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.”
He’s still with us. Why isn’t he doing stuff today? I feel like he’d be a huge YouTube star if he did his schtick reading Twitter threads or comment sections super fast. Stuff like that.
I own my own private electric scooter and it’s great. Makes for a quite pleasant commute, especially since I have a route that goes on protected bike lanes all the way from my apartment to my work!
I have pedal foldable bike(because I don’t want cramming unfoldable bike in elevator pornography) and regular scooter. I want escooter, but will buy it only after 3d printer.
It’s a relatively new term to refer to extremely small and lightweight vehicles generally used for short-distance rides. Things like bicycles, rollers, very small electric vehicles like e-rollers, e-bikes, segways etc.
What I’m saying is even if that car was part of a network of attachable cars, the maintenance of the infrastructure needed to accomodate those cars is still way more expensive. This is not even getting into the discussion that if you have enough cars to need a highway (let alone enough to start attaching self-driving cars to each other), a train is more feasible. Period.
I will agree with you that the train is not the be all and end all. Good bike infrastructure (separated bike lanes that are connected through a planned network), light rail/trams and buses all have their place. What I disagree is the use of cars in urban and suburban centers/ corridors. There is no need. The only people that should use private vehicles are delivery vehicles, emergency vehicles, and those that live in impossibly remote areas that are very much disconnected from urban centers - areas that are hardly surrounded by a self-sustaining community.
You realize car-dependent cities require you to be licensed and registered to be able to access groceries, no? In a walkable neighborhood, you can walk. For free. No license. No big government. No registration. Car dependence is the surveillance state.
Then be against surveillance in general… Its also a big problem. Not only a problem of 15 Minute cities. Cameras can also track your car quite easliy. Through the whole city.
All I need is less than 10 minutes away and I rarely need to go further for anything. And I love it. Not car dependend and no surveillance here.
Idk how the train will pick me up living in the middle of nowhere. Sure, trains are practical where civilization lives, but it’s just far too rural for trains here.
I live in a small walkable city in the Netherlands. I ride the bus, the train and my bicycle. I still own a car since those other transport modes don’t cover every need I have. And car sharing is non existent in my town.
I don’t think owning a car is necessarily a problem. For me FuckCars mostly means “fuck using a car unless you have to”, which means using a car for those kind of commutes that people do every day or very often. Go to your workplace, school or university, go shop groceries…
There will be other context where you are going to need a car. Your holidays, for one. It’s not a problem in my book. And of course it also applies to a lesser extent to folks living in the countryside, where it’s inherently more difficult and expensive to link communities to transit. Our main concern should be ridding cities of cars and you guys in the Netherlands are already doing an amazing work on that front in many places.
Accessible trains that cover long distances (particularly high-speed rail) with trains that have floors at the level of the platform, like any European country with a competent public transport system. “Your mother” could also use something like a microcar to get to the station, which is allowed on bike lanes in the Netherlands as long as she can prove she has a disability.
No, but your sons would have an easier and safer time getting around with protected bike lanes, which is precisely why parents in the Netherlands never have to do school runs.
Your groceries will get to you faster the less unneccessary road users are there due to less induced demand. Do you honestly think countries that heavily rely on public transport don’t have businesses that use the road regularly? Do you honestly think they have no emergency services (ambulances, firetrucks, police cars)? Have you actually thought about examples of how countries that actually exist using good public transport amenities and dense housing operate? Or are you just against change?
You meticulously avoided all hard questions. No problem, I just repeat them for you:
I wonder how a train is picking up my walking disabled mother from three Kilometres afar?
Will a train stop at my house to pick up my some two tons of gardening scraps per year?
At which time will it deliver my 100kg of groceries per week?
Also, How does a long distance train help my mother to get the 3km to her doctor?
How does a train help me buying building materials? Last week I bought 400kg of tiles. One drive with a car. It would have taken ten travels with a train if the train did stop inside the hardware store and directly in front of my house. Delivery by truck would have cost €50.
A “micro car” is not only insanely expensive, it also has no room for my mothers wheelchair.
My country has one of the best public transport systems in the western world. Everything you mention is available here. We can drive EVERYWHERE for a €49 flat rate and we have three bus stops within 100 metres. Still that doesn’t help to solve a single problem I mentioned earlier.
Oh, and spending €245 for a family trip in a train? Not gonna happen. With the car it is a €10 trip.
But there is a actually a solution which could work: Robotaxis at very low prices per km. It wouldn’t lower the traffic but reduce the parked cars and the TCO of personal transport.
Please give me moar bullshittery to mock you. It is fun.
I didn’t avoid your questions but if you would like to move your goalposts I can attempt to accomodate you.
The use of a microcar with a wheelchair is a very realistic possibility. In actual fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they already exist precicely because microcars are designed for people who are disabled. You know, the same people most likely to be wheelchair users?
I also find it so funny that you’re complaining about the potential cost of purchasing a microcar but a full size car is a justifiable expense to you.
Where in the fuck is a trip costing 235 Euros that costs you 10 Euros by car? That type of cost disparity is not even a thing in the UK, where there is some of the worst teains in all of Europe. That’s simply a shit public transport system. Unlimited journeys through the interrail system across 33 countries in Europe for one month costs 704 Euros.
That’s not even taking into account the fact that your mother would not be 3km away from some form of public transport service if your mother’s government was actually made of competent people.
I rented a car with adaptive cruise controle a month ago and it felt like riding a train. Driverles cars could work if they aren’t personal possession.
They won’t work because they take up space and therefore genrate traffic. They are also wasteful to resources, electric or not, because trains do a more efficient job of transporting people en mass than motorways/ highways (decreased cost of traintrack maintenance, decreased use of fuel per capita).
I ride a train 5 days a week. Not every destination can be reached by train. We need a multimodal approach to transport.
In the morning I ride to the railroad station with my own bike. There I take the train to the nearest hub and depending on my final destination I take a train or a bus. When I take the train I always take a shared bike for the last part of my journey.
Sometimes I really need to take a car because there is no suitable connection or the total commute takes up to much time by public transport. Then it would be great to eb able to call a self driving car to get me to my destination. A car that uses the highway and maind roads as if it was a railroad. Just attach your car to the line of cars passing. They could all go at the same speed and crossings could be arranged at turn by turn system so nobody really has to wait.
More likely that it will be trains between cities and AI taxis in cities. Owning a car will make less sense when you can at a moments notice just jump into a AI taxi and trains will be way faster than cars between cities. Within cities I do not see subways making much sense less a few busy routes.
Won’t ever happen that way, unless government sky rocket the cost of ownership. People are selfish and will fight that tooth and nail. Just look at the reaction to the ULEZ, and they are willing to buy the old junk from them.
You are on the right track. Trains go between cities, buses/metros/trams within a city. Cars (AI or not) will still exist, but their use will mostly be for people in rural areas to arrive near the next train station.
Traffic within a city is perfect for public transportation. It is dense enough with sufficient demand. Of course this doesn’t mean that robo taxis will (or should) be completely absent in the city, just that they should be the exception not the rule.
It depends where you live, here in Europe a lot of trips in the cities can also be done by walking, biking or other micromobility options because a lot of the trips are small distance.
It would be possible to slowly restructure the cities in the US to enable it there. It would also make the neighbourhoods much nicer in terms of livelyness and social interactions.
In the United States, I don’t know how you’d accomplish this. It would be impossible for almost all rural neighborhoods unless we’re going to build a grocery store within walking distance of most homes.
This is one of those liberal (I rarely leave my home) notions whose heart is in the right place but is ultimately stupid.
You actually should have a grocery store in walking distance. And a pharmacy, a dentist, a doctor, bars and restaurants, a kindergarten,… That’s how you get wrid of cars, indeed.
You could just put yourself in a coma and get fed by a tube. But yes, you can order from online stores. And if we all confine ourself to Amazon and then in the near future they would be governing us because they would be talking care of our basic needs.
You need small businesses. They are a cornerstone of society. Your food that is gron locally has to be sold locally. Otherwise you lose efficiency.
That’s a valid point. And I don’t see any problem with that. You live further form the city? You pay more for drinking water, electricity, etc… Because society has to invest more to bring those basic needs out there. I also feel like road taxes are supposed to be calculated on the distance you travel yearly.
I live in a very densely populated country and to live isolated is quite uncommon but people that build houses more rural are obliged to make some extra investments.
Gas heating is common over here and not so long ago the goal was to provide every house with gas. They changed that and now you have to be mor e self sufficient if you decide to build a house away outside of city limits. Same for sewage. You’ll have to invest in your own filtration. And so on…
They can, but it’s a multi trillion dollar century plus endeavor that well require eminent domain millions of properties in order to make enough space for the conversion. Infrastructure still needs to go some place, and you need to replace millions of sfh with apartments. My city doesn’t even have any land left to build more train lines. It’s just 30 miles of gridded small lots.
Further, policy-wise, we don’t need eminent domain. We don’t need to forcefully destroy everything. We just need to abolish the restrictive zoning and parking minimums that are stopping the invisible hand of the free market from providing us with density, walkability, and transit-oriented development.
That’s not going to fly today. Today, citizens can sue the jurisdiction and actually win, unlike the 1950s or '70s. And cities aren’t going to be able to target minority dominated neighborhoods like they did in the past, or they’re going to be in a real shitstorm both politically and legally.
Note the picture says “urban”, not rural neighborhoods. There’s no reason to think we can’t have train infrastructure connecting to rural areas though. The point would be to make our infrastructure human centered and supplement it with appropriate public transportation based on density. It can be done by rethinking how we zone and getting away from designing everything with cars and space for cars in mind. Not saying we do away with cars because they definitely serve a purpose the way we have things now, but gradually build up the non-car infrastructure so that cars are less needed over time. If we can imagine it in a way that works, we can accomplish it.
Yeah, but am I incorrect that the Netherlands is a fairly temperate place, if not on the cooler side? I don’t think you’ll convince most people to bike to work in the south, in the country, in 95+ degrees fahrenheit heat.
Ooh well in fact millions of people do ride bicycles for transportation every single day.
In Japan, like many other countries, women ride bikes for everyday transportation. They are so ubiquitous they are called “mamacharis” which loosely translates to ‘Mom-chariots.’
Every train station, shopping center and school in Japan has hundreds of not thousands of bicycle parking racks, similar to what you would find in the Netherlands.
My wife bought a bike in Japan for $400 and rode everyday, even in the countryside you see riding everyday. It’s totally normal. You see it all over in Asia. So people do ride, even when it’s hot and humid. Often with 1-2 kids on top of groceries, which weigh upwards of 50+ pounds of weight.
Ebikes can work wonders for that, in my experience. I’ve biked to work in 95 and humid weather and wasn’t super sweaty by the end (office job). The ebike allows you to pedal less and get more breeze going past you, which makes a MASSIVE difference in how hot and sweaty you get, especially on hills.
I would not have even considered that with a non-electric bike.
Not on distances I’ll have to travel after we finally move to an office further away in a car-centric hellhole. 18 km (~10 miles). ½ hr on a motorcycle or a moped, twice as long on an (e-)bike. Nah, I’m not doing the latter in the morning when I can barely get out of my bed. And I’m not the only one complaining about the office moving.
You know they’re illegal? E-bikes are supposed to go 25 kph (~15 mph) max and only assist when you pedal. Not the best solution when I want to get to work quite far away in the morning without being pulled over for obvious speeding on a cycleway.
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