Automated cars will make this kind of commute a lot more practical and enjoyable. A warm, comfortable and clean Uber will pick you up and drive you directly to your destination while you start your work day.
> Trains don't pick you up where you live and drop you off where you work.
Trains manage to do that in most countries, given a few minutes walk to and from a station.
I don't commute now but I used to commute two hours in the UK, and I walked 3 minutes to a train station, and then took a couple of trains all the way, and then a 3 minute walk at the other end to my office. And I lived in a small village not a major area.
Because the UK is a bit over half the size of California. Many folks in Europe tend to under appreciate the sheer size of the United States. To your point though...certain metro areas are largely this way...(NY/Chicago)...but others (LA/Detroit) are not... Not sure why some cities invest and others don't.
Everyone says it's due to the size difference. That doesn't make any sense to me!
Take just the Northern California region, then, around the same size as the UK. Now there's no argument about size difference. The population is around a third of the UK, so while that's less and so lower density, it isn't a crazy difference and the major areas of population themselves where you need the stations are high density.
I can go from any city in the UK, to any other city in the UK, via a couple of trains pretty effortlessly. Why couldn't that be replicated in an area of the same size and more of less the same population, in California?
Why can't it be replicated just in the Bay Area even! Why aren't there lots of trains there?!
1.) The Bay Area is made up of 100 cities and towns and several counties. There is not a single “Bay Area government.” Every single transit project has to be approved by several levels of government and funded by the state and federal government. Moreover, that funding and consent has to last for decades to keep the project on track. It rarely does. Every train line in the Bay Area was the result of a fight.
2.) Trains require density to be feasible. Density increases the supply of housing, driving down the value of existing single family homes. Owners of single family homes store a significant amount of their net worth in the equity of those homes. Municipalities rely on the property taxes from those high value homes.
3.) The Bay Area is not zoned for density. Trains will not catch on here because 60 odd years ago the people who designed the highway system did not consider the possibility that many people would need to live close together to make the place affordable. No one was thinking of affordable housing then.
But the density of even the wider Bay Area region (the CSA) is higher than the entire UK! How come that's dense enough for lots of trains in the UK but not dense enough for trains around the Bay Area?
I think this definitely depends where you live in the UK and how much your local rail network was screwed by the Beeching cuts. I live in Somerset and the two nearest railway stations are more than a 30 minute drive.
Imagine a combination of self-driving cars and trains. Perhaps the self-driving car can take you to the train station that is nearest, if there is a train that is coming in a reasonable amount of time.
For trains to be truly useful, we needed to not build our cities around the highway, around sprawl. We didn't do that. So self-driving cars will prove to be far, far more useful than trains, especially since trains require long term public investment, which Americans generally do not favor.
We can change that. The current city is built around an combination of parking minimums, subsidized free parking, and a system that supports building detached single family homes and not dense mixed use housing.
If we change the policies that ruin the cities and design them around the human and not the car, we can make transit work more.
We absolutely can change that and we absolutely won't. Rich people don't like transit, they like personal vehicles and sprawling neighborhoods, not loud trains and dense apartment blocks. Rich people write laws.
I'm not sure why the inaccurate statement that a train can pick you up at your house and drop you off at work made you think about how "car-centric" some regions are.
A train picks you up where you live only if you are a 1%er who can afford the extreme real estate premium for transit access on an infrequently spaced system (i.e. BART), or the train stops so frequency that it barely adds value relative to a bicycle (i.e. Muni).
I suggest, if you haven't you visit London, many places, not all expensive, are a 5-10 minute walk to a regional train stop that can get you to city center in 45minutes.
I will have to check that out! I suspect that these neighborhoods have a level of density that, if proposed in a typical American suburb, would spark cries of "Manhattanization."
There is a big middle ground between suburban ranch homes on 0.25 acres and "Manhattan", see some nice areas of dense row (aka. townhouses) houses in London suburbs.
I have travelled in London for 5 years and it is anything but predictable. My commute of 45 minutes would last anywhere between 45 minutes to two hours depending upon the excuses they will cookup. Sometimes my train travel will be converted to a nice picnic on London bus as train will be cancelled abruptly. Their list of excuses is legendary[1].
And then comes these patronising messages "This [Chrismas|Easter|Weekend|Holiday] I am working for you." I saw those messages for 5 years and still saw services going downhill.
One funny anecdote probably illustrates their lethargy. Station I used to board from was upgraded and platform extended to allow boarding from 10 carriages. This happened long before I started living their.
But announcement always said only 9 carriages will open. I lived their for two years and same message was played everyday.
I didn't downvote you, but something about systematic on-time performance metrics might have been more helpful than your personal dissatisfaction with delays?
Blaming transit workers for system performance is also pretty controversial; most would probably attribute that to incompetent management or stingy taxpayers?
”The train leaves at 4:43 a.m. and Cherry, 60 years old and a couple of years away from retirement, rides it all the way to the final stop, more than two hours away. That’s Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Scheduled arrival time: 7:05.”
Trains are nice too. I can hack on my projects, that's the only time I can work on them during the day. I used to take the subway and it was hell, specially during Canadian winters.
If that sort of commute becomes popular, it'll just lead even more massive congestion around job centers. In the limit, you'll reach your destination halfway through the workday and immediately turn around to go home.
It's not legal to camp in your car in a parking place but with a self-driving car, people can just sleep in the back while the vehicle drives aimlessly around.
If this process makes traffic go very slowly, so much the better - less gas spent and a gentler ride.
I don't think our roads have the capacity to allow everyone to be sitting on them in their own personal automobiles all day. And even if they do, the roads won't actually function as transportation infrastructure.
I was being a bit facetious above and aiming to show the multiple contradictions that seem to be in play in the idea that self-driving cars could solve the interlocked high-rent/absurd-commute problems.
I mean, sure, maybe the final absurdity is going to be a mass of people telecomuting from the back of their self-driving RVs as these inch along in some random location but maybe the complex will fall to pieces before this.
Believe it or not, I experienced the non-self-driving version of that scene. It was the mass of vehicles heading from the eclipse festival to Burning Man a few months ago, a block of traffic puttering along at 30 mph all day while passengers sat on their laptops.
If all cars were self driving, road capacity could be optimized by 2-3X, at least (they could move smoothly bumper to bumper). It won’t happen in the states first, but highly contested Asian cities in autocratic countries sure.
A. References for a claim a self-driving car could navigate that much more efficiently. As far as I know, current self-driving cars drive more conservatively than humans.
B. Such a claim would require all current cars off the road. How well do you think anyone could manage that? In any car-using nation, including Asia, there's a huge investment in current cars and ending that would be harder than simply introducing self-driving carts.
C. Even 2-3x the capacity can be used up quickly if people are willing to waste it and self-driving cars have much less incentive for not sitting in rush hour traffic than regular cars - which already spend a lot of time in rush hour traffic.
A. Today is definitely not tomorrow. Self driving cars also don’t have any network advantages atm.
B. See autocratic country claim. China has done this before with certain cars in certain cities (e.g. breadbox vans). Japan deprecates all cars after around 5 years to make them basically unusable. Singapore has that $60k car plate thing going on that I think only lasts five years.
C. People told me LA traffic was bad. When I moved there from Beijing, I thought I was in paradise. Same with Seattle, the USA does not have traffic problems, at least relative to China; the problems are just at different scales. Also, taxi ridership is much much larger in these countries (it isn’t unusual that every other car on the road is a taxi). Enforcing self driving only on the ring roads would already be a huge win; capacity is easily controlled already by plate lotteries.
Sure, a sufficiently strong state could impose a sane and efficient commuting system in some fashion if it chose to.
That would require some central control for whatever resources the transport system use (road, car position, etc).
Just about all the profit centers for cars and transport today hinge on entities that just control some parts of transport - so prying loose their hold would be quite a challenge. We shall see.
That is incredibly American centric. There is plenty of diversity in the way things work in the world. It will only take one country to use self driving cars as an economic advantage (by optimizing infrastructure investments) for the other countries to follow to keep up their competitiveness.
It would not be very comfortable to sleep strapped to the bed in a strange position. Sleeping in sitting position does not count as comfortable. At most you can count on sleeping like in an airplane.
Self-driving car can't beat physics. In case of an accident everything inside will fly continuing direction of movement. Including the passenger. There will be no two couches facing a table. Because in case of an accident the face of a passenger sitting facing the back of the car will be hit with: his book, his hot coffee and opposite sitting passenger's laptop.
Immediately? Surely the reason you trekked all the way in (while actually working remotely) was to have that one-hour, face-to-face meeting insisted upon by some manager.
Paying the driver is a pretty big cut. If there's no driver to pay and fuel is cheap (because electric / hydrogen / whatever futuristic efficient tech) then the numbers start to work out. You've also got a persistent customer, so you can probably operate on lower margins since you have a fairly stable customer base.
And then some data miner will discover most workers live near each other and will cut costs by getting a bigger self-driving bus to pickup several people.
And then another data miner will discover the bulk of the traffic time is spent on traffic, so they will buy land to create a right-of-way lane to optimise the commute times.
Finally, the Ouroboros eats his own tail by creating a private subway system.
Heh, what I had imagined in my own little scifi vision of the future was a hub system. Everybody gets their own little single seat self driving car pod thing that drives you to the train station. But here's the twist, instead of getting out and boarding the train the pod just drives up and latches in. You're then whisked away in the comfort of your own personalized vehicle, which automatically undocks at the appropriate station and delivers you to your workplace.
This is what happens with private cars now, except in a much more wasteful way.
Commuter train cars generally weigh about a ton per 3 passenger seats, but packed-full cars are considered uncomfortable. So a pod weighing 600 kg would be equal in weight per passenger to a train car where everyone sits alone on a double-seat place. Which is a pretty reasonable comfort standard. An EV pod could also be charged in the train during the journey, so you would have its full range available at both ends of the train journey.
The point wasn't to avoid people (I consider that a downside actually), it was to save having to have a vehicle come pick you up twice a day or generally having to drive around without a fare. It'd be your own personal vehicle and it'd have to be as small and light as possible for this exact reason - I had imagined golf cart sized. The vehicle would only need a minimal battery because it only has to take you from the station to work and home to the station (and could charge on the train and at work). You're right though, I dunno if the economics would ever work out.
With the disclaimer that this was just a fantasy and probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.
I thought the final step would be that they'd realise there was a geographic centrum, create a parking lot to save fuel, then realise they didn't need wheels, ... and you've got a "trailer park".
