![[meme] Trains -- not driverless cars -- are the future of transportation](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f6468af5-8151-4b4c-b339-2fa0b0373c3a.webp){kind=link}
Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, “Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND.”
Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, “Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND.”
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.”
The best long term solution for both nicer cities, happier people, and less environmental damage is to overhaul our infrastructure. Don’t build trains in car dependant cities, make the car dependant cities walkable with public transportation that will leave you within a few minutes of your destination. The real reason self driving cars are the “future” is because selling cars has a higher profit margin than train/bus tickets.
Not a foregone conclusion, at all. The average car occupancy now is something like 1.2 people, and self-driving cars might drop that below 1. Time behind the wheel is a cost that people pay for mobility, among other costs, and the Jevons Paradox says that if you make a commodity cost less per unit (i.e. more efficient) we end up using more of it in total, e.g. coal, or lighting. We could have more traffic as people send their empty cars on errands, for example. To get the benefits, you’d have to ban private car ownership. That seems like a heavy political lift, considering that they don’t even expect half of the U.S. private auto fleet to be electric before 2050, and those are available for sale right now.
The bit of the puzzle you are forgetting is the taxpayer-subsidized roads lose half their lobbying funds when electric cars are a thing. Wihtout trillions being spent sabotaging transit and micromobility it starts looking a lot better for cities to buipd a bike path for $1 million thna a highway upgrade for $1 billion