Elon:
Guys, I think I’ve got it… What if we built another lane but, you know, under the ground, like a tunnel.
I recently watched a video about autonomous car and the dude argue the tech isn’t here yet, but it will work if we build a lane just for autonomous car and put every autonomous car on that lane.
Everyone in the comment basically calling him out for reinventing the train lol.
Trains are the crabs of transportation.
Can’t improve a crab.
Study: 83% Of Road Construction Stops Right Before They Would Have Added The Lane That Would Solve Traffic Problems
I once heard of an experiment in economics that offers insight into this.
Say you have 100 people. You give each of them one of two choices:
A : you get $40 unconditionally B: you get $70 - n, where n is the number of people who choose B
You end up getting, on average across experiments, n = 30.
If you move the numbers around (i.e, the $40 and the $70), you keep getting, on average, a number of people choosing B so that B pays out the same as A.
I think the interpretation is that people can be categorized by the amount of risk they’re willing to take. If you make B less risky, you’ll get a new category of people. If you make it more risky, you’ll lose categories.
Applied to traffic, opening up a new lane brings in new categories of people who are willing to risk the traffic.
Or something. Sorry I don’t remember it better and am too lazy to look it up. Pretty pretty cool though.
I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn’t help, and the term they use is “induced demand.”
Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you’re just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.
You’ve essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.
If you make driving easier than transit, more people will drive who previously took transit. The reverse is also true. One of these situations is more desirable for myriad reasons.
As well, additional demand can be created by convenience. People will make trips they otherwise never would have if it’s easier to make them.
Communist transportation will never ever ever ever ever ever ever be easier than driving.
Because driving is “get in the car, go directly to destination”
Public transport adds walk to transport rally point, wait, follow a compromise route to accomodate other travellers with many stop, consider all the strangers gazing and judging you, arrive at not your destination, walk 5 to 20 mins to your actual destination. Plus you must carry any object on your person while navigating the terrain (good luck hauling 50lbs of groceries).
I am simply not interested in this nightmare, find a solution that isn’t horrible.
And NOoo I don’t want Musks robot taxis from the “you will own nothing” dystopia.
As much as I personally disagree with you, given that all you’re thinking about is your own benefit, and not any of the myriad of benefits to the city, the world, the people who can’t afford cars, etc, I understand that your outlook is shared by the vast majority of Americans, and can’t be ignored if we ever hope to have an effective public transport system.
We’re going to need to somehow devise a system so convenient that it actually sounds attractive to the huge amount of people who spend 10%+ of their paycheck on car payments not because they have to, but because they want to.
Work 👏 from 👏 home👏 !
The answer to so many manufactured problems.
But what about the office landlords, are no one think about how they are going to feed their yatchs?
After the Covid lockdown, Italian politicians, pundits, and talking heads used sandwich sales as a reason for a return to office.
I’ve seen that exact scene in Atlanta trying to get to Alpharetta from 75 S by 675.
Alpharetta represent! Lol
Just going to leave this one here:
What is suburban rail, and how is it different from light rail?
I don’t know what they call it where you are from but here light rail is trams. Similar to San Francisco cable cars.
I guess everything I’ve been calling light rail fits into the suburban rail category. Multiple cities I’ve lived in are adding in “light rail” tracks between major centers
LA? 5? 405?
