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boner confessor posted:storing cars far away and short wait times for cars seems like opposed concepts. this is one reason people store their privately owned vehicles inside of their houses, when possible, rather than in a communal lot. cars would also still definitely be stored downtown because you want to have a supply of vehicles as close as possible to where demand is highest, or else you'd get a weird pre-rush hour around 3.30-4 as all the cars start flooding out of their hives in the industrial district or wherever and start filling up downtown streets. not to mention that self driving cars further perpetuates the polycentric distributed metropolis which by its very nature makes downtown less valuable as economic activity doesn't need to be concentrated in any one spot in particular, which is a holdover from the era of predominantly pedestrian modes (like your posts, lmao) I don't think any system that still uses cars at all or even attempts to retrofit "far" suburbs is going to avoid promoting that same polycentric metropolis. Obviously we can get rid of zoning laws that prevent corner stores on residential streets and whatnot, but that doesn't matter if there aren't enough people with easy enough access to make such a store viable. A Wizard of Goatse posted:what statistically significant group of people are you imagining currently have a car, don't use it to drive to work, are still contributing to rush hour traffic and using up inner-city parking space during peak hours regardless, and wouldn't own a car if they could just Uber everywhere? Yes, a big part of the goal to me is to reclaim space currently used for car storage and turn it into worthwhile places that people might visit on purpose. It's a lot more than parking garages, but huge multi-acre parking lots which I'd like to replace.
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Dec 15, 2016 01:09
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah, you would have a time when all the cars file over to downtown before rush hour starts and away after it ends. Not the worst thing imaginable and it seems a lot better than leaving the cars in the middle of downtown. To me one of the major goals is reclaiming our shared space, and a huge portion of that right now is wasted on huge parking lots. it's wasted on huge parking lots specifically because of development patterns that rely on long distance automobile travel to work. the idea that we can all commute via auto but then the cars just sort of disappear into a pocket dimension is like some kind of diet fad as related to urban planning. the best and most reliable way to reduce parking lots and land devoted to roadways is to reduce the use of automobiles to navigate a space Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I don't think any system that still uses cars at all or even attempts to retrofit "far" suburbs is going to avoid promoting that same polycentric metropolis. Obviously we can get rid of zoning laws that prevent corner stores on residential streets and whatnot, but that doesn't matter if there aren't enough people with easy enough access to make such a store viable. easy access to stores involves increasing density. any system which makes it easier to travel by auto is by its nature antithetical to increasing density, specifically because of the amount of space cars take up in motion and standing still Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Your conditions are too stringent. One guy going to work at 8 and another at 9:30 both contribute to rush hour traffic, but might have their needs fulfilled by the same car, which now does not need to be stored in any of the valuable space close to either workplace. The point is that the commuters don't own the cars, there's storage somewhere of a single pool of cars that is the size of the number of concurrent drivers, not the total number of drivers as it is now. The "self-driving" part doesn't really matter here, it's the same advantage a fleet of taxis has over individual car ownership. land isn't all that valuable in the polycentric metropolis - right now i work in a low rise office building surrounded by half empty parking lots. there are so many low rise offices in the modern american metropolis and clustered around edge cities that often they sit vacant for long periods of time. the idea of everyone driving everywhere and why that's so revolutionary to 20th century urban development is that by making transportation extremely cheap (comparatively to prior modes) it makes land equally cheap by increasing the amount of land a person can reasonably access. this assumption that land in the metropolis is valuable simply doesn't hold true. to that end it's a lot more convenient for people to have exclusive access to a car a short walk away in a parking lot rather than wait in line for a car to show up anywhere in the next 5-45 minutes Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yes, a big part of the goal to me is to reclaim space currently used for car storage and turn it into worthwhile places that people might visit on purpose. It's a lot more than parking garages, but huge multi-acre parking lots which I'd like to replace. since you mentioned kunstler i think you're placing too much emphasis on one of his pet ideas, the placelessness of nowhere. which is a problem for sure, but it's more of an architectural problem than an economic problem. parking lots are ugly and horrible but they serve a useful economic function, which is supporting mass automotive mode infrastructure and travel. like there's really no way to divorce local storage ofsingle-occupant vehicles from widespread use of single-occupant vehicles. i appreciate you're taking a much more prosocial angle when advocating for the self-driving fleet by thinking of the impact on urban morphology! but the price of land, the rent, is determined by its highest and best use. the reason you see ugly lots or garages on valuable downtown land is because they themselves provide a valuable service, and 'storing automobiles' is actually a pretty profitable and economically useful activity. i dont see this fundamental use changing that much if we assume a self driving fleet - it's more plausible to me that cheaper bulk lots on the periphery would be used for overnight and low-priority storage, but you'd definitely see garages downtown and in wealthy areas to cater specifically to the uber platinum class users who don't want to wait more than five minutes, because they can afford to just own a car
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Dec 15, 2016 01:25
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i want to talk a second to address the bid rent curve, which is where we get the idea of "valuable downtown land" basically back in the day cities were mostly but not all the time monocentric, as in has a downtown AKA the central business district. this cbd, in theory, is centered on the import/export node - the place where business happens in abstract. the docks, which merchants want to be near, or the train station, or the bridge across the river, what have you. there can be more than one node. point is that there is a spot where everyone wants to be, and then locations of increasing distance from that spot bid rent theory states that people will bid for access to that spot. wall street in manhattan was and is an important cbd, so you see ever higher buildings going up around the stock exchange to house all the wealthy bankers and stockbrokers who need to be able to get to the stock exchange. then close to that are the wealthy people's houses so they dont have to commute far to work, then the middle class people, then so on etc. the link explains all this. you end up with the classic idea of a city skyline, that is the highest buildings in the center then tapering out in a curve (ignoring geography etc. this is a perfectly spherical economy in a vacuum ok) what mass automobile use did was introduce the polycentric metropolis, which means you can just set up a node wherever. usually these develop around important transportation hubs like interchanges. then you end up with the edge city, which is like a whole new city that pops up with offices and poo poo out in the burbs somewhere. now people aren't driving from the fringes to the core, they're driving from somewhere in the metro to an edge city and back. this really flattens out the bid rent curve and creates varying areas where it's higher, lower, gradually tapering off as you go to the suburbs to the exurbs. this is why downtown land isn't so valuable nowadays in most places, because downtown has to compete with a ton of other little downtowns the most classically monocentric cities in america are either old (boston, nyc, chicago) or constrained by geography (san fran, nyc) and so they exhibit polycentric behavior, but not too much. on the contrary more contemporary american cities, very car based cities, are polycentric as hell - los angeles, dallas-fort worth (two cities in one!), atlanta, houston etc. where each of these cities has an anemic downtown and then a ton of other little edge cities which collectively have far more economic activity then downtown
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Dec 15, 2016 01:33
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Badger of Basra posted:Bussing does not mean moving "lovely" students unless you think all minority students are lovely. Law of averages says the average minority student from a bad neighborhood will be behind the rest of the class and bring a number of social issues into the wealthier school. If bussing revolved around taking the top 10% of students out of poorly performing schools and busing them to better schools, I think a lot of people would be behind that, except for leftists who would scream about "Concentrating poverty and making bad schools worse REEEEEE!" like they bitterly complain about charter schools doing. Badger of Basra posted:Although I don't like to make this argument since it focuses on benefits to white people, it's the only one SCOTUS allows: white students also benefit from having classmates from a range of racial/ethnic backgrounds. Oh what a benefit! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 15, 2016 05:35
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next this guy is gonna accuse people of white knighting unworthy children e: newt gingrich alt spotted
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Dec 15, 2016 05:43
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on the left posted:Law of averages says the average minority student from a bad neighborhood will be behind the rest of the class and bring a number of social issues into the wealthier school. If their parents can't afford a good school I suppose those dumb nonwhite kids just have to suffer. Oh well! quote:If bussing revolved around taking the top 10% of students out of poorly performing schools and busing them to better schools, I think a lot of people would be behind that, except for leftists who would scream about "Concentrating poverty and making bad schools worse REEEEEE!" like they bitterly complain about charter schools doing. If you did that you would literally be concentrating poverty and making bad schools worse though????
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Dec 15, 2016 05:44
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I've never seen some describe the zip code lottery as a good thing before, really.
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Dec 15, 2016 05:45
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on the left posted:Law of averages says the average minority student from a bad neighborhood will be behind the rest of the class and bring a number of social issues into the wealthier school. You can just say that black people don't belong in white schools. It's not like this fools anyone.
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Dec 15, 2016 05:45
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Badger of Basra posted:If you did that you would literally be concentrating poverty and making bad schools worse though???? If the real goal of the program is to foster school diversity, what's wrong with just grabbing the talented tenth out of underperforming schools and busing them to the suburbs? As I mentioned earlier, the real goal is to spread out poverty thinly enough that nobody notices with a bonus of using minorities as a political statement and show of force for progressive causes.
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Dec 15, 2016 06:24
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on the left posted:If the real goal of the program is to foster school diversity, what's wrong with just grabbing the talented tenth out of underperforming schools and busing them to the suburbs? That's not the only goal.
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Dec 15, 2016 07:18
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wow, dispersing poverty and championing minority achievement? what a horrible dystopia
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Dec 15, 2016 08:00
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boner touched upon something that I think dovetails into the zoning arguments: I personally believe that metropolitan areas should be made more monocentric. This is a big reason why cars are relied upon so much and why mass transit kind of sucks. It's probably impossible because (edit: money.. and) everyone suburb on the face of the earth can't loving wait to give a sweet 20 year tax abatement so Office Corp can put a stupid 'campus' in their town. Doctor Butts fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 19:28
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Doctor Butts posted:boner touched upon something that I think dovetails into the zoning arguments: I personally believe that metropolitan areas should be made more monocentric. This is a big reason why cars are relied upon so much and why mass transit kind of sucks. well in the us it's not possible because there's generally no robust regional planning bodies in place who can coordinate economic, land use, and transportation policy across hundreds of independent jurisdictions on a multiple decade time span while also counteracting the effects of federal policies which generally favor the automotive mode and single family detached structure housing this seems a little counterintuitive because we haven't seen a model of it yet in the states but polycentric metropoli can very well be robust urban centers with good mass transit. look at tokyo - where is "downtown" tokyo? polycentrism arose due to mass automobile use in the states in the mid 20th century but you can knit it all together with better transit, if sufficient political will can be dredged up. happily this is the direction a lot of american cities are going - dallas and los angeles are both pursuing transit expansion with success. edge cities in DC are usually clustered around a transit stop too, which is an example of value capture boner confessor fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 19:33
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boner confessor posted:edge cities in DC are usually clustered around a transit stop too, which is an example of value capture yeah Reston goddamned exploded when they put in the silver line kinda chancy this'll continue with the Metro nigh-unusable for anyone who needs a reasonable expectation of getting to work on time though lol
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Dec 15, 2016 19:47
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:kinda chancy this'll continue with the Metro nigh-unusable for anyone who needs a reasonable expectation of getting to work on time though lol it's amazing how hosed DC is with its not-state weird limbo status and the fact that two states and loving congress have a say in WMATA funding. god drat like as bad as atlanta is (two now three counties and scattered cities providing most of the funding, a hostile state government that refuses meaningful funding and allows non-paying counties to have voting reps on the MARTA board for some idiot reason) at least nothing goes above the state level
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Dec 15, 2016 19:55
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boner confessor posted:it's amazing how hosed DC is with its not-state weird limbo status and the fact that two states and loving congress have a say in WMATA funding. god drat ???????? Can they vote to give themselves service that they don't pay for?
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Dec 15, 2016 19:59
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Doctor Butts posted:boner touched upon something that I think dovetails into the zoning arguments: I personally believe that metropolitan areas should be made more monocentric. This is a big reason why cars are relied upon so much and why mass transit kind of sucks. As someone that commutes by bike almost exclusively I'm of the opposite opinion: metro areas should be even more multi-centric. I don't want to have to drive or find some other means of commuting downtown. Everyone should be able to live close enough to their employer to walk or bike.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:01
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Badger of Basra posted:???????? haha no, but they get to vote on budget issues for a system which only marginally runs in their counties if at all (like special commuter routes that cross county lines and aren't part of GRTA for some reason) wouldn't be suprising otherwise tho considering how utterly hostile the state government is to the city of atlanta and everything to do with it
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Dec 15, 2016 20:03
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Family Values posted:As someone that commutes by bike almost exclusively I'm of the opposite opinion: metro areas should be even more multi-centric. I don't want to have to drive or find some other means of commuting downtown. Everyone should be able to live close enough to their employer to walk or bike. This is a nice thought, but things like weather really cut into this. Not to mention the fact that once someone gets fired from their job they now have to move or deal with almost not access to mass transit.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:18
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Family Values posted:As someone that commutes by bike almost exclusively I'm of the opposite opinion: metro areas should be even more multi-centric. I don't want to have to drive or find some other means of commuting downtown. Everyone should be able to live close enough to their employer to walk or bike. I see where you are coming from on your preference on mode of transit: but the last sentence just isn't possible. You don't really get walkable or bikeable areas with how a lot of the polycentric metro areas are coming into play: they're designed with automobiles in mind as the primary form of transit: because that's how most people will have to get to their jobs.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:25
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Polycentrism doesn't preclude housing next to jobs, though. You just have to get enough jobs next to enough housing instead of still having the vast majority of jobs in one place.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:27
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Doctor Butts posted:You don't really get walkable or bikeable areas with how a lot of the polycentric metro areas are coming into play: they're designed with automobiles in mind as the primary form of transit: because that's how most people will have to get to their jobs. 'designed' is a strong word, places built upon the mass use of the automotive mode sort of just flop out of organic, chaotic outgrowth polycentrism isn't necessarily dependent on automobiles though - cities as we know them were able to disperse because of the advantages of automotive travel and develop polycentrically (in a modern western context, there's a lot of weird development patterns out there in different cultures across history) but polycentric metropoli aren't necessarily locked exclusively to the automotive mode. a lot can be done to make them more pedestrian friendly in patches and loose networks - think of major transportation routes across the metropolis as like a spider's web, where if you live in the gap between strands you'll probably need a car. but this is more of a function of political will and available resources to build expensive transit and redevelopment projects, so la~
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Dec 15, 2016 20:59
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here's an example of what i'm talking about. let's say you're an alien who has never heard of new york city or tokyo. someone hands you a transit map of new york city and asks where the center of the city is well, it's probably that area in the lower left where all of the lines converge and mix together. there's a decently strong hub-and-spoke system here, and a couple of identifiable central areas that are very important. here's the tokyo map  i mean the center of this map is clearly more important than the edges but, which part is most important? where is the most central spot? it's all kind of mixed in there like spaghetti, and there's a lot of cross connections on the outside too tokyo is a unique example of dense polycentrism because it developed as a network of collected villages from hundreds of years ago, then 70 years ago the whole area was totally wiped clean and brand new rebuilding could take place. the redevelopment of tokyo was largely executed by firms that dealt in both building transit lines and developing land - they would buy a bunch of land, build trains along that land, then develop the now more valuable land around the train station. the same thing was done on a smaller scale in america with streetcar suburbs. turns out you make a shitload of money doing this, and it also produces extremely dense and walkable urban areas - and since there were so many firms doing this in tokyo, there were lots of different lines which all kind of connect together running from historical place A (now under rubble) to historical place B (mostly destroyed) and so on, reproducing and then further propogating that regional polycentrism a lot of world cities that are giant and experienced much of their growth in the 20th century - beijing, mexico city, seoul - have this same sort of thing going on, if not as strong, because really the development of polycentric cities in america, canada, to a lesser extent austrialia, came about at the same time that automobiles came about, and so these car nations went off and did their own thing, because it's easier to develop low density polycentrism with mass auto use but you can get dense polycentrism with sufficient investment in mass transit from public or private sources (or you just end up with huge traffic problems - mexico city, beijing, etc. i'd put moscow on this list because it has awful traffic but i'd argue it doesn't fit the criteria of 20th century polycentric)
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Dec 15, 2016 21:25
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Tokyo is more distributed than NYC yes but uh one of those is a proportional map of the land with the subways overlaid and one is a transit line map where all lines run perfectly straight at 45 degree angles and all stops are spaced equidistantly for maximum readability; it bears only the faintest relation to the actual layout of Tokyo (and is an extremely poorly designed attempt at what the DC metro map does IMO) This is what Tokyo's metro system actually looks like, viewed from above like the New York map. Still can't find the center? 
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Dec 15, 2016 21:53
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You can clearly tell that NYC is centered around downtown brooklyn, as it should be. 
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Dec 15, 2016 21:56
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Tokyo is more distributed than NYC yes but uh one of those is a proportional map of the land with the subways overlaid and one is a transit line map where all lines run perfectly straight at 45 degree angles and all stops are spaced equidistantly for maximum readability; it bears only the faintest relation to the actual layout of Tokyo (and is an extremely poorly designed attempt at what the DC metro map does IMO) good point and my bad, i was just hastily grabbing images, but really what i was getting at is the lack of a defined, singular center. any point along that inner ring could credibly be the cbd new york, being one of america's oldest cities and tokyo being (structurally) much younger, there's a different sort of development pattern that took hold as they were built up over different periods in history, leading to a more easily defined center. this is not to say one is better than the other, just pointing out differences
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Dec 15, 2016 22:18
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I'm not actually aware of any cities that have multiple discrete downtown areas with heavily developed infrastructure and high-rises and all; when I hear about polycentric cities I tend to think more along the lines of Portland or San Francisco or Austin where there's still one clearly definable 'heart' to the city, they just also contain a more evenly distributed network of semi-independent suburban villages with their own commercial corridors. Versus, say, DC or Baltimore, where outside a grocery store or an Outback Steakhouse here and there the suburban sprawl is a bunch of bedroom towns supporting people who all go to shop and work in the city center. This changes the commuting profile, yeah, but it's all a distinction of degrees than of kind and I don't think the result is particularly what's been described ITT so far. You can live in Portland, say, in Mt. Tabor or Humbolt or something and just never really go downtown, or be working in a job aimed primarily at serving those who work downtown, whereas if you're in Alexandria or Reston if you're not getting on 66 in towards the DC Beltway every morning you're serving coffee for the people who do. The former doesn't seem to increase dependency on the automobile in those towns, rather the opposite in fact. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 22:18
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Isn't Houston polycentric? I guess you could define within the Loop as the center but that's a pretty big area.
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Dec 15, 2016 22:19
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Honestly, NYC does kind of have multiple centers, at the very least midtown vs downtown is pretty distinct and both are filled with commuters during the day. Brooklyn's is smaller but it has one as well. All of them have pretty dense train clusters on that map.
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Dec 15, 2016 22:21
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:I'm not actually aware of any cities that have multiple discrete downtown areas with heavily developed infrastructure and high-rises and all; when I hear about polycentric cities I tend to think more along the lines of Portland or San Francisco or Austin where there's still one clearly definable 'heart' to the city, they just also contain a more evenly distributed network of semi-independent suburban villages with their own commercial corridors. Versus, say, DC or Baltimore, where outside a grocery store or an Outback Steakhouse here and there the suburban sprawl is a bunch of bedroom towns supporting people who all go to shop and work in the city center. San Francisco is a tiny corner of the Bay Area – geographically and in population San Jose is larger, and there's also Oakland.
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Dec 15, 2016 22:24
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:I'm not actually aware of any cities that have multiple discrete downtown areas with heavily developed infrastructure and high-rises and all; atlanta is one off the top of my head  far left is buckhead, center right is midtown, far right is downtown, the pair of buildings between them including the brown pointy building are on north ave. which is the traditional dividing line between midtown and downtown. all of atlanta is on bedrock so there's no geological reason for this clustering unlike downtown/midtown in nyc. there's only like a half hour walk between midtown and downtown so you may count those as one district but buckhead is definitely a discrete business district with high rise office and residential. headed north from there you hit sandy springs, an edge city, sometimes hilariously referred to as "perimeter center"  until recently that pair of towers were the tallest towers in america outside of an incorporated place (they were annexed a few years ago)
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Dec 15, 2016 22:31
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Honestly, NYC does kind of have multiple centers, at the very least midtown vs downtown is pretty distinct and both are filled with commuters during the day. Brooklyn's is smaller but it has one as well. All of them have pretty dense train clusters on that map. there's no binary betwen mono/polycentric and it's a spectrum, but nyc is very heavily mono just because arguably you can walk from midtown to downtown to brooklyn if you really had to. beacsuse of the rapid nature of urban growth in the modern era all cities are developing multiple centers in a way that they historically did not (again, talking about the western world here) but if there was a scale of major american metros going from monocentric to polycentric i'd say (looking at the top 11 to include the bay area) nyc > dc / boston > philly > chicago > miami > san fran> la > dfw / atlanta / houston
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Dec 15, 2016 22:38
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This article is driving me insane: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/12/using-preservation-to-stop-gentrification-before-it-starts/510653/ The author and many people quoted in it say over and over that historic designation will prevent gentrification, but I have no idea how that is supposed to work. This seems to be their argument: quote:Each situation is different and in Golden Belt’s case, its history might be its salvation. “There’s only so much you can do with some houses,” says Mallach, looking at Golden Belt’s homes on Google Maps’ street view during a phone interview. “They’re very small.” It seems like they're assuming that because the ability to build more stuff on each lot is limited, prices will not rise. But a neighborhood with single family houses close to downtown in a growing city seems like a perfect recipe for rising land/home values regardless of what you can build there because more people are going to want to live in those houses.
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Dec 16, 2016 06:12
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Badger of Basra posted:I have no idea how that is supposed to work the idea, i think, is that people will otherwise buy older homes and tear them down for infill/renovation. so by preventing anything of the sort from happening at least you're slowing down the pace of growth. i get it, gentrification is a real and ugly thing which has so far encouraged limited response except for people tut tutting and exclaiming how much gentrification sucks and is sad and all. so some folks are trying to use historic building codes and preservation to try to prevent gentrification, which is a bad and inappropriate strategy but also their hearts are in the right place and this is the kind of thing a grassroots group would resort to in the absence of local political support. like it's largely ineffective but it's something Badger of Basra posted:But a neighborhood with single family houses close to downtown in a growing city seems like a perfect recipe for rising land/home values regardless of what you can build there because more people are going to want to live in those houses. yeah. gentrification is sort of a horrible birthing process, it sucks and it's painful but it's necessary in a weird way that's going to cause a lot of distress. i started typing up an effort post but i can't possibly do it justice right now for the thread so in a one sentence summary: gentrification is the inevitable consequence of white flight and as much as it sucks and should be mitigated via local policy, ultimately it is an economic inevitability and all white millenials - yes, even you reading this - are gentrifiers. unless you live in the burbs. and then, in a weird way, good for you?
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Dec 16, 2016 08:40
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FCKGW posted:People don't seem to be able to grasp that removing the driver from a vehicle does not fundamentally change how transit works. Yeah it does, because you no longer have to pay a shitload of unionized public sector employees to have a bus service. I'm about to blow everyone's mind: self-driving is good for public transit because it plays on transit's strengths (professionally maintained and regularly replaced fleet vehicles that do a ton of miles) while nearly eliminating public transit's biggest problem (you need a lot of expensive operators). Eliminating those labor costs (and the pension liabilities of future drivers) makes public transit expansion something you can do much faster, cheaper, and without the threat that the entire system will collapse in a recession. It's less good for Uber because Uber's maximally efficient business model is contractor serfs who buy the cars for them and they already have that. They're investing into automated cars because they want to survive the next ten years, not because it'll be a better business than what they already have.
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Dec 16, 2016 08:55
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The Oldest Man posted:Yeah it does, because you no longer have to pay a shitload of unionized public sector employees to have a bus service. I'm about to blow everyone's mind: self-driving is good for public transit because it plays on transit's strengths (professionally maintained and regularly replaced fleet vehicles that do a ton of miles) while nearly eliminating public transit's biggest problem (you need a lot of expensive operators). Eliminating those labor costs (and the pension liabilities of future drivers) makes public transit expansion something you can do much faster, cheaper, and without the threat that the entire system will collapse in a recession. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8QRExBfQhs the biggest movers of mass transit are trains, which have been automatable since the 70's. the problem here is convincing people to give up the automotive mode or personal car use for getting onto a bus onto a train to take them near where they want to go just to get onto another bus, etc. which gets at the idea of transit just being something that dense, walkable areas can do well, which means that you already have options for transportation versus always choosing a car, etc. like you're right that putting bus drivers out of work could lower the cost of a mass transit via bus trip, but price isn't the biggest concern here versus just the time spent waiting and using the system, and unless we could flood the streets with robobuses that collect people onto trains (plausible) this is more likely to have some marginal input into a transit system's budget rather than the likelihood of attracting comparative new users and thus reducing relative congestion
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Dec 16, 2016 09:17
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The Oldest Man posted:Yeah it does, because you no longer have to pay a shitload of unionized public sector employees to have a bus service. I'm about to blow everyone's mind: self-driving is good for public transit because it plays on transit's strengths (professionally maintained and regularly replaced fleet vehicles that do a ton of miles) while nearly eliminating public transit's biggest problem (you need a lot of expensive operators). Eliminating those labor costs (and the pension liabilities of future drivers) makes public transit expansion something you can do much faster, cheaper, and without the threat that the entire system will collapse in a recession. Uber's hosed because their fares already don't cover their costs even before they drive people out of business with their low fares: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-five-addressing-reader-comments-and-questions.html And anybody can buy a self driving car once they come to market, including cab companies, so that's not going to save them. Also, now that a millions of people are out of work for having the audacity to have fought for and maintained livable wages, it is up to you to find work for them that pays a comparable salary. Not just for the lazy, fat, unmotivated (going by your obvious opinion of unions) workers, but also for the taxes they pay, and the goods and services they can no longer afford, and therefor all the businesses they support. If nobody can afford the future, it's not going to happen.
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Dec 16, 2016 17:12
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The Oldest Man posted:Yeah it does, because you no longer have to pay a shitload of unionized public sector employees to have a bus service. I'm about to blow everyone's mind: self-driving is good for public transit because it plays on transit's strengths (professionally maintained and regularly replaced fleet vehicles that do a ton of miles) while nearly eliminating public transit's biggest problem (you need a lot of expensive operators). Eliminating those labor costs (and the pension liabilities of future drivers) makes public transit expansion something you can do much faster, cheaper, and without the threat that the entire system will collapse in a recession.
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Dec 16, 2016 17:27
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twodot posted:Do you have evidence this is true? I can think of a lot people you need to employ that aren't drivers (fare enforcement, mechanics, administrators), and a lot of marginal expenses that aren't employees (maintenance, parking space, energy) that makes me think driver salary and benefits aren't particulary large obstacles to expansion. Can't speak to everyone's mass transit issues but it's literally The Problem for King Country Metro: http://mynorthwest.com/362881/king-county-metro-needs-more-drivers/
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Dec 17, 2016 03:28
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That article seems to say that the problem is they don't have enough drivers, rather than that the ones they do have are a huge drain on their budget.
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Dec 17, 2016 17:04
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