Pre-empting, obviously many places still require cars, but we shouldn't codify cars into the building code. It makes everything that bit more expensive, and it's a waste of valuable city real estate.
At the moment the cost per square meter in Melbourne and my city means a single carspace is worth more than my salary. That's ridiculous.
Yeah its sounds great until you need mass transport system to support this idea which means only mega cities can benefit the most when tier 2 and tier 3 cities is having a hard time investment
see: japan
If anything, properly built small cities and towns are actually even better for public transit, since they're small. You don't need to cover a lot of ground.
Heck, everyone talks about self-driving taxis. Self-driving trains and buses, that's where it's at, actually. A decent chunk of the cost (and limitations) for public transit is the need for human drivers. Self-driving buses could have longer routes, could drive around the clock, etc, etc.
Ah, forgot, they could also be much smaller, but still cost effective. Think 10-15 places for smaller routes. That would do wonders for connectivity in more remote places.
Agreed, with the caveat that everything is crazy expensive now so smaller cities struggle to afford to build even a small amount of rail. We had excellent public transport in the 1900s, it was torn up for the automotive revolution, and now we can't afford to put even a 10th of it back. We struggle to put an extra station into an existing line, let alone new lines.
One of the big issues is that property is so expensive in the modern west that buying up the land to build is prohibitively expensive. The old game of private rail companies making money off property around public transit stops isn't working here at least, because property is already so unaffordable, there's no room for price growth.
(Edit: not that these necessarily need car parks, but they'll need to wait somewhere when they're not carrying passengers)
This claim has been made for years now and a number of big companies like Google, Uber and Tesla have tried to jump into this market, but does this hold up?
I vaguely recall a self driving taxi service being active in some areas, but how are they doing?
Anyway, static routes and stations work fine for big parts of e.g. the Netherlands, but you need a good structure of bus routes and transit hubs. It's a fact that it takes longer than driving for most trips though and IMO the cost should be a lot lower, but that's the tradeoff made.
It's not even remotely competitive, and for that reason private cars are used for some ridiculously high proportion of journeys (90% of passenger miles overall).
In the UK only 17% of commuters use public transport, and 5% use "other" including bicycle/motorcycle/taxi.
I think a lot of what you're saying can be solved with cheaper ebikes and better bike infrastructure. Even the rain :-)
If it rains a lot you put on a big bike poncho, which turns you into a big sail and slows you down, and that's where the <<e>>bike part of ebike comes in, since you pump up the assist and still go fast.
The consensus seems to be on my side in spite of lower share of total commutes, because housing near stations is significantly more expensive. From that I infer two things, public transport is desired, and there's not enough of it to support demand.
This is only because of the suburban sprawl we built not being compatible, but I agree it is a problem to solve one way or another.
Nothing in your argument goes against what I think edwcross's proposal was: "IF an apartment has parking, that parking must have charging."
Heck. I arrived by train from London to a town where I found the busses to the start of my walk were basically non-existent. Fortunately a taxi pulled up as I was trying to find a taxi service by cell as the train station didn't have any staff.
One of the positive things labour has done is allowed local authorities more control over this, which should help - I can also imagine them being very bad at communicating this if it does.
Of course I'd prefer a bunch more investment too, more train lines and go ahead with many of the previously touted tram schemes.
Or, an enterprising landchad could realize they can charge 10% more kWh than people actually pull (blaming efficiency losses), along with a healthy margin for "maintenance".
Lots can go wrong.