Their chief priority is profit, isolation and creating a sense of elitism. Public transit is incompatible with all that. So we need buses that are set up like casinos with live bands
Public transit is incompatible with all that.
“Take that, you lowlifes! I don’t stay in same cabin as you filthy people, because I am have a gold card that lets me travel to work with way more comfort than you!”
Look, I know I’ll never be allowed in the gold card room, but if that’s what it takes to get robust public transit in the U.S., I’m good with it.
There are some countries that offer a more luxurious experience on the rails by offering higher class cabins, similar to an airline.
I think the real reason is because they’re hooked on Lighting McQueen R34.
Or at least, I feel morally fine with dropping that accusation.
Here is a review of the gold class : https://www.businessinsider.com/dubai-metro-gold-class-experience-review-2018-2?r=US&IR=T#the-verdict-21
I am disapointed. There is no gold.
Carcels vs. trainchads
The previous Italian government appointed Cingolani, someone with strong ties to ENI (an infamous Italian multinational energy company with a history of oil leaks and bribes) to the the so-called “ecological transition”.
The current Italian government has cut the subsidies for public transportation and has announced public funding for a renewal of privately-owned cars.
There is no way out of this. The last CEO will die whispering, “profits are up, though.”
to be fair the current italian government are also fascists
I read in a book that the current system of drivers acting on their own without something coordinating their every move is actually 75% as efficient as a fully coordinated system.
Therefore, the benefit obtained with all people using self driving cars is nothing compared to just improving public transit or improving car infrastructure.
I don’t know what book that was or what metrics its using, but my local intersections could easily pass 3x the current number of cars per green light if they accelerated together, and right away.
The number of people who poorly merge and cause traffic shockwaves, how slow cars drive in the fast lane, the accidents caused by human error. Really curious how they came to that 75% number.
I was slightly wrong. From page 237 of Algorithms to Live By, The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, further referencing the paper How Bad is Selfish Routing? by Roughgarden and Tardos, it says that
“…the “selfish routing” approach [of cars] has a price of anarchy that’s a mere 4/3. That is, a free-for-all is only 33% worse than perfect top-down coordination.”
Anyways, the way they got to that number is mathematical game theory. In this case people will choose the fastest route which happens to not be so bad.
It’s also very possible that what they’re concluding is significantly abstracted, but I haven’t read the source reference to know for sure.
That’s on the macro level with decision making. I think, coordinated has another advantage on the micro level, the traffic jams will move as one without waiting for information spread from the head, the accidents are less likely to happen and jam even more.
Having said that, I’d still prefer a good and technologically advanced tram network to any amount of cars 🥲
Just the number of people being moved on a bus or light rail for a given amount of space tosses that efficiently number away.
Exactly. The point it was making is that perfect top-down coordination takes a ton of resources for a whole lotta nothing.
I don’t think cars are ever going away, even if public is the main transportation method. Which obviously sucks, but it’s the way it is.
I’ve always imagined a protocol that lets cars communicate their planned speed. I’m pretty sure this is how cars will work in the future. A decentralized mesh of coordinated vehicles. This means that cars can:
- Maximize constant speed time, improving energy consumption and traffic flow.
- Minimize distance between vehicles based on speed and acxeleration while complying with safety standards.
- Connect to devices such as semaphores in order to tell if the vehicle will pass or not, to make a better decision.
- Connect to other mesh devices such as AI cameras that feed events to the vehicle mesh.
Public is obviously the best option though. Imagine a city with no streets, only subterranean public transportation. You wouldn’t even need such a large public transportation system, cities would be a fraction of the current size. I wonder what percentage of the area of a city is wasted on streets.
In the 90s in school, I did a report and imagined computers would be too expensive to have in every car, so the road itself would have wireless infrastructure to control the cars.
Sounds like a use case for SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS!
A hybrid system would be cool. I could see a future where electric vehicles could link up to a pod like train cars for long trips along standard routes, and schedule automated disembarkation for their “stops” to continue the rest of the way to their destination. Full autonomous driving is a difficult problem be a lane pods of this nature could be quite efficient and easier to automate
PRT is kinda like this, but they don’t link together.
With a few exceptions, US housing is so sprawled out that I don’t know how we could do an effective train system. As things presently stand where I live, there’s a decent train system, but most people have to travel several miles to get to the nearest station. For many, the park and ride concept works ok, so I suppose that reduces traffic a little bit.
I work in a corridor that lies between two lines with no public transportation anywhere near it.
I guess adding a shiton of buses from residential neighborhoods to train stations would help, but the time that would take would meet with enormous resistance from those who would rather sit in stop and go traffic in the comfort of their giant eighty thousand dollar pickup trucks (in which they are invariably up to their ears in debt)
Under current infrastructure, my twenty minute commute would take over three hours each way on public transportation, and I’d have to be in good enough shape to ride a bike a couple miles to the nearest bus stop, not taking rain snow ice or sweltering summer heat into consideration.
It can be better, but I don’t know that it can be ideal as suggested in the OP without compelling several million people to move closer to the city center.
It takes me a good 15 minutes just to walk out of my large subdivision. And then we’re outside of city limits and down a country road (there are corn fields), so it would probably take me another half an hour to 45 minutes just to get to a place where a train is feasible, let alone has a station there. And there’s no sidewalks.
There’s a city bus now. If we wanted to ride it, and we would, it’s a 5 mile walk. And crossing a four-lane highway would be required.
I would love a robust U.S. train network, but it wouldn’t help me get groceries from the supermarket to my house and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to make that walk in the middle of February around here. Cars are just going to be needed in the U.S. for all the people who don’t live in cities.
A bike could make that hour-long walk into a 15 minute ride.
This is a wonderful and naive statement. I would die within a week if I tried getting around on a bike. The only bikes I ever see on my commute are set out in memorial of people who died there on the roadside.i have lived in many places where bikes and public transportation were great, but reality is very different in many other places.
I am very much aware. I only intended to highlight that public transport doesn’t have to visit every last corner of the suburbs, given proper infrastructure and traffic regulations.
Indeed, that’s also partially a problem outside of the US in more rural parts of many countries. If governments made moving closer to the city center more compelling then I’m sure that lots of people would do so naturally with time. But that would require some actual thought, lots of planning, time and money. It’s not easy to un-fuck decades of bad city planning, especially in the US with it’s myriad of other, connected problems.
That’s a tram
That is 100% a streetcar.
77a? I guess that’d be okay. But I want 77b on the T-T-TTC
T R A M
the line between train and tram is very blurry
I think the point of this meme was that you must either train your models or use train (trams/streetcars/metro/tube etc.)
Allow me to throw in a viable alternative: bus
Relying on buses that get stuck in traffic isn’t great
I disagree. My city has a dedicated bus lane that essentially goes from one end to the other, and if more people were using the bus, well, that’s even less traffic.
Trains are the perfect solution to move people between hubs, but it still doesn’t solve for the last mile problem - which could be solved very effectively with self driving cars (buses, bikes and scooters can work too but based on the usage it can be a mix of all).
I would love a self driving car that would drop me off at the train station, then take itself back home until I return.
The last mile problem exists for cars too, we just don’t think of parking in that way.
How far do you park from your home?
Not very far, thanks to the minimum parking requirements that are a subsidy to car owners and strangling the US.
No one needed any minimum parking requirements to make my house’s built-in garage and I’ve noticed driveways and garages in homes in the other countries I’ve been to as well, so I’m not so sure you’re right about that.
My bad, like most people my age, I have to rent my housing because of the massive amounts of debt I was saddled with early on in the promise for a better life. Suburbs are a different, related problem. It’s a reason why there’s so much urban sprawl, basically making a very expensive luxury item a requirement.
It’s called a very short walk indeed.
Parking lots are a taxpayer subsidy to cars and car owners. As an example, studies show that parking for apartments adds $245 per month onto someone’s rent because of minimum parking requirements.
The last mile problem is more like the last 15-30 mile problem for most Americans.
Good luck installing train stations and other public transport within 1 mile of all rural and urban sprawl. It sounds perfect for big cities but it quickly falls apart when you see how the rest of the country lives outside cities.
Additionally, most commercial vehicles that require delivering tools and equipment on-site will never be public transport based and will still be crowding streets.
Of course we need better public transport, but cars aren’t going away any time soon so let’s make them more efficient with smart coordinated movement.
I used to live out in the boonies, trust me when I say that public transit is more simple than you think in rural areas. There will remain the need for cars and trucks for rural areas, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have train stations going between county seats, busses between towns, and express trains to the nearest big city. Urban sprawl absolutely is a challenge to public transit while deprogramming our collective car brain, but the trick is to place transit where people are to where people want to go. Suburbs already answer 1 of those 2 sides in the equation.
This description of self-driving cars sounds like taxis, but less resource efficient, more error prone, and exclusive to those who can afford to own one.
Additionally, trams/streetcars have been solving the last mile problem since the 1800s. Sure, you run the risk of needing to walk 5 minutes instead of being driven straight to your destination, but I really don’t see how that justifies paving over millions of acres of land merely to have a convenient place to stick our cars.
My nearest bus stop is four miles away with no buses or bike lanes. I live inside the perimeter loop of a major US city.
That sucks. That’s why I think we should build more bus stops instead of millions of acres of parking lots and forcing everyone to spend thousands of dollars a year to own and operate their own personal heavy machinery.
the last mile problem is trivially solved by bus lines, bicycles, and just walking using the legs god gave you
It’d make more sense for it to give other people rides to/from the station when you’re not using it. Public self driving cars.
You could also walk, cycle, take a bus, or take a tram.
Absolytely! Options when you are traveling with small children or a lot of luggage are limited, so there’s still opportunities there.
Yea, but why not just have a transit station within a 2km radius that you can walk to/ bike to? No need to build expensive roads for cars. U’d get a much more efficient transportation infrastructure which also doesn’t require tech that hasn’t been perfected yet.
The last mile problem is much much bigger for cars. Where do u park ur cars? U need large parkings then. Parking spaces need a lot of space. Space that can be used for more housing, more commercial, more parks, etc.
The best last mile solution in this case is walking and biking. Walking doesn’t require parking. Bicycles do, but they require very very less parking space.
Also, due to the non motorized nature of these two modes of transport, the public stays healthier, thus drawing less resources from the public health infrastructure.
I could go on and on, but here’s like 90% of ur answer for the last mile problem.
Hey the Queens Quay streetcar. I recognize it even though the pic is slightly deep fried.
OP probably doesn’t know you need to wait 1h in line just to board it out of Union evening rush hour. And that’s assuming it doesn’t get stuck in snow, traffic, crash, etc. Toronto needs subways, and better optimized roads, not more streetcars.
I have literally walked faster than streetcars on multiple occasions!
As far as transit goes, the TTC should NOT be the model to follow. It’s better than nothing, but there’s better.
There was a young man who said, “Damn!
It is borne upon me that I am
An engine that moves
In predestinate grooves;
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.”Who are these “some people”. I don’t think it’s a majority. In fact most comments I see say the opposite.
Corporate propaganda is the “some people.” Electric/self-driving cars are more profitable than fixing or expanding public transit.
Lemmy faces selection bias, of course most people here are more partial towards public transit
But the general public is more mixed, and the technosphere of silicon valley etc very much favours the former.
Lol at Lemmy being a representation of the public.
Are you assuming that i would only be talking about Lemmy comments?
It’s what you hear a lot of on more mainstream media.
That’s a bim!
Subway or aerotrains are great tram just added more mess into the traffic and are dangerous for pedestrians.
Me a guy in infrastructure: hahahahaha… oh wait you were serious. Let me laugh even harder now.
Engineering is to a great extent accepting the givens. Cost disease grows more rampant by the year without showing any signs of letting up. There are ways to fix that but we aren’t going to do them. The reason why people are considering solutions like this is because better solutions aren’t possible any more.
Yeah so my crippled ass that can’t walk has to somehow get to the train station, then somehow get from the station to my destination, then back again, often times with a bunch of groceries or whatever. Or I could drive directly there and park in a handicap spot, then have a place to load the groceries into, saving me considerable pain and letting me get more done in a single trip
We do need better public transportation, yeah, but I am so tired of all the fuck cars people not giving a single shit about disabled folks
Nobody is saying you can’t own a car, we are just saying that it should not be expected that everyone own a car. There are also people with other disabilties, such as vision impairments, where a car does not work for them.
I care a lot about disabled folks in general, because I’m a 20-something who’s about 20 years away from being too blind to drive. Accessible public transit is essential for everyone, not just the able-bodied. Car-centric design is choking us to death, and a lack of good public transit will leave me stranded.
