Trains -- not driverless cars -- are the future of transportation
Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, "Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND."
I like how you assume that society will choose to have a future over self-immolation.
Yeah that's a bold assumption. My bet is on "it's going to get progressively worse and never better". I have yet to be proven wrong. Since the day I was born everything's been enshittening with only inconsequential cosmetic improvements (lol technology, what a joke).
If nothing else, car dependency is fiscally unsustainable. We might go kicking and screaming towards the solution, but eventually people will have no choice but to abandon the financial suicide that is making your city car dependent.
True, and I wish my city would realize it harder, sooner. On the other hand, I just read an article the other day that claims that the collapse of civilization has begun. A lot of societies throughout history perseverated with maladaptive habits after the local environment changed, and thus collapsed. A lot of them didn’t, though, and I hope that we’ll wise up in time.
Let me remind you that there are rural areas where people life in farms and need to drive to the factory they work in, there's no shuttle bus, no train no nothing, and while isolated factories exist this will still be the case. They can't really arrange a bus that goes to pick up their employees, since the roundabout would make it more gax expensive and some people live in places where a bus can't even dream to get in.
I wish things improved, and that this became a reality for cities, there's already cities in holland where getting the car in is prohibited, you need to leave it outside the city, but making car dependency fiscally unsustainable is punishing people that can't have the privilege to work on other stuff. Imagine electrical technitians, they can't take a bus/train/tram with machinery, even in a city. I'm all in for improvement and punishment for whim driving, but it needs to be regulated well not to fuck again poor people, because factory workers of rural areas aren't partcularly rich.
For reference, I live in a mountain area, Europe.
I especially like that this format of the meme removes the d-bag that is in the original.
I'm still not 100% on board with it because it still made me immediately think of that mentally, sexually, and maybe even physically abusive fuckhead.
Memes are so much better without the backstory. This was the first time I’ve seen it mentioned so I looked it up, and holy shit. Had no idea that was him, I’ve seen the name but not the face.
What is micromobility? I am unfamiliar with this term.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzd11GMBONg
He's still with us. Why isn't he doing stuff today? I feel like he'd be a huge YouTube star if he did his schtick reading Twitter threads or comment sections super fast. Stuff like that.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !micromobility@lemmy.world
Seems like all posts about e-bikes. Let’s see some pedal power!
Cars, but like, Hot Wheels size.
It's a relatively new term to refer to extremely small and lightweight vehicles generally used for short-distance rides. Things like bicycles, rollers, very small electric vehicles like e-rollers, e-bikes, segways etc.
Wasn’t there a toy in the 80s called Micromobiles?
We shouldn't take anything for granted. The US has happily killed it's cities for decades instead of investing in public transit. If we don't push for it, car companies and rich people will keep public transportation from ever taking off.
If remote work takes off, and ordering most everything online, I wonder if urban sprawl will get even worse.
Yeah, I live in a conservative state, and the state department of transportation stepped in and blocked my city from adding a few blocks of bike lanes. They want to get rid of everything "public;" transportation, schools, health, etc.
The more people try to "innovate" transportation the closer it gets to going back to trains. Driverless cars, for efficiency have them communicate with eachother, to accelerate and brake at the same time, for example. That's just less efficient and more expensive trains.
There's a massive failure condition for your example - sure, autonomous cars behave like trains when they communicate with each other to sync acceleration and deceleration, but they can also separate themselves from the collective to drive you to the door of your home. In the train metaphor this would be like you sitting in your own train car, and the train car separating from the rest of it and driving you to your doorstep.
Or you could have a train that drops you off either close to your home or close to a bus station that drops off near your home. This would require a walkable city, so it's definitely not as simple as just building tracks and bus stations. The issue is that Americans are so used to car dependent infrastructure, that when they try to imagine what public transport would be like, they think of it in the context of where they live. That's why I think so many are opposed to the idea. It's not an impossible task, it's just that it'd require money and effort, so it probably won't happen.
oh no, if only someone hadn't centralized like, a point, say, a station, where people could conveniently access the train of cars....
they could call it a... hmm.... TRAIN STATION?
You reinvented switches.
I think you miss part of transportation system that says system. It's more than one element.
How to not make a train out of cars:
Now you got Certanly Not A Train™.
Why it's certanly not a train? Because it still has terrible rollong resistance and low material efficiency.
That not true!
For some places rail is too expensive or inflexible. So you need driverless cars, but you can make them cheaper by not having so many of them, instead having really big ones, and since driverless is not ready we hire a human to drive for now.
So sometimes you get buses!
Good job with meme template, everyone needs to start adopting this format and not the one with the conservative fascist chud that abuses his wife.
I'm going to make the argument against trains for everything, despite being a huge fanatic for trains.
Trains are the most efficient transport method per tonne-km over land, yes. However from certain operational standpoints trains can make less sense than existing solutions.
When distance between stops for heavy rail becomes too short, you lose quite a bit of efficiency. Trains themselves aren't a one-size fits all solution as there are various types that each need their own form of investment (which is a lot $), when roads are compatible with both personal transport and large trucks with little investment by the transporter (govt pays for road maintenance).
Rail companies right now are chasing profits and neglecting operational improvements. In the US, hauling a long, LONG, old and slow train loaded with bulk aggregate, oil, grain, chemicals is more profitable than aiming for JIT capability that is more feasible with trucks. A complete change in societal incentives is necessary to bring back the usefulness of railway in all types of transport. Second, the North American way of railroad companies owning the tracks dissuades a lot of innovation and new firms from entering the market, unlike the "open road" where there are many competing OTR freight companies. None of the Big Six would like my idea of a nationally controlled rail/track system.
Electric motors are now capable of >90% regen, so the braking energy argument against short stops doesn't work anymore (and the energy during motion strictly less than a rubber tired vehicle with a worse aspect ratio so long as the trip is no longer).
The amount of rail needed for short distance distribution networks could still be prohibitive in regions designed for road though. Even then one could still argue that the total infrastructure costs are lower by moving the destinations slightly given how much roads cost to maintain.
Just to pick on one point, as a tangent, the government paying for roads with little cost to the freight carriers is a major, major problem. If the cost of transport is not factored into the cost of goods, it breaks the feedback mechanism of prices in the market affecting the supply of road transport, both per se, and in relation to other, possibly more efficient, means of transport. I came up with a reductio ad absurdum scenario to illustrate better: Imagine the government provided free air freight across oceans, without limit.
It’s pretty obvious what would happen: The logistics companies would abandon cargo ships, which cost them money, for the free air service. It would be horribly inefficient and wasteful, but that would not be their concern. We’d end up in the same situation that we are today with roads; our governments are going broke trying to pay for it. (In that world, I also imagine that people consider the service the normal baseline that they’ve structured their lives and businesses around, and can’t fathom ending it, just like roads in our world.
Anyway, passenger rail service has never been profitable. Railroads just operated passenger trains as a condition of being allowed to operate freight routes, which the government had subsidized with land giveaways. The question is whether passenger is more sustainable fiscally than roads for personal vehicles, and the survival of rail freight against massively subsidized road freight suggests that it would be. At least for longer, intercity routes.
Yes you've got a point. Part of this was an exercise to argue against something I really love and passionate about for the sake of "Change my Mind".
But that's part of the thing. If an organization paid for unlimited free air passenger and freight transport system, converting to better alternatives (on monetary cost, the environment and other bases) would be difficult to convince from people and logistics companies alike. If left alone, this sort of system would be unlikely to change until some devastating consequence made it unfeasible to switch at that point anyway. And in such a universe maybe we'd see more blimps in the sky.
So either road has to be regulated fairly and costs that were externalized get properly accounted for and renumerated, or railroad track has to be managed nationally, and provide fair access to communities large and small, in order for rail and wheeled vehicles to be on equal footing. Neither of these things I would expect to happen naturally, it must come from an organized effort somewhere.
Trains themselves aren't a one-size fits all solution as there are various types that each need their own form of investment (which is a lot $)
Trains(international and intercity), metro(across the city) and trams(across the city) - all of them use same wheels. They are not that different.
when roads are compatible with both personal transport
*(here personal transport excludes everything that is not a car)
and large trucks with little investment by the transporter (govt pays for road maintenance).
Maintanance is most expensive part of car infrastructure. At least between those that directly paid.
Wheels are 100% different on Heavy Rail, Metros and Light Rails.
In addition to that all 3 have different requirements for curves, runout and grades.
Source: my employer makes all 3.
Metrolink in California does really well though, even with everything you described above.
Metrolink, and the subway system in Los Angeles, shows that it is doable and within cost.
Corporate has corrupted the train system in the US. People have become secondary to company profits. I watched this a while back and couldn't believe the US has allowed this.
The railroads in a region have actually been removing rail so that many of the main lines are now single track instead of double or triple.
The future of transportation is no transportation.
How many car miles could be saved each year if people didn't have to go to the office to do their jobs? We were already most of the way there.
That... is silly. Things need to move.
So you expect us to live in a virtual pod with a treadmill and grow all of our own food? And collect rainwater?
Edit: I’m not saying we shouldn’t reduce our need for freight. Growing food in your backyard (half of my yard is good production) reduces the need for freight emissions. And I cycle to work. But drive or fly on holidays, I wish we had a more reliable train network.
They said transporation, not freight. I think they mean you can access everything on foot. But just for your heresay against the pod, your pod was made 10% smaller and your treadmill was made 10% faster.
That point maybe wasn't very good, probably saying that offices should be closer (also work from home)
How far and how often is the key, on a well planned city people should live close to their jobs and recreational areas, taking away people commuting to work and grouping people with similar destinations together you can solve traffic and give people more mobility.
Not everyone works in an office. Construction, trades, and utility works still need vehicles to work on and create infrastructure out and indoors.
You'll also have tons of people in rural area like farmers and ranchers that still need vehicles.
That being said most of those vehicles will be electric soon. My company will be moving to electric starting in 3 years.
PS: I'm a utility worker, and we take our work vehicles home foe weather emergencies, so the transportation line is a little blurred for me
Yeah, you still need to transport items, and people that do things with their hands, but surely in most first world countries, these things are a minority of road traffic.
If you can get those chokepoints out the way, from dystopian 10 lane traffic jams to an overcrowded tube train, everything else would run so much smoother.
Construction, trades, and utility works still need vehicles to work on and create infrastructure out and indoors.
That didn't stop people before cars. Back then people built small railways if we are talking about construction.
farmers and ranchers that still need vehicles.
They need specialized equipment. They need heavy equipment.
That being said most of those vehicles will be electric soon.
A car is a car. Another motor doesn't turn car into magic.
What about groceries, various errands? it's definitely not just going to the office is the only reason people get around with cars.
Basically in countries with more micromobility, they have smaller grocery stores. There will be one on every corner and you can just walk to it.
I see you mentioned suburbs. Yeah. The thing keeping shops and homes far apart in that case is zoning laws. And also building code dictating single family housing. In a more dense suburb in amsterdam or chicago you might have some rowhouse apartments but the first floor will be for shops, and one of those shops willcbe your nearest grocery store.
It's a discussion about the bulk of transport and commutes. Distributors don't need to follow a centralised system.
Trains(or cargo trams if you want fancy) for delivery to store and your eleven for delivery from store to home. Or ebike. Or bus.
You make a good point but it's hard to agree. I don't like home, and would prefer not to work in my own home. I want to see the world, I like to travel. Perhaps if my life had more social mobility I wouldn't be so starved for literal mobility. I have a car, could go drive anywhere. But it's not real freedom.
These are the jobs AI will replace first.
LLMs are not AI.
If you can train an AI to take the stream of nonsense I am given on a daily basis, and not only turn it into software but also the software they needed rather than what they actually described, then that AI is fucking welcome to my job...
mfs in 1923: "Cars will never replace trains and horses because there's whole swaths of the country with no highways or gas stations!"
True. Then came ethyl alchohol. Then came alchohol ban, that basically subsidised oil industry.
I agree. I just wanted to say that I really hope this meme completely replaces the original one, so we won't have to look at Steven Crowder's face as much going forward.
inevitability the future of urban transportation
I don't know, I think you're forgetting the possibility of us all just dying.
Nope.
Those super long electric busses will become more popular than trains. They are muuch cheaper to get. You can just send in a new one in case the first one breaks down, etc.
Though we also cant all live nrar these "train stops"?
I dont live near any right now.
Trains can transport higher loads of people though. So ultimately both trains and busses need to be the priority.
100% depends on where you're going and how far journeys are.
For a small inner city area, a subway is great. For a larger urban area, a tram system. For intercity travel, trains. Out in a rural area, buses would be the way, although more remote locations would need government subsidies to be even remotely functional, and even then it may resemble on demand taxis rather than a scheduled bus service.
No single solution will get you all the way there.
What needs to happen first is fuel price needs to be so high that people are incentivized to
a) switch to public transit no matter how shitty it is because they just can't afford a car anymore
b) start public transit companies because there is money to be made and the oil lobbies don't have enough money anymore to lobby effectively
My guess is before 2050 nobody will really get anything done because the oil lobby is just too powerful. Would be great though.
We can all live near a train stop. Roads were built everywhere. Train rails are actually not as expensive to build
But they don't handle the 90° corners that are built into so much of the existing landscape.
You'd been trams,not trains. Trains are great at covering long distance quickly, but if they have to navigate tight turns and stop every few minutes then they'll be pointless.
Not sure why people aren't talking more about busses here, it would make way more sense to utilize busses for local travel.
Those super long electric busses will become more popular than trains.
Though heavy batteries are bad for energy efficiency and big capacity batteries are long to charge. Well, it can be solved by constantly charging them. This also allows to reduce required capacity, thus reducing weight. Constant charging most efficiently can be done by using wires. Oh, wait. I just reinvented trolley.
Though we also cant all live nrar these "train stops"?
European disagreeing noises
The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.
Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.
Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.
Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.
Yes, bulldoze suburbia!
Well Los Angeles used to have an extensive streetcar system like Toronto. It was bulldozed in the 1950s and that was that. So LA isn't inherently anti-transit, but that was a result of deliberate planning. I could be converted back, however it's density is quite low and it could stand to have some urban centers linked by high-capacity mass transit.
The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.
New suburbs get built and they can be built differently. Not to mention that the current suburbs in the US aren't made to last the next hundred years, like stone houses in Europe are. They can, have to and will change.
The Work from home trend for example is a huge change. If you work from home and do not have to drive to work and back, you do not want to drive the same amount anyway just for grocery shopping. You want to use the free time won, by stepping outside of your home and go on a walk, sit in a café and meet people in your suburb.
Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car?
If a human makes a mistake while driving, we call for self-driving cars.
If a self-driving car causes an accident, we call for the road to be more catered to self-driving cars.
Self-driving car is still too many cars rotting on the road, unused most of the day, heating up cities and taking up space and resources, when a bus can replace hundreds of them.
A self-driving car is still a car, and it can't do what humans can do: People make billions of good decisions every day that help avoid accidents. We just don't recognise them because we focus on the bad decisions that cause accidents. Self-driving cars will never be able to make those good decisions, so having lots of them will only work if the roads are designed more for them. Then we will have roads that are like train tracks with all the negative characteristics of today's cars on top, when we could just have trains and busses all the benefits that come with them.
10 or 20 years from now when you're taking a nap or jerking off or eating fried chicken or playing Call of Duty while a self-driving car (you can call it an "automated transportation pod" if the word "car" triggers you) takes your extremely drunk self right to your front door you'll think it's fine.
With Uber and other ride hailing services it became clear that cheap point to point transport replaces trips that are otherwise being made with public transportation like buses, and thereby increasing traffic. There were also more trips in total done because of the convenience than were done before, thus also increasing traffic. It's the classic Jevons paradox.
Self driving taxis could certainly have the same effect or more if they are cheaper than ride hailing. The increase in usage can easily be greater than the number of private cars it replaces.
Self-driving cars also have an added benefit, if they are exclusively on the road, in that they could eliminate traffic. But they won't have exclusive access to the road, because people like driving cars. Interconnected compiters planning everyone's trips could eliminate the need for stop signs, stop lights, or the slinky effect on highways, because it turns out comouters can be better drivers than the typical human driver. They just need to stop hitting pedestrians....
There are indeed suburbs that make use of transportation, but they... look a bit different than the sprawling, disconnected single family detached with a lawn and a backyard style suburbs. I peraonally believe with a few changes the suburbs could make use of public transport in busses. The suburbs are actually inconvenient for cars, they are poorly connected and have many stop signs and generally no lines or other features. The scale is best with a vehicle rather than on foot, but it's not the end of the world either.
Personally, my anti-car dream only applies to me. I wanna live in a city where I'm at zero inconvenience without one and the risk of being hit by one is significantly lower, too.
The argument that we will get rid of all cars on the planet is just silly. Prior to the automobile, people had wagons and carriages for thousands of years. They had the same problem as cars due today - they cause pollution from horse poop, and they caused massive congestion.
I don't think there is a single major city on the planet today that doesn't use cars in some level of the transportation system.
What's really funny I said a bus is just a really large car. And a taxi is just a car that somebody else drives for you. So saying that mass transit and taxis or a solution to cars is ignoring the fact that they're basically the same thing.
American cities weren't built for the car; they were bulldozed for the car. See Cincinnati, pictured below:
Further, we only have suburban sprawl because of government mandates. For example, thanks to restrictive zoning, it is literally illegal to build anything but detached single-family houses on the vast majority of urban land in this country.
Then there's the matter of parking minimums, based in arbitrary pseudoscience, that have resulted in the demolition of our urban cores.
And also the matter that most cities in America had incredibly extensive streetcar networks, before they were literally torn up. It's no accident that the city in the world with the largest tram network -- Melbourne, Australia -- is also the only city that left its historic streetcar intact.
The beautiful thing about fixing all this malarkey is we don't have to demolish and displace millions of people from their homes like we already did once only ~60 years ago. We just have to abolish those restrictive, Euclidean zoning laws and parking minimums and setback requirements and so forth. Let the invisible hand of the free market provide us with the density and walkability and transit-oriented development it's trying to provide us with!
The primary thing that needs demolishing is parking lots, and absolutely no one will miss those, I guarantee it.
That's whete micromobility comes in and abolish whatever prevents suburbs from having shops every other street.
While zoning does interfere in many cases, even without zoning, the businesses aren't interested. Our city has started mandating mixed use for every new residential, and the retail and office space end up mostly empty.
Now that companies are used to consolidating people from miles around, it's not appealing to go back to the old days of having a store per neighborhood.
I don't disagree but there are two points that spring to mind.
The cities were radically different before we decided that a car should be able to go anywhere.
I think you're making it out to be a bigger problem than it really would be. Nobody is going to push personal and commercial vehicles out, but there would be a lot less of them, they'd only be as big as necessary, and they'd be more environmentally friendly.
Like every other huge factory before cars: connect to railways. Or tram network if you are in city.
A huge problem with public transportation is safety and usability for small children, the elderly, and people with disabilities or who are sick. All these people often can't use bikes or scooters. They have problems with having to wait standing and constantly out of order escalators and elevators.
I don't own a car and live in a place with relatively good public transportation. That's the biggest problem I see, next to how badly organised it is (at least here in Germany).
One of the leading causes of death for children in North America is from cars. Well funded and built transit should be accessible to all in their urban areas. Stops should have sheltered waiting areas with adequate and maintained seating. Good maintanence and funding would reduce equipment failures in elevators and other equipment. Ideally we densify around this transit as well which would help to reduce travel distances for people with movement disabilties and promote walkability. 95% of the time well designed and funded transit paired with good urban density and zoning will be more accessible to those with disabilities than private vehicle ownership.
Federalism is the key impediment to a sensible transportation policy, though. Corpo stakeholders drive sprawl. Developers have legislatures captured to a degree that exceeds even the gun lobby. 50 different state governments, with thousands of local governments, with a federal government that is unable to plan beyond the next election - the US is fucked. There are way too many entry points for bad faith actors to wreck a good plan. More opportunities for direct democracy and recall could help, plus rank-choiced voting, plus dosing the water with Wellbutrin to turn off people's worry about supernatural bullshit, and we might get somewhere.
Yes, I agree fully.
Good maintanence and funding would reduce equipment failures in elevators and other equipment.
Thnk you! You said line nobody says. You are hero of your city.
That is an organizational problem because my country next to it has all those things at just about every train stop (Switzerland).
Even in a country it depends on the state or city. In Munich and even around Tegernsee in Bavaria they have it better organised than in some places here in NRW. It's because so many different private companies are responsible.
A big problem with car-heavy streets is everyone’s safety when the elderly are driving on them.
It’s also shown that if people live in walkable neighborhoods, they get more exercise and can get used to movement even in old age.
I literally see the struggle of the people I talked about everyday. In a walkable city with public transportation.
Criticising aspects of public transport also doesn't mean I am against it or pro cars.
Elderly people use electric mobility scooters at Disney literally all the time. They're pretty great for the elderly so long as there's accessability ramps everywhere.
Escalators and elevators being out of service seems like an issue of lack of investment in public transit.
And cities can be built around public transit and micromobility while still allowing cars. Generally, you'll have better access for emergency vehicles, and you can do the same for people with disabilities.
I feel like people misunderstand my post. That it is a lack of investment is 100 % true. I want more investment and better public transport. People here seem to think I want to have cars, but that's not my point?!
That's definitely not a problem everywhere. The buses we use in Canada are very disability friendly and we have programs to teach kids how to ride the bus alone. We have bike racks on the front of our buses too, so we can combine modes of transportation.
The biggest problem with public transit over here is lack of funding and infrastructure. The bus system is intentionally kept shitty here so that people will opt to buy cars where possible.
Here the public transit was sold to private companies by the government. It still costs a huge sum of money but they have less strict laws when it comes to accessibility. The government is very much a boot licker of the car industry here and Germany in general has a weird car culture.
"Barely functioning" is good enough for public transport, that seems to be the overall attitude, even in the general population.
People here have no trouble walking to stops and bikes / scooters are common, so the premises are there. But instead of taking the final leap and improving public transportation so that more people switch, they are currently moving backwards it seems.
programs to teach kids how to ride the bus alone
Seems to be america-specific thing. Everyone I know just used buses since being kids just fine.
American here, I have a disabled family member. Cars are ultimately harder on them because they physically cannot lift themselves into a car while also stowing their 200lbs wheelchair.
A bus or train doesn't have that problem and are therefore better.
And the more walk able the area the better because it makes it far easier. I'm sure there are disabled and elderly people who have an easier time using cars. But to say in a broad sweeping generalization that it's better for all disabled and elderly people is a mistake. Cars should not be the first go to for a solution.
And kids can't even use cars. They are dependent on public transportation and the walkability in their area.
? I never said cars are better?
It's just a problem that needs to be fixed and is rarely mentioned (if at all). Especially the unreliable elevators + escalators.
Additionally, many trams and busses here have narrow stairs to enter or a huge gap to the floor. Some bus drivers refuse to help people in wheelchairs, they will just claim the bus is too full so they don't need to build the ramp. For the trams, there's no way to get in with a wheelchair.
Ironically, these were meant to have enough space for at least one wheelchair. But the entrance is not friendly, for various reasons.
I have a mild disability and often can't use the public transport because I struggle with stairs. Than I have to wait for a tram with a new model or walk around the city to a stop with no stairs.
They still build crossings like these and call it "modernized" ...
For kids the biggest problem is that in a lot of vehicles the stop isn't announced. And when the bus is (too) full they can't see the monitors or out of the windows. (That's a problem for all very short people I guess.)
A huge problem with public transportation is safety and usability for small children, the elderly, and people with disabilities
Probably because all of them can drive. Sarcasm. You just named all groups that will not get driver license. Expecially children and disabled.
They have problems with having to wait standing and constantly out of order escalators and elevators.
Everyone have to wait. Everyone hates standing. Maybe just do proper benches, maintanance of escalators or remove steps? Well, probably Germany don't have problems with last one.
I would personally bet on boats... (or even fins)
Mom's gonna fix it all soon.
Mom's comin round to put it back the way it ought to be
Can we get light rail and trams in there?
The focus urban transportation is a good one imo
That's a nice idea. The trams in Melbourne work really well.
Society wants it, companies don’t
That is why we won’t adopt trains and why we haven’t yet
It's funny because trains are both the past and the future.
Tbh, as someone living in rural community all i want is decent public transportation of any sort. Like, it would be nice to have trains or escooters but, we don't even have busses ( though that having been said i don't how busses would get out here without it making tarc fare more expensive) or making bikes or scooter ( e or otherwise) a viable option in my area or making walking a more viable option. Admittedly i don't know how they would do the last one but, the others they've been trying to do for awhile. I'm hoping that this not only made sense but, actually was on point.
The US (and much of europe) needs to realize that car centric planning is not the solution to mobility problems, it's the cause! Suburbia could be more walkable if a few steps were taken during planning:
Note that the commenter said rural rather than suburban, and that's a really whole other can of worms, but on the other hand they aren't as frustrating to have cars. The population density is so low and the distances so large, it's hard to figure any thing other than cars to meet those needs.
But I'm in suburbia, in fact right next to one of my cities mixed use mandate (all new housing must be dense housing and must construct retail space and office space with any housing construction). They also have very little parking for the retail space. So what has happened with those projects? The housing has filled up, but no company wants the retail space. A company could choose to open up a store there to serve that community and not much else owing to tiny parking, or they can set up 5 miles away for not much more and serve dozens of communities.
There was one successful mixed use development, but they were massive and dedicated a huge amount to multiple parking decks. People pay a lot of money to live there and it is walkable distance wise, but it's car centric and unfortunately would have failed without accommodating cars.
Best walkable experience I've had was a place with trams and pedestrian bridges, as well as roads and parking decks. Businesses could count on the reach afforded by accommodating cars, and pedestrians never had to step on a car road or suffer a bus stuck in traffic. However, it was a massively expensive place to be.
I wonder how a train is picking up my walking disabled mother from three Kilometres afar?
Will a train stop at my house to pick up my some two tons of gardening scraps per year?
At which time will it deliver my 100kg of groceries per week?
You meticulously avoided all hard questions. No problem, I just repeat them for you:
I wonder how a train is picking up my walking disabled mother from three Kilometres afar?
Will a train stop at my house to pick up my some two tons of gardening scraps per year?
At which time will it deliver my 100kg of groceries per week?
Also, How does a long distance train help my mother to get the 3km to her doctor?
How does a train help me buying building materials? Last week I bought 400kg of tiles. One drive with a car. It would have taken ten travels with a train if the train did stop inside the hardware store and directly in front of my house. Delivery by truck would have cost €50.
A "micro car" is not only insanely expensive, it also has no room for my mothers wheelchair.
My country has one of the best public transport systems in the western world. Everything you mention is available here. We can drive EVERYWHERE for a €49 flat rate and we have three bus stops within 100 metres. Still that doesn't help to solve a single problem I mentioned earlier.
Oh, and spending €245 for a family trip in a train? Not gonna happen. With the car it is a €10 trip.
But there is a actually a solution which could work: Robotaxis at very low prices per km. It wouldn't lower the traffic but reduce the parked cars and the TCO of personal transport.
Please give me moar bullshittery to mock you. It is fun.
Do you run an orphanage?
In Europe ( i mean Paris, France and Italy ) public authority had pushed hard on micromobility, but now they are, in reality banning it cause safety problems.
the main reason driverless cars haven't taken off in Europe is that European road safety regulators require strong evidence that a technology is safe before it is used on roads, as opposed to the US, where new technology is largely allowed on roads by default until it kills enough people.
GDPR doesn't prevent you making a recording as a private citizen of a public space on a local device in the car with a 1 week rolling buffer.
Regulating in a manner to ban them. Driverless cars are not technologically ready right now. GDPR, is the bare minimum privacy protection, as a lot o citizens required.
of the GDPR barrier
Well, not spying on people is also an option
Also, trains and light rail have already been automated. The tech is already here.
not before we figure out if teleporters kill people
As a thought experiment, do you know if going to sleep kills you?
You wake up in the morning with all the memories of life before sleeping, but do you really know if that was you living that life? What if your consciousness dies each night when you fall asleep, and a new consciousness is formed in the morning who thinks it's you?
Thinking of which, I'd image it'd be used for military use way before commercial. Militarized teleporters sound pretty terrifying. Move someone's torso over one foot, or put micro bombs inside people or vehicles.
At least I'll have some company taking shuttles everywhere because same lol
Just make sure there are no flies in the teleporter.
Well in the UK, considering that a return ticket to London for commuting hours costs me £140, no, it is not the future here. I could drive most of the way from home into London, pay the ULEZ charge, park in an expensive train station car park and get a short distance train for a third of that, including fuel.
But that's an issue with capitalism, not the technology itself. Roads and high(motor)ways are very heavily subsidized and tax funded, while rail in the UK is largely privatized. It's just a sign of what is being prioritized by government and/or society, which is cars in this case. There are plenty of places where public transit is free or at least the definitive cheapest way to travel, also due to government funding.
Trains are directly linked to capitalism, not sure what you are getting at here. They require incredible amounts of capital to build, and incredible amounts of money to operate. They enabled the industrialization.
Communist countries also, in fact, received their trains from capitalist countries. Russia had hardly any before the US started supplying them during the industrialization process by Albert Kahn and associates.
The most train centric countries in the world are also the most capitalist. Whether that's state run capitalism or private, state run generally provides more passenger rail service. However, Japan is an exception there with its JR Rail.
In Japan a train ticket on an express train to central Tokyo from the suburbs 50 miles away would cost you around $30. The local trains would be around $10-$15.
$110 will get you about 300 km by high speed shinkansen, say Tokyo to Nagoya.
You can blame privatisation for that.
Price gouging might be just a trend that dies with Boomers.
so doing the right thing is right out because it's a bit more out of your pocketbook to give a shit about the wellbeing of the next generation?
Your kids must love you. sorry you little shits, it wasn't convenient for dad and would cost me a few quid so fuck your future.
There are limits to what people can afford.
The cost of commuting to London via train every day would be more than my entire salary lmao, what are you on about. I work remotely for the most part anyway, which is better for the environment than taking the train every day.
Nothing's stopping you from sending them money to cover the cost.
At one point you just can't move all these people where they need to be in individual tin cans that seat four but mostly hold one.
Just wait for autonomous vehicles, when they would sit zero most of the time.
Time for work. Make sure you bring a sofa, two easy chairs, and a sound system with you.
I rented a car with adaptive cruise controle a month ago and it felt like riding a train. Driverles cars could work if they aren't personal possession.
They won't work because they take up space and therefore genrate traffic. They are also wasteful to resources, electric or not, because trains do a more efficient job of transporting people en mass than motorways/ highways (decreased cost of traintrack maintenance, decreased use of fuel per capita).
I ride a train 5 days a week. Not every destination can be reached by train. We need a multimodal approach to transport.
In the morning I ride to the railroad station with my own bike. There I take the train to the nearest hub and depending on my final destination I take a train or a bus. When I take the train I always take a shared bike for the last part of my journey.
Sometimes I really need to take a car because there is no suitable connection or the total commute takes up to much time by public transport. Then it would be great to eb able to call a self driving car to get me to my destination. A car that uses the highway and maind roads as if it was a railroad. Just attach your car to the line of cars passing. They could all go at the same speed and crossings could be arranged at turn by turn system so nobody really has to wait.
It's the best thing for the future, that doesn't mean it's inevitably the future
Trains are great but people want their own personal bubble and don't want to stand around outside waiting for a train especially since the timetable is out of their control
What people want and what is sustainable may be two different things and some people will just have to deal with that. Leave earlier and dress for the weather 🤷♀️
Quite frankly as an American, I think it's very American to even consider the timetable as out of your control. For a lot of places, the trains come so fast that you're not even waiting for a few minutes - like most drivers take longer to get settled into their car seat before driving. The sorry state of American transit is absolutely not the pinnacle of transit.
This is key. Urban planners and environment folks focus so much on their respective fields and don't consider dignity enough. Of course we'd all like cheap, fast, sustainable transportation, but not if that means being packed into bench seating, plagued with delays, and sometimes even risk our safety due to other passengers. Trains don't have to be bad, but the penny-pinching planners often ruin the experience.
I drove through Atlanta at rush hour once. I'll never go there again, if I can help it. That was kind of the opposite of what I think of when I think of "dignity."
This has been my sticking point with trains. In theory, it sounds fantastic and I’m all for it. The problem is is that Having a vehicle is so much nicer. Air conditioned and private transportation, whenever you want. Listen to what you want, go where you want.
Maybe if the train was much more convenient? I like the idea for travel more.
If you look at old maps of streetcar networks in cities (before they ripped up the tracks to replace them with cars), one thing that stands out is just how dense the networks were. For instance, here's the old Montreal streetcar map:
Versus the modern-day Montreal metro map:
And Montreal has some of the best modern-day urbanism in North America, mind you; most cities are far worse. But it really makes you imagine what our cities could be like if we made many/most streets car-free and just had ultra-dense networks of trams again. Maybe even cargo trams to deliver goods to stores as well. Trains would be ubiquitous and ultra-convenient.
Air conditioned
Public transit has this technology.
Listen to what you want
Headphones.
whenever you want [..] go where you want
Public transit can solve these problems with more frequency and routes. Sometimes public transit goes places private transport can't!
private transportation
Can't do this one.
I recently bought a car for the first time in a decade. Driving is hell.
Move to the city and use a bike? Can't or don't want? Not a problem for the city or the people that live in it, you're a guest, not a resident.
Do electric mopeds and motorcycles count?
Which are currently being replaced by electric bicycles.
Not on distances I'll have to travel after we finally move to an office further away in a car-centric hellhole. 18 km (~10 miles). ½ hr on a motorcycle or a moped, twice as long on an (e-)bike. Nah, I'm not doing the latter in the morning when I can barely get out of my bed. And I'm not the only one complaining about the office moving.
Well, you certainly can be poor and need gas money to go to work in a remote factory because you live in a farm in a rural area and there's no transport, and the most cost effective way is a car.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !micromobility@lemmy.world
I looked at that group but it seems like it's just ads for new bike models
There are a lot of ebike posts but there's definitely other stuff there
The future is as hazy as literally everything else. Do we have cars where they aren't needed? Yes Do we have rail systems that are hot garbage? yes Do we have rural area that are sprawling making rail and micro less possible? yes
Will trains and public trans be a staple of the future just like it is today in larger cities? yes.
When I lived in Philly, I took the train everywhere but the grocery store.... except when I had leisure time then I took my car... and where I went, and a train or self driving care won't take me there.
Actually rural areas usually are connected by rail. At least in Europe.
Idk how the train will pick me up living in the middle of nowhere. Sure, trains are practical where civilization lives, but it's just far too rural for trains here.
The image says urban mobility. Issues with cars clearly don't apply to the tiny number of people in the middle of nowhere.
it says "urban transportation"
Good luck with that municipal planning.
Also, did everyone just forget about the pandemic we just went through? Haven't we decided as a society stuffing lots of people in a small space is bad for our health?
yup. point out how people can ride transit safely, they don't want to hear it. cars are literally destroying the only ecosystem we have in the universe, and we're letting the car chuds do it because....?
trust me, if the situation was reversed, they'd happily run everyone else down if it meant saving their way of life.
they don't even fucking care about their own kids.
Micro mobility is great if you plan on never leaving a 5 or 10 square mile area. The problem with that is the majority of Americas have at least 1 trip a month that's 30+ miles.
No one is making that kind of trip with a micro mobility solution. Especially not in the heat and cold extremes we have now.
wear your damned mask and it won't be a problem.
For everybody else at least. Also stop downvoting.
Based
One day, we will be jacked in the comfort of our houses and remotely control our android avatars who do our physical labors irl.
In the United States, I don't know how you'd accomplish this. It would be impossible for almost all rural neighborhoods unless we're going to build a grocery store within walking distance of most homes.
This is one of those liberal (I rarely leave my home) notions whose heart is in the right place but is ultimately stupid.
Note the picture says "urban", not rural neighborhoods. There's no reason to think we can't have train infrastructure connecting to rural areas though. The point would be to make our infrastructure human centered and supplement it with appropriate public transportation based on density. It can be done by rethinking how we zone and getting away from designing everything with cars and space for cars in mind. Not saying we do away with cars because they definitely serve a purpose the way we have things now, but gradually build up the non-car infrastructure so that cars are less needed over time. If we can imagine it in a way that works, we can accomplish it.
This comment seems to be based on the false presumption that cities and settlements cannot be transformed, however they can
They can, but it's a multi trillion dollar century plus endeavor that well require eminent domain millions of properties in order to make enough space for the conversion. Infrastructure still needs to go some place, and you need to replace millions of sfh with apartments. My city doesn't even have any land left to build more train lines. It's just 30 miles of gridded small lots.
You actually should have a grocery store in walking distance. And a pharmacy, a dentist, a doctor, bars and restaurants, a kindergarten,... That's how you get wrid of cars, indeed.
the drawing specifies urban transportation. didn't say it would work in rural neighborhoods.
There should most definitely be a grocery store within walking distance of most homes.
I love cars way more than the next guy, but the meme clearly says "urban transportation".
I heartily agree, but I'm 67 years old and society is slower than the Antarctic melt. Oh, wait, that's not slow.
I live in a small walkable city in the Netherlands. I ride the bus, the train and my bicycle. I still own a car since those other transport modes don’t cover every need I have. And car sharing is non existent in my town.
I don't think owning a car is necessarily a problem. For me FuckCars mostly means "fuck using a car unless you have to", which means using a car for those kind of commutes that people do every day or very often. Go to your workplace, school or university, go shop groceries...
There will be other context where you are going to need a car. Your holidays, for one. It's not a problem in my book. And of course it also applies to a lesser extent to folks living in the countryside, where it's inherently more difficult and expensive to link communities to transit. Our main concern should be ridding cities of cars and you guys in the Netherlands are already doing an amazing work on that front in many places.
What do you need your car for?
Okay. For the US: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9658b5befb944256bb587bc9b268a09a
Trains and micro mobility don't work for the significant majority of homes.
Edit: That link estimates that 20% of the US population lives within a 10 minutes walk from a grocery store.
That is correct. It would need a lot of change in the US. But I can say in Europe it works pretty well.
Mixed Zoning and less suburbs are just two of the changes that would make a lot of lifes a lot better!
What is micro mobility? I've not heard this phrase before.
I thought remote work and urban archipelagos, so yeah.
What I'm saying is even if that car was part of a network of attachable cars, the maintenance of the infrastructure needed to accomodate those cars is still way more expensive. This is not even getting into the discussion that if you have enough cars to need a highway (let alone enough to start attaching self-driving cars to each other), a train is more feasible. Period.
I will agree with you that the train is not the be all and end all. Good bike infrastructure (separated bike lanes that are connected through a planned network), light rail/trams and buses all have their place. What I disagree is the use of cars in urban and suburban centers/ corridors. There is no need. The only people that should use private vehicles are delivery vehicles, emergency vehicles, and those that live in impossibly remote areas that are very much disconnected from urban centers - areas that are hardly surrounded by a self-sustaining community.
Counterpoint: Society will collapse to the point where cities, let alone trains and microtransport, will no longer be available or viable.
In that scenario, I think analog bicycles will be essential for getting around between places, albeit using the actual roads and stuff.
Fuel would likely either be extremely rare IMO or a military luxury
I agree. There just won't be trains running for a very long time if ever again, is all. Maybe a couple centuries minimum while humanity recovers from whatever toppled it.
When this point of infrastructural collaps is reached, cars won't help you much either.
The post is about trains though
Driverless cars will very much have a future because you can't build trains everywhere. They won't be personally owned though, i.e. they'll be robotaxis. Just imagine cities without parked cars.
I agree trains will just be more common for distance. I also agree driverless cars will be more common, but would add I think we'll see more one person, two person, eight person cars in the city. No point in sending a four person car to take John to see his grandma.
We already have a system where you can request a car to come to your location, take you there and then it goes off and drives around doing the same thing for other people. I don't know why it being autonomous means that people will ditch their private cars for it.
if japan can build trains, high speed ones at that then I think it's safe to say you can build trains anywhere you fucking want.
You certainly can build trains wherever you want, but it comes at a cost that's not necessarily worth paying everywhere, as it comes with both short term and maintenance costs. I say this as someone who works in rail and is passionate about it; in some locations there isn't the demand to run the kind of high frequency service necessary to remove the need for car ownership. You can be better off with a demand responsive bus service, for example, to connect to your long-distance, high speed links.
By the time those thing will have taken over, something else will be in their place. For certain values of ‘trains’, ‘urban’ and ‘micro mobility’, your claim will likely be true, but ithat is too vague to talk someone out of if that’s simply your stance.
Yeah, never going to happen. Most of us don't like to live like sardines in a tin can, sharing 4 walls with other inconsiderate assholes.
Fuck city living. Fuck the city. Fuck densely packed consumer culture bullshit. Fuck public transportation. Put up as many roads as you can, give me 4 wheels and a place to visit.
City living just exacerbates the problem with corporations owning everybodies housing, and the expectation of everyone coming into the office every day. Move education, work, etc online and be done with the need to travel into a city at all.
All it would take is a couple thousand city-dwellers to move out into rural America and America's republicans would be eradicated, moving us towards actually electing politicians that believe in sound scientific policy, etc.
But instead, all the uneducated slack jawed yokels are out living in nature, meanwhile people who don't even SEE trees or wildlife are on the internet proclaiming how much they love the earth and how we need to save it. Fucking come out here you cowards!
I live in the middle of nowhere and drive race cars on the weekend, I think we agree on a lot of things. I love having plenty of space, not a fan of close neighbors, apartment living or any of that shit.
I still want cheap trains and micromobility though. Every once in awhile I need to go into the city and taking my ebike in on the train is so much better than driving. Also even if you still drive like normal, it would go so much smoother if all the city folks stuck to the train and got off the roads.
Not saying cars should be more expensive, and definitely not saying city living is the way, but having better options for city folks only helps the situation for the rest of us.
No one is forcing you to live in the city, but at our current population plus the current growth, it makesmore sense to have to majority of people live in cities and use public transportation. We cannot all live rurally, it's just not doable. And isolating ourselves to everything online is not good for most people's mental health- through we should all have a choice in that.
And if you want to continue having a "place to visit" everyone needs to take a more environmentally friendly approach to travel. Fewer roads and smaller private vehicles alongside increased public transit to wherever isn't too remote to service.
Also the bank owns the farms too.
You really want my kids screaming on the train during your commute?
Apparently, yes. And also the mentally ill people who aren't medicated causing a scene.
Whether society wants it or not? Quite, um, authoritarian if I do say so, sir.
More likely that it will be trains between cities and AI taxis in cities. Owning a car will make less sense when you can at a moments notice just jump into a AI taxi and trains will be way faster than cars between cities. Within cities I do not see subways making much sense less a few busy routes.
It depends where you live, here in Europe a lot of trips in the cities can also be done by walking, biking or other micromobility options because a lot of the trips are small distance.
It would be possible to slowly restructure the cities in the US to enable it there. It would also make the neighbourhoods much nicer in terms of livelyness and social interactions.
You are on the right track. Trains go between cities, buses/metros/trams within a city. Cars (AI or not) will still exist, but their use will mostly be for people in rural areas to arrive near the next train station.
Traffic within a city is perfect for public transportation. It is dense enough with sufficient demand. Of course this doesn't mean that robo taxis will (or should) be completely absent in the city, just that they should be the exception not the rule.
Won't ever happen that way, unless government sky rocket the cost of ownership. People are selfish and will fight that tooth and nail. Just look at the reaction to the ULEZ, and they are willing to buy the old junk from them.
Then be against surveillance in general... Its also a big problem. Not only a problem of 15 Minute cities. Cameras can also track your car quite easliy. Through the whole city.
All I need is less than 10 minutes away and I rarely need to go further for anything. And I love it. Not car dependend and no surveillance here.