Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.

  • Farid@startrek.website
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    9
    ·
    2 months ago

    While I’m a strong proponent of reducing and possibly eliminating car use, this image is disingenuous. They neatly packed 69 (nice) people into a medium bus, sure. But when showing cars, it’s almost 1 persons per car (I counted 15 cars in a row and there are 4 rows, so 60 cars). You can definitely use cars more efficiently than that.

    Assuming that actually autonomous self-driving cars exist, they could be extremely efficient. Especially if you treat them like ride sharing taxis. In other words, a lot of people could share the same car and that would reduce the amount of owned cars. They also never waste space being parked. So I can see how when we make a real self-driving car, it can potentially reduce traffic. Especially for all those cases where public transportation doesn’t work.

    And what the heck is a “connected car”?

    • yimby@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      27
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      2 months ago

      Two facts:

      1. The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
      2. Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars. They will circle empty with no passengers and drive to pick up passengers empty (dead heading) even with a fully rideshare system. If there is widespread private ownership of autonomous vehicles (and you bet your butt that car companies will campaign for this aggressively to keep sales up), the dead heading problems only multiply. If you don’t believe me, look up any recent literature on the topic: by most accounts it will be worse, not better. Dead heading is only the tip of the iceberg of problems there.
      • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago
        1. The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
        2. Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars.
        1. Is that for rush hour? Because, overall, the national average is closer to 1.5

        2. Fully agree.

      • TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago
        1. How so? Wouldn’t autonomous cars disincentivize car ownership, meaning fewer cars that can be on the road?
        • dustyData@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 months ago

          See the argument of induced demand: “Oh everyone is using self-driving cars, that means there’s more space for my car!”

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        And what is the average occupancy of a bus in your North American city?

    • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      You can use cars more efficiently but by and large they aren’t.

      Also, you think people are gonna share a car? Fat chance. People would need to work out shared upkeep, time slots to have it, etc.

      We simply need to stop subsidizing cars which is the whole point here.

      • Farid@startrek.website
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        Doesn’t Lyft work sorta like that? Idk, it doesn’t operate in my country, but from what I’ve seen online, it’s several strangers sharing one ride.

        But after giving it more thought, I tend to agree with you on this. Except… After posting my comment I got curious and decided to calculate the efficiency of cars vs busses. I always assumed that they were way more efficient than cars (cause lugging around 2 tons of steel just to move 1 or a couple 70kg hairlines apes is stupid). But it turns out that busses only win if we compare it to cars with only one passengers. So basically, at half load, both are about equally efficient (about 10%). And on average a bus is only half full. Turns out, busses are really heavy… there’s of course the density, of course, and busses win if you give each passenger their own car, but if we pack cars fully, they will be significantly more efficient. Not to mention if you use smaller European cars that carry basically their own weight in passengers.

        So my conclusion is, to maximize efficiency in the future we should try to implement a system of highly packed smaller sized transportation devices.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          2 months ago

          There are multiple levels of efficiency or benefits here for the bus over the car

          • no worries about driving or parking
          • all incomes, ages and skill levels
          • can handle groups
          • can handle more people, such as at rush
          • don’t require street parking
          • don’t require parking lots
          • don’t require as many garages, gas stations, repair shops
          • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            2 months ago

            Thank you. You succinctly summarized what I was going to post. The cost to subsidize cars far outweighs whatever theoretical efficiency gains just from packing cars more densely.

        • daltotron@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 months ago

          Doesn’t Lyft work sorta like that?

          I’ve only ever heard of lyft being a normal taxi service where people just use their own cars they already own. Also, I dunno where you’re getting your numbers for the calculation you’re doing, that would probably be something good to include. You could say the same for everything I write, I guess, but none of my criticisms much have to do with the numbers, except for this: I dunno what “smaller european cars” you’re using. Most cars nowadays are like, 2 tons or so at the least, probably more, and you could maybe get one ton of human body weight, at the most, if you had several 250 pound chucks riding around in one car, which I don’t really imagine to be the case normally at all.

          There’s also an efficiency created by the “inefficient” route planning of the bus. By having something that travels in a loop, rather than having every individual travel to every individual point, we’re trading some amount of efficiency in terms of total time spent by everyone (theoretically, but this time is probably eaten up by increased amounts of car traffic in reality), and we’re trading that for a slight increase in the amount of foot traffic that people are collectively engaging in, which is probably a good thing. So that’s a total decrease in curb weight as a factor of total travel time, which is a decrease in road maintenance.

          You’re also probably looking at a massive decrease in mechanical maintenance for buses compared to cars, using one big engine, set of brakes, A/C systems, etc, rather than like 15-20 smaller non-standardized sets, and maintenance costs for the specific roads you’re traveling on via bus means you can engineer in less maintenance over time compared to a more spread out system.

          Density is also a pretty big consideration, because real estate downtown, i.e. the location most people are going to want to go, is at a high premium, both for people and for the city/state’s tax base. High density has the capacity to provide a sustainable tax base for the cost of providing utilities and maintenance by the city… Unless you park the series of autonomous cars all in some huge superstructure outside of town, and then basically just merge them straight into the highway, where you’d still have to overbuild and deal with a massive amount of car infrastructure (more than just the space you’d save on all this parking, since you could just have a couple pickup and dropoff spaces, if that, compared to all this other parking taken up downtown). I can’t really see it working out, and even at the normal densities we’d be looking at, I’d struggle to come up with a way by which it’s more efficient overall.

          There’s also other types of buses, if we’re just talking about emissions efficiency, or energy efficiency. Obviously an overhead electrified bus is probably the most desirable, just behind a tram or a streetcar or whatever. Then you have the weird stupid hybrid battery overhead-electrified buses that I hate, and then probably all your natural gas buses and diesel buses and whatnot, and then your pure battery buses.

          If we’re talking about autonomous vehicles, then we’re kind of also sidestepping all these questions about like, the scalability of the AI for this, and the computing power we’d have to use on that, constantly. We’d have to deal with the traveling mailman problem on a near constant basis, something which public transport can mostly sidestep by assuming passengers will come to it, and that public transit will be of a high enough density to create desirable locations simply by stopping there. We have all the pedestrian and cyclist traffic conflicts which we’d encounter, or else have to segregate from these cars entirely (something normal traffic already struggles to do adequately). And if we’re segregating the traffic entirely with a large amount of infrastructure, which definitely makes this much more achievable and easier, if still not easy, I think it makes more sense from a top down maintenance perspective to just go for trams or streetcars, or subways, or something like that.

          I think the only real way in which I can cook up a reason this might be done, is because it’s outsourcing costs onto the public, and onto the state. Road maintenance can be done by the city, or state. Probably, this would mean that the autonomous vehicles would not be segregated, which means it’s less of a good idea, which I believe, is the primary reason it hasn’t been done. Then, the taxi service could basically make a bunch of money on their highly necessary transportation, which they have created a large need for, simply by existing and demanding a large amount of infrastructure by existing.

          Use bicycles, e-bikes, and walking for individual pedestrian point to point travel. Fuck all the bullshit excuses people give about how, oh no it’s too hot out, too rainy, too hilly, what do I do with this cargo that’s not large or consistently arriving or departing enough to be loaded by a freight train, or by a professional truck, but isn’t so small that I can carry it, what do I do with all my kids, etc… Use cars sparingly enough to fill the very minor amount of gaps that can’t be bridged by bikes, cycling, and public transit, as a method of last resort. Mostly for people that would maybe need to live out in the boonies, like park rangers, maybe. Actual farms, not the stupid rich people playtime “ranches”, and industrial locations, they usually have a large enough cargo haul to justify a small freight train, or a large truck taking a small route to a freight yard.

      • drathvedro@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        In my country, the most popular taxi app(yandex) has an option to allow hitchhikers. If you and other person order a ride with this option on and a similar route, it will pick one of you then the other, and then drop each other off. Currently, the savings are not as good as I would expect, roughly 15-20% off for both, and there are hard limits like 2 minute wait time with no paid waiting, non-refundable order fee, only one person, no baggage, and this option only shows up if you’re either taking a long ride or if someone’s already riding one that somewhat coincides with yours. Sometimes, no second is found and the company, but mostly the driver, just have to eat the discount they gave you for enabling it. But, already as is, taxis are wrecking public transit and car ownership by utilizing cheaper immigrant labor. With scale they can potentially be filled more consistently and with more than 2 riders, and with autonomous cars there’s no need to pay the driver, even further reducing the cost. Also, never parking could massively increase throughput on some of the streets where there are entire lanes are filled with parked cars. At least in my city, this has enormous potential. The only problem is that competition is lacking, therefore reduced cost won’t necessarily result in lower prices.

    • IIII@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Every panel is flawed

      People don’t walk that closely together

      People don’t bike that closely together

      Only a double decker bus could fit that many people without cramming people in like sardines

      Moving cars should obey a safe following distance, so unless traffic is gridlocked, they shouldn’t be that close either

      • CEbbinghaus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        Bikes even if not packed as closely massively decrease the total volume. Even if they were all riding all after one another on a bike lane it would be miles shorter than cars on a road.

        And as for the bus… I have been on busses that full. You clearly have not travelled peak hour traffic on a busy route. Just look at any Japanese or Indian train to see how space efficient they are able to transport petiole

        • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          2 months ago

          Just look at any Japanese or Indian train to see how space efficient they are able to transport petiole

          “Space efficient” is a very kind euphemism for “being packed cheek by jowl and smelling what everyone had for lunch.”

      • Farid@startrek.website
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        2 months ago

        Things being close together isn’t really an issue here because it’s just meant to visualize the volume. They are not trying to paint a realistic scenario, I don’t think.

    • r_se_random@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      2 months ago

      I’d argue against that.

      The concept of robot taxi sounds nice, but it devolves into an unsustainable mess. Ride sharing isn’t simple, especially when we talk about uncertain way points. Meaningfully matching cases where people can share a robot car with completely random drop off is a logistical nightmare. I used to work at a Ride hailing company as an analyst, and people being unhappy with the duration of the shared ride was the biggest issue for that category (removing for generic cases like payment issues).

      Additionally, I’m sure it’s going to be a safety factor. I’m unlikely to get into a car with a random stranger when there’s literally no one else in the car. Miss me with trusting some corporate with safety in such cases.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 months ago

        I’ve done ride shares a few times with Uber and it went pretty well. Basically it only worked from downtown to the airport, as the only scenarios with similar routes. Maybe a sporting or music event would be the same, I don’t know

        • r_se_random@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 months ago

          I’m not sure what you mean here by Downtown.

          But again, if all you’re looking for is a good transport system from one high population density area (airports almost always are) to another high population density area, you’ll be better served by having a reliable and decently fast metro train or the likes, than a cab, as long as people don’t mind walking for 5-10 minutes from their closest stop. If that distance is higher, by all means taxis are amazing for last mile connectivity. But expecting cars to solve public transport at large has always looked like a losing battle to me.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            2 months ago

            Boston. I’ve gotten shared rides between downtown Boston and the airport but that’s the only scenario where I’ve been able to

            It’s also a bit of a cautionary tale on transit, because Boston managed to screw that up with too many connections making it take too long.

            • Subway. But only the blue line, no connection to red line, and you need to transfer to a bus.
            • silver line. Connects to red line only. Glorified bus, drives in regular traffic.
            • park and ride - no overnight parking.
            • AirPort Express bus. Only serves outer burbs

            If I want to goto the airport from my home in the inner ‘burbs:

            • commuter train is up to 2 hours apart, limited hours. Can head into town, walk a block or two to the blue line, wait as long as 20 minutes, take that to the airport. Wait up to 5 minutes for a shuttle, take that to the terminal. Not practical.
            • drive to red line. No overnight parking. Wait up to 20 minutes for subway, take it to silver line. Wait up to 20 minutes. Get stuck in traffic in the tunnels. Not practical.

            I have lots of great transit options but none that connect smoothly and frequently enough to actually use. This is better when living in the city but still all the connections and delays turn what should be a great transit experience into an impractical one. I’m going to end up driving to the airport every time (up to three day trip or Uber for longer)

            • r_se_random@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              2 months ago

              Never been to US, so I won’t comment on the specific infra.

              However, I have lived in multiple cities, and have seen multiple cities build their metro networks from scratch in 20 years. And they’ve been absolutely over and beyond what could’ve been achieved by any improvement in car infrastructure, apart from demolishing entire houses and shops to expand the roads on both sides.

      • Farid@startrek.website
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        Thank you, that is a very interesting insight. But besides sharing cars in parallel (multiple passengers at once) there can also be sequential sharing, which is, I understand, a regular taxi without a driver. But I think that high availability of cars like that, which are cheap, would still reduce the amount of car owners, and consequently increase public transportation utilization.

        • BakerBagel@midwest.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 months ago

          Why do something that complicated when bus and tram lines are way more efficient? Cities need to take the money they apend on subsidizing car ownership and invest it into mass transit.

        • r_se_random@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 months ago

          Sequential sharing isn’t sharing. That’s how any cab operators functions.

          The problems you’re mentioning aren’t problems with human drivers, but the problems with perfect allocation. Robo taxis won’t solve them.

    • TurboHarbinger@feddit.cl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      You’re correct sir, this thread is nothing more than shitty propaganda. Instead of, you know, going with actual real facts.

    • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      The solution would be autonomous single seat cars, similar to the podbike. They would only be like ~1m wide (3 feet) and could use mostly bicycle transmission hardware and be extremely aerodynamic at commuting speeds.

      Without needing steering you could also do two seaters with seats that face each other, so could also be low to the ground and narrow for aerodynamics.

      The majority should still be bus or tram or train but autonomous cars could unlock a lot of possibilities because they fill the gaps. We just haven’t seen the “correct” design for autonomous robo taxies yet.