Comment by Zambyte
3 days ago
Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.
I'm well aware that there are multiple options for public transport, but none of them are actually as flexible or as far reaching as cars/taxis. To me this 'but why not trains' on every article about self-driving cars is a tired meme that fails to address that these are not equivalent options. I might as well say "Well, why don't we get rid of these expensive rails and fixed timetables and just lay down some cheap concrete and let people navigate how they want" in just as condescending a tone and be equally as unconvincing.
It shouldn't be all black and white (either 100% car use or 100% public transport use).
If you're rural - of course this probably doesn't apply.
If you're suburban - "park and ride" type of thing solves a lot of problems in western Europe already. Drive to nearest hub, hop on a train (that is included in your parking ticket) that has bigger bandwidth comparable up to a 30 lane highway[1], also don't worry about parking in dense downtown as a benefit.
If you're urban, city planners should plan public transport network dense enough so you could walk - at worst do "park and ride" thing again.
Of course there are cases where car still may be fastest and most convenient way to reach your destination (e.g. if you're suburban and need to go to other suburban town), but in big cities (individual) car travel should be a minority.
Compare Japan's, China's mega cities. Whole countries like Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, to LA, SF or other USA's mega cities. It just falls to the Onion trope of `'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens`.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity#/media/File:Pas...
The key issue is that cars have _vastly_ lower capacity per meter than mass transit. For most large cities, there is simply not enough road for that to work, nevermind parking.
There are car lobbyists of course but the streetcars in LA at least were put there by housing developments to sell suburban homes before most people owned cars. Once the homes were sold the corporation that built the rails had no incentive to maintain them, and eventually they were spun off and went bankrupt (of course competing with cars didn't help)
Nor did the fixed price controls they were often saddled with. It seems that politicians are congenitally completely incapable of considering inflation indexing as a concept when they are writing laws.
Street cars are a red herring anyway. Because street cars don't maintain anywhere near the same number of routes as free-form roads. It is a routing problem still, and railed vehicles perform much, much worse at it, which is why they need to be time multiplexed with rail schedules.