Space is the limiting factor in all those situations and if you're buying any one of those things above you also have to 'provide' space for it. With cars this inefficiency wouldn't matter, if people only parked it in the spaces they owned or in the middle of nowhere. But in a lot of cities there is a conviction that car owners are owed a parking space in walking distance of anything that has to be ready for them at anytime and is absurdly cheap.
Elon Musk | Owner of X
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A bit like parks. It would make the city a nicer place.
I don't need to care all that much. I live in the countryside and don't foresee participating in such carpooling, even if it happens in my lifetime. Think it will improve urban society when it happens though.
i think self driving cars will inevitably become common-place because it will be cheaper for companies
i think the idea it won't catch on is quite absurd really, it will take time but it's obviously a better solution and more efficient solution
i think the idea it won't catch on is quite absurd really, it will take time but it's obviously a better solution and more efficient solution
That's only a problem to the people not owning cars though, everybody else needs exactly the same. I'm not sure where you live but in my city if I park in a public garage that's about 2€ /hour which comes out at ~1440 € / month for at most 24 m² of unheated, unprotected dirty space.
Hardly absurdly cheap.
Eventually I agree but can't see it happen this decade, maybe next.
We were promised to have it for at least 5-6 years now though. So a bit of ridicule for those that keep claiming it's right around the corner is to be expected, no?
(I think a large % of current car owners will still want to own their own self driving car though)
yeah i expect it to take at least a decade from here, but honestly who knows
i'd definitely rather just share a self-driving car, or one of a pool of cars, rather than own one.. so I'm on board once the tech is ready
the amount of jobs that will be lost will be crazy though, so not entirely sure its a good thing
Irrespective of how clean or clever private cars are, they'll always be awful for urban environments. The sheer amount of land roads take up, the cost of maintaining them and the impact they have on the walkability of a city far outweigh how efficient they are as a means of transport.
This esentially. For us to take our private space with us in a trip, a gigantic and mainly public effort is needed in infrastructure, maintenance, signaling, workforce, parking space, law enforcement, etc. And that's not considering things like the consumption of non renewable resources, the carbon print, or the fact that we have to look at the million-a-year casualties from car accidents and just shrug it off.
I appreciate the technology behind self driving cars and kind of understand the hype, but there's a leap between that and to consider it a long term efficient solution.
Pooled cars as a concept is already up and running. I have two kids which occasionally means owning just one car is a hassle but I really didn’t want a second one for environmental/financial reasons. So I signed up with these guys and have access to a car round the corner from my house which I can rent on an hourly basis. The hourly rates are very expensive but still work out miles cheaper (and better for the environment) than a second car. I think more and more people living in big cities will do the same. A lot of them will be able to avoid owning any car at all. Which is great. I’ve heard of even more sophisticated versions in other European capitals. In Berlin there are BMWs you can rent and pick up/drop off wherever you want (GoCar version involved dropping back to same spot you picked it up)
That's what I did as well when I lived in Copenhagen and didn't own a car. Far easier and cheaper for the times I actually needed a car. I used ShareNow where you can rent by the minutes, or pre-purchase for some hours or even a week. At one point I even bought a monthly subscription on minutes for the discount. Much cheaper than a taxi and faster the public transport (at one point, sometimes even cheaper than buying a bus ticket to get across town. Definitely been a positive in the city.
It's a product where you pay mostly for flexibility and availability, if you wanted to find anything close to a direct equivalent you would probably have to compare it to hotels charging hourly and I think it's a fairly safe guess that controlling for the differences in costs they run on astronomically higher margins. Public garages are also usually both funded and heavily subsidized, not sure how much of it applies to your particular one.
Ignoring the 'not my problem, therefore not a problem' sentiment, the car-centric cities are horrible to live in for car users too, they're just basically unlivable for anybody else.
The future is fully integrated public transport, not driverless cars.
Well to my mind motorways are car-centric. Hardly any city in Europe that I'm aware of can be called car centric (Maybe Basel? Hardly a horrible place), some have banned cars from huge stretches like Amsterdam or Barcelona but most have a healthy mix cultivated over decades, and I don't see that changing anytime soon other than for tourist places. And I'll gladly visit Amsterdam but you couldn't pay me to live in the car free parts of it.
I love trams and trains but they only take you where they drive, and that is largely between different populated places (hence why mass transit makes sense). Even in places that have truly great networks like Switzerland or Japan that makes huge parts of the country inaccessible without some access to a car. Good enough if you only want to move from one urban environment to another but hardly perfect. Just look at London, with trains, tube, crossrail, buses, trams etc. and huge price penalties on privately driven cars. Yet there's still plenty of cars around because people still value them enough compared to the alternatives to pay up and go through the pain of driving (maybe not the majority anymore but still more than enough).
It's not like we won't need roads once private cars are replaced anyway, no matter how much not just bikes says so
.I think the idea of some technology marvel not happening yet being subjective of ridicule is a bit weird. I celebrate the recent developments in fusion despite that fusion was 2 decades away for the last 5 decades. Self-driving car technology is probably as hard to be achieved.
But public transport kinda sucks. So it won’t be the future of anything. And in non dense cities (most of the US), it sucks even more.
1 Year out https://www.popsci.com/article/cars/tesla-ceo-wants-mostly-self-driving-cars-next-year/ (2014)
2 Years out https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview/ (2015)
It's achieved https://www.wired.com/2016/10/elon-musk-says-every-new-tesla-can-drive/ (2016)
I'm sure I could go on but can't bother doing it for every year. It's 2023 now.
I agree that it's always in the future like fusion but I'd also say anyone who confidently predicted fusion (economical use) would happen within 2 years in 2015 has a bit of egg on his face now.
The non density of American cities is a disaster in city planning, an environmental disaster, a monetary disaster and a choice of policy that needs to be corrected. Public transportation is part of a solution for the underlying issue. And not, as you suggest, a reason against it.
Current public transport sucks. But it could be better. I actually see a future of driverless trams more than personal cars.
Public transport doesn't suck, though. It sucks in rural areas (where few people live) and in places where it's a political decision for it to suck (almost all of the US).
Most of the western US cities were planned during an era where environmental issues were not known and done in a way to take advantage of the one resource they believed they had in abundance: space. Sadly, the automobile industry also dismantled the public transportation infrastructure in places like Los Angeles and after a half-century or more building this way it's not really something that can just be "corrected." Once a city has grown the way a Los Angeles or Dallas or even a smaller city like Reno has grown, it's pretty much impossible to now say "oops" let's make these cities more like Copenhagen or Berlin. Los Angeles has been trying for two decades now to retroactively reinstall a public transportation system and it's not very efficient (either monetarily or environmentally) but its slowly making things a little better.
California has been doing a decent job (minus the disaster of Jerry Brown's fossil fuel-burning railway boondoggle to Bakersfield and Fresno) of updating the state infrastructure and taking contemporary environmental concerns into account but it's not an easy process and spending billions on transportation comes with tradeoffs such as less money to manage the housing crisis and thus, the homeless.
One thing that helps, a positive lesson from the pandemic, is increasing remote work which removes the need for daily commutes. More businesses have switched to that model and should be encouraged to do that in the future. I work remotely myself but if I had to go into my company's office and take public transportation it would literally take 2.5 hours each way every day (which is basically a non-starter). Personally, I think every job that could be done remotely should, at least, have a hybrid option as the more remote workers we have the easier it is to reduce carbon footprint and make transportation (public or private) much more effective. Remote work and energy efficiency of buildings + personal and commercial solar has been a great success in California and that's the best place to start here IMO.
So, so far off topic 
Isn't there a thread for this stuff instead?
Isn't there a thread for this stuff instead?
Cities cannot be rebuilt though. So that is a non starter.
Also, it sucks. I use it every day for monetary and environmental reasons, but still it sucks. I can only imagine how it would be in sparse cities of US.
They can. But it takes time, money, determination and politicians willing to do what should have been done decades ago.
We'll have flying cars before autonomous ones.
We'll only have flying cars if we've perfected autonomous ones. Or we're going to have a lot of drunk drivers crashing into buildings.
How? It's easy to just say vague things like "time, money, and politicians" but how would you actually go about rebuilding Los Angeles into some futuristic city like you envision? It would be far easier and more efficient and better for the environment to simply build new cities with all the knowledge we have now than trying to tear down and reconstruct current ones.
The same principles low density cities were build. By doing whatever is possible to make city centers more attractive. Stop any subsidies for private car ownership. Build functioning public transportation networks in city centers. Make driving there less attractive, too expensive and simply unnecessary. Locate businesses back in city centers instead of building them in the middle of nowhere, in giant ugly malls. It's a long process. It's an expensive process. But so was the construction of hellish asphalt deserts such as the city of Houston, which is no more than a miscarriage of city developing. And obviously you start with the most doable stuff and utilize the resources already at your disposal. Better public transportation? You already have a shitload of streets. Buy busses, make them cheap, clean and reliable and go from there. And houses can be torn down. So can malls. Renaturation is possible and has been done before.
American cities are a suburban nightmare. And they are so by choice. And these choices were also incredibly expensive, difficult, took decades of (idiotic) planning and were no less of a monstrous task to enact, than reversing this wrong course could be.
I absolutely know that I'm demanding an awful lot and that it is in no way realistic that we will see it happen. But I'm also convinced that it is necessary, doable and the right thing to do. And personally that's more than enough reason to do it, for me.
Oh, there's also nothing futuristic about it. We already have cities like this and there are more and more going this way.
To recap: spend a shitload of money for some solution which is worse than the current one, and that likely most of people will just not accept. HTG for president!
Is this still the Elon Musk thread?
WTF happened to this thread?
Might as well start talking about what I had for lunch today. Chicken White bean chili with a little shredded cheddar on top and avocado slices. It was excellent.
Might as well start talking about what I had for lunch today. Chicken White bean chili with a little shredded cheddar on top and avocado slices. It was excellent.
Back to Musk's Twitter, my app just kindly recommended a tweet from Musk despite having him blocked.
This seems like a very undesirable idea to me, especially for a city like Los Angeles where you also have to take into account earthquakes and the water issue.
What I started to hear from people that worked in the green energy sector when I worked there some years ago was actually the exact opposite. Dispersing population more away from city centers and building more sustainable communities from the ground up that include far more efficient water and waste recycling, more energy efficient buildings and implementing solar (and other energy sources from geothermal to wind, etc) then connecting this more dispersed communities using non-fossil fuel burning transportation like mag-lev trains.
To me, that is really the solution moving forward. It's not to force people back into commuting into city centers and tearing down hundreds of thousands houses to build apartments and condos (regardless if that commute is on non-fossil burning public transport), its to reject completely this outdated idea of going into the office and forcing high density living entirely. Remote work solves some of these issues organically IMO. The pandemic showed that people don't have to commute to an office to get work done. I've had recruiters contact me in the last year and my first question is "is this position 100% remote?" and if the answer is no I end the talk right there. Feck living in a high-density city just so I can commute to an office. I, and many people I know, have zero desire to ever go back to 20th-century office culture. Feck that. Working remotely allows people to not have to cram into high-density cities and allows for solutions like the new communities I know some green sector people have been envisioning.
Anyway, I guess people just want to whine about Musk's latest tweet so we can continue this in another thread at some point.
Woke mind virus.
Judge all you want, it was fantastic.
I'm sure it was, it does sound good.
My feed is now awash with right wing blowhards, GBeebies and Tory MPs (although they’re not mutually exclusive) - is this Musk creating that so-called virtual town hall?
Define kinda sucks.
Because this was posited by finance VC types as their little minds struggled to come up with ways to make money so pushed this dumb ass idea onto the world.