize their personal car sale business: they're using this as a way to get test data to build personal AVs. Maybe car share will increase over time, but we're not about to witness some revolution, especially if it reduces consumption or profit.
I presume you mean mass transit, but that's disproven by induced demand: cars removed from the roads will be replaced by others, either drivers who were previously taking other forms of transportation or by new trips. Removing cars frees up capacity, which is effectively no different than new capacity from expanded roads.
No one wants their $60k+ self driving car casually risking accidents. And I certainly don't want to end my date night with drunk/messy Uber patron roulette for like $10 profit. Not hating if you do.. just not for me.
In that case it sounds like the self-driving doesn't matter and we're no worse off.
plenty of actual academics project that autonomous vehicles improve occupancy of city streets by 40% and highways by 80%.
I mean assuming I don’t want to leave my sunglasses in the car, or anything else.
If all cars are Ubers I’ll just move to some other place that isn’t the ninth circle of rent seeking, sharing economy, dot com nightmare dystopia.
Of course, it still costs money and if everyone does that now maybe it's 2+ hours in a car each way and I still won't mostly do it.
I'd also routinely take the car into the city for a work event of some sort rather than dealing with non-trivial hassle of multi-modal driving to the train station and 2 different forms of public transit.
I've really cut down on casually swinging into town to meet someone or do an activity on a weeknight because it's just a hassle to drive with all the traffic and driving back home when I'm probably getting a bit tired.
So it is a combination.
With self driving cars, it will be like a NYC taxi, the goal is 24 hour operations.
So for those cars, the time on the road per user doesn't change much, but the need for parking greatly decreases.
You poor innocent child. Spent a couple of years of my life doing pretty much that, in crowded trains with a thousand others doing the same. Some did it for many, many years. It's a thing. (OK, I was lucky about where I worked and only had a 3-hr commute each way.)
Related data point... my commuting choices were
a) drive all or most of the way (saving 45 minutes to an hour each way);
b) drive 15 minutes to a park-and-ride, take a commuter bus;
c) drive 45 minutes to train station, take train in (extra 30 to 45 minutes each way, exta $$/mo).
Often did (b) for practical reasons, much preferred (c) for comfort. Didn't do (a) too often. (d) "black car" (private driver) was an idle astronomically expensive dream. But if it was only a relatively small premium over normal car ownership? I and 100's of thousands of my fellow commuters would have given our left kidneys.
I drove 90 minutes each way in/ around Atlanta and that was considered long; I had friends in NYC who were on the train 90 minutes each way and that was considered long.
I can't think of anyone I knew who had 2 hours each way, every day. (Some days, yes, but not as the norm.)
I do know folks who drive/ ride/ fly and then stay locally for some days, then commute back for the weekend or their WFH days. And most are for 2-3 hour driving commutes, not 4.
I agree with them 8 hours a day of travel "isn't a realistic concern".
To paraphrase a certain fictional pirate captain, "You'd best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias... you're in one!"
Personally, I'd be down for a driverless Uber-like service.
I wonder if we would see as many idle/empty self-driving cars as we do idle/empty human-driven cabs and Ubers/etc. I could see a self-driving system being a lot more efficient because it doesn't have to keep a car on the road for a driver's entire shift.
If it involves the car having a data link to someone else's server, then I have no interest whatsoever in self-driving vehicles.
Yes, you're probably right. So what? I wasn't even remotely asserting otherwise.
Like if someone says "a lot of people will buy the new iPhone" and someone replies "I will never own a cellular phone or even a cordless landline phone" I can understand why that could seem irrelevant to the conversation.
Replies to comments such as mine saying "you don't matter" strike me as interesting because they come off as overly defensive, is all.
Also, it's more than just having "a negligible effect on the market" - if your preferences diverge too much from the main trend, they'll simply not be met at all. In this context, it means that with large enough self-driving car adoption, you won't get to keep a regular car - they'll eventually stop being sold, but by that time you won't be allowed to legally drive one anyway.
Not only can you, you do. Every dollar you spend is a vote telling the company that you approve of how they do business and should continue doing what they're doing.
But my comment isn't that. My point about not purchasing self-driving cars isn't that I'm trying to influence companies to stop making their cars spying platforms. It's just that such a product is not one that I'm interested in owning.
> you won't get to keep a regular car - they'll eventually stop being sold, but by that time you won't be allowed to legally drive one anyway.
I'll get to keep my regular car for sure. By the time the used car market dries up to the point that getting an old used car isn't a realistic option (or that they're made illegal), I'll have died from old age.
It's the younger crowd that may not have the choice. But they may not care.
It may be that those cars are prohibited in big cities or are prohibitively expensive to insure in a city, but they won't go away entirely.
Until they don't, because of prohibitive insurance premiums or some accelerated phase-out of HDC bill. That's the blessing and the curse of the technology market: you don't get to keep your old toys if most of the market has moved on.
You might think that viewpoint is extreme, but that's exactly how it will look when cars have been made completely safe with new technology. You'll be made to take your manual car to private property to use away from other people.
"completely safe"
No, they won't be completely safe. They might be safer than the current median driver, they might even be safer than the top 10% driver, but they won't be completely safe.
> The rest of society will not accept recklessly controlled death machines around them because some sovereign citizen didn't want a networked car.
Our "recklessly controlled death machines" are doing pretty good today. In fact, automobile related death rates are down in most Developed nations, sometimes down in raw numbers.
But hyperbole will certainly solve all of our problems.
What will happen is:
Companies will buy fleets of self driving cars.
The best self driving cars will be too expensive for most people to buy.
People will just pay one of those companies for transportation services.
The transportation - serving companies who will use the cars in the most efficient way will survive. They will use AI to optimize the usage of the fleets.
Regulators (governments) will tax the companies per km / time interval / peak hours.
People will pay more if they want to travel alone or want to travel in a straight line. They will pay more if they want more exact timing.
Roads will be safer because they will communicate with the cars and the cars will communicate with other cars.
There will be manned vehicles that will help relieve any obstructions.
In other words, given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.
That's a legitimate question I haven't done the research on this. It would seem though that usually it's a municipal employee, probably a union job, so probably paid pretty well (relative to say an uber driver). Also that cost for the driver would be double if you half the size of the bus and run them twice as much which would be a better experience for passengers. It would seem like the cost of drivers could be a real impact but this is me being handwavy I haven't crunched any numbers.
The average bus only drives less than miles in cities like NYC, Chicago, and LA per day.
They get >6 MPGe. Fuel is about $65 per day or less. The cost of the vehicle financed probably averages less than that - and should definitely be less than $85 per day. Maintenance and insurance are peanuts. Parking should be quite expensive, but they usually have pieces of land worth tons of money they already own and aren't going to sell. Practically, it's close to $0.
A driver for 12 hours per day costs >$360 without factoring in pensions. With a pension it's >$450.
The reality of the situation is bus fare is currently less than $2. If you get rid of the driver, it's gonna cost a lot less than $2. If you can make trollies ubiquitous, a huge potion of the population isn't going to take taxis anymore (or drive themselves).
I think the problem is not the cost of the bus but the organisation of the city's infrastructure. The bus could be a viable option for a lot more people -- far more than 200 per bus per day -- they just don't structure the roadways to maximise bus use but rather to minimise it. If there isn't a dedicated lane for buses (physically separated since NYPD cannot or will not enforce painted separation) then buses will go at least as slow as traffic, along with regular stopping, making it a less attractive option to driving or cabbing. It's pointless to operate the system this way and very cheap to fix it, where fixing it would make everyone's lives so much better as explained in this video with the extreme example of the Bahamas [2]
[1] https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz6FeQLuHQ
On what are you basing this?
I grew up in NYC which had the most frequent buses I've seen anywhere in the US, and 10+ minutes on a route was common, far far more on off hours. Plus, that route would only get me so far, so I'd have to change buses.
My ~2 mile trip from my apartment to my elementary school required at least two buses, often three.
> a substantial amount of people aren't going to pay $20 to get from A to B when you can get there slightly slower for $2.
NYC MTA trip fare is $2.75. Atlanta is $2.50.
Are you Chuck Wollery? How are you doing 2 and 2?
Comparing to a current system limited in service by the cost of the driver to a future system that won't have this meaningless.
And I've got news for you. Your $2.75 ticket wouldn't be $2.75 without a driver.
Additionally, the vast majority of transit rides are covered by a monthly pass, and the average trip price is less than $2.75.
This is not necessarily a given; after all, most Americans have other little-utilized equipment that nobody bothers to try to "rent out" to maximize usage. Think - washing machines, dish washers, lawn mowers, snow blowers, etc. In fact, there's an entire industry built around storing little-used equipment (storage units).
And we have high-usage vehicles transport already, they're called taxis and they're at use in most major cities; the AI cannot save MORE than the cost of the driver without some magical accounting.
And if you mix together "modern American government" and "billions of dollars at stake for mega-corporations" - just how close to zero is the real-world probability of those "proper tax rules" being made and maintained?
I don't really follow the argument. I don't think of my car as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think of it as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly a necessary cost of living (commuting for work, shopping) and partly for leisure (visiting friends and family, going out on the town, road trips). It makes very little sense to me to "want to be on the road as much as possible," especially considering that most of the depreciation for when I eventually sell it or trade it in is likely going to be based on the odometer rather than the calendar.
This means you'll end up not owning a car at all. Like with housing, those who look at it as investment game outcompete and drive up prices for those who just want a place to live in and call their own.
Right now, SDC is operating in the real world, in non-trivial environments (San Francisco), without special road infrastructure to make them work. It’s beautifully backwards compatible, at the cost of not being generalized (the service areas are extensively mapped).
Once SDC take off we’ll likely start getting infrastructure and rules to support them. Think standards for communicating position locally - ie car A broadcasts its position and route to cars B, C, D within 200m, special road infrastructure to make lanes and corners more manageable for SDC, rules against aimless circling. There’s already a carrying cost in the form of gas or electricity plus wear incentivizing aimless driving, also the opportunity cost of not actively moving someone or something, but we can probably introduce some kind of toll or tax on a SDC operating with no humans inside it to further disincentivize this.
A very useful thing about SDC, and something I think people forget about rideshare and taxis, is that they let people move around independently without needing parking for those trips. In dense cities like SF and NYC that’s hugely useful. A single rideshare or SDC can move 10 people on custom routes without any of those people needing to find and pay for parking, and without using any parking infrastructure. That’s great because it disincentivizes wasting more space on parking in aggregate. Over time this should let us build denser.
Of course, public transit could obviate all these concerns, and I’m a big believer in funding way more public transit than we do already, but it will take a lot of time and political will to make that happen in the US. And it still does not offer the flexibility of SDC and rideshare. SDC is fully compatible with existing infrastructure and may give us a way to morph into public transit more smoothly with things like dynamically routed SDBusses and a reduction of parking infrastructure leading to denser urban environments that more easily support public transit. I think we can solve the “spending too much time on the road doing nothing” problem with congestion pricing, which we should really be doing already.
I believe it's quite common. In about 50 y this place will look very different.
Today, it's 3.7 million.
Austin in 2010 had 950K and now has 1.4mn.
Cities like Austin just felt like they grew more b/c they had a smaller starting point.
GP's implication was that SF has abundant jobs because so many people leave and I was clarifying how that is a misconception.
Your point is different entirely, but thank you for making it.
Which may be.. but backwards compatibility doesn't absolve you of actually doing maintenance on your legacy systems. Unless the upgrade is free.
https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ehq-production-austr...
That picture has the cars bumper to bumper, which is likely rather better than even the self-driving best case. Cars take up a lot of space.
I can imagine interesting and efficient ways to move large numbers of people that involve self-driving vehicles for part of the journey, but for high capacity at reasonable cost and space utilization, feet, bicycles, busses, trains, subways, etc are dramatically better.
And stop calling for-hire cars "rideshare", because it isn't sharing, it's hiring or renting.
On the other hand, ride sharing could mean less cars overall and less car ownership. Electric cars mean fewer or no emissions. Totally automated traffic management could enable vastly higher throughput, and otherwise congested roads could have dynamic tolls applied so people won't use them unless they really need to. Delivery vehicles can batch shopping pickups and dropoffs to use less vehicles than currently.
If problems arise, they can be fixed through policy and incentives. Otherwise, traditional economic incentives for efficiency continue to apply.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/car-tire...
After that isn’t important, let’s see how much priority roads will get.
And obviously fewer/no emissions is also referring just to operation, not manufacture or disposal or power plants either.
But... there's another dimension here. Would you share a car with a random stranger with no "trusted" third-party (i.e. the driver) present?
Sounds like a great way to isolate someone and make sure there is no chance of rehabilitation, being shunned by the car swarm and isolated away
And the smelly (or messy) passenger problem doesn't even require ridesharing! Who will clean the previous passenger's McNugget crumbs off your seat?
They won’t park, they’ll just move from one job to the next (like taxis and ubers).
I think the possibility is more around SDCs becoming not simply a business to individual customer service or subscription, but rather SDCs being offered by organizations the individual customer is already a member of as part of that organizational offering. This can begin at large and wealthy retirement communities first (like Sun City Grand in Phoenix), but there's no reason why it couldn't be implemented elsewhere or why an organization that is already setup to handle customer and vehicle relationships can't offer it as well. Think AARP or your auto insurance company.
old argument i know, but if a human gets that wrong and plows a pedestrian they wear the consequences, will an auto manufacturer do the same?
my guess is no, and the result of that is that even if we can get a majority of cars to be self driving they are probably not going to be pushing the limits of road capacity any time soon like GP suggests, more likely they will continue to drive super conservatively and fail fast like the videos in the linked article.
As happens surprisingly frequently.
We are surprisingly fast, and the slow part is that we have to perceive that the thing in the road is no longer moving past the landmarks in the road.
https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/driving-...
The variation in brake performance between vehicles will more than outweigh the effects of reaction time.
My old Citroën CX will easily outbrake a Tesla. If you are driving too close, even if the Tesla could brake at the same instant as I do, it will still hit me.
How long is it going to take to communicate between cars? How do you see that communication working? How will it respond to interference and packet loss?
After giving control over to an AI, suddenly I don't care at all about saving 3 minutes by picking the perfect lane, getting the best spot on every merge, maxing out the speed limit threshold where the local police will pull me over.
That kind of gamification with no tangible reward actually generates the anxiety. When you're no longer the player, there's no more anxiety about those weird time optimizations.
If streets are "clogged" it saves me a few pennies and gives me less reason to worry about a human cutting across to risk my life for no reason. It's actually kinda relaxing.
But you are wrong about one thing: AI have a fear of death. Every aspect of their training is hyper focused on a paranoid level of death avoidance.
When I picked up my father from the airport last month, I did your worst nightmare, my car circled the terminal for about an hour while I jammed out to progressive rock. 90% of the time I was in bumper to bumper on a closed access road with no entrance or exit. From a traffic perspective it was irrelevant whether I was there or not. On the 10% when I reached the terminal on the loop, surprise, I was blocked by loading cars in front of me... The same blockage the car behind me would face.
The scenario you outline was part of Mega-City One's landscape in the 2000AD/Judge Dredd comics: cars on the road all day every day, with people living out of their perpetually moving RVs; something similar was depicted for Termight in the Nemesis the Warlock series.
I believe this scenario was discussed as an argument for congestion pricing, serving as a vital solution to the tragedy of the commons exacerbated by self-driving cars.
I think this would ultimately be for the best. If the streets clogged up so severely with traffic then the value of owning a car would drop precipitously. Even if car owners lobbied successfully to widen all the streets the traffic would just expand to fill the available capacity.
People would finally be forced to seek alternatives!
It’s more likely that roads will be widened and traffic will grow to meet that supply than it is that cars start to go away. Cars only go away when governments announce near immediate bans.
Sure!
An entire class of accidents and injuries will be entirely gone, saving countless lives. Insurance will get cheaper for everyone. Cities will be able to adapt and grow more quickly, since traffic management can finally happen in realtime and at scale. Pollution will plummet.
Cars can get smaller and smaller, focusing only on having a safe space for passengers and eliminating all the extra "driver" nonsense. With so many cars on the road, you'd always be able to catch a ride, anywhere, anytime.
Each car could have a delicious sandwich compartment, so that it's always doing double-duty for carrying both passengers and sandwiches. (Every car would have a couple drones it could dispatch to pick up and deliver sandwiches, so that passenger trips can go on uninterrupted.)
People will forget how to drive entirely, of course, so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, and we'll enter a golden era of cheap transportation and ever-faster sandwich delivery.
I for one welcome our autonomous sandwich delivery overlords.
Joking aside I'm more curious on the negative aspect of self driving vehicles as I'm not entirely convinced they will explode into the market quite the way it's been pitched.
In the long run however you can't ignore the productivity increases and the cultural changes that will come with it being a net positive.
Governance and ownership is the sticky point for me.
Listen, and understand! That relentless driving machine is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!
FTFY
Actually, yes. However, my take is a bit different from yours.
The future driverless car will not at all look like a Tesla.
It will be a moving office or comfortable room for family trips. This does not mean it has to be massive. Something of the size of a modern minivan could be fantastic if you did not have to worry about driving at all.
In other words, I actually see future driverless cars giving us more time rather than taking it away by being stuck on traffic paying attention to stay in a lane, press the brake or accelerator.
As for people forgetting how to drive. Well, maybe in one or two more generations?
Nobody really likes driving. People either need to go from point A to point B or want to (vacations, eating out, etc.). I enjoy driving, not on the street, on the race track. I do that with some frequency. Driving on the street is boring, dangerous, time consuming and stressful. I hate that kind of driving. I can't wait until I don't have to do it any more.
None of this is coming soon as far as I'm aware mind you. I just don't think the end game of self driving vehicle is bleak - just the long mid game :)
Why? Attrition on a car is mainly miles based. Sharing a car won't make it last more miles. Not accounting for vandalism.
But even today, even in north America, they're barely rational. Most people don't mentally add up the purchase price plus insurance plus gas plus maintenance etc. And the inconvenience of garage and parking and clearing driveway and snow etc etc.
The reason we have them is convenience. Public transit in North America with our huge suburbs is on average crap.
I firmly believe that for modern generation, car is increasingly a liability not pleasure. So if we / they can exchange it for a self riding car that magically shows up when needed but also magically buggers off when not, we / they will.
Why do you think this would happen? Self-driving cars are poised to dramatically improve parking overall. One can be dropped off exactly at their destination, and the car can then go elsewhere. Even an elsewhere of "somewhere 5 minutes away" is a large amount of potential parking in a typical urban environment. Additionally, any existing parking lot that chooses to only accept self-driving vehicles instantly gets additional capacity: self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves into space efficient configurations.
And if your counter is "a minority of selfish entitled people", the answer to that is "laws and regulations". Self-driving cars will have to follow the laws of wherever they're driving. If your "circling the block" apocalypse comes to pass, the mitigation would literally be a law/regulation that self-driving cars would have to obey.
do you:
- send the car home
no, it would only get halfway home before the end of your appointment
- send it on a rideshare journey
let's say (conservatively, and according to some minimum regulations from the rideshare service) it gets assigned a job after 5 minutes to drive somebody 10 minutes away. it finishes its job at the same time as your appointment ends. you have to wait 10 minutes for it to return to you. again no.
- send it to a parking lot
assuming the parking lot is 5 minutes away and you can tell it to return 5m before your appointment ends this seems reasonable
- drive circles around your appointment
all the benefits of sending it to the parking lot but requires even less effort as you no longer have to remember to tell it your appointment is finishing.
now apply this logic to the general public. what is the most likely outcome?
Cars are not going anywhere.
Imagine an inner city without cars. Cities in which this is a reality are a bliss to be in. And people get in and out just fine.
But also, while I'd love (love!) to see much better, European-style public transit in US cities, it would take a fantastic level of political will, lobbying, and pitching to even begin to happen. For all sorts of reasons, public transit is wildly unpopular in the US, and construction is wildly expensive.
But a company like Tesla could (if they could figure out the FSD part) just roll out self-driving taxis after a few legal tweaks. It's achievable in a reasonable timeframe (once the tech is in place).
Seems Americans are just too used to staring at a 2 ton steel can in front of them.
Reinvented, but much better. It's the difference between Circuit-Switched vs. Packet-Switched in networking. Trains are extremely inefficient use of resources. They require a dedicated and very expensive path, cannot re-route around problems (e.g. broken tracks or obstructed tracks), and frequently travel at a fraction of their capacity. Properly sized and routed electric vehicles are much more efficient in terms of cost per mile, travel time, and almost any other metric.
> frequently travel at a fraction of their capacity.
The average occupancy of a car with 5 seats is only marginally above 1. So, 20-25%? The average occupancy of a European streetcar is far above that.
> Properly sized and routed electric vehicles are much more efficient in terms of cost per mile, travel time, and almost any other metric.
Just as much as you can optimize those factors in electric cars can you optimize them in trains/trams/buses/...
If the concept of a remote accident is so appalling to you...just don't get a self-driving vehicle. But other car users are capable of processing statistical risk non-emotionally, and they will get to enjoy stress-free parking once these vehicles become available.
Anyway, in all likelihood, self-driving cars will result in a large pivot away from car ownership. The impact of "your car" being involved in a remote accident becomes moot if it's not even your car.
It was already starting to happen in NYC with Uber's exponential growth before they capped the number of cars permitted. They were a year away from carmageddon.
And interestingly, all of the parking lots in a city, in theory, will be obsolete, opening a whole bunch of opportunities for new urban design. The idea behind self-driving cars is not to own the car, but to rent it...which is why some people are super bullish in the long term on Uber.
The cutover to autonomous cars will be a huge PITA however, and I think this is really what the OP is getting at.
I've had this same thought, but haven't seen it discussed much.
Parking lots essentially switch from random access (which requires expensive unoccupied 'lanes') into a slowly snaking space-filling curve. Cars can crawl slowly from entrance to exit, moving like water through a pipe. The paths can even branch and merge to make efficient use of the entire surface area.
If you also want to charge the cars stored in the parking lot, your solutions fall into two broad categories:
1.) Arrange the parking lot with rows of chargers that automatically plug in. Cars choose the appropriate row based on state-of-charge, twith he algorithm making sure the entire row finishing charging at roughly the same time. This minimizes unnecessary disconnect/move forward/reconnect cycles. Or,
2.) put wireless charging under the parking lot. This would be a lot more feasible than electrifying large swaths of highway.
Personally I still prefer option 1, because the peak charging speeds can be much greater.
Why would they? You still need to get the car to unpark itself when the owner needs it?
Oh, you mean everybody shares cars with everybody? What about letting sections of that "snake" just drive around, stopping at different spots and let people enter and leave? And perhaps let them walk around inside? Congratulations, you've just re-invented public transit.
This is unlikely to ever happen. Even in the human-driver world, there would be huge potential to have cars communicate directly with each other. Never materialized.
In your hypothetical future, where no humans manually drive anymore, it opens up the possibility of completely redesigning our vehicle infrastructure without having to worry about the training and compliance of a mixed human/AI population on the road.
My optimistic hope is that with fully automated vehicles, mass transit wins out on sheer efficiency in order to negate the wasteful deadheading inherent in personal vehicles.
How does a self driving car deal with a blizzard with white-out conditions or a complete loss of traction due to ice? Yes, humans get into a lot of accidents in these conditions but as a percentage of the time the rate is still remarkably low.
If you want to eliminate large classes of those adverse situations then the best approach we have right now is to switch to rail transport. Public transit is truly the way to go!
The eternal pessimist within me looks at how difficult it is to get anything with infrastructure accomplished, both at a reasonable pace and reasonable cost, in the US and can't help but expect this sort of thing to not play out as wonderfully as that sounds.
We are nowhere near a future where cars exist in hermetically sealed tubes, completely walled off from the rest of existence.
Excommunicating humans from all public space and drawing a moat of monopoly owned robo taxis around every block and every destination isn't a utopia, it's a complete nightmare.
In short, what took 25 minutes door to door on any given day before ended up taking ~two hours on the way to work. And for reasons I can no longer remember, getting back home ended up taking twenty minutes longer.
In other words, a total commute time of ~50 minutes (max) was turned into a ~4.5 hour commute due to having to rely on public transportation.
I also remember the specific reason why I went and bought a new car that same weekend (fortunately this happened on a Friday): it was the realization, upon arriving at home (after said ~2.5 hour commute), that I had forgotten my apartment keys at work.
It's pretty neat, I've moved to a European city recently myself and I'm slightly horrified at the prospect of moving back.
I used to write them off as over the top worries of uninformed people.
More recently as Elon Musk’s failure to deliver has been made clear, I’ve realized that I was myself taken in by a lot of hype.
Now when I go back and look at some of the cyclical content around self driving cars that has been around for years, I realize that a lot of it makes sense. The most damning criticism is that automobile-focused infrastructure sucks, and self driving cars won’t change that. We need to invest in traditional forms of transit. But in a world with cheap money (the last decade) and winner-take-all mentality, we get huge investment in individualized technology like self driving cars instead of better urban design and transport infrastructure.
Hopefully we can use this moment to purge inner city areas of cars.
Road Pricing
When a scare resource is given away for free, it becomes overused. Somehow we have a hard time seeing that for road access, but it's true anyway.
It's very unlikely that it happens to be the optimal price.
(Group parking spots are typically better monitored than streets.)
Listen, and understand. That car is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶ reach your destination.
The national media of course wants to produce content confirming the biases of people who are (in the back of their minds) anxious about the prospect of SDC but don’t have exposure to them. I have a lot of exposure to them - not as an employee though - and think Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox are all doing a great job at being cautious and respectful with their testing programs. Sure they do get stuck sometimes, but human drivers disrupt traffic too, and honestly SDC are already better at being safe drivers around pedestrians and other vehicles than humans IME. It’s just that they are so cautious sometimes they just stop and create situations like this.
Most people who haven’t been living with SDC for years like we have in SF want to hand wring about them based on articles like this, but the reality is quite different. You’ll note you don’t hear much about the cars injuring people or getting in accidents despite the appetite for negative SDC media coverage.
On top of that they have a bunch of electric scooters and electric skateboards and such.
If so, then the answer is "largely no".
Although I also haven't been to any major cities in the southeast, so can't speak to them, and I haven't done any studies, so my impression could very well be mistaken.
Big cities I've been to in Europe, though, tend to have a lot of pedestrians and bicyclists.
The only side-shows I have seen have been in Oakland and even further into the East Bay.
With that being said, I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians and traffic abiding cyclists around the lower Haight. I have also seen self-driving cars block buses and the street car.
As for the Cruise cars, I believe they were still being trained so were not carrying passengers yet. They might have ironed out the kinks.
> I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians
I live in the lower Haight as well and have never personally witnessed that, but don't doubt that it happens. The non-self driving cars here don't interact with the Wiggle super well either though.
> Sideshows entail street stunts in which parties perform “doughnuts,” or high-speed circles, burn-outs and other risky maneuvers.
In the summer, I can hear side shows in Oakland, which are miles away. Because the night air is still and the particular acoustics of the terrain, I guess, it sounds like it is a few blocks away. I once laid in bed for almost an hour listening to it.
You will see weird speed bumps that form a circle that are designed just to stop people from doing these.
As to how many such incidents there were, it wasn't a lot. Quote from the article:
> Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023
The crux of the article seems to be “wow! If you block traffic it really adds up to wasting people’s time!”. Duh. Lots of things do this, many less valuable than driverless cars.
As an example, Seattle’s drawbridges sound like much more of a disaster than whatever time is being wasted by Cruise vehicles. Sailboats can’t even make it under the Fremont bridge, so every rich dude with a boat blocks traffic (including multiple bus lines) for 10 min when they sail by.
Those bridges don't open 7-9AM and 4-6PM, which shows that we have and should continue to regulate to mitigate disruptions!
I've dreamt of a reverse-toll system where those folks end up paying drivers, pedestrians, and bus passengers some token amount for the delay (not enough to encourage lolligagging but enough to encourage boats to find better travel times or coordinate to spread the tolls.
Special laws sometimes are passed to have "boat times" so the boat has to wait until the top of the hour or similar.
There are some special laws about when the bridge can open during the week, but not on the weekend.
Unsafe/stupid driving is accepted as inevitable and rarely enforced against for human drivers (outside accidents). Not a good thing, but definitely the reality these days. Tbh, it’ll likely be much easier to enforce rules on a self driving car, since almost everything is tracked and recorded. Every mistake can be scrutinized for a self driving car, in ways that would never be required for human drivers.
If the purpose is to spot bad behavior and then correct it within these systems, then this is as far from achieving that goal as you can get. I'm not interested in penalizing the corporation, I'm interested in getting the best performance we can.
What natural incentives are there otherwise? If users come to expect that their self driving cab "breaks a few rules" to get them there faster, then how do you balance that?
> Unsafe/stupid driving is accepted as inevitable and rarely enforced against for human drivers
What is your source for this assertion?
> it’ll likely be much easier to enforce rules on a self driving car, since almost everything is tracked and recorded
If the car can't correctly drive itself, then what help is this? How would you sort through this data without the very type of automation which is in the car itself?
> in ways that would never be required for human drivers.
There's much more to roadway enforcement than what the U.S. currently does. China has an entirely different system of police and thus traffic enforcement. European countries love speed cameras. Several U.S. states are big on red light cameras.
Self driving vehicles confidently drive down one way streets and block other vehicles offering no recourse to solve the problem for the other driver. We don't have an enforcement mechanism for this because this hasn't happened before.
Whether this technology is "better than humans" or not is beside the point. It's using roadways designed and still majority occupied by actual humans. This is not being properly accounted for.
Of course, in the case of SF you could argue they have far more highly paid tech jobs than the city can support already, and no need to bootstrap a technology hub....
Put another way: the value proposition for SF (and other tech cities) exists above and prior to these companies being allowed to treat the city's streets as a testing ground.
Got a large vehicle that blocks multiple lanes while turning? No problem. Heavy 18-wheelers that fuck up the road surface? We're pro-business. Trash collectors need to stop to collect trash? Of course they do. Customers trying to parallel park block a complete lane of traffic, in addition to the lane of on-street parking? No worries. Taxis want to stop traffic to pick up customers? Sure thing. Delivery drivers want to double park? Well, you gotta deliver somehow, just make it quick. Parked vehicles blocking the cycle lane? Well you'll just have to go around. Slow cyclist in a narrow street? They've got every right to be there. Hire scooters all over the sidewalk? Yeah, that happens.
I'm not sure the comparison to toxic waste dumping is really warranted.
Similarly, 53’ trailers are outright illegal in NYC (because they destroy the road surface, as you mentioned, and can’t navigate the city safety). Enforcement is currently poor, however.
The point is this: using city streets to trial-run experimental technology is something new and distinct, and it isn’t immediately clear to me why the public shouldn’t be compensated for the bother.
> As driverless cars keep racking up the miles, San Francisco transit advocates propose a variety of measures to lessen their impact. Jaime Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots group of riders in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies operating autonomous vehicles should be fined for causing delays.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
If the driver just stops driving of their own volition, while in the way, that can be its own kind of ticket.
But "ticket both" would still be an improvement.
Obviously not every breakdown is going to be a result of something under the driver's control, but it's probably more under their control than it is under the control of all the other people the breakdown is inconveniencing.
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/traffic-congesti...
You can steal ~899$ worth of shit and the cops don’t show up. Open air drug markets, people shitting in the streets, thousands of homeless people. But yeah let’s pontificate about fines for someone disrupting traffic.
You gonna fine the person that runs out of gas, causes an accident or just mechanically breaks down?
I'm much more interested in fining the crap out of the people who don't have an "excuse" for their bad traffic performance.
OP clearly refers to a fee on autonomous car companies using public infra as a testing ground. Causing traffic jam is but a tiny part of it
What they seem to be missing is a “get out of the way” path-planning mode when it doesn’t know how to proceed.
The ability to "read the road" seem to leave a lot to be desired.
That sounds the same as most human drivers.
I think most clogs are when cars are mapping so I’m not sure if they either don’t have enough data to offer that when they get stuck (depends on how much they depend on mapping to implement the feature). It could also just be that they figure a stuck car is too messed up to reliably pull over without causing more problems, so to err on the side of caution they don’t use that feature.
Slack notification comes in: a car is stuck. Click link, get jacked-in and take manual control to move it to a safe location for further debugging.
So about one unplanned stop every 3 days? Seems a bit of a stretch to call it "clogging" San Francisco.
By a regular old delivery truck.
Better statistical data on these incidents is called for.
I think after a few times bailing their cars out of impound, these companies would find a way to "return to profitability".
Not sure what you do in that situation, honestly.
Not pushing a luddite agenda, just curious how it might all play out.
(And "just don't drive then" isn't an option for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances.)
Cars in Avignon Old Walled City: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9491327,4.8100308,3a,75y,99.... https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9493463,4.8114883,3a,75y,328... https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9482465,4.8084919,3a,75y,3.4... https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9476804,4.8115635,3a,75y,126...
I don’t think they’ll have much trouble in Boston. The current Cruise service area includes a lot of steep hills, narrow roads with parking/pedestrians on each side, and some winding streets. Driverless cars are typically pretty cautious around hazards like this, sometimes a bit too much (like driving up to a stop sign too slowly), but matching what I would want a “safe driver” to do.
I took a Cruise in the rain a few days ago and the rain didn’t seem to cause any problems at all. Even though you can only take Cruise at night, between 9 and 12 pm there have still been plenty of situations where it had to deal with pedestrians walking across middle of streets, opening and closing doors of cars parked on the street, cars stopping in the middle of the road to unload pedestrians, etc. and it’s actually handled all of them well.
When the cars get stuck, I am pretty sure it’s because they are in “mapping mode”. I think it’s weird and likely unscaleable for an entire service area to need to be mapped before opened commercially, but once the cars are actually “working” they don’t get stuck much.
Anyway, I think the only real problem with Boston would be snow and ice (on the ground, I think the rains and fog in SF are close enough that cars could handle snow and ice in the air).As far as I know, no self driving car company has tested much under snowy/icy conditions.
humans have been driving for a century and we still have 30,000 traffic fatalities per year in just the U.S.: human-level automation (AGI) doesn’t solve that. sure, you could tune the driving parameters to significantly reduce that count — but not for free and not without creating new (but hopefully smaller) problems. at some point it just mirrors any other unsolved human system, where you’re left debating values and tradeoffs. think the Ford Pinto memo [1] but where the tradeoffs are “do we tune driving parameters to achieve 10 fatalities/year and 10M man-years of travel time per year, or 1 fatality and 11M man-years of travel time?”
personally i think the tradeoffs in this article are overblown. 99% of us accept that traffic lights are stupid and will delay every 2am no-other-cars-on-the-road trip by a few minutes. but when it’s a new autonomous system suddenly those delays are to be treated as unsolved problems? don’t get me wrong, i like when people acknowledge that there are things around us that ought to be improved, but the distinction here just seems arbitrary. it’s just some weird status quo bias that seems to carry more weight than i can justify.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost–benefit_analys...
Self driving vehicles which run on their own closed circuits have existed for a half century in production. They work so well that they’re downright boring.
I just hope that they will continue to extend that tolerance to still allowing human drivers for a long time after automated ones are more safe. It's almost inevitable that there will be a story like this someday about the hazards of letting humans disable their auto-pilot.
The bus- / train-riders have no choice in the matter.
It adds hours onto the driver's day.
It's a shame the mitigation takes as long as the article claims it does.
"They oughtn't to let old ladies carry magnums," he murmured.
Witherspoon-Hobbs nodded agreement across the front-seat corpse. "They oughtn't to let 'em carry anything. God, how I hate Feet," he muttered, looking down at his shrunken legs. "Wheels forever!" he softly cheered.
Literally spent close to half an hour stuck like this once in SOMA behind one of these.
This could be that.
look at the dashcam footage. What's taking up space?
The driverless car, or the long lines of parked cars on each side of the road?
It seems so limited. If I had to bet I’d say we solve general AI first and then driverless cars are somewhat of a byproduct. Like many oldskool specialty AI’s get owned by general purpose LLM’s nowadays.
my problem with busses is that they are huge and, in my experience, mostly empty. they create traffic and their weight damages roads.
as far as public transportation goes, busses are as braindead as it gets.
I wonder what amount of disruption was caused by homeless and mentally ill people during the same period.
Pick any date in the future and I will wager that my 16yo son can more intelligently navigate a tricky driving scenario and deal more effectively with tough edge cases.
In addition to our human superiority at driving we also owe it to each other to enter these driving transactions with literal skin in the game. I need to know that your driving strategies are backed up with "... or else I will be dead".
The solution to our societal woes is not the further over-production of personal autos and autonomous driving - it is the investment in real mass transit (the kind that runs on rails).
(Remember this the next time someone says "teachers are the reason our kids are dumb".)
Waymo has a lot of miles in quiet suburbs with broad streets and light traffic. How has that helped them when they get to SF?
Disruption of economic activity (qua output) can be significant in places where traffic is substantial and solvable yet unsolved.
In my personal experience (I've spent significant time in the neighborhoods around Nvidia's headquarters) approximately 3 cars fewer get through any given stoplight if an autonomous vehicle is in that lane. I can imagine how in a place like SF this could cause real, measurable negative impacts.
Self-driving cars have already killed many more people than 1/100mill -- it's about 1 in 1 mil iirc.
My comment was to frame the saftey of driving in the relevant units: amount of driving. When scaled by the right factor, "human driving" is incredibly safe by comparison.
What about Big Walking Shoe, are they going to pay for these sidewalks or are we going to continue to subsidize their profits?
False, everyone is not a Pedestrian, I moved into my current home specifically because there are no sidewalks (and no HOA), and I resist any movement to add them to my street.
>>What voting block is going to push for infrastructure improvements needed by self-driving cars?
People that want to use and benefit from Self Driving cars, just like people that vote for sidewalks.
I have a feeling the number of people that want the dream of being able to have a car that just drives itself is FAR FAR FAR FAR higher than the number of people that utilize sidewalks. At least for my Geographic region...
Your geographic region doesn't really matter.
What the fuck!? Why don't you want a sidewalk? Why would any street even be built without a sidewalk, like how is that even an option. How is anyone meant to walk safely?
>I have a feeling the number of people that want the dream of being able to have a car that just drives itself is FAR FAR FAR FAR higher than the number of people that utilize sidewalks. At least for my Geographic region...
Where are you from, Mars? Cause you may as well be speaking Martian, I can't comprehend your mindset at all.
How does anyone go for a morning run? Walk their dog? How do kids get to their friends' houses? Even in a low density suburb people do these things.
"The number of people who use sidewalks" is like ... 99%. Everyone uses them at least a little, unless you're literally bedridden or something. Or out in the middle of nowhere.
Only the poors walk and they drag down the property values by their mere presence.
And kids? Nasty little creatures.
on the road, there is like zero traffic on my road, and I spend my entire child hood playing in the street.
>>Where are you from, Mars?
No the midwest... probably mars to you...
>>Why don't you want a sidewalk?
Because I do not want to maintain them, shovel them, or accept the liability of someone is injured on them.
>>Everyone uses them at least a little, unless you're literally bedridden or something.
Not bed Ridden, do not use sidewalks.
My vehicle goes from my drive to a parking lot, I walk from the inside of my home to the vehicle and then from the vehicle to the inside of a business on the tarmac of the parking lot. No sidewalks
Same in my childhood, but there were sidewalks (pavements) everywhere. A street without one is simply defective, like if it didn't have lampposts or adequate drainage. Cars go down the middle, pedestrians go on the sides, that's just how it works.
>No the midwest... probably mars to you...
I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
>Because I do not want to maintain them, shovel them, or accept the liability of someone is injured on them.
Why on earth would it be your responsibility to maintain the sidewalk? It's not yours! It's publicly owned and it's maintained at public expense, exactly like the road surface. I've never personally had to maintain any sidewalk outside my house, they're in adequately good repair because it comes out of my taxes. Does your council expect you to mix your own concrete to patch up cracks, or something? Like the backyard steel mills in Maoist China? Are you expected to fill potholes in the road too? And why would you have any liability if someone is injured? That's not how torts work, again cause it's not your pavement. You're just making up nonsensical reasons.
>My vehicle goes from my drive to a parking lot, I walk from the inside of my home to the vehicle and then from the vehicle to the inside of a business on the tarmac of the parking lot. No sidewalks
So every single little errand you have to do requires getting in a car and driving to a new destination? And you expect everyone else to live this way on your street? Again, how do kids or anyone who doesn't have access to a car at that particular moment manage to do anything?
Your entire world amounts to your house, your car, parking lots, and the inside of shops and offices. That's unimaginably sad to me. I could never live like that. Do you really never use the two legs God gave you, and never let your lungs breathe natural air, and never let your eyes see the beauty of the world unimpeded by a plexiglass windshield?
My street has lights, drains, everything but sidewalks...
>I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
I suspected (and still do) you either live outside the US, or on one of the coasts.
>>Why on earth would it be your responsibility to maintain the sidewalk? It's not yours, it's publicly owned and it's maintained at public expense.
No, not it is not. Not anywhere I have ever lived. They are "easements" that are privately owned, and have to maintained by the home owner, at the home owners expense, and you will be fined if they are not maintained, shoveled, etc.
In some cases the city my pay for the initial creation of the sidewalks, but after that it is on the homeowner to maintain them.
>Does your council expect you to mix your own concrete to patch up cracks, or something?
Yes?... Or hire a contractor to replace them if they are disrepair.. Often times it is HOA that is responsible as well which comes out of the HOA dues you would pay. Rarely is it the city in area of single family home neighborhoods.
Example This is not my city, but my city is simliar... Peoria, IL ARTICLE VII. > DIVISION 1. > Sec. 26-231. - Declaration of disrepair; notice. [1]
>> " . The notice shall advise the owner that he must repair or contract for repairs of the sidewalk in need of repair within 30 days of the date of the mailing of the notice. The notice shall describe with particularity the location of the sidewalk in need of repair."
Now in Peoria, IL they do cover upto 80% of the bill but the owner still has to find, contract, and schedule the contractor, and the city can reject any bill they soley claim is "excessive" in costs and only reimburse what they fill is not excessive, Some / Many cities do not offer any reimbursement at all or offer a lower rate...
In either case it is still property that is owned by the home owner, the public has the right of access via an easement. Liability in those states and cities is on the homeowner.
[1] https://library.municode.com/il/peoria/codes/code_of_ordinan...
>So every single little errand you have to do requires getting in a car and driving to a new destination?
Most people in my city already do... I am the norm.
>Do you really never use the two legs God gave you, and never let your lungs breathe natural air,
Sure that is what Parks, Camping, Trails, etc are for. Not sidewalks on my street
Then it's defective.
>No, not it is not. Not anywhere I have ever lived. They are "easements" that are privately owned, and have to maintained by the home owner, at the home owners expense, and you will be fined if they are not maintained, shoveled, etc.
>Yes?... Or hire a contractor to replace them if they are disrepair.. Often times it is HOA that is responsible as well which comes out of the HOA dues you would pay. Rarely is it the city in area of single family home neighborhoods.
>Now in Peoria, IL they do cover upto 80% of the bill but the owner still has to find, contract, and schedule the contractor, and the city can reject any bill they soley claim is "excessive" in costs and only reimburse what they fill is not excessive, Some / Many cities do not offer any reimbursement at all or offer a lower rate...
>In either case it is still property that is owned by the home owner, the public has the right of access via an easement. Liability in those states and cities is on the homeowner.
That's insane. Stark raving mad. Completely, utterly barmy.
Such a byzantine, litigious system would deter one from wanting a sidewalk next to one's house. It is obviously broken. It should be reformed so that people's incentives are not aligned against basic standards of civilization, by taking sidewalks into proper public ownership (not this "easement" frippery) and allowing for coordination and economies of scale in their maintenance. Imagine if roads worked this way! A patchwork of (ir)responsibility, individualism pursued to a farcical extreme.
>Most people in my city already do... I am the norm.
How do people go places and get things done if they can't drive? Like being under 18, or elderly, or poor, or with vision disabilities, or mentally retarded, or their spouse needed the car for something else, or being drunk at that particular moment, or the car is in for repairs, or they had their license suspended, or any number of other reasons? It would seem one is utterly dependent on an expensive machine, a prisoner in your own home without it, having to pay an enormous ante just for basic participation in society.
>Sure that is what Parks, Camping, Trails, etc are for. Not sidewalks on my street
Those things I listed aren't special treats that you save for a holiday. They're supposed to be a normal everyday part of human existence. Your body needs a baseline level of exertion to maintain cardiovascular health. What you're describing isn't normal at all.
UK or EU?
>> their spouse needed the car for something else
Most have a second car.... or even 3... hell for most of my adult life I had both a Car and Truck, I was single. I dont today just a truck but I have thought about getting an EV Car, It would not however replace my Truck but in addition to it.
Uber / Lyft has gone a long way for me not having that 2nd vehicle
>How do people go places and get things done if they can't drive? Like being under 18, or elderly, or poor, or with vision disabilities, or mentally retarded
Bike, Bus, etc.. But I am unclear why you think people under 18, the poor, or the elderly do not also have cars? People can drive here as young as 15, many poor people have cars... hell if you drive through some of the government funded housing / income restricted housing (i.e housing for poor people) some of them have newer cars than I do.
and the elderly drive all the time though I would like them to stop as they drive to f'in slow....
>> litigious system would deter one from wanting a sidewalk next to one's house.
and we have come full circle. see my first post in this subject.
>>by taking sidewalks into proper public ownership (not this "easement" frippery) and allowing for coordination and economies of scale in their maintenance.
I dont know if that is a good case either, the roads in many area;s or pretty shitty, and low traffic residential streets often never get replaced until you can no longer tell if the road as paved or is gravel, and there are soo many pot holes that looks like a photo from a bombing run in war zone.
"Economies of Scale" is not a thing with government project. No Bid Contraction to government preferred contractors aka corruption is ....
Most studies show governments massively over pay for road projects compared to if a private citizen were to simply hire the same company to do the same job. Companies charge the government MORE not less.
This data[2] gives it by cars per property (not the same as household). Summing across both owner- and renter- occupied, I find 10.7% with no car, 35.8% with one car.
It's a safe assumption that many of those renter-occupied properties are apartments that comprise more than one household. So it's somewhere between 10% and 15% of households that don't have any car at all, and at least 35% with only one car. 1-car households are the plurality. Yet the average car ownership rate is 2, skewed by people who own 3 or more.
So: it's not some tiny eccentric sliver of households with no cars. It's actually a substantial minority. A plurality of couples cannot rely on the second car while one spouse is using the first, because they have only one car.
And in turn, it's an even greater proportion of people (not households) who don't, can't, or shouldn't drive. Children, teenagers, elderly, disabled, and so on.
Those poors with cars, do you really suppose they can afford it? Living paycheque to paycheque with a car loan that's underwater isn't what I'd call "afford". The auto loan delinquency rate in the county is 8% (twice the national average), and 26% among nonwhites: https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=a...
As for buses and bikes: I searched for "peoria illinois bike lanes" and the top results were all about recreational trails. Never a good sign: it means the city government views bicycles as toys, not a means of practical transport. I looked on Streetview for ten minutes and I didn't see any bike lanes anywhere, protected or otherwise. The place seems to be full of 4-, 5-, and 6-lane stroads with 40+mph traffic. There seems to be no infrastructure whatsoever to make that safe to cycle on. I wouldn't dare bike down a road like this[3], to take a random example. And that's not even the worst one I found.
My intuition that the roads are unsafe is correct: in 2019 (the most recent non-corona year on the city-data page), the city of Peoria reported 7 traffic-related fatalities, out of a population of 113,150. In that same year, there were only 3 such fatalities in Cardiff (where I live), a city with a population of 480,000. Peoria's roads are 10x as dangerous by that metric. The story for non-fatal injuries is similar.
And here's blogpost[4] quoting local cyclists (what a hardy breed they must be!):
>Roads on these maps have been suggested by local cyclists as being safe to ride on – most of the time. Caution should still be taken at busier times of the day when people are driving to and from work.
Lmao. So if you actually want to like, get to work safely ... you can't do it on a bike. That's what you're expecting people to do?
No bus lanes anywhere on Streetview that I can see either, so that puts a hard ceiling on how much the city cares about public transport, and therefore how viable it is to rely on. EDIT: actually, to hell with bus lanes, where are the bus stops? I saw places with bus stop icons on Google maps, but the Streetview shows nothing at first glance. Like here for example https://goo.gl/maps/2UmQU9SumppeBmTt9 the overhead map shows two bus stops. I searched for several minutes on Streetview for the physical objects corresponding to these bus stops -- eventually I found them. They're just little metal signs attached to lamp posts that say "bus stop" on them. You call that a bus stop? Where's the shelter from sun and rain, where's the place to sit, where's the map of the routes and timetables? It's the same story even in the busier parts, like this place dares to call itself a "Main Street" https://goo.gl/maps/ovFbS37DLVCsN9t4A it's right next to a University, yet its "bus stop" is a perfunctory little disk of metal stuck on a light pole. How does anyone think this is remotely adequate?
Enormous indoor parking facility right next to it though. They didn't skimp on that ...
Actually now that I think about it, "Peoria", sounds familiar. Oh yeah, I coincidentally read about it the other day. An article about how atrocious the built environment is for non-drivers[5], and the indignities they suffer. Read that article. It's absolutely fascinating.
>On their walk, the group observed a corner of the city by East Peoria, from a downtown shopping area to a nearby neighborhood. They discovered there were no sidewalks for a significant length of the stretch, but there was a wide road, and clear, muddy pathways filled with shoe prints and bike marks showed that despite the area not being designed for people on foot, people were using it.
>“Everybody acknowledged [the neighborhood] had a pretty wide road. And very little vehicle traffic went by us during the time that we walked through there,” said Fenton.
>In one of the spaces where there was a dedicated walking area with a sidewalk, it felt uncomfortable and out of place—like people didn’t belong there.
>“We came through this area, which is bizarre, there's a sidewalk with chain link fences,” said Fenton. “People literally said ‘are we supposed to be going here?’ And the reason that that was interesting was because when we came out the backside we could see footprints and mountain bike tracks. Clearly, people from that neighborhood use this as a shortcut to cut back over to the retail area.”
It's fucking barbaric to make people live this way. You can't even get from one side of the river to the other on foot:
>After some research, Lees learned that, between 271 miles of river, there were only two bridges with a protected walking path—and they were nearly 267 miles apart, closest to the large metropolitan cities Chicago and St. Louis. It was obvious to Lees that there was an unequal opportunity for locals to travel safely about the city.
Clearly there's latent demand for sidewalks, that is going unmet. Far more people would walk if the city cared about making it safer and more pleasant.
Meanwhile, staggeringly large amounts of land in Peoria is apparently wasted on empty parking spaces[6]. Everything is pushed further apart for no reason.
>In fact, Peoria is so full of parking that the amount of land devoted to surface parking in the county actually surpasses the amount of land devoted to buildings
Just amazing. No wonder people own so many vehicles, they're pretty much forced to, just to do ordinary things. The infrastructure is biased comprehensively towards motor cars, rendering anything else impractical and/or unsafe.
So, if where you live is anywhere like Peoria, then you're pretty much like Marie Antoinette saying "let them eat cake". There are no safe, reliable viable alternatives to the car, by design, and you're trying to keep it that way on purpose, out of sheer selfishness. Maybe you should try living car-free for even a single week, so you have first hand experience of what you're choosing to make your fellow citizens endure. Do it, if you think it's so trivial. And then maybe after that week (if you survive) you'll gain some empathy and realize why they want sidewalks.
[1] https://www.governing.com/archive/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...
[2] https://www.city-data.com/county/Peoria_County-IL.html
[3] https://goo.gl/maps/qiK3QZ4WNKgFj4Cm6
[4] https://ivwheelmn.org/wordpress/?page_id=372
[5] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/6/peoria-reformin...
[6] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/16/parking-peoria...
You call it barbaric, but I call your "15 min walkable cities" open air prisons...
So how about we ton down the hyperbolic rhetoric.
>Clearly there's latent demand for sidewalks, that is going unmet. Far more people would walk if the city cared about making it safer and more pleasant.
I guess that is a chicken vs egg statement. I dont think they actually would, and I believe the "demand" for sidewalks is a very small minority of the taxpaying base. If it was not there would be more puch for it in Local Politics which is far easier to get things like that through.
Chances are though to it would require a tax bond initiative on the ballot, which I suspect would have a VERY VERY VERY poor chance of succeeding, thus no funding to do it. People often claim they want sidewalks right up until they have to vote to increase their property, sales, or income taxes to pay for them.
Also for the record, I find "Strong Towns" to be propaganda not serious research or journalism or what ever...
>>Everything is pushed further apart for no reason.
it is not for no reason, it just reasons you disagree with.
You desire greater population density, more closely packed cities, and everything to be walkable so a person a work, live and shop in a small area.
I, and many other Americans, find population density to be a BAD thing, we do not want to live all stacked on each either. I own a 3/4 acre (about 3000 sq meters) of land where my home sits. That is the absolute minimum I would accept, and I am actively looking for a homestead that is 4+ acres (16000 sq meters)...
>So, if where you live is anywhere like Peoria,
Very similar, but more population. The city i live in is about 2x the population, but also about 2x the land area so we have about the same population density.
>> so you have first hand experience of what you're choosing to make your fellow citizens endure
This is a problem with your conceptualization you believe that I am in the minority of my citizens / neighbors, you can not comprehend that people in the US may not want to live like you live in Cardiff.
You believe that because I oppose something in my small neighborhood, of which the sidewalks on my street would have zero impact of the walkablity of my street, means I am some how keeping the poor down...
In reality all of my neighbors, agree with me..
What about it is a prison? Go on Streetview for Cardiff or any British city, show me what you regard as prison-like. I don't understand what you could possibly be talking about.
(Apart from the literal HMP Cardiff of course, but nobody goes there unless found guilty by a jury of twelve)
There's a reason I refer to Streetview so much: I can point to very specific concrete things (often literally made of concrete), instead of getting lost in abstractions and rhetoric (I notice you didn't even address what I said about the shitty bus stops, probably because you know they're indefensible). So show me the bars of my prison, tell me about the shadows on the cave wall.
>I guess that is a chicken vs egg statement. I dont think they actually would, and I believe the "demand" for sidewalks is a very small minority of the taxpaying base. If it was not there would be more puch for it in Local Politics which is far easier to get things like that through.
>Chances are though to it would require a tax bond initiative on the ballot, which I suspect would have a VERY VERY VERY poor chance of succeeding, thus no funding to do it. People often claim they want sidewalks right up until they have to vote to increase their property, sales, or income taxes to pay for them.
This is just another way of saying your political system is completely broken. What you're describing is not competent governance. Why do sidewalks require a referendum? And moreover, why don't roads? Why don't you need to vote for every little new road that gets built, but you do have to vote for every new sidewalk? There's your answer for why the latter doesn't get built. If you needed a referendum and tax bond initiative to build street lighting, that wouldn't get built much either. Democracy drives in darkness.
And might I remind you, given the talk of taxes: the federal gasoline tax comes nowhere close to paying for roads, the way it's theoretically supposed to. It's been fixed at the same per-gallon rate for 30 years, hasn't risen with inflation (93% since then), presumably because voters like you don't want it to go up. Road building and maintenance comes out of an increasing share of general funds each year. Non-drivers subsidize you.
>Also for the record, I find "Strong Towns" to be propaganda not serious research or journalism or what ever...
You can just look at the photographs in the articles, they speak for themselves. You can't just call something "propaganda" because you don't like its point of view.
>You desire greater population density
Greater than what?
>more closely packed cities
More closely packed than what?
I don't want to live in the Kowloon walled city, if that's what you think. I don't like tower blocks (they're usually a false economy). There's a happy middle ground in these things.
>and everything to be walkable so a person a work, live and shop in a small area.
And yeah, what's wrong with being able to work, live, and shop in a small area? You seem to have this fevered delusion that I'm somehow imprisoned in my neighbourhood, that I'm forced to shop locally, but that simply isn't the case. I can do things nearby, and I also can go further afield if I want (which I in fact do), and I have the choice to walk, bike, take a bus, taxi, train, or indeed drive. There are cars going back and forth on the road next to my house right now, they're not impeded in the slightest. The difficulties in getting around that I do have are -- you guessed it -- caused by excessive car infrastructure more than anything else. In the manner of Archimedes: give me a protected bike lane long enough, and I shall circumnavigate the Earth.
On the other hand you can't do things nearby, and you must go far afield, and you must drive to get there. You have objectively fewer options, which makes you less free.
And you must always carry official travel documents, and produce them on demand to armed officers of the state, with severe penalties for refusal. Whereas I go about as I please, breathing free English air, carrying no identification, and never hearing the snarl of "papers, please"; a continental despotism which here thankfully has never taken root. In a country dependent on the car, driving licenses are tantamount to internal passports. How's that for an open-air prison?
>I, and many other Americans, find population density to be a BAD thing, we do not want to live all stacked on each either. I own a 3/4 acre (about 3000 sq meters) of land where my home sits. That is the absolute minimum I would accept, and I am actively looking for a homestead that is 4+ acres (16000 sq meters)...
That's great! I really don't have a problem with you living out in the middle of nowhere with a big house. There's a lot to be said for that way of living.
But I will say this: there's density, and then there's density. One of the good things about low density, I'm sure you'll agree, is that, per person, you have lots of beautiful nature and open places around you, that you can enjoy. But quality is important too, not just quantity. Look at Peoria: there certainly is a lot of area per person, but it's low quality: it's "space", but it's not "place". Most of it is surface parking, or sad little disconnected patches of grass on which no child will ever play a ball game, with no actual nature or biodiversity, or similar ugly and unpleasant non-places that no human being can enjoy. The actual nice public places seem pretty sparse, and have to be shared by a lot of people, as if it were high density anyway. So it seems to be the worst of both worlds: all the downsides of low density (increased distances, worse walkability), but not much upside.
As for private acreage, again: it's possible to have that, without the miles and miles of surface parking. I really have no problem at all with big houses in outlying districts, my problem is with extravagantly wasteful land-use patterns in productive urban cores. That, and unsafe-by-design roads.
>This is a problem with your conceptualization you believe that I am in the minority of my citizens / neighbors, you can not comprehend that people in the US may not want to live like you live in Cardiff.
I get that not everyone wants to live in an extremely dense city (and Cardiff is not such a city). But I don't think most Americans are quite as explicitly hellbent as you about low-density living. I think most people just want a pleasant and affordable place to live, where "pleasant" might amount to many possible things. People can enjoy low density and high density at the same time, without any contradiction; they will weigh the benefits and drawbacks against one another. And I suspect many literally don't even realize what a good walkable city can be, because they haven't lived in one and don't know what they're missing. For example, I've spoken to someone who literally thought I made an enormous measurement error when I said I could walk to buy groceries because there are so many shops within 10 minute walk. He asked me to double check that it really was 10 minutes and really was half a mile and there really were so many in that radius. The idea was foreign, it had never occurred to him that this might be possible and easy and normal, in a place that isn't like Manhattan or something (and I found Manhattan fairly unpleasant when I visited fwiw, it's not the kind of urbanism I like). Low density suburbia was all he knew.
(That's part of why that "Not Just Bikes" channel got so popular -- what it depicts is so mundane, yet so foreign to so many people's experiences. And East Berliners didn't know they liked bananas, until the Wall fell and they tasted them.)
So maybe this "lack of comprehension" runs both ways.
nothing today, it is slipply slope that is enables. Which I am sure you reject.. (I am also a pro-gun rights person for many of the same reasons. something i am sure you will also reject.)
I have no trust, faith, or desire for government control. 15min cities enable government control
>>This is just another way of saying your political system is completely broken. What you're describing is not competent governance.
We go back again to you jumping to the conclusion that your method is the correct way, and no other ways are valid. This is the biggest thing I am trying to get through here. People have have different views than you, and that is ok. It is broken, evil, or wrong for us to have a different from of governance,
One where government is limited, extremely so.
>Why don't you need to vote for every little new road that gets built, but you do have to vote for every new sidewalk?
Many locations you would, any project that would require the local city to take on long term debt would need to be voted on by the public assuming that debt. This is why it is a bond initiative. Most Local governments in my area are required by law to have balanced budgets. In my area the city government must submit a Budget to the state at year before, from that local tax rates are set to give the city the money they requested. For a large capital projects that require the city to take out debt (i.e issue bonds) they must go to the tax payers for approval for that.
Outside of that new roads are often created by developers wanting to develop land, the city requires developers to "improve" the roads near the new development as part of approving their zoning and permits, Sidewalks can be included in that requirement which would not need tax payer approval
I find this system to be very functional and the correct way to ensure governments to overspend the public money and go in massive debt like our Federal government has.
>And might I remind you, given the talk of taxes: the federal gasoline tax comes nowhere close to paying for roads, the way it's theoretically supposed to. It's been fixed at the same per-gallon rate for 30 years, hasn't risen with inflation (93% since then), presumably because voters like you don't want it to go up. Road building and maintenance comes out of an increasing share of general funds each year. Non-drivers subsidize you.
That is the federal gas tax, which only pays for federal roads which is like 10% of the paved surface in the US none of which have any sidewalks at all, and all prohibit non-motorized travel of any kind. Seem odd to bring up in a conversation about sidewalks.
Further the federal gas tax is not the only tax that is (or suppose to be) ear marked for Road Maintenance, other taxes and fees include Wheel Taxes, Sales Taxes on Cars, Tolls, Excise Taxes on Vehicles. I can assure all of these taxes have gone up.
Per Gallon gas based taxation is very out dated and not the only revenue source for roads. In the light of the push for EV's needs to be replaced completely
>> I said I could walk to buy groceries because there are so many shops within 10 minute walk
This sounds like you go to multiple places to buy these things, all with in 10misn of each other. People I know that live in walkable cities live a very different life style that is of no interest to me, which includes shopping for "fresh" food daily or multiple times per week, going to small specialize shops (for example a baker, butcher, etc) instead of a supermarket.
I like, and prefer being able to go into one store where I can buy my Milk, Meat, Potatos, a Tent, a new Appliance, a Rug, a new TV, ammo, and anything else I may need for a 2 for 4 week interval where I make that trip no more than once per week.
More recently I like not even having to go into those places, I order online pull out outside in my car they load it up for me and I drive away, shopping for 1-2 weeks of supplies takes 10mins to pickup...
I thought you might say something like that. You can't actually point to anything real, so you retreat to vague paranoid insinuations. Well, monsters tend to live in shadows, because when you turn on the light you see they're not real. And it may surprise and please you to know that I'm pro-gun too; I wish we had 2A here. Once upon a time, England had gun laws that would make Texas look effeminate. And as a practical matter, I think fewer drivers would make dangerous close passes if I had a loaded rifle strapped to my back.
>15min cities enable government control
You have to carry government-issued ID to go anywhere in your car, which for you means anywhere at all. Armed officers of the state can arbitrarily intercept you and demand to see your papers. Tell me more about "government control".
>I find this system to be very functional and the correct way to ensure governments to overspend the public money and go in massive debt like our Federal government has.
Then why do so many cities have so many unfunded road maintenance liabilities? The potholes you complain about.
How can you call the system "functional", when it produces roads that are 10x deadlier than a normal country?
Besides, you're ignoring most of the story[1]. Most highway and road spending comes from federal and state funds, not local. A lot of that is interstate highway spending, but also a lot of it isn't.
And if you're so concerned about government overreach, you must surely be against mandatory parking minimums, where local governments compel private businesses to over-provide free parking. Or are you okay with it, because it makes your life more convenient?
>That is the federal gas tax, which only pays for federal roads which is like 10% of the paved surface in the US none of which have any sidewalks at all, and all prohibit non-motorized travel of any kind. Seem odd to bring up in a conversation about sidewalks.
I brought it up because the tax isn't enough to cover the cost of those paved surfaces. By your stated preference for fiscal responsibility, the gas tax should be at least 93% higher (and probably higher still, because there are more highways now than there were in 1993).
Again, you seem to demand everything pay for itself, except the things you personally benefit from. Everyone's a socialist about what he loves best.
>Further the federal gas tax is not the only tax that is (or suppose to be) ear marked for Road Maintenance, other taxes and fees include Wheel Taxes, Sales Taxes on Cars, Tolls, Excise Taxes on Vehicles. I can assure all of these taxes have gone up.
They still don't cover the cost, and at any rate they're unlike the gasoline tax in that they are taxes on one-time purchases, not ongoing use (aside from tolls, which are so rare they hardly bear mention, and at any rate tend to demonstrate by revealed preferences that people place a very low dollar value on driving). The gasoline tax is the closest thing to a Pigouvian tax on the externalities of motor traffic: road wear, pollution, noise, congestion. However, I agree it needs reform with the advent of EVs.
>This sounds like you go to multiple places to buy these things, all with in 10misn of each other.
I don't. Most of the time I go to one, sometimes two (they're practically next door to each other). Sometimes I go to a different one, if it's on the way back from an unrelated journey.
> People I know that live in walkable cities live a very different life style that is of no interest to me, which includes shopping for "fresh" food daily or multiple times per week,
Why the scare-quotes on "fresh"? It is fresh, I can tell it's fresh, I know what fresh food tastes like. I'll tell you what's not fresh: whatever's been sitting in your fridge for 2 weeks.
What's wrong with going multiple times a week? I mean I get that you personally don't like that, and that's perfectly alright, but what is objectively wrong with it? It's not a hassle to do that when it's close by, and you don't need to buy much. I go once or twice a week. Does that offend you somehow?
Other people can, and do, shop less frequently, taking their car and stocking up on large amounts, just as you do. My parents buy food for 1-2 weeks. I could do it if I wanted to, but I simply don't.
What are you trying to imply by all this?
It's becoming a little exasperating talking to you, that I need to spell out these quite mundane matters of existence, and reassure you that there aren't sinister forces at work. Like .. there aren't secret police who disappear you because you didn't pick up your mandatory rations three times a week. You can buy food the way you like. Frequently or not frequently. By car, or bike, or public transport. You can go in person or get it delivered. Do you get it?
>I like, and prefer being able to go into one store where I can buy my Milk, Meat, Potatos, a Tent, a new Appliance, a Rug, a new TV, ammo, and anything else I may need for a 2 for 4 week interval where I make that trip no more than once per week.
You can do that here!!! My goodness. Well it's usually not one giant store but it would be like 2-4 reasonably large stores literally right next to each other in a retail park. But I'm sure you could manage ... you'd walk about the same distance indoors. We have malls (shopping centres) too, except you can also bike or take public transport, if you want. And ours are doing okay, the "dead mall" phenomenon mostly isn't a thing here.
>More recently I like not even having to go into those places, I order online pull out outside in my car they load it up for me and I drive away, shopping for 1-2 weeks of supplies takes 10mins to pickup...
Yeah same here. You can do all that. Easily. The 15 minute city Stasi have not yet extinguished this ancient rite.
[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
TIL history is not real, and learning from history is paranoia... nice...
>>And it may surprise and please you to know that I'm pro-gun too; I wish we had 2A here. Once upon a time, England had gun laws that would make Texas look effeminate. And as a practical matter, I think fewer drivers would make dangerous close passes if I had a loaded rifle strapped to my back.
That does surprise me, and Texas is effeminate, contrary to the public persona of Texas being "Ultra conservative" they are not, The red states of the MidWest are far far more "red" than Texas.
>>you must surely be against mandatory parking minimums, where local governments compel private businesses to over-provide free parking. Or are you okay with it, because it makes your life more convenient?
In general I am against all government regulations that do not protect the personal or property rights of individuals against harm, theft or fraud. So not I do not support compelling private businesses to provide free parking.
>Most highway and road spending comes from federal and state funds, not local.
Highway funding sure, Highways are owned by the Federal and State governments.
Highways do not have sidewalks so I am not sure why that is relevant. Roads with sidewalks are 100% funded by local tax revenues.
>>They still don't cover the cost,
They would if they were 100% used for roads only... they not though
>>Again, you seem to demand everything pay for itself, except the things you personally benefit from. Everyone's a socialist about what he loves best.
>> and at any rate they're unlike the gasoline tax in that they are taxes on one-time purchases, not ongoing use
100% false, of the taxes I listed only one of them are on one-time purchases (sales), I pay excise and property taxes annually on my vehicle(s), I pay things like wheel taxes, and other related taxes annually. Further excluding sales taxes on Automobile for road maintenance seems to be odd to me. Why would those taxes not count?
I never said I disagreed with raising the user taxes, I said I believe they already collect enough to cover the roads and instead they appropriated the money in correctly to other programs. If however there an actual need for more money they I would support that provided they are actually using the money for the roads and not just adding it to the general fund where by they use it for pet projects and continue to ignore the road.
>>It's becoming a little exasperating talking to you, that I need to spell out these quite mundane matters of existence, and reassure you that there aren't sinister forces at work
you have confused the order of conversation here. You are the one wanting to use governmental force to impose your preferred life on to others via government regulated and owned roads, sidewalks, etc
I want to leave that up to individual property owner to choose for themselves if that is what they want.
IF you want to create, and with other create a walkable city, through voluntary cooperation more power to you, however it seems you do not want anyone to be able to have a non-walkable city, you believe that is "barbaric" or something close to that, and those types of communities should be abolished.
I think both can and should exist, that is the point I have been trying to get across and in all of your comments you have done nothing but attempt to justify the use of government to impose your preference, while in an odd and convoluted way twisting my comments to where me not wanting government to do something is some how forcing others to live my way. They are free to use non-governmental resources and voluntary exchange on their property to put in sidewalks, they are free to advocate other do the same, but they should not be free to force me do follow them via government.
(but I'm fine with streets with no sidewalks, as long as the speed limit is appropriately reduced to 10 mph or so to make walking safe. Otherwise how are kids to walk to school and back?).
Time and weight consume road and sidewalk infrastructure.
[1] - Not Just Bikes
Denser inner-city areas generate much more tax revenue with less cost of services because they have to cover a smaller area, and this can be solvent and subsidises the suburbs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI "Suburbs are subsidized: Here's the Math"
NB. the last time I linked this on HN someone dismissed it as "Strong towns propaganda" claiming that if suburbs didn't exist, everyone would starve. They completely failed to respond to followup questions about cities which are not sprawling suburbs and are not starving. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238666
I’ve written about them before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599508
For convenience, they include: Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) among others.
Lafayette, Louisiana[2] (the city from the video I linked) has 121k people in an area of 56 square miles for a density of 2.1k people per square mile, but a metro area population of 478k people over a metro area of 3,400 square miles with a density of 140 people per square mile of services.
Arlington has a median family income of $131k, Lafayette has a median family income of $54k (both from the same Wikipedia pages). Just the urban parts - roads covering 5.5 square miles in Arlington vs 56 square miles in Lafayette, but they've got a quarter of the population density who are less than half as wealthy paying taxes to maintain them. I don't know how it's funded for roads in the 3,400 square miles of suburban area.
Watertown has 35k people in 4 square miles, Lincoln has 7k people over 15 square miles with a median family income of $202,704 - these hardly seem to fit "sprawling car dependent suburbia"? I haven't looked very hard because internet argument, but I'd be surprised if the 7k people in Lincoln have their own dedicated fire service, hospital, ambulances, sewage works, dump, salt gritters, dual carriageway highways for moving cities worth of vehicles, and so on public services that a big city with 20x the population would need, which Lincoln likely shares with other places or just doesn't have.
Sounds more like SimCity metric than what a real life city should care about.
The fact that there are less cars on the road already is a HUGE benefit to them. Less cars => less parking lots and less noise pollution => less maintenance costs => savings for tax payers.
For another bikes take up ~half the space of a car going in the same direction. So the inclusion of bike lanes and their usage would only improve traffic because it removes the actual cause of traffic (cars) from the road.
You sound like you're assuming that, given more bike lanes, 50% of the traffic will ditch their cars and ride bikes. (At least, your logic doesn't work without that assumption.) I don't think that's a valid assumption.
There's been road diets, where they've been reduced to single lane, and these had had no effect on travel time. Did reduce crashes a lot, less of that aggressive jostling for position, just cars chugging along calmly in single file.
There's been years long construction on a few big buildings, blocking whole lanes, forcing cars into single file; absolutely zero effect on travel times.
When there's snowfall, only middle lanes are cleared. Zero effect on traffic flow.
Imho traffic flow is pretty much determined by number of cars and number of intersections, and very little by number of parallel lanes. So much room for dedicated bike or bus lanes, it's really AND/AND, really everybody wins, and it's such a tragedy that my city just doesn't seem to understand that. All it takes is paint and bollards.
I was mostly objecting to the comment up-thread implying that bike lanes are inherently win win. They can be a good idea on net while increasing driving times.
But I definitely agree with you that we could probably 1/100th the size of roads (and open up a whole lot of space for property development), if everyone biked everywhere. (Not useful as a goal, just useful as an idea for space requirements.)
Of course you could choose to drive anyway, but as long as people have the option to rely less on their cars it's a net win.
That is, you are okay with giving up low-value car transportation lanes for valuable bicycle lanes, yes?
You may be interested in Braess's paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox describe it as "the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it."
That Wikipedia entry gives a few examples where closing roads helped automobile throughput, and links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand for more details about how building more highways fails to reduce congestion. ("the more highways were built to alleviate congestion, the more automobiles would pour into them and congest them and thus force the building of more highways – which would generate more traffic and become congested in their turn in an ever-widening spiral that contained far-reaching implications for the future of New York and of all urban areas").
Thus feels very much like there are net-negative transportation lanes which can be replaced by bicycle lanes and improve your transit rates.
Are you against removing those lanes? Are you against experiments to determine where those lanes might be?
As for the rest of your comment, you live in an area designed for cars, so of course cars are essential for your daily life. If you don't know what you're missing, it's easy to overlook how other solutions exist.
I happen to live in a walkable part of my city. Our health care center is 4 blocks away. The urgent care center is about a mile away. Both are walkable, even with two stroller-age kids, which we've done.
When we've needed to get to the hospital in a hurry, we've used a taxi. The savings in not having a car more than pays for both a bus pass and the occasional taxi.
We've got a good bus system, so when the weather is horrible, people switch from walking or bikes to buses when going to work.
We get our groceries delivered - again, the cost of delivery is less than the cost of owning a car.
And since we live in a walkable area of the city, we used strollers to move babies around, including on the bus, and to get to preschool. (We had several choices within walking distance.)
The big box store is about 10 minutes away by bus, and it's 5 minutes to the bus stop. When we've bought something big, we pay for delivery and removal of the old item, but car/truck rentals are also possible.
Nor must one be without a car to live here. We have several neighbors with a car, parked in the parking garage on our block. Instead, we've made the choice to not have a car.
While you don't have that choice. You are stuck, just like most people in the US. It's no wonder you interpret any talk about opening other possibilities as a diminishment of your life.
But on the other hand, having everyone's life organized around the way you personally want it diminishes the ability for people who want a car free life, and for those who for whatever reason cannot drive.
Consider that in a few years your kids will need you or another adult to drive them to all the places they want to go. The proverbial soccer mom is an unpaid chauffeur, and likely needs an extra vehicle for that purpose.
While my kids will be able to walk, bike, or take a bus, on their own, even as 10 year olds. I'll be able to send them to the store to pick up a missing ingredient for dinner. If they get bored they can walk 6 blocks to the library, or to a park to play, or to the local youth arts and culture center, or the swimming pool, or visit friends.
What will your kids be able to do?
The problem is solved by cars but only because it was created by cars. People used to have bigger families and walk to the grocery store.
No. Usage taxes and registration fees only cover ~37% of the cost of the roads.
"In 2020, state and local motor fuel tax revenue ($53 billion) accounted for 26 percent of highway and road spending, while toll facilities and other street construction and repair fees ($22 billion) provided another 11 percent. The majority of funding for highway and road spending came from state and local general funds and federal funds." - https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
The remaining ~63% comes from other sources, including property taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes which bikers pay either directly or indirectly (eg, through rent).
I would bet dollars to donuts that 99.9+% of cyclist fatalities are cars hitting cyclists. (As opposed to cyclists hitting pedestrians. If there are any driver deaths from cyclists hitting cars I will eat my shorts)
Car lanes are paying money for people to skip those places and only go to one place at a time without drawing them to other places in the same area. If I'm driving to the store, I'm driving... To the store. I'm not going to walk around outside of the store after I'm done. This has no benefits for adjacent businesses.
Car lanes bring more customers from far away locations etc. etc.
You can make the other argument... but can you bring the other data for it?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI&ab_channel=NotJu...
(I was 100% expecting that lol).
Let me spell it out. I was looking for peer-reviewed publications. I am not going through an ad-infested StrongTowns video to hunt for references.
He has links to his Patreon, paid-subs on Nebula, and donations but zero links to any peer-reviewed articles. That says a lot.
Where are your "peer-reviewed publications" that prove I'm wrong. How about let's see that first, since you've provided nothing (not even an argument) for why I'm wrong. You just stated you could make the argument, and you yada yada yada'd your way through the rest of the point:
> Car lanes bring more customers from far away locations etc. etc.
How about you fill out the etc's with some peer-reviewed publications?
You don't know how to install an ad-blocker?
Are bike manufacturers operating the bicycles for profit?
> What about Big Walking Shoe…
Are they operating the shoes for profit?
Or is it the citizens, taxpayers if you will, operating the shoes and bikes as part of their “social contract” with the city?
Now, are the citizens of SF owning and operating robocars as part of this social bargain or is it for-profit entities 100% doing it to extract income from the citizens?
Not that I’m saying profit as an incentive is wrong but you do see the difference in these two things, right?
Insufficient. They'll only count it as part of the cost of doing business.
I think every person director or above at these companies should be eligible to be delayed at random for a time equal to the total human-minutes of delay caused to transit riders and people in private vehicles. If a driverless vehicle blocks a train with 60 riders for 15 minutes, those directors and executives should in aggregate spend 15 hours not able to go wherever they want to go, and in a way which they are unable to schedule in advance.