Comment by andrepd
3 years ago
Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big, inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious space. Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities which are designed around cars are terrible.
This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely. Focusing on self-driving technology, or on electric cars as if they're going to "save the planet", is entirely the wrong direction imo.
This is the logical answer but companies need to profit off something and EVs are what “save the world” right now.
Everyone is committed to being green as long as their lifestyle isn’t inconvenienced and they have the funds to buy the green equivalent technology.
EV promotes energy independence of a country. In the worst case they can use electricity from coal that is widely available on this planet. And as long as the coal plant is modern they still will generate less CO2 than petrol-based cars.
Personally, I think while probably too futuristic large drones that are autonomous and deliver people would be safer. Its arguably easier to avoid objects when you can dodge in 360 degrees of direction.
It's also easier to avoid pedestrians as most can't fly.
It also could save on gas and energy as you can go directly as a bird flies to your destination instead of taking 20 minutes it takes 3.
Of course this would be a huge infrastructure ordeal as well probably and require a damn good system as you don't want vehicles landing on houses all over the place, but it'd be amazing for people with long commutes.
You could probably have airbuses that pick up like 30 people say in a small town and fly them to the city to be delivered individually by smaller vehicles locally. What took 45 minutes, now maybe takes 15.
These would be better if maybe electric with gas as an emergency backup system, and then just have good batteries and solar power fuel most trips.
Los Angeles has already been built, however.
Make the boardwalk wider (so you can have fun things like restaurants on the boardwalk), add 2 direction bike lanes on both side and have thin single direction car lane in the middle.
>the future is having cars removed from cities entirely.
Sounds somewhat authoritarian to impose your idea of the 'future' to inconvenience a large number of people.
If you live in an American suburb you're swimming in that sort of authoritarianism.
I live in a small American suburb, have lived in large cities, and travel to Europe, NYC, LA, SF on the regular. And I wouldn’t trade my car and the ability to drive somewhere for anything in the world.
There are a lot of great things about cities but you are dependent on other people for everything in your life, and it can go sideways incredibly fast. I.e the energy situation in Europe, or with COVID-19. Personally I don’t know how it’s not obvious to the millions of people who live in places like that.
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No-one cares about cities.