Boy doesn't look like subtracting cars from the road is a very good move on this forum. It looks like it's drive drive and drive, need to get your mail? Take the car. Need to reduce our carbon foot print? Pass the requirement on to the next guy. I gotta drive to the store to get my booze and cigs. Who cares if the store is less than a mile away! Taking my H1 Hummer this time! Take two cars if I had AI!

 

Boy, you're awfully black and white. You hate cars. You hate drivers. You hate any opinions other than your own. Got it.

Do you have anything substantive to say? Because that post is just emotional vomiting. It's unfortunate that this dreck comes out whenever anybody voices an opinion contrary to your own highly narrow worldview.

One would assume the reason you keep posting these threads is to spark discussion about the article you link to, but apparently that's not the case. You just want to stand on your soapbox, spew your drivel, and not be challenged. Nice.

BTW, I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't drive an H1, and my mailbox is within walking distance.

 

I probably like cars more than you or almost anyone on this forum.

I strongly believe and know they're an absolute scourge for our natural and built environments. One doesn't have to hate cars to understand the issues they cause.
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I'd respond to your earlier post full of fallacies about transit but I'm on my phone, I'll try to get to it at some point in coming days.

 

This is so childish and arrogant. "I like cars more than you!" Next, are you going to tell me that your dad can beat up my dad?

I'm not going to get into an infantile peen-swinging contest over who likes cars more. Let's just say you like cars more than me. Congrats.

Cars do pollute and infrastructure is invasive, yes. Scourge is subjectively a bit strong, but I agree that they certainly have little environmental upside. Like anything else in life, there are trade-offs. I hold that the upsides to autonomous transportation outweigh the downsides and believe there is plenty of room here for reasonable disagreement.
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I look forward to it. I'm glad to be proven wrong. Just leave the Nazi implications out of it this time, k?

 

Wow, I missed this whole thing?

I'll just say this for now- any given problem is bound to have multiple approaches to fix or mitigate it. Especially something as complex as transportation for a whole country, state, or even city, from heavy industry down to delivery trucks bringing food to the grocery stores to commuting workers to maybe a parent just trying to get their kids to a park outside of walking distance. The solutions may not be the same in as diverse a place as the United States. Try to treat traffic the same in farm country anywhere like you would in NYC or vice versa? Ridiculous.

If someone's first instinct is to tell people they need to drastically change their lives to suit a central planner's utopian vision, and pay double or triple their current tax rates (I live in the Sound Transit district, and my tabs went up something like 5x what they were) for the privilege of doing what they're told? Sounds like the kind of authoritarian state we've spent much of our national history fighting against. Not just for traffic, either. There are people advocating for the government telling us what to eat, where we can live, all manner of things that in years past would have been left to individual choice, to the freedom we're supposed to have as Americans.

I've met more than one person advocating for government restriction of reproduction, so that humans either gradually go extinct, or only exist in small pockets dedicated to preserving the sanctity of the wilderness. Obviously nobody here is proposing anything that extreme, but it's a matter of degree. There are solutions to nearly every problem except violent crime that don't start with taking people's freedom. We ought to start with those.

 

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There are ZERO environmental upsides to cars.

Autonomous transportation won't happen for DECADES.

Also, lets look at the downsides to autonomous cars:

-More vehicle miles
-More congestion
-Transportation wholly susceptible to hacking
-More reason for sprawling communities and the incredible waste that comes with them

The infrastructure affiliated with cars is terrible for human health, city health and businesses.

Do you know why cities struggled in the middle of the twentieth century and until recently? Cars. Urban renewal tried to make it easier for cars to exist in cities, making them dirty, loud, smoggy, miserable places to walk and live.

Why are cars bad for businesses? You're a lot more likely to walk into a small business/storefront if you're a pedestrian than you are to park a car & get out to walk in.

Why are car-oriented businesses bad for pedestrians? If you have to walk to a Wal-Mart for groceries, you generally have to walk across a fast paced road with no/minimal pedestrian infrastructure and then cross a huge piece of car-centric infrastructure again.

As for costs...

Car infrastructure is INCREDIBLY expensive. An interstate interchange outside of Milwaukee cost $1.7 BILLION a few years ago. That's ONE interchange.

Now you've complained about transit costing too much. MCTS (Milwaukee County Transit Service) spends an average of $4ish per bus passenger, it costs passengers $2 for a trip. Even if you were to take the entire MCTS program and make it FREE to every passenger (which you should, it would boost ridership and equity across the entire county), that ONE interchange could have paid for all of MCTS costs for the next 11 years. With all of the environmental benefits that come with getting cars off of the road.

As for your light rail talk...that has absolutely zero to do with getting cars off of city streets. Light rail is better at getting people/stuff between cities/states, not from Brooklyn to Harlem.

The US and most state DoT spend around 95% of their budget on automobile infrastructure, putting the car number around 80%, 10% for bike/ped and 10% for public transit could change our cities massively for the better.

Climate change is the number one issue facing the world right now, continuing to think cars are a part of anything other than the problem is anti-science ignorance/naivete.

 

BTW, my line about me liking cars more than you is a result of your childish attacks at user1 "you hate cars. you hate drivers. you hate any opinions other than your own."

 

Yeah, I was understating for effect. I understand that doesn't come across well in this sort of format. I agree. However, like I said, everything is a trade-off. I acknowledge the pollution and impact on the environment that cars cause. I continue to believe that the benefit outweighs the impact. I'm all for finding reasonable ways to reduce that impact.

Sorry, I meant 'autonomous' in the traditional sense. i.e. operating independently or your ability to transport yourself independently. Meaning not tethered to rail, transit schedule, etc. I was not referring to autonomous vehicles in the modern sense. (e.g. self-driving cars) Sorry if that wasn't more clear.

To your point, however, I agree. Self-driving cars bring a host of challenges and the headlong rush to develop them is misguided. I especially believe that testing them at this stage on public roads is grossly irresponsible. That is where we will eventually end up, however. Autonomous transportation (in the traditional sense) is desirable and anything else, as a replacement for cars, is regressive. Non-autonomous transport will (bold prediction here) never be more than supplemental until we invent a matter transporter.

Your biases are clear. Anyway, I expected to read a refutation of my supposed fallacies about transit, but I found nothing of the sort. We'll dig in anyway...

I don't necessarily disagree with any of this. Again, you're looking at it from the perspective of an urban dweller. I hold the opinion that, for me, cities are miserable places to live regardless of the presence of cars. I also believe that having a car is a desirable method of transportation, so infrastructure should support them. could there be a better balance? Perhaps. Could transit and pedestrian traffic be better built and those that choose that route be better accommodated? Perhaps. But as you know, this country has been built around the car because it's the most flexible, adaptable, and IMO, best method of transportation, especially if one chooses to or cannot live in the city.

This is all true. It still doesn't refute anything I wrote. You're talking about total dollars spent where passenger cost-per-mile is all that matters when one talks about costs, and in that sense, transit is significantly more expensive. One needs to talk about how cost efficient a given method of transportation is.

Otherwise it's like saying that a single M&M at a cost of $0.15 costs less than a whole bag at $5. Yeah, that's obvious, but it speaks nothing to cost effectiveness if buying M&Ms individually is a crap-ton more expensive on a per-bite-of-candy-basis.

You know, I'm honestly surprised and delighted to read this from you. Most environmentally-minded people don't hold this view. I have heard from too many clowns that try to pitch light rail as a means to remove cars from the roads and it just doesn't happen. It's a complete fallacy and a huge money suck. So, I'm sincerely glad to read that.

However, be clear, that when I say 'Light' rail, that means 'low capacity' as defined. Meaning the short, passenger-only lines like the Northstar rail in MN. I agree that rail is best for goods or high-capacity passenger situations over long distance. For moving a handful of passengers between the Mall of America (ugh) and the Airport it's woefully cost inefficient.

Again, you speak of total costs, nothing about cost efficiency. If your point is to spend more on public transit, there are definitely situations where that's warranted and appropriate. As I stated above, I agree that public transit has it's place as a matter of public good.

I'm quite hesitant to go down this rabbit hole since this seems to be a particularly hot-button issue with you. If I'm honest, it seems to me that those that hold the view that "cliMatE CHanGe iS aN ExiSteNtiaL cRisiS" are simply too far gone to hold reasonable conversations on the topic. They use terms like 'anti-science' and 'climate denier' to shut down conversation. If that's you, then I'm not going to discuss it. If you do, however, want to hold a balanced and reasonable conversation about climate change, I'm up for it. But, based on your pattern of responses to other threads, the way you often word things when talking about climate change, and the way you have historically implied that all who hold views different from yours are Nazis, I really doubt we'd get anywhere productive on that issue simply due to your apparent personal investment in it, but, again, I'd be glad to be proven wrong. You've acted relatively sane in this thread so far, so there's hope.

 

Oh, I don't know. His retort to being challenged was completely unsubstantial emotional vomiting. I stand by that assessment as accurate. Could I have been gentler? Perhaps.

 

Maybe next time I'll let you know such a thread is going on as I tend to like the cut of your proverbial jib.

Yes. That.

 

Thanks for the discussion here. I for one pretty much believe everything that was stated at the OP. Much change needs to happen and it's really not fair to pass things off to the next generation, which seems like is what is happening, as far as I can see. Yeah little things get changed, but there always seems to be without sacrifices.

What I would love to see is fairly large push to give coming generations a great incentive to not even consider cars for personal transit.

Another thing, I maybe off, but maybe not, but it's about who is contributing to transportation infrastructure. I haven't found the latest and greatest about this issue, but found this as good article till I/we find the greatest summation.

Who pays for roads from frontiergroup.org (warning, they mention the T-word)

Somehow I'm not convinced that cars, being 20% efficient, on their good days, as being any answer to the issues faced.