> The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters.
The problem is that we've given so much space to automobiles that there's no room for anything else (bikes, scooters, etc). Pedestrians have been given a sliver only because drivers need to walk between parking and their destination. This is true even in cities where the majority of people don't even drive!
Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
I think Bacerlona hits a good compromise. The city has the concept of a superblock, which is a few city blocks grouped into one calm zone. Most car traffic stays on the streets around the outside, the perimeter of the superblock. Inside, driving is restricted and only at low speeds where allowed, so people and bikes get the space. So deliveries and residents can still but only slowly.
That’s far from the only example - many cities in Asia follow a similar model.
> their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.
This is neat but also seems like an insane solution to the problem of “I don’t like seeing service trucks”. How many such tunnels and elevators would it take to supply the buildings in a typical city’s downtown area?
> Eliminating cars doesn’t eliminate the need for infrastructure for moving goods.
Burying other last mile utilities that waste less land was not insane when real estate was a fraction as valuable as now and engineering technology was worse.
I wonder how many people such an automated freight system would kill per year, compared to cars in the same cities. Once we have some numbers, you would probably reconsider the use of "insane" there.
Sure. In 2022, 672 pedestrians were killed by large trucks. How many of those do you believe happened in say New York City? And how many of those do you think you could eliminate with this hypothetical tunnel system? And how much will this hypothetical tunnel system cost?
New York has about 300 pedestrian deaths total from all vehicles every year. So my guesstimate is that if you eliminated all of the trucks from New York City, you might save 50 lives a year, max. I would also guesstimate that it would probably cost well north of $50 billion to create this tunnel system to connect all of the major buildings in New York City. So we’re looking at about $1 billion per life saved. I bet you could save more than one life per billion if you put that money somewhere more useful.
> What do you think, ready to imagine such a comparison?
What are you intending to accomplish with your snarky and condescending tone?
How much will those robots cost? How many will we be able to make within the next 30 years?
How will they be autonomous considering bipedal operation in random environments is MUCH, MUCH harder that full self driving for cars on public roads? And that's just moving around, we're talking about actual judgement to do a human job that requires reasoning and practical skills.
Jetson type robots are a pipe dream at this point. I don't expect to have a robot maid within my lifetime.
Let's be realistic and not plan society today around scifi fantasies, please.
We're probably lacking 80% of the basic science needed for autonomous robot maids.
Also perhaps worth mentioning in Chicago is Lower Wacker Drive.
It's a split-level street, more-or-less with local traffic on the surface and with through traffic at the subterranean level. It's a quick way to get through the area.
And beneath parts of that that is an road I've heard referred to as Lower Lower Wacker. This is almost entirely the realm of delivery and service vehicles (except for a time in fairly recent years when those darned kids were using it for drag racing at night).
It's all crazy-expensive to build anything like underground local delivery rail and underground roadways.
(But the stuff at the surface is crazy-expensive, too, and often can't be expanded horizontally without demolition of the very buildings that it seeks to benefit.
But expanding down? Sometimes, yeah -- that can happen.)
Smaller trucks. Japan makes due with one-lane alleys. (Not one in each direction. One. Deliveries and vehicular traffic are so uncommon, and the tightness of the space so inconducive to speeding, that it's safe for trucks and cars to go down them in whichever direction they need to.)
London is edging in that direction with the introduction of "low traffic neighbourhoods". Basically this involves preventing vehicles using them as a through route, by limiting some connections to only emergency vehicles.
The problem is that it's also annoying for residents as it means the allowed entry/exit routes aren't necessarily in the direction you need to go. Does Barcelona have a smarter method?
That's unevenly distributed. Lots of people in London do walk or use public transport, but you still need many delivery drivers, tradespeople, etc and it doesn't make sense for them all to live outside the city. And people who don't usually drive occasionally need to use a vehicle, and then it's more stressful because you aren't used to having to know where the vehicular entrances are. It's too simplistic to just make provision for the majority and assume that it doesn't matter what the second order effects are.
So if you make it safe and pleasant for everybody who doesn't need a truck as part of their job, then the remaining roads are available for the small minority that "must" use them.
But maybe rethink whether they "need" to and whether said vehicles must live in dense residential neighborhoods.
There is still pushback. I live in Toronto and when central businesses are canvassed about streetscape changes they overwhelmingly are against removing parking, access for cars, etc. They assume that 90% of their customers drive to them, but it turns out that it is closer to 10% for most of them.
My city has been making efforts to stymie traffic flow to encourage less driving. I almost never drive but it's still annoying as crap when what used to be a 20 min drive is now 40+ because of how slow the first/last mile is now.
When I'm not driving I do enjoy it, so I understand that it's a tradeoff and I can't have it both ways. That doesn't make me not irritated when behind the wheel though.
It’s about actively blocking police and other emergency vehicles while allowing a new class of problem vehicles, illegal e-motorbikes, to pass unimpeded.
As a motorist, the war on cars (and milking of motorists for tax revenue) would be less infuriating if we didn’t have the rising broad-daylight lawlessness of illegal e-bikes and scooters doing 30mph+ with no pedaling, no tax, and no insurance. Often with corporate branding in the form of Deliveroo or Just Eat bags. Sometimes balaclava-clad and engaging in dodgier activities.
(Would be in favour of regulating and policing these bikes and scooters rather than outright prohibition, but the UK government chooses to stick to prohibition and very inconsistent policing)
Sorry, this doesn’t make any sense. If the problem were that criminals have high powered e-bikes, the obvious answer would be to give high powered e-bikes to the police.
What you’re actually griping about isn’t criminals using e-bikes as getaway vehicles, but the presence of these unsafe e-bikes at all. You’re basically saying “how come I can’t drive my unsafe machine but they can drive theirs?” And yeah, I don’t want people zipping by at 30mph on scooters either, but the problem isn’t that the cars are gone.
I live in Vancouver, and we have plenty of both roads and bike lanes. Its not hard to fit a bike lane that's usually 1/4th the width of a lane onto a road or allow bikes to share with cars on smaller roads. We have trucks and vans and lots of deliveries too. The reason most cities are oriented around cars is because we designed them that way and it's difficult to change - there's no logistical constraint, its just politics and cost.
I lived in Vancouver for many years, and it’s an outlier in terms of ease of bike lane installation. The city is quite new, and as it grew in the 50s and 60s the roads were designed for a future with more cars than there are now in the city. That means that there’s super wide boulevards and streets everywhere. Cities that were designed for horses and carts barely have room for cars as it is, so there’s almost no room for anything else next to them.
> Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.
Totally. Banning automobiles is usually a bad idea, especially for residential zones. Years ago, I remember seeing a presentation about redeveloping a bad public housing block that was built in the 1960s with no auto-access (the assumption being poor people don't have cars), but it turns out that it meant they couldn't even get pizza.
At least in New York City and outside the U.S., I regularly see pizzas being delivered frequently by bicycle, moped, and motorcycle. I also see deliveries being done with small trucks (Kei style) and vans that fit in alleyways.
Some number of the people at the time likely noticed the lapse and thought to themselves "good, this will make it inconvenient for them to get a car that lets them easily get far from their designated area on a whim" so they kept their mouths shut.
it takes surprisingly few trucks to keep stores stocked. most of the trucks you see driving around are either delivering packages or hauling bulk cargo that used to go by rail
There's still room for a lot more, but plenty of space has been taken away from automobiles precisely for bikes, scooters, etc. It's trending in the right direction. Especially now that bike lanes are increasingly being designed with parking between the bike land and vehicle lanes.
The same case was in Italy, and calendars of Vespa were awesome back in the 70s ''Piaggio (maker of Vespa) had had its Pontedera (Italy) factory (where they used to make bomber planes) bombed during the conflict.
Italy had it’s aircraft industry restricted to a great extent as part of the ceasefire agreement with the allies. Enrico Piaggio, son of the founder of the company Rinaldo Piaggio, decided to leave the aeronautical field behind and address the people’s need for an economic mode of transport.
The idea was to make a scooter utilitarian and appealing enough to the masses. Till that time, scooters were mainly used by the military for quick on-ground transportation (you might have seen this in some Call of Duty games).
So, two Piaggio engineers, Renzo Spolti and Vittorio Casini, took to their whiteboard and designed the first-ever Vespa, or maybe not quite. Mr. Piaggio was disappointed with the initial scooter. The scooter was named Paperino, and looking at the photo, you can understand Mr. Piaggios disappointment.' https://www.vespalicious.com/gallery/
For real. Loads of places in the UK are in desperate need of wider paths. Some probably haven't changed for 100 years except for making them narrower with stupid full height advertising screens (a travesty and civic vandalism by the councils)
I'm sure they went away because it's a fad or the costs/benefits don't balance, not because there is no space for them. This is evident by the fact that we have scooters in abundance now!
Despite city dwellers hating on cars and wanting complete streets, cars are poised to win even bigger when self driving becomes widespread.
Our roads and highways will metamorphose into logistics corridors and optimal public transit systems.
Everything will be delivered same hour. The cost of this will drop and entire new business models will be built on top of the "direct to you" model.
Self-driving cars will replace public transit. They connect every destination on demand. Short hops, cross-country long-haul. Waymo alikes will become cheaper than the city bus.
Van life will accelerate. People will live in their automated vans and SUVs. They'll become luxury and status items for knowledge workers who are constantly conveying themselves coast to coast, from cozy fire pits by the sea to hidden mountain getaways. Life in America will become one of constant travel, because we can take our life with us without lifting a finger. People will have large home bases in the affordable suburbs - possibly one on each coast. They'll wine and dine in the city, then be off to hike the next day.
Life will turn into adventure and it'll be accessible to almost everyone. Rich, poor. Young, old. Busy, retired.
Nobody will lift a finger for any of this.
We're going to want more roads.
Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
> Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
I would invite you to come and have a look in the Netherlands. It’s very common for octogenarians to cycle. My wife cycled up to the day of the birth of our daughter. Children have more independence because they can cycle to football practice on their own. Bike lanes are great for mobility scooters. It rains here, a lot! And it snows. I picked up our Christmas tree with our cargo bike. When I need to transport anything larger I will book a carshare, which are dotted around our neighbourhood.
There are two main reasons for what you describe: very flat terrain in Netherlands and people living in multi-family buildings mostly. Thus people don't ride any substantial distance according to Netherland's own statistics [1] and don't physically exert while doing so.
In the US average commute is 42 miles daily, that's over 67 km, or more than two weeks of riding a Dutch 12-18 y.o. does, or a month of riding of a Dutch 35-50 y.o. I'd like to invite any Dutch, who believes it's the same in the US, to ride 67km daily for 5 days straight, even in their own flat neighborhood. It might enlighten them why cyclists elsewhere wear special clothes too! And this is without hills...
European weather is still mild relative to the US. It will be so long as the Gulf Stream doesn't shut down.
Americans are fatter and less healthy.
Americans are busy and work longer and harder. ("Work hard, play hard.")
Americans buy more stuff. Big stuff. Lots of stuff. Frequently. (This is actually a superpower of our consumer economy.)
We have invested hundreds of trillions of dollars in our infrastructure. We might be able to put in a bike land here or there in a majorly dense city or two, but we're not changing all of this.
And more than anything else, America is fucking huge.
I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us. The proponents in the US trying to make it happen misunderstand the fundamental differences.
Just five years ago I would have said you were selling a monorail fantasy or sight to the blind to us. And an unfortunate few in the US were lapping it up as something we could actually do.
Now that self driving is finally arriving, what I'm saying is that our future is even brighter than most countries. We have the road infra to really make this magic.
I can wake up one day, make my coffee, hop into my car with my wife, and through no effort of my own, wind up at a mountain resort. No security checkpoints. No hassle packing. No screaming babies. We can listen to music, read, cuddle. It's our own space taking us wherever we want at complete and total leisure, affordably, comfortably, privately. We can even detour for food or whatever.
It's going to be pure magic. As big a revolution as the internet was.
> I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us.
lol. You're what we call "carbrained".
Explain how the climate of the coastal West coast is unsuitable for year-round bicycling. Much of it is nicer than the Netherlands and has several times the population.
That's because you're using planned economy principles for your cities.
Remove all zoning but for industrial zoning, and remove prop 13, like it is in most of Europe, and the invisible hand of the market will transform most of cities into medium-density mixed-use like in Europe, though in your case likely accomplished with 5-over-1s instead.
And with increased density, maybe you'd even have space for some public parks again.
You do realize most of the US doesn't live on the West coast, right?
Your sampling is skewed.
It's been freezing cold here and any destination within our major city you want to reach is 30+ minutes away by bike.
The "carbrained" insult is so stupid, btw. Once autonomous vehicles are commonplace you'll either come around or be complaining about it nonstop. Car usage is going to 2-10x.
I cannot fathom the bleak pessimistic perspective of wanting fixed trains and busses over this. Crying babies, rude people.
American transit sucks and it's not getting better. It's tolerable in cities like NYC, but even so it's a far cry from Asia. If you're not American, please don't project. We'll never have that here. We are not dense enough for it.
I don't think this is a crazy take, but it is missing two big factors that self driving maximalists often ignore.
First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/mile all in (i.e. including depreciation, repairs, gas, etc) -- you can get down to half that pretty easily and maybe a little lower, but especially if you're spending tons of time in this car you're probably going to want a nice comfy one, which will cost more and depreciate faster. So, these trips you're imagining everyone taking constantly are not going to be accessible to most people. Cars are already the second biggest expense in most Americans' budgets, one which scales with mileage, and which self driving would only increase (have to pay for the lidar, on-device compute, whatever remote service handled edge cases, etc).
The second thing your predictions miss is geometry. Despite the decades of predictions about self-driving cars being able to run safely at much higher speeds and with much tighter tolerances than human-run cars, the tyranny of geometry and stopping distances (which actually won't change much even with millisecond reaction times) means that throughput of car lanes is unlikely to change much (though we could all imagine top-down infrastructural changes helping this a lot, eg coordinated self driving cars and smart roads, those seem unlikely to land anytime soon given American political inclinations). Imagine how spaced-out people are on the highway -- in each lane, 1.6 people (average car occupancy) every football field (300 feet -- safe stopping distance at 70mph). If you're trying to go anywhere more densely packed than that -- e.g., a city, a restaurant, a ball game -- you're going to start to run into capacity constraints. Mass transit, walking, and cycling all can manage an order of magnitude higher throughput.
So while I think your prediction -- that self driving cars will increase demand for road space -- is right, the valence that takes for me is much more negative. The wealthy will be able to take up way more space on the road (e.g., one car each dropping off each kid at each extra curricular activity), condemning the poor to even worse traffic (especially the poor who cannot afford a self driving vehicle, who will not even be able to play candy crush while they're waiting in this traffic). People will continue to suburbanize and atomize, demanding their governments pay for bigger and bigger roads and suburbs, despoiling more of the areas you'd like to hike in, with debt that will keep rolling over to the next generation. Bikes and peds will continue to be marginalized as the norm for how far apart people live will continue to grow, making it even more impossible and dangerous to get anywhere without a car. I hope I'm wrong but this is how mass motorization played out the first time, in the post-war period, and if anything our society is less prepared now to oppose the inequitable, race-to-the-bottom, socialize-your-externalities results of that phase of development.
You really think the idea of anything like bumper to bumper traffic existed more than a hundred years ago? Everything before 2000s (though surely car traffic existed in the 1900s) seems like a dramatization.
The number of horses in London was causing problems at the end of the 19th century - they don't scale well when you need to provide stables, food and of course leave piles of dung everywhere.
I would think in some places there was bumper to bumper for short distances. I would expect in parts of NYC it existed. I think it was in the 1920s when traffic lights started to appear.
Some (more niche) industries/products/etc require larger margins to be able to exist. Without scale, they need to sometimes charge more.
It's the classic single gas station in the middle of nowhere argument. Without volume, they can't reasonably survive without charging more per unit - if competition shows up, one of them will inevitably go out of business due to the reduced margins.
Hubs still exist(ed), but nobody implemented half-duplex or CSMA from gigabit ethernet on up (I can't remember if it was technically part of the gig-e spec or not)
If you worked in an industrial setting, legacy tech abounds due to the capital costs of replacing the equipment it supports (includes manufacturing, older hospitals, power plants, and etc). Many of these even still use token ring, coax, etc.
One co-op job at a manufacturing plant I worked at ~20 years ago involved replacing the backend core networking equipment with more modern ethernet kit, but we had to setup media converters (in that case token ring to ethernet) as close as possible to the manufacturing equipment (so that token ring only ran between the equipment and the media converter for a few meters at most).
They were "lucky" in that:
1) the networking protocol that was supported by the manufacturing equipment was IPX/SPX, so at least that worked cleanly on ethernet and newer upstream control software running on an OS (HP-UX at the time)
2) there were no lives at stake (eg nuclear safety/hospital), so they had minimal regulatory issues.
Separation of church and state, especially when schools don’t allow alternative books (eg in some Bible Belt areas). Also, the bible does have violence, sex (including rape and incest), etc.
I understand there are reasons it could be banned, but I'm saying that in reality it is not. It is widely available in elementary and middle school libraries.
There have been many attempts to ban it, but a backlash usually results in its reinstatement. IIRC there are often cases where questionable verses are blotted out or it's only the new testament (which is in general less "graphic"), but it really depends on the jurisdiction.
Except for one case in Texas that made a splash in the news last year, I didn't find other cases of the Bible being banned from school libraries. Did I miss something?
If not, it would make sense that Texas made the news because it's out of the ordinary.
Nominally I agree with you, but your example is classic survivorship bias.
The chances of getting kidnapped are and always were far, far, far less than automobile related injuries and deaths, yet we just see that as a normal risk of modern life.
I have been wondering if the fact that the current generation of 20-somethings isn't going out as much is because of this "over parenting" that they received. I'm sure it's also TikTok, living costs, and avoiding other vice related behaviour (drinking, sex) at such high rates, but it does make me think...
> A planned economy is certainly a lot more viable now than it was in 1950, let alone 1920. The Soviet Union was in many ways just a century too early.
If the economy were otherwise stagnant, maybe. But top-down planning just cannot take into account all the multitudes of inputs to plan anywhere near the scale that communist countries did. Bureaucrats are never going to be incentivized anywhere near the level that private decision making can be. Businesses (within a legal/regulatory framework) can "just do" things if they make economic sense via a relatively simple price signal. A top-down planner can never fully take that into account, and governments should only intervene in specific national interest situations (eg in a shortage environment legally mandating an important precursor medicine ingredient to medical companies instead of other uses).
The Soviet Union decided that defence was priority number one and shoved an enormous amount of national resources into it. In the west, the US government encouraged development that also spilled over into the civilian sector and vice-versa.
> But a major failing of the Soviet economic system was that there simply wasn't good data to make decisions, because at every layer people had the means and incentive to make their data look better than it really was.
It wasn't just data that was the problem, but also quality control, having to plan far, far ahead due to bureaucracy in the supply chain, not being able get spare parts because wear and tear wasn't properly planned, etc. There's an old saying even in private business that if you create and measure people on a metric they'll game or over concentrate on said metric. The USSR often pumped out large numbers of various widgets, but quality would often be poor (the stories of submarine and nuclear power plant manufacturers having to repeatedly deal and replace bad inputs was a massive source of waste).
Considering how much government spending goes to the elderly, either directly via programs like OAS and tax benefits or indirectly via healthcare, and it was only a matter of time before young people question their position in it all (higher schooling tuition/debt, bad job market, expensive housing, etc). OAS doesn't even start getting clawed back until personal income is over $90K and is only fully clawed back at $150K! And it's double that for a couple!
The timing of the last election was perfect for Carney when there was a window where the whole country was going WTF with Trump and PP was still railing against various "woke" grievances and mentioning Trudeau by name. The fact that he wasn't turfed after not only losing the election that was his to win, but also losing his seat, is everything wrong with the myopic federal Conservative Party (whose core members refuse to "compromise" with the rest of the country).
There is a real generational tilt happening and young Canadians no longer defaulting to left leaning ways of thinking (not that they ever were as much as people thought).
Yep agreed on all points. I like that there are a few local orgs (GenerationSqueeze, Missing Middle) bringing light to things like the portion of the federal budget allocated to OAS and how it's structured, and generally being real about present day inequities.
Carney will (hopefully) have to reckon with those in the coming year, while Pierre seriously missed a (the?) boat. It does feel like something big is shifting slowly.
> There is a real generational tilt happening and young Canadians no longer defaulting to left leaning ways of thinking (not that they ever were as much as people thought).
It's my impression that the balance between economic prosperity and social good needs to be constantly curated and revered as an inherent virtue of a democracy with strong social safety nets. It's much easier to get working age people to compensate for the ails of generations past if there's no doubt in their mind they'll have a roof over their head next year.
Progressive, often barely tangible issues, necessarily become internalized as luxurious if the people who could support them can't even pay for food.
IMO, the US business industry has become over-financialised to the point of self-sabotage. R&D and capital expenditure are seen as "bad" things to have on accounting statements. Combine this with Jack Welsh type CEOs who do everything they can to cut out "costs" on financial statements and you get organizations like GE turned into (badly run) banks.
Cisco is now essentially a publicly traded PE firm that buys up other companies to milk dry. Most internal development is outsourced by suits far removed from any qualifications on quality.
We all know the foibles of Boeing, where accountants made the final calls on everything.
The only innovations the traditional American car companies seem to be able to focus on is how to make cars bigger to increase margins. It's ludicrous that it took a new company (Tesla) to make electric cars available.
I could go on. This is not to say that other countries (including China) don't have their own issues with their business climate, but the United States has an environment where some of the smartest and best paid people in the country are working their asses off to find out better ways to show ads (Google/Facebook).
That's ultimately what you get when you have a system that 1) has most of its money held by the retirement/pension funds of a generation that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth and 2) has incentivized returns to those institutional investors at the board and c-suite levels of most companies.
I mean if we're talking about generations that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth, then China is actually ahead of us there. Their birth rate plummeted below replacement well before the US's did.
Everyone acts like the C8 corvette doesn’t exist when they shit on American cars. Actually GM is an innovative awesome company.
The C8 has topped many “top car” lists since it came out in 2020. The reviews on it are universally excellent and it gaps pretty much anything that the turn-signal hating BMW crowd manufactures both in literal performance and in design.
Also there's no longer really any such thing as an American car. Everything now is some globalized mess of parts from brands here and there. Made in factories wherever is most financially convenient.
The problem is that we've given so much space to automobiles that there's no room for anything else (bikes, scooters, etc). Pedestrians have been given a sliver only because drivers need to walk between parking and their destination. This is true even in cities where the majority of people don't even drive!
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