Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
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”?
Two facts:
Is that for rush hour? Because, overall, the national average is closer to 1.5
Fully agree.
See the argument of induced demand: “Oh everyone is using self-driving cars, that means there’s more space for my car!”
I’m not a car owner, so I might be wrong. But I don’t think it’s normal for people to decide owning a car based on whether or not there’s room for it.
Also, I think they meant that self-driving cars that will be taking non-owners to their destination. Since there’s already a car that’s taking me, I don’t need to buy my own.
When people feel there’s more room for cars/infrastructure is more hostile to walking, they are more inclined to buy and use a car. That’s why adding lanes to highways never works to reduce traffic. You are not making more space for the same amount of cars, you’re inducing non-car owners to switch and get one, or already existing car owners to use it more, resulting in more cars in circulation.
Similarly, autonomous cars are perceived as taxis which people irrationally perceive as emotional license to acquire and use a car. Narratives like cars as freedom or tech companies coming to take your car.
Sure, it is counter intuitive, but there’s a billion dollar marketing industry dedicated to exploiting this and other similar cognitive biases. See green washing and the use of recycling to promote further consumerism. Or using health labeling to keep unhealthy foods in high demand, etc.
The problem you described sounds more like a side effect of the core issue – corporate greed. Cars can be bad, and overuse is a problem, but let’s not blame them for the faults of the system. Until the core issue is fixed, nothings will be truly efficient and useful, because those aspects will be sacrificed to profit.
And what is the average occupancy of a bus in your North American city?
Regarding your 1st point, yes, it is a problem that cars are underutilized. So I think that in addition to promoting public transport, for the time being, we could also promote proper usage of cars. Here in Europe, we don’t have much problems with cars compared to US, but oh boy you guys overseas need to tame your F-150 owners.
Regarding the 2nd point, it’s not a fact but an opinion. With which I don’t really agree. I believe that true self-driving cars will eventually surpass the capabilities of meatbags, but I will look up the literature. Solely based on what you said, it seems to me that the “dead heading” problem is just a logistical issue that can be solved using science/technology (if the fleet of cars is algorithmically dispersed enough, they will always pick up a nearby passenger, as a hypothetical solution).
But yes, the corporations remain an issue and they will surely find a way to mess everything up. That is a separate problem that also needs solving, capitalism and overconsumption.
Regarding your first point, I’m aware that that is the unfortunate truth. That IS the issue with cars when it comes to efficiency.
If you load the car with 3-5 passengers it easily beats busses in efficiency, according to my calculations. But that’s not gonna happen.Regarding your second point, the core of the issue is just capitalism, not self-driving cars or privately owned cars.
Cars don’t have to drive around empty if they are some sort of shared transport that can pick up the nearest passenger.
If companies aren’t gonna cause unnecessary car purchases only those who need them anyway will own them.
Basically, the problem with cars is not cars themselves as a concept, it’s the overuse and misuse. But unfortunately, that isn’t changing anytime soon.
Huh? If you’re being very generous you can fit 3 cars into the space of 1 bus. A bus can definitely hold more than 15 people.
I have already rescinded that decision in this comment. But I wasn’t comparing the volume, I was comparing the amount of useful work done relative to the weight. If you wish, the details are in the linked comment.
So true, extra emphasis on the misuse in the US. I was recently in Iceland, which is a very car centric country, and I was amazed by how much better their car situation was. They kept their roads nice and tight, used roundabouts, they had 30kmph(18mph) speed limits in residential and city centers, raised sidewalks, etc. Best of all most people drove small cars! It was the first time I enjoyed driving and didn’t mind being around cars because I actually felt safe.
But then I got back to the US and it was disgusting how wasteful we are with our car infrastructure. Instead of 9ft car lanes our lanes are 12ft minimum often with 8ft buffers. Even small suburban streets are 40 to 50 feet wide. Our parking lots look like lakes of asphalt, and our intersections are so fucking huge there is no safe way for a kid to use them
Would love to see those calculations.
See this.
Spoiler alert: I decided I was wrong.
But try the cool calculator I made!
Even being generous with using SUVs, a really small bus can fit 30+ people, in the same space that would occupy two SUVs with less than 10 people combined.
Yeah, I already crossed out that statement. See details here.
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.
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, 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.
Edit: I did some more calculations and now disagree with my own conclusion. Busses still win even when cars are reasonable utilized, not to mention the usual utilization, which is 1.2 passengers.
More details in this comment.
There are multiple levels of efficiency or benefits here for the bus over the car
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.
I already crossed out the statement you’re referring to and added and edit, but I was talking strictly about weight carrying efficiency. As in, how much useful work is done compared to carried weight. You still make some fair points that I didn’t consider though.
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.
Absolutely fair. In fact, since yesterday night I tried to do more variations of my calculations for different types and now I, at least, heavily doubt my own conclusions and, at most, disagree with my conclusions entirely. Especially taking into consideration some of the aspects that people like you mentioned. But here’s my approach. When I was saying “efficiency” I specifically meant percentage of useful work done relative to weight (I know it’s not a be-all, end-all metric, but that’s what I chose). For example, a 2 ton car carrying one 70kg person has efficiency rating of:
(70 kg / 2,070 kg) * 100 = ~3.38%Then I did these calculations for 1, 3 and 5 passengers, which makes 3.38%, 9.50% and 14.89% respectively. Then I took a random bus (curb weight = 12000 kg, max capacity 40 passengers), and repeated the calculations for 1 passenger, half and full occupancies. That came out to 0.58%, 10.45% and 18.92% respectively. Seeing that at half occupancy, cars are basically as efficient as busses, and knowing that on average busses are not even half-loaded (around 40%) I concluded that cars are in fact very efficient, given that you use them properly.
But of course that isn’t the whole picture. Some issues with my numbers that I found:
Taking these things into account, I (mostly Claude) made this calculator. It even has rough numbers for certain cars and bus types. Using that calculator I can clearly see, that busses win, even when lighter cars are reasonably utilized.
This was a sci-fi hypothetical anyway, even optimistically, I don’t think we will have truly self-driving cars for another 5-10 years. I agree with a lot of what you said, but we can’t really apply today’s approach to that future sci-fi scenario. For example, if we have a swarm of hive-mind public cars that anticipate each other’s moves, then those potentially could be way more efficient than route based traffic. But I don’t wanna fixate on the hypotheticals.
Regarding your last paragraph, I don’t own a car, mostly walk and use trams. But I live in Europe, and here in Warsaw, we don’t really have a car problem. Sure, the work commute hours are a bit loaded, but otherwise, public transport is really good and a car is barely needed. So yes, until further notice, avoid cars if possible.
Thank you for such a lengthy and detailed response!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If I want to goto the airport from my home in the inner ‘burbs:
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)
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.
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.
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.
Because trams and busses can’t fulfill every need. Certain point to point transportation options still need to exist, we just need to make them as efficient as possible.
And as I mentioned in another comment,
turns out busses aren’t really as efficient as I thought they were. Fully packed small cars are way more efficient.Edit: Changed my mind. See previous comment.
Most cars only ever have 1 person in them, 2 occasionally, and rarely ever more than that inlesst it’s a damily trip somewhere. A bus with 5 passengers is taking up less space than 5 cars of any size. Even in mass transit Meccas like The Netherlands obviously still have private cars that people use. But designing transport infrastructure around more efficient methods allows for use cases where a personal car iis necessary fleeting. Obviously moving trucks and delivery vans can’t be replaced by a tram. But a well designed city wouldn’t require me to drive my car just to pick up eggs and a loaf of bread, or to get a beer at a local bar, or go to a baseball game.
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.
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.
Interesting proposal. I think that a single-seat vehicle will inherently be too inefficient cause you need to have all the infrastructure, but you carry only 1 person. 2-4 passenger vehicles would probably still be most optimal.
But yes, I do believe that autonomous cars will unlock possibilities that humans can tap into. Eventually, robo-car will not be equal to a taxi, it will be more than that. But I hope that it’s publicly owned and not corporate.
Yeah that would need to be planned together with the city planning and redesign to make mostly walkable cities / suburbs.
Someone mentioned statistics that average passenger number is 1.2. And with an autonomous taxi you wouldn’t need to drive your kid somewhere and then pick it up, you’d throw it in the single seat podcar and get notified once it arrived. So for rides where you can’t take public transport or a bicycle / velomobile, the passenger number would be closer to 1. Then you’d have double seater podbikes which would also be good for shopping if you have bags of stuff you can put on the seat in front of you.
Then you’d still need 4 passenger vehicles but they would be incredibly rare. Plus delivery trucks for grocery stores etc.
As for embedded energy for a “podcar”, it only weighs like 50kg compared to the 2000kg of a car (ok probably more like 150kg). Presuming that autonomous vehicles are vastly more safe than normal cars and almost never crash, you save on infrastructure too. You don’t need a heavy windscreen out of glass because you don’t need high visibility (glass is required for wipers and because plastic gets dull over time). You only need much smaller motors, batteries, simple bicycle style wheels, lightweight breaks, and no steering wheel and no cockpit. At least for speeds lower than say ~60 kmh (40 mph) you could literally use bicycle hardware.
If what you say is true, and they can fit all the necessary tech into 50kg, or anything under the weight of an average human, then I agree, in efficiency, that (50%+) beats even the best bus scenario (35% at full capacity) according to my calculations. By efficiency, I mean what percentage of carried weight is useful.
Hmm, weight of the podbike is 90kg, so it’s probably closer to 200kg as an autonomous vehicle. It would be awesome if it could beat a bus but that is unlikely.
You could make it lighter but it becomes a question of manufacturing cost (lightweight is costly, like composite) and battery size and how often it drives itself to charging and how many solar / wind you need at the charging station.
You’re correct sir, this thread is nothing more than shitty propaganda. Instead of, you know, going with actual real facts.