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).

Depends on society. Here in Europe we build more and more railways even though we already have shitloads (compared to US).

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.

There’s an argument to be made that driverless cars make more efficient use of our existing infrastructure, namely, roads, and are more adapted to the hellscape of sprawl that we created. Traffic jams could effectively be eliminated if you get rid of people that treat the left lane like a regular traffic lane, people going too slow, people going too fast, etc. It’s not like building more trains is going to suddenly mean that trains are convenient - there is a VAST amount of sprawl, and it’s not going anywhere. It took the steel industry shutting down in Pittsburgh, and 60% of the population relocating, before people got the bright idea that actually living closer in to the population center makes sense and turn small outliers into ghost towns. I’m not against trains, I just think the scale of the problem is larger than most people understand when they say “build more trains.”

How to not make a train out of cars:

1. Remove driver
2. Make them follow predefined path
3. Make them accelerate and decellerate together
4. Link them together for better space-efficiency

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!

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.

Why do you live in the USA?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What about groceries, various errands? it’s definitely not just going to the office is the only reason people get around with cars.

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.

Trains can transport higher loads of people though. So ultimately both trains and busses need to be the priority.

We can all live near a train stop. Roads were built everywhere. Train rails are actually not as expensive to build

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 cities were radically different before we decided that a car should be able to go anywhere.

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1. People are calling for radical change to their cities as they realize the poor economics of urban sprawl and suburban development. You do have a good point though as transit, density, and mixed zoning all work best when used together.

2. The shift to transit and walkability will actually make exisiting roadways and highways less congested and better serve any delivery vehicles using them. We won’t rip out all existing roads, but we will stop building a new lane every 5 years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That is an organizational problem because my country next to it has all those things at just about every train stop (Switzerland).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.