On Wednesday the White House announced that it wants to spend $4B on “research and infrastructure improvements” for driverless cars. They’re promoting it as a driver (so to speak) for “innovation” and a public safety measure: “[Transportation Secretary Anthony Fox] estimated that as many as 25,000 deaths could have been avoided last year if driverless technology had been in widespread use.”
Yeah for innovation and safety! But do you know where else $4 billion would help create innovation and save lives—not to mention, save the climate? Mass transit.
Driving sucks, and dealing with other drivers sucks more, so I really do kinda want a driverless car. (Although I want a robot butler more.) But, do you know who REALLY wants a driverless car? The trucking industry, which is growing as online commerce grows, and whose goal is, “to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the role of the human.”
There go 1.5 million trucking jobs.
Oh, and the Wired article says they will “platoon”:
Trucks could platoon: one leading the way, with others in a line copying its every move, separated by as little as 30 feet. Having one driver lead seven trucks means significant savings on labor and fuel efficiency, says David Carlisle, chairman of the board of auto industry consultancy Carlisle & Company. Even if you still need a human in each as a backup, all the vehicles benefit from reduced wind resistance, like a Tour de France cyclist team.
I feel safer already! (The ongoing militarization of our language and culture is perhaps a topic for another time.)
Seriously, I’m all for R&D and infrastructure and even business/government partnerships but why driverless cars for industry instead of supertrainz for you and me? We were in Japan last year and every form of transportation was amazing in exactly the ways you’ve heard: clean, convenient, fast, quiet, and exquisitely, precisely, on time. The 200+ mph Shikansen bullet trains look like snakes and are like a ride—whee!—into the future, even if you don’t happen to pass the 3x-football-field-sized Solar Ark.
Plus, the trains and train stations were all abundantly staffed with people who actually seemed to want to help a tourist.
Amazing what a country can accomplish when it decides to invest in infrastructure for people instead of a perpetual war machine or corporate bailouts.
And is there anyone who thinks that a parallel road system for driverless trucks wouldn’t cannibalize resources from the roads that actual hoomans drive? I picture us all wheezing along like bumpkins from pothole to pothole to occasional sinkhole while our Robot Truck Overlords whiz past us on pristine asphalt.
Then again, maybe this guy can help.
Hillary Rettig
apologies for the funky formatting which has resisted several attempts to fix. i blame Obama.
john carter
And when the lead Lemming (or its drone controller) falls asleep and the first one runs over pedestrians, other cars, buildings, over an embankment or jackknifes because of icy roads, will the others follow?
Hillary Rettig
@john carter: i like the way your mind works!
Big R
The incrementalist response: isn’t ANY infrastructure spending better than what the Republicans want, which is for infrastructure to be repaired via fairy dust (but manly fairy dust, not that Tinkerbell crap) and tolls?
debbie
The way people drive on the interstates around here, a driverless car’s computer would only freak out and roll itself into a fetal position on the shoulder. I don’t trust these cars and hopefully I’ll never have to be in one.
Betty Cracker
RE: the formatting, one unfortunate consequence of the site redesign seems to be that if you select several words to embed a link (as opposed to just one or two), the line break gets messed up. As for the massive gaps that sometimes occur between paragraphs, as near as I can tell, the backend now automatically inserts those for ad placement. Not a damn thing you can do about that as far as I know, but sometimes it straightens itself out.
dr. bloor
The unemployed truckers can get work as ambulance drivers to cover the accidents those “platoons” are going to create on the DC-Boston corridor of I-95.
Re-employed truckers, salvage industry, auto sales, personal injury lawyers…sometimes the invisible hand of the free market likes to pretend he’s Gomez Addams playing with his model trains.
Baud
Planes pretty much fly themselves but we still have pilots.
Hillary Rettig
@Betty Cracker: thanks Betty! I will try to fix.
RSA
@dr. bloor: I’ve heard a lot of talk about driverless cars in the near term, but much less on what would be needed to change federal, state, and local laws to make them feasible in practice. Not to mention insurance. Who wants to be the test case for being sued as the non-driver in the first driverless car in a multi-car accident?
sparrow
@Big R: No, not necessarily. In the 50s, “infrastructure spending” on highways went hand-in-hand with the decay of public transit in cities. In Baltimore, we tore out a city-wide streetcar system which was efficient and carried a lot of people. Now the replacement bus system is inefficient, often unsafe, and does not cover nearly the same area. I realize this is not something Baltimore alone could fight given the nationwide push for private car ownership, but it’s something we are hurting for to this day. Everything that happened in building after the war in this country was pretty much a net negative: eyesore highways and overpasses (think the cityscape of Houston immortalized in the movie Paris, Texas), suburbia, planned obsolescence, and mostly forgettable architecture.
Shwell Thanksh
Schoolbus driver seems to me a job so important that it will exist in a hundred years. There is a lot more involved than driving, that requires a human touch. Steering and braking large containers of cargo along a trackway for hours at a time? Honestly not so much. In fact it sounds like exactly what machines are best at. I won’t mourn the loss of jobs when these people are doing something more fulfilling with their lives, just like I won’t mourn the millions of corporate drone jobs that could have been and were replaced by processors running small shell scripts.
Hillary Rettig
@Big R: I wouldn’t call this incremental. This is the introduction of an entirely new cost center – and corporate subsidy – that I’m guessing will further compete with, and bleed, public infrastructure investment.
Hillary Rettig
@Baud: great point!
J R in WV
WE once visited NE Spain (Bilbao and basque country) and SW France, up to and including Toulouse, France. In France, there were small slow trains in the tiny communities, and large and swift trains between larger towns. We took a train from Toulouse to Paris, a 5 hour trip, not a high-speed train. The seats were comfortable, and the food was high-end convenience food, good bread, good cheese, a salad, and red or white wine, all good.
When the conductor came around to check our tickets, we complimented him on the train, which was second grade compared to the bullet trains. He looked at us, glanced around to be sure where he was, and then said “This train?” as if we were jesting him about not being conductor on a bullet train. We reassured him that even “This?” train was better than American trains, mostly. Just because trains are everywhere in France, and seldom found here in America.
We should build a train network that would serve all communities, that would put more people to work than self driving cars would put out of work.
Baud
@Hillary Rettig:
Nah. I just know my history.
Hillary Rettig
@Shwell Thanksh: > when these people are doing something more fulfilling with their lives
like being on the dole? or just starving to death? // also who are you to decide what’s meaningful?
first of all, the “steering and braking large containers of cargo along a trackway for hours at a time?” technology you describe exists and is called a train. however for some reason our govt would like to create an entirely new infrastructure that only serves corporations instead of investing in something that serves the public, creates jobs, and is better for the environment.
the solution to people working meaningless jobs is to create jobs for them that are meaningful. there is plenty of meaningful and important work to be done, which is the point I was making re Japan, and which I think is also the point the Michael Moore made in Sicko and is about to make in his new movie
debit
@sparrow: In Minneapolis we have, thankfully, a very active biking community and infrastructure planning takes that into account. Lots of bike lanes and dedicated paths are being built and planned for. I realize it’s a drop in the bucket spending wise (although the screamers on the right would beg to differ) but every little bit makes the city more accessible, safer and (hopefully) healthier.
Osirisopto
Whoever would believe that any member of Y’all Queda would buy into autonomous vehicles and give up their Black Silverado is doing market research on themselves and the other villagers.
Much like the Elon Musk Hyperloop, this idea has no relation to the common reality. It’s a grift.
Punchy
And when the lead truck changes lanes, do all the other 6 follow suit regardless of traffic in that lane? And if they are forbidden from changing lanes dur to heavy traffic (to reach an exit ramp, say) and miss their exit, thereby losing the lead vehicle, how do they continue? What happens when Ne’er do Wells learn to jam the transmissons, leading to massive accidents or stolen goods? How do all 7 trucks approach a gas station all at once?
And whos gunna staff truckstop restaurants if there’s no drivers?
Baud
@Osirisopto:
Huh? The main market isn’t the people in the boonies. Like hybrid and electric cars, it’s urban and suburban commuters.
Oldgold
The interstate highway system was sold as a means of moving troops and supplies. Our best bet for getting a supertrainz system is to sell it the same way.
donnah
Ohio was attempting to build a light rail system to connect major cities. It would have been a financial boost where I live in the SW part of the state. But Kasich was running for Governor and ran on the promise that there would be no light rail in Ohio, propagandized the project as costly, wasteful, and useless. And of course he won.
Lolis
I get your point, but driverless cars will be of great help to people who are unable to drive for reasons like epilepsy, blindness, age, etc. Even in cities with public transit, many locations are not close to public transit. The layout and sprawl of most American cities and small towns make public transit not even a possibility.
Hillary Rettig
@J R in WV: It’s one of those things you don’t realize till you’ve experienced it – how a well run transportation (and society) should operate. This is part of what Michael Moore does in his movies; try to wake up Americans to how provincial they are and how little they settle for.
The Japan Air flight out to Tokyo was a dream. in contrast, the US Air flight back from Japan was disgusting–seats filled with crumbs and no USB or other hookups for electronics (on a 12 hour flight). Plus the 1 hour connecting flight from Chicago was 6 hours late. It was a rude reentry back to the US.
Oldgold
Yes, just in time for tax season. Yet, I hope to get down there for a long weekend in either February or early March.
Hillary Rettig
@debit: Minneapolis certainly does a lot right. What’s going on with your bird-annihilating stadium?
sparrow
@debit: I was really impressed last time I visited Minneapolis. You feel like some of the old “socialist” feeling of the northern Europeans that settled there is still alive. The University was much more impressive than I had expected, and the new urban renewal is very nice.
In Baltimore I am terrified to bike even a couple of blocks. And not without reason: cyclists are regularly killed here (two have happened in the last year, close to my house). The roads are too narrow, and more importantly, the drivers unaware and uncaring. :( So I ride public transit instead (but there are certain lines I won’t take, and one of the last times I took the light rail, there was a fight and someone pulled a gun). We have an active cyclist association but they get ignored completely when it comes to city planning. :(
Jinchi
I know that Google has been hyping the idea of the perfect driverless car for a while now. But those cars do not exist, and probably never will. I’d love to have a driverless car for my 90 year old grandfather, but most humans are still far better at driving than computers are.
June 2015: “Google Now Reporting Self-Driving Car Accidents: Hey, It’s Not The Car’s Fault”
January 2016 : “Google’s driverless cars have needed hundreds of human interventions to stop accidents and failures”
Hillary Rettig
@donnah: terrible
Hillary Rettig
@Lolis: perhaps! that’s an interesting angle that I will ask some of my friends who write about disability issues. In many communities – not just rural – (human) taxis and medical shuttles do the job. In Massachusetts, I know, there is a good payment structure set up that encourages taxis to serve this population.
sparrow
@Hillary Rettig: My brother and I both visited Europe as young adults and fell totally in love. It was like realizing you had been stuck in a suicide cult and seeing how normal people live. I love and defend the USA all the time, but we are no longer leading the world in most things. Higher education we are just barely holding on to, but the republicans will soon destroy that too. Infrastructure, civic planning, social safety nets, etc. are all behind what the really civilized places do.
ThresherK
Pisses me off that there’s always a spot for Wired folk to hoor the Car of the Future. It’s always 1939 for them.
Transit people? They get the glamourous work of trying to get railbeds built during the Wilson administration up to snuff for the Eisenhower age.
debit
@Hillary Rettig: It looks like a giant took a large, gray, vaguely boat shaped shit in downtown.
@sparrow: Yikes. That sounds utterly terrifying. My sympathies.
Hillary Rettig
@sparrow: sadly I concur. as a friend put it, “The end of empire is not fun.” I advise all young people, these days, to try to get dual citizenship somewhere and have an exit plan, just in case.
Frank Wilhoit
“…25,000 deaths could have been avoided last year if driverless technology had been in widespread use…”
…and some number of deaths would have been caused by driverless technology. How many? Fewer? Are these the right questions? I say they are not.
The question is not how to balance off this many deaths in the left pan of the scale versus that many in the right.
The question is who/what is responsible for each death, for any death.
“Driverless technology” will make that question impossible to answer. That is the only reason why “driverless technology” is being proposed, and it is the sufficient reason why “driverless technology” is ethically impermissible.
Satby
@dr. bloor: I need a like button for that.
dr. bloor
When I saw the aerial shot during last weekend’s game, my first thought was they built a giant, capsized viking longboat. Seems appropriate enough.
pluege
you mean almost like a train, but not quite. With a train the following trucks are only about 15′ behind each other, the “trucks” are a lot bigger, and you can have more than 100 followers with one trains crew or 2.
Baud
@Frank Wilhoit:
What? That makes no sense. That’s like saying airbags are a bad idea because some small fraction of people have been killed by airbags being deployed.
dnfree
“Plus, the trains and train stations were all abundantly staffed with people who actually seemed to want to help a tourist.”
We took a train from New York’s Penn Station to Connecticut in December–our first time on Amtrak. No one at Penn Station had any interest in telling us where the actual train tracks were, or even where the bathrooms were. When we saw on the board that our train was in we asked the attendant in the waiting area how to get to track 7 and he just vaguely waved his arm and said “down there”. It was actually down two flights, and we almost missed the train looking for track 7. The train itself was fine, although rather primitive compared to European trains, as others have noted. I hope never to have to set foot in Penn Station again, though.
Matt McIrvin
@Hillary Rettig: My impression is that disability advocates are extremely skeptical of the use of disability as an argument for driverless cars, because the mass of disabled people are probably among the last people in the world who are going to get to benefit from them, and in the meantime the looming possibility of driverless cars will eat into support for services for them.
Satby
@Hillary Rettig: Too many people in this country have no idea of how little we settle for here and how much better so many things are in other countries. Try to tell them, and you get argle bargle back about high taxes and socialism. They’d rather blow hours of their lives in traffic jams than give up their independence.
Citizen_X
One of the main reasons Japan and Europe got good train systems, and we didn’t, is that they got their infrastructure bombed to smithereens in the war. It’s easier to build the future from scratch if you start with none of the old technology in the way.
debit
This little documentary show what can be done in cities. Yes, it’s about biking but watch it anyway. :)
Germy
@J R in WV:
thank you. Well said.
Satby
@Citizen_X: Maybe true of mainland Europe and Japan, but Ireland and the UK had train and bus service to every town before WWI.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Yeah, while I’m extremely skeptical that completely driverless cars will be a viable mass product anywhere near as soon as they’re hyped to be (it’s the last 1% of cases that get you), I also find dubious all the handwringing about how their algorithms will have to code in decisions about life and death. Because this isn’t novel; safety engineers already make those kinds of cold calculations all the time. Just about every safety measure that operates in the real world (seat belts, airbags, child safety seats) has a chance of killing somebody while saving others.
With children there’s been this interesting cascade: people died in crashes so airbags were introduced, but airbags killed some children so there were laws mandating that children have to sit in the back in special child seats, but that led to some parents accidentally leaving their small children in the car and baking them to death. Every improvement has its own new horror stories that come with it. But the large trend is nevertheless that things are getting safer. We don’t go back when these stories appear.
Avery Greynold
One word that makes self-driving cars inevitable: Advertising!
Cars will be time-shared. The lower classes will summon a car that imprisons them for the duration of the trip. Advertisements without volume controls will run continuously. Ads tailored to passenger marketing histories and pointing out sponsored businesses along the way with their latest sales. Would you like to stop or drive thru, it asks? The route will be adjusted to the maximum exposure to the ad sponsors.
Or, you could be rich and own a quiet car.
boatboy_srq
That by itself is reason enough why mass transit will never be as successful in the US as elsewhere. Staffing for public trans is hard enough; staffing to that level with that level of professionalism is nigh impossible.
Have you actually ridden Amtrak? MBTA? WMATA? MARTA? BART? None of those systems has the level of staffing you describe here, and none of them ever will. Between the incessant squeals about “cutting costs” and WF&A, in many cases the need to get notorious tightwads like CSX engaged to actually maintain their systems, and the unsilenceable whinge about “giveaways [in this case jobs] to Those People,” resistance to the idea is simply too great. Consider that the monitoring equipment for the speed control system which would have prevented the crash in Philadelphia has been delayed yet again with no firm deliverable even for that.
“Driverless cars” aounds like one of BHO’s last attempts to push a program the Reichwing won’t knee-jerk oppose. It helps tech, it helps the auto industry, it helps trucking, and it just might funnel some spending into infrastructure (which last is badly needed). Plus, it’s cars and not the Dreaded Socialistic Mass Transit.
beb
How long will it be before the first computer controlled (driverless) car is hacked? One has only to read Slashdot.org regularly to see where hacking is a hobby for some. Driverless cars will be an open invitation for mischief-makers and nihilists to attack.
Fair Economist
@Frank Wilhoit:
Well, by that standard, human driven cars are similarly ethically impermissible. If a driver runs over a pedestrian near a crosswalk, who’s responsible? The car designer who put in too wide a pillar blocking the view? The traffic engineer who put in a road designed for high speeds next to pedestrians? The city planner who left pedestrians with no choice but to cross dangerous roads? There’s no single “responsible” person because if any of these people had done their job better, the accident wouldn’t have happened. Likewise, if any do their jobs worse, a lot more drivers will have accidents, without being any less responsible than they are now.
redshirt
It’s pointless and self defeating to bemoan the loss of jobs due to automation. As Obama said in the SotU, technology is our future and automation is a reality. There’s no going back. The proper response is not to fight it, but adapt to it. For examples, programs designed to retrain people who lose their jobs due to automation.
Hillary Rettig
@dnfree: of course, as a native New Yorker, the part of that story that I find most horrific is that you wanted to use the bathrooms in Penn Station. :-)
boatboy_srq
@J R in WV: I have friends in Eastern Europe who all dream of coming to the US and riding the trains, which they are convinced are better than theirs. I’ve ridden theirs: they may be older with less metal and more wood, but the quality is a match for Amtrak and the service is no different.
I think that there’s some deeply-buried conviction in the US psyche that Ahmurrrcans don’t deserve sparkling, comfortable transport like Europe and Japan have. Look at the modern flying experience: it’s uncomfortable, cramped and generally unpleasant; trains have to be no better than this because the comfy seats only go to the folks paying for First Class or the frequent travelers (and for the latter only once every 50 trips) and it has to be as bad if not worse on the ground. The idea that travel – in anything but your Very Own Automobile – should be comfortable and enjoyable seems alien to the US mindset, and it’s in no small part because people don’t deserve it.
Hillary Rettig
@Matt McIrvin: makes sense. another supposed “service” that is anything but and exists only to make someone a buck
Mike J
Think of all the buggy whip makers! Has anybody considered the impact this will have on your local blacksmith? The farrier? The knock on effects are devastating to the employment picture.
Anoniminous
@Citizen_X:
That was true at one time. 70 years on that excuse is getting a little lame.
Corner Stone
Couple of items on this. The $4B is actually for over 10 years.
Which means this is pie in the sky territory. The WH may be using this as a smokescreen to actually get real dollars applied to existing useful infrastructure projects but this amount of money toward an essentially non-existing technology and supporting infrastructure is nonsense.
And this was the part of the NYT article I really enjoyed:
That’s in the article right after this same gentleman “estimated that as many as 25,000 deaths could have been avoided last year if driverless technology had been in widespread use”. And provided zero basis for any of it. The potential reduction in deaths is a distraction and means nothing except as a fact-free talking point.
rikyrah
Iowa Poll: Clinton slides, leads Sanders by 2 points
COPYRIGHT 2016, DES MOINES REGISTER AND TRIBUNE COMPANY
Hillary Clinton has lost most of her lead over Bernie Sanders in the race to win Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucuses, a new Iowa Poll shows.
Clinton, who has been the favorite all along, now leads Sanders by just 2 percentage points in The Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll. That’s down from 9 percentage points a month ago.
Clinton is now the top choice of 42 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers, compared with Sanders’ 40 percent, the poll finds. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
“It shows Bernie is around to stay for sure. It’s not a fly-by-night thing,” said Grant Woodard, a Des Moines lawyer who has worked for several state and national Democratic campaigns. “It really shows we’re going to have a pretty crazy last few weeks here.”
Germy
@boatboy_srq:
I wonder if the WWII experience was a factor. Servicemen of all ranks saw Europe, saw the trains, the cattle cars, and returned home determined to be the Anti-Europe. “Whatever Europe did, we’ll do the opposite,” seemed to be the mindset. Eisenhower saw enough of Europe that he wanted to create a cross-national system of highways. “Everyone gets their own car! Junior? Your own car! Grandma? Your own car! Not like ‘old’ Europe.”
Hillary Rettig
@Satby: yup
Hillary Rettig
@redshirt: this is patently untrue as the Japan situation (and others) illustrates. it is possible to deploy tech in a cutting edge way that makes life easier for the mass of humans instead of worse. as I and others have pointed out, these platoons are highly speculative and will do little that a well run train service can’t do. (I could see them helping out, in some places, with the last mile.)
it all depends on priorities.
Germy
@Mike J:
And yet I’ve seen it argued here that we can never have a single payer health system because of all the insurance company employees losing their jobs.
Hillary Rettig
@Germy: really interesting point. also, i think many of the GI’s came home wanting nothing more than their own safe suburban domestic cocoons. also, the us was on the top of the world then with cheap energy and essentially no economic competitors so we could invest (and squander) a lot of resources
redshirt
@Hillary Rettig: No, it’s absolutely true. I don’t know any details, but I’m sure Japan has programs to help people who lose their jobs due to automation. Japan has one of the most automated industries in the world.
Your overall point is correct about the need to invest in both infrastructure and people, but condemning automation is not the answer. It’s a Luddite argument that’s been incorrect for hundreds of years.
Citizen_X
@Germy:
Actually, what I understand is that he saw enough of Hitler’s Autobahn and said, “Let’s do that.”
Corner Stone
@Mike J:
First they came for the buggy whip makers, but I said nothing…because it was over 100 years ago and it made no sense to even mention it any longer.
TOP123
@dnfree: Penn Sta. is horrible. Grand Central really is a lot better. Amtrak is pretty weak, but if you were going to Conn., you might have been better served taking commuter rail. You get to use GCT, for one!
The MTA and Metro North are no great shakes, but I pine for them when, as at present, I live in other parts of the country.
Oh, and what Hillary said about the bathrooms at Penn Station! (shudder)
ETA: GCT is also a nice example of the pretty things we get to have when we spend money on infrastructure!
rikyrah
@donnah:
same thing in Wisconsin.
Citizen_X
@Satby: @Anoniminous: Good points, but one of the key problem areas is the whole northeast corridor. Trains don’t go as fast as they can already, because they’re following the old rights-of-way. To straighten the tracks requires too much expensive real estate on either side. How do you solve a problem like that? I don’t know.
SatanicPanic
@Lolis: .
This is why I think electric driverless cars is a more realistic option than trains. Sure, light rail, subways, etc. are great for cities, but I don’t see how useful they’ll be in suburbs.
SatanicPanic
@redshirt:
Do they? My understanding of Japan was always that the social safety net is actually incredibly weak and that if you lose your job you’re basically condemned to a life of living in your parents’ back room.
Corner Stone
I, for one, say bring on the driverless cars. Even with some wrinkles they can not be any worse than the 95% of drivers I see daily who are looking down at their phone, swerving half way into other lanes or the shoulder, then inexplicably speeding up or slowing down.
dnfree
@Hillary Rettig: Not so much WANTED to use the restrooms in Penn Station, but needed to, after taking a taxi ride from our hotel to the station that was almost an hour to go just over a mile. (The driver said some commissioner was at Penn Station that day, accounting for the difficulty in getting there, or so he told us.) But you are right about the restrooms…..
Corner Stone
I’m Gonna Git You Sucka is on and I had forgotten how entertaining a show it was.
“Any sign of violence?” “No, looks like he died of OG.”
boatboy_srq
@Corner Stone: That’s probably the single best selling point: whatever the risks, driverless cars are inherently safer than cars controlled by drivers more interested in Twitter than traffic.
Jinchi
@Corner Stone:
But that’s the point. They are more accident prone than 95% of the drivers you see daily.
sparrow
@dnfree: You know the story of what happened with old Penn Station, right? It was demolished. An architectural crime if ever there was. Here is an article highlighting that one and several other destructions in NYC: http://www.6sqft.com/crimes-against-architecture-the-guiltiest-nyc-felons/
The new Penn station is the most squalid, depressing train station in the US, not least because it’s the busiest and should represent our “real capital” city NYC much better.
Eolirin
Anyone who thinks machines won’t be better at driving vehicles than humans, within 10 years, is not paying attention to the rapid advances that are occurring in computer vision technologies. Humans are pretty bad drivers, in the aggregate. It won’t be very difficult for deep learning algorithms to outperform us once there’s enough data for them to work on.
A brief note to the non-technically inclined, there won’t be humans programming the cars on the fine details and specifics of driving and what trade offs to make in terms of how to respond to a situation. That would, in fact, be impossible to accomplish and would never result in a beneficial outcome. The way the approaches that are being used work is that the computer takes a massive amount of data from actual driving conditions and trains it’s responses from that. It’s very similar to the way humans learn. So it improves over time, as it gets more and more data, and it’s basically going to, given a high enough quality and quantity of data, optimize it’s responses based on the statistically most likely outcome in any given situation. The computer vision portions of this are already beginning to outperform humans in terms of being able to identify vehicles in poor weather conditions like heavy rain or snow. They haven’t yet learned all the complexities of driving, but it’s not a terribly complicated task as far as these things go.
And that doesn’t even get into the potential benefits of data sharing across vehicles so that they can coordinate not just safety information but also traffic flow.
And to bring up hacking? Yes, it’s a potential problem, but you know what stops being an issue entirely? Intoxication, fatigue, loss of focus, distraction. I’m very much willing to bet the net balance in terms of minimizing accidents and loss of life is greatly in favor of the machines when all is said and done. Especially if the platforms are built with security in mind.
But, to be clear, I would also much prefer more trains. There are problems with going trains in the US beyond the politics though, you’ve also got issues with existing infrastructure and the size of the country. This is a 4 billion dollar investment for a technology that, once properly developed, will function on the existing interstate highway system and roads that we already have. 4 billion would maybe, maaaybe, be enough to do a high-quality rail system in *just* the northeast, and even attempting that would be massively disruptive to existing infrastructure. You need to lay a lot of new track if you want the ability to go carless, and if you can’t go significantly carless, you still need to invest in the driverless stuff.
Highspeed rail interconnections between major urban areas still make sense even with driverless cars, because that competes more with air travel. Highspeed rail is of minimal practicality in rural areas. Light rail is great in cities that can support it, but many haven’t been designed that way and it’s very difficult to retrofit for it. It doesn’t solve all problems.
For a country like ours, you really do need to invest in both. They’re complimentary technologies. Rail between hubs, roads for final mile.
Anoniminous
@Citizen_X:
(FYWP eated my comment.)
I don’t know either. When I lived in NYC I’d always take the train to where I was going in the BosWash corridor. I found it was as quick as an airplane and much, much, quicker than driving.
KS in MA
@J R in WV:
You are so right!!!!
boatboy_srq
Has it occurred to anyone that one of the reasons modern driving in the US is so unsafe is that driver’s ed is no longer in most schools’ curricula? Teaching people how to drive – which is increasingly a necessity of surviving in the US – ranks just above music and art for most school districts, and we have at least two generations of graduates now who got behind the wheel with nothing more than a sorry excuse for a driver’s written exam and a couple hours behind the wheel of a family member’s jalopy. The same countries that make trains so attractive are committed to making sure drivers are competent: Finland, for example, requires eighteen hours of hands-on instruction, nineteen classes, and a thirty minute practical examination plus a “written” test – for a license for two years.
It doesn’t help that driving is a necessity for living in the US: work, shopping, virtually any business that requires in-person interaction demands some amount of time behind the wheel. People sometimes forget that DUIs and other infractions can prevent the offender from holding down a decent job in many communities: when you can’t get to work without a car, being denied driving privileges means being denied employment.
Mr Stagger Lee
I can see this turning into a new version of Westworld Where nothing possibly could go wrong. Loved Yul Brynner.
Mike J
@Jinchi:
Also, everyone hates the teletype interface hooked up to a 300 baud modem.
TOP123
@Hillary Rettig: As someone who shares your questionable native New Yorker values, I’ve got to say that I love NYC transit. It has whole big bunches of rough edges, and I’m well aware of them when I’m there, but I sure do miss the subway when I live elsewhere. I currently get to call Ted Cruz my senator, and traffic is so bad you’d better find something else to do rather then try to get anywhere between 2 and 7. At least on a long subway or train commute you can read, play cards like my uncle did, or look at the ads. (Thanks, Dr. Zizmor!)
I do regularly talk to friends about how, if Americans traveled more, they would be amazed at the crap infrastructure we have to put up with. I still fantasize about the trains in Japan.
Elizabelle
@Avery Greynold: Is that you, Matthew B. Crawford?
(re the inescapable advertising in driverless cars for the plebes)
MB Crawford, The NY Times: The Cost of Paying Attention
Whatever you do, don’t let the plebes think.
Frank Wilhoit
@Eolirin: I’m sorry, this kind of techno-utopian optimysticism is just not on. Humans will program the learning algorithms and — most importantly — will utterly fail to program the fallback behaviors when unanticipated conditions are encountered. At that point, someone is going to get kiilled. Are 25,000 people going to get killed? Probably not; but each of those 25,000 was either a genuine accident or else somebody could be prosecuted for vehicular manslaughter. How do you prosecute a car? How do you prosecute the developer of a learning algorithm, etc. etc. (The advantage of the learning-algorithm approach is that it creates a new class of shells to hide the guilt under.)
I speak as a software architect, but my argument is not a technical one. It will be impossible to assign responsibility for anything that goes wrong and therefore this a path that cannot ethically be taken.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hillary Rettig: There is a mentality in this country that people are getting in the way of profit, and profit is more important than people. Meaningful work? For the peasants? You cause me to guffaw.
sparrow
@Germy: It’s a stupid argument. For one, an awful lot of those people would be prime to work in administering medicare. It’s not like it runs on fairy dust.
Mike J
Doug Baldwin to Russell Wilson
raven
The PA dude has to tell veterans to salute during the natural anthem.
sparrow
@SatanicPanic: Honestly, I think we should just bulldoze most of the suburbs. My parents bought a house in an exurb built in 1995. It’s already falling apart. My husband, who is European, refers to these suburban dwellings as “paper houses”, and is appalled at our wood-and-drywall construction. They are not meant to last a century, or even half. When they hit their planned end-of-life, I don’t think we’ll be rebuilding out there. It makes way more sense for most people to live in dense communities in cities.
Mike J
In the Panthers’ stadium, so they start with the strangling of a cat. But jingoistic cat strangling!
D58826
@rikyrah: And Christie shoot down the new tunnel under the Hudson. Of course NOW he is favor of a new tunnel as long as the feds pick up the tab. You know the same feds that he will eliminate as Preez. Or the Gov. of Michigan who needs federal help after poisoning the citizens of Flint.
Eolirin
@Frank Wilhoit: Is not being able to hold someone responsible more of an issue than reducing that 25k a year number by even half? Seriously? Not impacting 12 thousand *lives* wouldn’t be worth it because you can’t prosecute on some small portion of the remaining 12 thousand, as if those prosecutions show any positive correlation with a reduction in the number of accidents? And if the numbers are eventually more like 99% of current accidents are eliminated? We should just allow avoidable deaths because those few people that still die won’t be able to hold anyone accountable? How the hell is *that* ethical?
SatanicPanic
@sparrow: I think a lot of further out suburbs are going to fall into disrepair. But there is always going to be some people who prefer to live in single-family homes. The problem for me is that they don’t allow you to build a store in your housing tract so every time you want something you have to drive to get it. That’s just bad planning.
ThresherK (GPad)
@boatboy_srq: How did he go to the bathroom in that thing?
Eric U.
I work in robotics, and driverless cars is some really stupid shit. Much better to have more buses and trains. It’s a libertarian dream, you don’t have to sit in a bus with a batch of poor people.
OTOH, the long haul trucking industry would be a lot better off with driverless trucks. It wouldn’t actually get rid of most trucking jobs, they would just be short-haul jobs because the trucks would get off the highway and unload onto local trucks.
Goblue72
@Hillary Rettig: My wife and I are structuring our retirement planning around buying a condo in Dijon, France or possibly down in Arles or Avignon.
So done with the USA.
Germy
@Eric U.: Would a driverless tractor trailer truck passive-agressively speed up when it perceived I was trying to pass it? Because that’s been my experience with human tractor trailer drivers. It’s a game they play. “Oh, you’re in the passing lane trying to go past me? I’ll just wake up here and step on the gas. Have a nice day.”
When we can have driverless tractor trailers messing with driverless passenger cars, we will have achieved the Singularity.
Corner Stone
@SatanicPanic: The argument is not made successfully that “cheap” living in the suburbs is in actuality quite expensive. And I’m sure we could go on to discuss many of those relative factors involved in the equation.
But the stickler for some families, at least in my case, is that I could afford rent inside the city but I could not afford both rent *and* the cost of private school. IOW, I chose to spend some amount of money for rather limited amenities but a better QoL for education for my family.
As this relates to mass transit, the bigger issue is funding between counties. No one can agree on who owns what or who is stuck maintaining what when you cross a county line.
Corner Stone
@Germy:
I love that so much. “Ok, so I want to go faster than 60mph so I’m going to move over to pass. But wait, what’s this? I somehow now have to do almost 80 to get ahead of you? That’s odd.”
Eolirin
@Eric U.: That’s not a fair assessment of transportation in non-urban parts of the US. Even getting to a bus route requires a car in a lot of places. Anyone arguing for more cars in urban areas is a nut case, mind. Busses and trains are the right answer for very densely populated areas, sure. But that isn’t enough of the country.
boatboy_srq
@ThresherK (GPad): ???
boatboy_srq
@Germy: If that were true, cruise holidays would have never taken off; all those former GIs and sailors would have been put off by crossing back and forth in transports and never want to set foot on board anything that floats.
Jay Noble
@Frank Wilhoit: Assigning responsiblity. Really? I give you the Affluenza Boy. I give the Baltimore Police Van Driver. I give you . . .
Baud
@Eolirin:
Not that I disagree, but it seems like part of the problem is that commuting patterns don’t reflect bright line demarcations between urban, suburban, and exurban areas.
NCSteve
Every time a liberal talks about mass transit, I hear “eat your spinach!”
If we wanted more, we’d have more. But we don’t have more because America is a big ass spread-out country with big, spread-out cities and mass transportation is a pain in the balls in most of it, entailing a lot of walking when you get where you’re going, and yeah, I know that would be good for us too, like spinach.
There are places where there’s unmet demand for it and where it would be a good investment, but you can’t create demand for it in places where people don’t want it merely by building it. Which means there’s a real, potentially huge, opportunity cost to big mass transit projects.
SatanicPanic
@Corner Stone:
Last time I was in the bay area I had to travel between Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose. Between Oakland and San Francisco you just hop on BART and it’s less than 20 minutes. From there I had to go to San Jose, in Santa Clara county, which, 50 years ago decided not to be part of BART. So you have to drive. It took like 4 hours to get there, when the cities are like 30 miles apart. Now they’re finally joining BART, but the area’s all built out, so they can only easily connect to the east bay, and it’s going to cost billions that they would have already paid off by now if they’d made a smart choice. But the bay area is either 6 or 9 counties depending on where you draw the lines, so it was almost certain some part would opt out. Maybe we just need less counties?
boatboy_srq
@SatanicPanic: That doesn’t matter so much when your parents’ back room is only half the size of your old apartment.
Corner Stone
@boatboy_srq: I think that reply was for me as it is a follow on line to the scene in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka that I mentioned right ahead of your post up there at 76 & 77. But maybe not? Maybe we have an instance of a commenter-less robot driving through the comments seeing how many wrecks it can get into?
Germy
@boatboy_srq: My father, the WWII vet, spent too much time in transports. He told me he saw big waves almost wash men overboard. I don’t believe he ever set foot on a boat again after returning to the states. But strictly anecdotal, I know.
boatboy_srq
@SatanicPanic: San Jose wasn’t the place that killed BART in the South Bay; it was San Mateo. They didn’t want Those People coming in and messing up their pretty little peninsula; and besides they had CalTrain which took them everywhere they wanted to go. It took the jobs going to Hayward and Fremont and bypassing Redwood City and Burlingame to convince them that was the wrong approach. San Jose didn’t participate because the only path to SFO from there via BART would have been up the East Bay (which wasn’t convenient), and they already had CalTrain up the Peninsula (and only CalTrain thanks to San Mateo), so there was less incentive for them to join up.
Commutes by car from San Jose to Oakland for me were either one hour or three, depending on
driver stupiditytraffic conditions; and that was working out of an Oakland office with South Bay clients so I wasn’t getting the full force of the rush hour.Amanda in the South Bay
Wake me up when automated vehicles can drive in all weather, rather than summers in Mountain View.
redshirt
There is Amtrack service from Portland ME to Boston, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would use it, as opposed to the many bus options. It’s far slower and far more expensive then the bus.
Germy
@boatboy_srq:
So much of the American Way of doing things, whether it’s transit or community planning, is based on race. Avoiding Those People, to be precise.
Eolirin
@Baud: Right, which why solutions that would work really well if we were all living in well designed urban environments aren’t going to work terribly well at scale, or solve more than a portion of the issue. The systems we try to move toward need to be capable of incorporating multiple solutions and methods into something more coherent and efficient. It can’t ever be just fantastic public transportation, more rail, or just better ways to deal with car traffic, it has to involve everything and be tailored to existing infrastructure. It’s going to be messy and full of compromises, basically. Just like healthcare, really.
Germy
this thread is getting more and more interesting, but so many threads have opened above it that I’m afraid it is winding down.
redshirt
@Germy: And no one has even mentioned Elon Musk’s HYPERLOOP yet!
Amanda in the South Bay
@SatanicPanic: If Caltrain had been electrified 20 years ago, instead of the disastrous BART to SFO extension, you’d have fast, frequent service to San Jose from SF. Electrify Caltrain and extend the people mover to San Carlos or Millbrae. Problem solved, no San Mateo BART extension that ruins SamTrans’ finances.
Baud
@Germy: Agree.
boatboy_srq
@Germy: My dad was a destroyerman in the Pacific. He told similar stories (and DDs were far wetter than APs). But he kept on sailing: he and Mum told a horror story of a Bahamas cruise aboard the Yarmouth Castle before she burned: everyone seasick but Dad and the radio operator, lifeboats painted to their davits, etc. I think they both actuallyenjoyed the trip (as much as they could), and told the story both for the effect and because Yarmouth Castle sank a year or two later: the sensationalism factor (“I did X before Y happened”) probably counted for a lot.
boatboy_srq
@Amanda in the South Bay: And how, exactly, would you connect CalTrain (at 3rd St and Embarcadero) to the rest of BART (on Market St)? That disconnect is a killer.
TOP123
Okay, I have a question (and it’s a question, not a rhetorical device: I have an opinion, but I’m really interested in hearing what others have to say): how would you feel about the idea of the USA (or elsewhere) being composed almost entirely of urban centers (linked by rail, highway, and air transit, plus whatever transporter pads and so on the future might hold) and rural areas and wilderness in the rest of the space? I’m not asking about the obstacles to this outcome, but rather everyone’s opinion on the result. A lot of our country live in suburbs, and this would be a very different world.
WereBear
Yes, but what about the farmers? The National parks? Wilderness tourist areas?The people who make goat cheese?
I don’t blame any young person who wants to live in the big city. But some form of suburbs for child raising will continue to be popular.
Amanda in the South Bay
@boatboy_srq: What should’ve happened (and I believe was floated around) was to run Caltrain down the Embarcadero, along the old Belt Line Railroad, when that closed down in the 90s and the elevated freeway was torn down. Instead we got the KT/N MUNI Metro running very, very slowly down the Embarcadero.
Germy
@Baud: Will you pledge as a candidate to resist the temptation of the above football threads and stay here to discuss public transit and driverless cars? A show of hands, please.
SatanicPanic
@boatboy_srq: You’re right, San Mateo was the culprit there. My apologies to Santa Clara county. That being said, they are getting an East Bay route anyway when it connects to downtown SJ, whenever that happens
TOP123
@Germy: agreed!
SatanicPanic
@Amanda in the South Bay: Still seems like it would have been better to have just the one authority back in the 60s do the planning than have two competing ones in an area that’s not all that big.
Eolirin
@TOP123: You’re basically looking at Japan, no? I think it’d be mostly great, as long as you have ways to deal with some of the sensory issues that can crop up with dense urban areas. You need quieter spaces too and I don’t just mean literal noise.
Baud
@Germy:
I’d show my hands but then I couldn’t drive. Can’t wait for driverless cars.
Germy
@boatboy_srq:
This is why I see so many stories in my local news about people being pulled over (for DWI, or failure to signal, or whatever) and a big deal is made of the fact the perp is driving with a suspended license! Of course, they have no choice.
Cars are supposed to be a symbol of Our Freedom®, but it sucks when we have no choice. I remember being so contented back in the ’70s, when I lived for two years in the city of Boston. Walked or took public transport everywhere. But then I made the mistake of moving to a place where I had to drive five miles to buy a tube of toothpaste. Country living!
Germy
@Baud: Your principal mode of transportation will be Air Force One, if I have anything to say about it.
liberal
@Eolirin: LOL. Get back to me when Google no longer needs to map/model the living shit out of its routes to make driverless transit feasible.
Baud
@Germy:
If I’m elected, we will have a BJ meetup on Air Force 1. I’ll fill the whole plane with green balloons.
Corner Stone
@Germy: Single issue voters are the worst.
Corner Stone
@liberal: I wonder what happens when a driverless car encounters a swoop & squat insurance scam?
Amanda in the South Bay
@SatanicPanic: BART should’ve taken over Southern Pacific’s Peninsula Commute back in the 70s when SP wanted to get rid of the service. Right there is your extant right of way down into San Jose. Of course that’d have necessitated grade separations, because BART foolishly is third rail. Also you’d have to tear out the tracks and put new ones in, because BART was Futuristic Broad Gauge.
Anoniminous
@TOP123:
You mean the United States in 1915?
Germy
@TOP123:
Not everyone wants to live in an urban area, because the word “urban” to them means high-crime, poor schools, litter and graffiti everywhere. They see suburban (or exurban) living as the logical solution.
Germy
@Corner Stone: Single issue voters are the worst.
Free ice cream for everyone. That’s my ticket.
moderateindy
@Frank Wilhoit: The who can be held responsible argument is moronic. The owner of the car will be responsible, that is their insurance company will be. There will not be vehicular manslaughter for driverless cars. Manslaughter charges are basically reserved for cases where negligence is involved, (DUI, reckless driving etc.) Plenty of crashes with fatalities occur without such charges being brought.
Insurance, and the legal system will adapt, and it won’t be some silly scenario where no one will end up accountable.
As for public transit goes, I live in Chicago which has great public transit access, and I use it often, but in most scenarios it is neither fast, convenient, nor efficient.
A couple of weeks ago I used it to go to a concert. I was going to drink so I didn’t want to drive. The venue was near the El (elevated train that services Chicago) , as is my apartment. I only had to transfer once. Still the overall trip took roughly twice as long as it would had I drove. If I would had to use a bus as well, the time would easily had tripled the time that driving would have taken. People that talk about how wonderful public transit is have never needed to count on it for their main mode of transport.
Anoniminous
The problems with a mulligan on the US transportation system is we’ve sunk a trillion (at least) into a automobile/highway system and trillions into real estate, commercial plant, & etc., based on that system. Plus there’s no over-whelming need to re-construct the system.
Corner Stone
@Germy: And you just lost the lactose intolerant voter bloc and now have the yogurt lobby gunning for you.
Germy
@liberal: They need to improve their perception of flooded-out roads, as well as roads that have been detoured because of infrastructure repair.
We had a water main replaced on our street, and the municipal hardhats put up “Road closed” signs, but the tractor trailer drivers insisted on driving through anyway. They told the workers “but my GPS says to go here.”
Anoniminous
@Corner Stone:
Another reason BAUD! is climbing in the polls.
Germy
@Anoniminous:
And that’s it in a nutshell.
Suzanne
Driverless cars are likely to be much more fuel-efficient, as they likely eliminate the speed-up-slow-down thing that human drivers do, they can pack in closer together on the highways and more efficiently use the space, and could potentially reduce lots of human hazards like drunks and tired drivers and old people who slow down traffic.
I also support better mass transit, but it really doesn’t have to be an either-or thing, but a both-and thing. Lots of people have a hard time with mass transit for valid reasons—women don’t like the street harassment and getting hit on by weirdos, we have light rail here and it’s dreadful to wait at the stations and bus stops in the heat, it has limited hours and routes and service intervals in this gigantic, sprawling city, it’s hard to navigate for the disabled and the elderly. And mass transit won’t take semis off the road, which make the roads less safe for car drivers. The loss of trucking jobs is more than offset by the increased safety for everyone else on the roads.
TOP123
@Eolirin: well, our country is massively bigger, so the spaces would be larger, but yes, that’s part of what I’m getting at. Would people be willing to be, on the one hand, farmers and shepherds and so on (though I’ll bet plenty of people could come up with interesting ways to find a living in the country when without futuristic imagining we already have the Internet) or live in huge integrated bustling teeming cities? I’ll freely tip my hand and say I love this idea, and can imagine both living in the country with a pick-em-up or in the city with tubes underground with trains that take people places, but I can see a whole lot of people who wouldn’t, so I wonder. My only exposure to ‘suburbs’ was in the NE Corridor, so I don’t think it was particularly representative.
ThresherK (GPad)
Is “suburb” a monolithic word for “not dense” now?
Because they used to be more dense in the northeast than what it seems is being built in the south and west in the last 30 years. But my life has been completely in NE suburbs, so I need to ask people elsewhere.
Also, if we’ve not paved ourselves to a standstill yet, we’ll get there soon. Even in freedomvilles like Atlanta, Phoenix and Houston.
Germy
@Citizen_X:
And so our way of life was decided by Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford.
This explains the widespread use of antidepressants….
Corner Stone
@Germy:
In the recent past I spent almost two years looking at and researching every urban area I could potentially afford, in an effort to be closer to work and leave the very expensive amenity-free burbs. After investing quite a bit of time I decided that it actually did mean high-crime, poor schools, litter and graffiti everywhere. At least in the urban metro Houston area. Austin “urban” on the other hand is a completely different ballgame. Except for the schools. They are still mostly sub-par in urban Austin ISD’s.
Germy
@ThresherK (GPad): The cartoonist Backderf used to have a character named Suburban White Man. The comic strip was about white flight. In one episode, he moves way, way out into the exurbs (after moving the the suburbs, and then the exurbs, and then further out still) and after trimming some hedges is horrified to uncover a sign: “Detroit City Limits”
TOP123
@Anoniminous: well, my point is to try to consider how we’d apply this now. I, for one, think it’s a nice idea, but since my experiential bias involves NYC metro, and then the bloody mess that is the major Southern “It” cities I’ve lived in, I am deeply biased toward a sensible transit intervention for our country.
Corner Stone
@ThresherK (GPad): I don’t know about Hotlanta, or too much about PHX, but that’s a big misconception about The Greater Houston Metro Area. One thing I always hear visitors say when they get up a few floors in a downtown building is how much greenspace there is all around us. Houston is a huge, sprawling metro area with F’d up zoning laws. So turn any corner and you’re not sure what you may find. But it is overwhelmingly not developed in big chunks of directions right outside downtown. Eventually? Sure. I’ve seen what’s been developed over the last few decades and we are not close to being concreted out in my lifetime, and maybe my kid’s, all depending.
Suzanne
In many metros, including mine, the cost-per-square-foot for housing is higher in the urban cores than in the suburbs (that considers some lower-density single-family-house-dominated areas of cities as suburbs—think Ahwatukee Foothills of Phoenix as a perfect example). Furthermore, most of the housing in the urban fabric is either older and requires more upkeep/renovation, or the units themselves are smaller. And these units only work for certain types of families. Single-family homes truly are better for families with young kids, pets, elderly relatives, etc. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t have, say, row houses or zero-lot-line designs that would promote more density but still offer most of the same benefits of the suburban fabric.
But I get sooooo sick of hipsters who want everyone to live in dense urban areas without understanding why the suburbs arose. Homeownership helped create the middle class, as it is still most families’ only appreciating asset that they will ever buy. Vertical arrangements like condos or apartments are often shitty for kids or poor people or animals. Those of us for whom living within walking distance of trendy bars often prefer the suburban lifestyle for some damn good reasons that have nothing to do with racism or the desire to disproportionately consume resources.
Germy
@Corner Stone:
Decades ago, when our children were infants, we lived in a town that must have been beautiful around 1928. Brownstones, a park with a bandstand, walkable, wide sidewalks everywhere. But it was decaying. There was litter everywhere. The schools were underfunded. I remember taking a walk one morning to buy a Sunday paper, and stepping over broken glass, and thinking to myself “I don’t want to raise our kids here.” It’s a shame that local governments couldn’t find the money to take pride in their towns.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Germy: Now I have to find out more about Backderf.
Hey, I’m sure there are plenty of foreclosurevilles in the far-offs of CA, CO, AZ and such without a lot of congestion. The only problem is, how does one keep them from building even-further burbs and clogging up my empty roads with all their traffic?
Anoniminous
@TOP123:
See my previous comment, re: trillions.
There are livable US cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and they are choking on population increase because forward-thinking cities (i.e. liberal pinko-commie) attract the Creative Class AND they attract people because they are (were) really, really, really nice places to live. Most of these livable cities were built before the invention of the automobile. Places like Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix, etc., that were built up post-car, and in most cases post WW 2, suck and there just isn’t a way to make them unsuck.
Germy
@ThresherK (GPad):
here he is (or was)
Ruckus
FYWP
eatted a comment. again. still.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Corner Stone: I do recall hearing about Houston’s lack of zoning coherence. Is there a no-tongue-in-cheek descriptor of them locally as Freedom Laws?
PS Not near Houston, but wasn’t West, TX’s fertilizer plant explosion a 7 iron from an adult living facility or kindergarten? Liberty means all the safety you can afford!
Corner Stone
@Anoniminous: And every time I visit Chicago I am newly amazed at what an awesome city it is. I love visiting Chicago. But all of my friends and colleagues take a train an hour into Chicago and an hour home. Because no one can afford to live there, in any semblance of a decent lifestyle.
Anoniminous
@Germy:
Have you read Jane Jacobs? If not, highly recommended.
Ruckus
@Anoniminous:
LA had tracks for the Red cars long before most people had cars, when Orange county was mostly orange groves. But in the early 50’s those were torn out and buses replaced them, first electric buses using the same overhead wires, then buses with combustion engines. And LA now once again has a somewhat decent rail transport system, the Metro, supplemented with buses. It isn’t perfect for sure but it is growing and more important, being used.
Corner Stone
@ThresherK (GPad):
If that’s an actual question then I will say no, not I personally have ever heard. It’s always been just about money. The people that want to make it into something want no regulations or limits on what they can do, and the people already established in the area don’t want to let anyone in after them.
There’s many a PhD to be written (if they have not yet been) about the several fits and starts of growth spurts in the larger Houston area, almost all related to relatively modern day petro-crises.
Germy
@Anoniminous: I haven’t read her, but I’ve seen her name mentioned. Can you recommend a book?
Suzanne
@Anoniminous: I live on the Phoenix metro, and much of it is lovely. It doesn’t “suck”, per se, but it appeals to different people than those who want to live in a denser urban fabric. Not all cities need to be the same. And many people who live here, though not me, think it is awesome here.
Ironically and contrary to stereotype, the PHX area is younger on average than many other metros, because families can afford decent QoL here and because there are affordable starter homes. There are always tradeoffs. We would do better to reduce the negative impacts of the different types of lifestyles if we didn’t criticize people for their choices and preferences and circumstances.
Suzanne
@Germy: Jacobs is most famous for “the death and life of Great American Cities”.
Anoniminous
@Corner Stone:
I know. Our urban areas have become a “playground” for the well-off or a slum. Very few, if any, Real People© can afford to live and raise a family in them … or want to.
Lurking Canadian
@Eolirin: I would no-fooling kill myself if you told me I had to live the rest of my life in a city like New York or Philadelphia or Toronto (or Tokyo or Moscow or I have no doubt other places I have not visited.)
Nobody should be making urban planning decisions based on my mental health, but I really don’t like the idealization of city living as if it’s for everybody.
Anoniminous
@Ruckus:
LA and San Francisco both had working mass transit systems up until they were all ripped-out in the 50s. The Red Rail Lines became the right-of-way for the 405, IIRC.
Germy
My son has a book of collected old Will Eisner “Spirit” stories. One of them is hauntingly called “The Last Trolley”
It’s spooky and sad. And the artwork is achingly beautiful.
Anoniminous
@Suzanne:
I concede “suck” is a Subjective Opinion.
You may find it interesting, or not, Herself and I currently live in a small town in the New Mexico mountain desert with ~900 population. We have lived in the urban core, and prefer it, but are quite happy here.
Anoniminous
@Germy:
Suzanne has mentioned “Death and Life of Great American Cities” … ditto … and definitely read that first. I’ll suggest “The Economy of Cities” and “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” as well, read in that order. Her other books are fun (subjective opinion) but not necessary.
Corner Stone
@Germy:
I was recently visiting my dad in AZ. I upgraded to the small rental SUV that had a GPS because I planned some side trips by myself. And even though I knew how to get from hotel to my dad’s house I decided to follow the GPS directions. That was a most fun excursion, passing by the house while the GPS had me making at least two more turns to get there. It was helpful overall though, as I did some night driving and that community has a serious light pollution regulation in effect. So you can’t see shit at night. Like at all.
Anyway, point being, driverless cars, GPS, AI, etc. Still have a ways to go.
Suzanne
@Anoniminous: I am an architect and I do some planning work, and the jump from “the suburbs result in large amounts of resource consumption because of inefficient land use and poor transit options” to “people who live in suburbs are boring and have bad taste in restaurants and have no soul” is distressingly small among the designers and planners of the built environment.
It should be noted that most planners and architects are upper-middle-class white people, many of whom are “creative class” types. And I include myself in that.
PJ
@Suzanne: This is indeed another factor, the American desire to be as far as possible from one’s neighbors (and to have a house that is bigger than the neighbors’). But while it may not be your, or most suburbanites’ intention, it certainly does consume a disproportionate amount of resources.
Suzanne
@PJ: Sure it does. But the desire to throw signals of wealth is certainly not confined to suburban dwellers—the rich do plenty of air travel and resource consumption, too. And the desire to be “far” from one’s neighbors is really more of a rural thing. Most suburbanites want to be far enough away to have some degree of quiet—don’t want to be woken by dogs barking or hear the neighbor’s baby screaming. But they don’t want to be ***that*** far away from people, for the most part. They’re looking for a sweet spot.
So let’s help solve the problems that suburban development can cause. (For that matter, our rural areas and dense urban areas could also use this attention.) Driverless cars could be a godsend for reducing consumption and emissions that result from suburban development. Honestly, that is of far more benefit to society than 1.5 million trucking jobs.
Anoniminous
BTW, although I came across in here as Anti-Suburb I’m really not. I only want urban areas, especially the urban core, to be designed, maintained, etc., in the way urban areas need and allow. If people want to live in suburbs, more power to ’em. That should not require, however, urban areas to be gutted a la Robert Moses.
sparrow
@WereBear: I don’t mean to demonize people who genuinely like suburbia. But as a kid that grew up in it, it was not good for my childhood. We moved into a neighborhood late, after the first “boom” of kids had all grown up and gone. There was nothing to do, and I was pretty lonely. My parents were not extroverts so we never had friends there. I used to read books about kids that lived in big cities with serious envy. The idea of chance meetings! Taking the subway, going to the museum… There was never anyone “out” in our neighborhood. The only thing my mom had to do was shopping at the big box stores a few miles away. No surprise it became an addiction for her eventually (a whole other story of financial disaster at home). I guess I just don’t see the appeal.
Anoniminous
@Suzanne:
Yup. And the other side of that are the Infrastructure planners who see urban neighborhoods only as impediments for their freeway on/off ramps and the people who object should be encased in concrete and dumped in a river.
In theory there’s a middle way. In over 40 years of off-and-on trying I haven’t found it.
ETA: and we haven’t even touched on rural land use. There’s a frickin’ disaster.
sparrow
@Suzanne:
I don’t think that can be thrown out as some kind of objective fact. My husband grew up in a city in Europe, a flat with two bedrooms and three kids, and at one point a grandfather in the mix. He was middle class, and this is how 99% of the families there were and are living, including with young children and elderly parents. He in no way thinks he was deprived or that his childhood was messed up — quite the opposite. His grandparents lived in flats until they died (they have these things called elevators) and never went to a nursing home (in his country, putting parents in a home is considered majorly wrong).
I’m not delusional, I know that Americans will be addicted to “more is better, bigger is better’ for the rest of my life, but it’s really not. In southern Europe I saw very different family dynamics and living situations, and you realize that this actually has a *positive* effect on their relationships and ability to deal with other people. I’m not saying suburbia doesn’t work for some, but I definitely disagree that it’s better for everyone.
Ruckus
A few other issues.
In 1950 the population was right around 150 million in the US. Today it is 320 million.
In CA today the population is 38-39 million, or very roughly 1/4 of the population of the entire US in 1950. And yet we have lots of land that no one lives on or grows/builds any thing on. And that has changed dramatically over the decades such that areas of the NE are fairly well built out, but even there, there is room. But our urban areas have in many cases declined rapidly and badly, an example would be Detroit. Many/most of our urban/suburban areas have changed dramatically because we have more than doubled in population in the last 65 yrs and many people are still alive who remember when it wasn’t anywhere near this crowed. If you are over 30, this isn’t the same world you grew up in and it won’t be the same in 10 yrs. Those of us who are older need to leave a better world than we got when we arrived. We in many cases have failed miserably at this. But many are working on this but just coming to some consensus of what the world is like and what can we do to make it better when we are gone is a monumental task, as can be seen in the comments here. It’s a big enough place that we don’t have to all live in urban areas nor all in suburban areas nor all in rural. We have choices, although to me it’s pretty obvious that many have made the choice to at least suburban if not urban. But it takes cooperation between counties/states, population centers/rural to make it work. We are nowhere near anything like that in this country, what with half our population only looking backwards and in mortal fear of the future.
Suzanne
@sparrow: There’s a body of research that indicates that 400-500 SF per person in a residence is ideal for human physical and mental health. This is considering air circulation and hygiene, in addition to just the issue of the stress that crowding can cause. I’m sure it also takes into account the amount of space needed between walls and objects to avoid injury, accessibility for the disabled, access to natural light, egress in case of a fire or other emergency, and other factors. I am not an expert in this by any means, and I’m sure that there are cultural factors, as well. So obviously YMMV.
Bill Murray
@redshirt: the fact that job retraining programs don’t actually work very well, doesn’t seem to have made it into your argument. Major technological changes still basically give a big middle finger to an entire generation of less well off people who did not grow up with the new technology. This is part of the reason that lower middle and lower class whites have skyrocketing drug overdose death rates
Atrios
Los Angeles wasn’t built around cars, it was built around the red and yellow lines. It might have been the first major city to be built around mass transit instead of walking, and that was enough to make it less dense than east coast or european cities, and then of course it was retrofitted with the urban highways and the red and yellow lines were junked, but the basic density of LA is pretty high and it’s because it wasn’t originally built around cars.
Ruckus
@sparrow:
Part of that is the culture that we have here. Same as it’s OK there as that’s the culture there. And many people here have extended families living under one roof today, maybe not like in Europe but they do absolutely exist. Nothing is cut and dried in large groups of humans, nothing. We have people in this post who can not imagine living in an urban environment and I use to be one of them, but now I do and of course it’s different, but just fine. I’ve had to make adjustments but I also get to live with the advantages. We can adapt to many situations IF we want to. I’ve lived as an adult with 80 guys living in a 40×40 room that moves up/down/sideways, I’ve lived in a commercial building with no shower (had to walk/bike/drive 2 miles to the YMCA) for several yrs, I’ve lived in a room with the kitchen/bath in another building. I’ve owned 2 homes in suburban areas in 2 different states, a condo, a duplex, 2 apartment buildings. I’d bet that many have similar experiences. All of them were home because I wanted them to be.
It isn’t so much where or how you live, it’s making where you live, home. I can’t imagine a car to be home and I’ve been very close to having to make it one.
Ruckus
@Atrios:
Well that and the geography sort of lends itself to urban/suburban if you have much of a population at all. As a child I remember the San Fernando valley being a lot of ranches and open land. Not for a number of decades now, it’s all suburban homes and business. But that can be said of a number of our largest cities.
sparrow
@Suzanne: Yes, there are highly technical descriptions like this, probably studied in isolation. I mean, yeah, if I have to live in suburbia, I guess I’d rather have lot of space than not. But I can tell you that as a kid, I LOVED sharing a room with my brother, and hated that I was made to have my own room later on. I probably had something like 500 square feet growing up, dividing the house by four. I would have preferred only 100 square feet of “my own” if it meant I lived in a part of town with other human beings out on the street, grandma nearby, kids to play with, etc.
But as Ruckus says, it’s partly cultural. For me personally, the suburbs equal loneliness and isolation. I would never, ever put my kids through the experience of my childhood.
Atrios
Sure LA as a metro area and to some extent as a municipality expanded post-car (population, geographic area), but the non-trivial core of the city grew up around trains and streetcars. The good old days, when the red cars ran to Balboa…
http://www.awalkerinla.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/pe_system_map.jpg
Suzanne
@sparrow: And that’s fine. But many people also find urban life isolating and overstimulating, so I really don’t think the built form is the sole or primary determinant of social ties—many kids who grew up in urban areas grow up and talk about feeling “trapped”, especially if they were poor.. Everyone should have choices about what they want and none of them should really be judged as “better” or “worse”. Every lifestyle has certain environmental impacts, which I think we should seek to minimize, but I also think a goal of public policy should be to many a variety of lifestyles accessible to everyone.
sparrow
@Suzanne: Totally. And I should mention that where I am now, in Baltimore, is probably under some metrics “old suburbs”. It’s very dense now — I can walk to bars, shops, all of my doctors, school, etc, but it’s not downtown. But it’s miles different from where I grew up in the midwest, where you *had* to drive several miles just to get to the walmart. But if we’re comparing decaying rural/urban/suburban, well they’re all bad in their own special way and I don’t disbelieve those that had very bad experiences in urban areas. God knows there’s enough of that very close to where I now live. I want good places for all humans to live, with some slight preference for us not ridiculously squandering resources so that the well-off can keep trying to get even further away from “those people”…
Atrios
A problem is that Americans see “the city” as “downtown,” that place where the skyscrapers are. But “urban” is really about walkable density, not skyscrapers, and you can have that with 3 story buildings if you minimize setbacks, parking requirements, and lot sizes. Paris is basically 6 story buildings. London mostly 4 or fewer (though the skyscrapers are creeping in) . You can easily have 1800 sq. foot homes with 3 stories and small yards in a nice “urban” neighborhood. The choice isn’t between midtown Manhattan and, say, Hoffman Estates.
Kayla Rudbek
@Satby: And at one point the US also had rail service to a lot of small towns. I really want that map I saw years ago of the train routes in Wisconsin around 1890-1900 or so…
Ruckus
@Atrios:
Used to know someone who owned a 4 story row house in Boston. Small back yard but the house was large enough for a decent sized family. Large living room kitchen/dinning area downstairs with 2 large bedrooms on each of two floors upstairs with a shared bath on each floor and the bottom floor was a family room. Bigger than either of my two suburban homes but the lot size was less than half of either.
Corner Stone
@Atrios: You still have to have infrastructure and amenities for families or you’re left with either a transitory population or sedentary elderly.
Nerull
@Frank Wilhoit: People are regularly not charged for killing people in cars, even with clear negligence. As a regular cyclist, I tend to notice the many news articles where people run over cyclists while texting or even on purpose and are never held responsible for it. Killing pedestrians is practically legal unless you’re drunk.
redshirt
It takes me 3 hours round trip just to see a movie.
So I don’t see many movies.
And there’s no solution other than moving. The rural areas of Maine are dead or dying.
Atrios
People say this kind of thing but what amenities are you talking about? Fine to argue about the reality of many american urban areas, but that’s different than arguing that urban areas can’t be family friendly. Think my friend and his kids are doing just fine in London, for example. And while I won’t deny that the schools issue is an issue in my urban area, I have friends with kids here who are doing just fine. Plenty of parks, etc. That too many US urban areas have, for whatever reason, failed to provide family-friendly infrastructure doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
BillinGlendaleCA
Back when my car was inoperable for extended period, I priced out how much it would cost to go to a business about 7 miles from here. I could take the city bus for $0.50 round trip and Metrorail to the location of the business, however that would cost $11.00 for the round trip. I wouldn’t mind the extra time to take mass transit, or the small walks involved, but the cost made prohibitive.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Atrios: What about pets, finding pet friendly accommodations are a real PITA in even relatively low density urban areas.
Corner Stone
@Atrios: How about sidewalks as an amenity? I get you’re hepped up on the density BS but you don’t seem to be getting it. I looked for two years for neighborhood density inside I-610 in The Greater Houston Metro Area. And it’s just not happening for a single parent with a minor school age child. Not in “the city” near the skyscrapers. I would have to be able to afford a mortgage that was at minimum double what I had in the suburbs to have some semblance of QoL with a child in mind. And then send him to HISD schools?
Sorry, friend. We are not all in Philly, childless and have the top priority of getting pho for lunch every other day.
Other amenities are grocery stores, parks, community pools/outdoor activities, movie theaters and relatively inexpensive adult cultural outings. You’re trapped in a NE mindset. Unfortunately, the whole world does not live there.
Atrios
What do you mean by pet friendly? Do you mean landlords who allow them or just big yards for dogs? I admit that I don’t quite get why so many people have big dogs in my urban area, but they do have them. Not really an issue at all for smaller dogs and cats. But, hey, if a big yard is important to you probably the city isn’t for you. That’s fine.
Corner Stone
@Atrios:
Where do they send their kids to school? And if it’s public school then nobody gives a shit what else they have to say about “urban” living.
Because I could send my child to public school in an “urban” space. But I’d have to be able to afford a $900K+ mortgage in West University in HISD. You could maybe cheese in on the Bellaire/West U split and buy a $450K house and be in a non-dense but still excellent “urban” school district.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Atrios: Many landlords have a no pet(or at least dog) policy, it tends to reduce friction between tenants.
Corner Stone
This isn’t how 90% of America is built. Maybe it should have been. But it is not. Outside of the NE you have SF, CHI and maybe Seattle. I know it’s a little south but I include DC in this description. And no one can afford to live in the walkable dense areas of those spaces. Some may suggest Miami, but in my experience, if you don’t have $2K to blow on the weekends you are essentially sitting home or walking the beach by yourself.
Satby
@Corner Stone: not totally true. Some of the neighborhoods are great and very young family friendly, like Beverly on the South Side. Big yards, good schools, all the things people say they want from the burbs. And a lovely, stably integrated community… which most white people flee. The ones who stay get housing that is older, certainly, but solid and competitively priced to anything in the far burbs.
Corner Stone
@Atrios:
I have an attorney friend that lives in dense London part of the year. He makes almost $2M a year USD and has his loft near the tube subsidized for business. Your friend must do pretty well to live in the third or fourth most expensive urban area in the world, with kids. Let’s guess where they go to school.
Corner Stone
@Satby: Can’t speak for the reasoning of the 40+ people I know who work in downtown Chicago. But I will say that only two of them actually live in Chicago and both have no children.
Satby
@sparrow: I also grew up in the city, Chicago, in a two flat for a good chunk of my life, then a small bungalow down the street from my grandparents apartment until my teens. Then my parents succumbed to the siren song of “better for the kids” of suburbia and I spent my free time until I could drive myself taking the bus back to my old hood. I hated the suburbs, still do to this day. As a kid who couldn’t drive, I had to wait until a parent could give me a ride somewhere when I previously caught a bus or train downtown. Consolidated school districts meant my friends often lived miles away in unwalkable communities.
I raised my own kids back in Chicago.
Corner Stone
The closed mindedness of some assholes. No one is talking about setbacks or parking requirements. There’s a whole quality of life issue that has been missed by some assholes who have no idea what they are talking about.
Fuck you and your curb cut nonsense.
Satby
@Corner Stone: I’ve been to Houston, but it was pretty empty because I was there after the evacuation for Hurricane Rita. I’m not slagging anyone’s choices, just saying how all urban areas aren’t garbage strewn hellholes unfit for raising children. My neighborhood had walkable distances to stores, parks, nice schools including public ones, easy strolls to train and bus stops. My sons both went to public schools, my oldest to an international baccalaureate program. Housing in that exact area can be had for around $200k. People think the South side is either Shameless territory or a stone ghetto and never bother to really look at housing there.
Ruckus
@BillinGlendaleCA:
The price changes a lot when you get to be a senior. However getting the Metro to actually send you a senior tap card seems to be a skill far out of their reach. The website says 20 business days, on the phone I’ve been told 12 weeks to get a card. Seems to be a discrepancy in the delivery. I don’t think they really give a shit about service or having seniors riding the system.
Corner Stone
@Satby: That’s great, glad to hear it. I have a number of Sox fan South Siders who all raise their families an hour train ride outside of that area. The two people I personally know who live in downtown area are a thespian and her partner and a gay careerist who job hops.
That sample size is probably not very representative but as I said, I know three dozen or more people who work in CHI and it’s quite small.
We were in Sealy, TX an hour + west of Houston for Hurricane Rita! Sorry we missed you!
Suzanne
@sparrow: Yeah, i live in the Phx metro, which is almost all suburban density, even the parts of Phoenix that are close to the urban core. I live in an “inner suburb”, which is a term that doesn’t really make much sense here, since much of Phoenix itself is low-density and parts of the suburbs are denser, especially Tempe, and have more amenities and services and better transit access than a good deal of Phoenix itself. This is definitely an urban area that is more in the network-of-nodes pattern of development than the simple concentric-rings pattern that the northeastern cities have.
I have found that suburban living here can be awesome, or it can fucking suck. Where I live is actually quite walkable, when it isn’t 836452839464 degrees outside. We have parks nearby, we back on an elementary school, we have grocery stores and coffee shops and bagels and the dry cleaners and some mediocre restaurants and the local library branch and the nail place all within a half a mile. The mall (which I hate), the movie theater, some better restaurants within two miles. Employment centers aren’t all stacked up in the city center, either—I have a large computer chip manufacturing company’s campus within a ten-minute walk. Ironically, I work in midtown PHX, but my husband works for our suburban school district, so if we moved into the urban center of Phoenix, we wouldn’t save on driving. And our house would be $225 per square foot, not $125. The dense areas of the city here are almost all vertically built—BARF. Not for me. Before I had kids, it was fine, and I lived there. When it came time to buy, I moved outward. Row houses would have produced better development—denser but with more amenities for single-family-home dwellers, but we don’t have that. It literally is not an option to buy. Even in areas with zero-lot-line zoning, they don’t build them here.
What I object to is the stereotyping that always underlies this debate. I don’t live here because I think Chili’s and the Olive Garden are awesome. I don’t live here because I’m an antisocial gun humper. I don’t live here because I’m “soulless” and bland and uneducated and uncultured and don’t want to be near the art museum (in fact, by spending less on housing and more on travel, I’ve been to many of the world’s best art museums). I don’t live here because I want to get away from black people. I don’t live here because IGMFY or NIMBY. I live here because I grew up working-middle class and didn’t get a down payment from my parents, I live here because the schools are good and I can’t afford private schools for my kids, and I’m still paying off my own considerable student debt. I live here because I have a 70-pound black lab, and because I’m a relative introvert/homebody, and because I need to build wealth rather than rent. I am happy, nay THRILLED to take action to offset my carbon footprint.
Atrios
London real estate is incredibly expensive. It actually wasn’t 15ish years ago when he bought. Lucky him. BUt this is a different discussion. Quality urban areas are expensive because there aren’t enough of them, not because quality urban areas are unpossible.
Satby
@Suzanne: Housing doesn’t always appreciate. Says the person about to mail in the keys on her $34k underwater rural house. Or says my friends in the far west suburban area of Chicago who bought just before the bubble burst and still are $100k underwater. My Chicago house weathered the bubble just fine, but then I bought that one in 1985.
Edited to add that I am also kind of sick of hearing about how defenders of city living are all hipsters living downtown judging people as racist for not wanting to live in the city.I don’t, necessarily, but if I had a nickel for every time someone said “you live on the South side? I didn’t think any white people still lived there”, I might not be so far in the hole. Just sayin.
Suzanne
@Satby: That is true, but you’re missing the point—most people will never buy anything else that has a chance of appreciating. Their house is literally the only chance they will have to build wealth. That doesn’t mean that every house will work out to appreciate, but the majority of people will not have significant investments in other assets that grow. When we get away from a homeownership society, we have to be honest with ourselves—we don’t have another wealth-builder to take the place of owning a home.
I used to be a picture framer when I was in college, and I remember all the fucking ugly “signed-and-numbered” Thomas Kinkade prints I framed. Almost everyone talked about how they were an investment. Now those things are worth far less than the frames cost and are finally seen to be as tacky as they are. But most middle-class and below-middle-class people can’t invest in art. They can’t invest in the stock market at a large enough scale to make a dramatic change in lifestyle. They’re not going to do the startup thing. Their cars aren’t ever going to be collector’s items—they’re for actual commutation. From a policy perspective, we need to encourage homeownership, with a slow-but-steady rise in home values that keeps pace with wage growth, at a range of price points for a range of lifestyles. Easier said than done.
Corner Stone
@Atrios: Of course it was. It has been my entire adult life. London has been in the top 5 or 10 most expensive cities since before I graduated high school.
Quality urban areas are expensive because quality urban areas are expensive to create and maintain. They are not unpossible by any means but they cost a fortune to exist. And they are more and more being relegated to the uber wealthy or unattached. Ten years or so ago I could have bought a loft in midtown with a nice view or a townhouse walkable to Memorial Park. Even more recently I could have bought a tear down in the Museum District or a rebuild in The Heights. All would have presented some neat/nice options for walkability/bicycle rides to work, bars, restaurants, adult amenities, all that. Perfect!
Now tell me what I do with my 10 year old.
Families just aren’t able to live the way you keep expounding on. I make a decent living and I would have had to essentially pay the equivalent of annual tuition to University of Texas to a private school for my child to have primary education. HISD is a fucking train wreck. Most US inner city “urban” schools are in the same boat.
Matt McIrvin
@NCSteve:
Well, you should fucking eat your spinach too.
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: Concur. Families with kids usually can’t reasonably afford housing over $250K, $300K, tops in most of the country. As a result, our urban areas out here are becoming fulla DINKs and singles, or horrible crime-ridden shitholes (not race-specific). There is not a substantial stock of affordable housing units.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
And a part of that slow but study growth in both home value and wages across the board is actually having policy that runs farther than city limits. It’s a big country and while prices in Kansas don’t really hurt someone 1500-2000 miles away immediately, wages do, which then affects affordability. And now circle is made that more people can’t afford a house, no matter how you describe the architecture or it’s location. Bernie is not wrong, he just seems to get only one part of the picture. It’s an important part for sure but he seems to leave out several other rather important parts.
Suzanne
@Ruckus: Agreed. This is a difficult problem. Housing is growing much faster than wages, and it’s a huge problem that is only getting worse. For stability and QoL, we need to make nice (and by “nice”. I mean clean, safe, new enough to not be difficult or expensive to maintain, and with good outdoor access) neighborhoods affordable. A household bringing in $30 grand a year should be able to comfortably afford a starter home.
Corner Stone
You keep talking about curb cuts and setbacks and all that. It’s adult porn. It’s all nonsense that is only relevant to professional adults with no kids. It’s the height of garbage to spout that kind of bullshit. Find a space anywhere within two miles of your residence in the urban hellhole that has a nearby grocery store, a park, safe sidewalks and a school district that does not have a murder rating for educational attainment.
Let’s see what that costs, perfessor.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Germy: IIRC, Eisenhower’s vision of a modern, high-speed highway system goes way back before WWII.
Yup. It goes back to 1919:
Emphasis added.
Cheers,
Scott.
j_doc
That’s such an odd use of “platoon”.
Besides the military meaning – which really has nothing to do specifically with shared or coordinated effort – the only similar use in English I can think of is the baseball platoon. But that’s about complementary skills, not shared effort. They’re describing a peloton of trucks pretty well. And wikipedia tells me that peloton comes from the French word for platoon. But no one ever called a group of drafting cyclists as a platoon. They’re a peloton. Did Wired just not want to use a french-sounding word? So odd all around.
And yeah, nothing says “safety” like the idea of a dozen 18-wheelers all drafting each other a few feet apart plodding down I-5. Especially when the driver of one peloton decides to overtake another peloton at 1 mph differential speed.
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: I have to deal with city planning and zoning ordinances all the time in my job, and I don’t think setbacks and curb cuts are dumb. They are minutae, sure, but over a neighborhood, a superblock, a district, a city, they add up to a great deal. Well-designed spaces are well-designed at all scales. The average homebuyer or city resident doesn’t notice them, but they can dramatically enhance or degrade livability.
The problem with some of the setback requirements is that they eat up land and don’t always provide much benefit. I would like to see more Phoenix neighborhoods with smaller front setbacks and one zero-lot-line, consistently on, say, the west side of the housing unit. I’d also like gardens to be allowed in front yard areas. Also narrower street sections with dedicated bike lanes with a large tree buffer between the car and bike lanes. An architect girl can dream.
Corner Stone
@Suzanne: No, of course for the overall benefit and QoL received all that makes sense to think about and plan for. I didn’t mean it was useless to take care of that while planning, sorry.
My larger point being that when I evaluate an “urban” space for livability, those points are important but on a different level.
It’s like now I can’t walk into a business space without looking up at the ceiling grid and seeing if it’s bent/out of shape/etc. Are the tiles dirty? And the door joints are level. And the HVAC is balanced. Those are all important. But other items weigh heavier before I get to my punch list.
Tripod
The long haul truck stuff is pie in the sky. The infrastructure requirements are extensive, and the assumption that they’ll just piggy back on the cellular wireless carriers out in bumfuck is wishful thinking.
Railroads spent a ton on signaling departments, on a private right of way and are no where near Tomorrow-Land fantasies of remote control. That’s just the reality of it.
Tommy
@j_doc:
This use of “platoon”, odd though it sounds to lay ears, has been a part of traffic engineering jargon for decades. Wired didn’t make it up.
boatboy_srq
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Emphasis added.
I realise that this thread is dead, but that section bears inspection for a whole different reason. Consider where the Teahad – indeed most anti-gummint sentiment – gets its backing. Now reread the italicized section. The idea that infrastructure spending (indeed, any federal government spending for anything in the public sphere) is a pet hatred of the Reichwing is not new, and resistance to federal programs for such things appear to have a considerably longer history than would appear.
mclaren
@redshirt:
There, fixed that for ya.
mclaren
@Eolirin:
This, from the “face recognition” technology that couldn’t figure out black people weren’t apes.
I’ve been hearing this hilarious pie-in-the-sky bullshit about humanoid robots and “true” AI and driverless cars and 99.9999% accurate speech recognition and working face recognition for my entire life, since the early 1960s, and it’s complete and total horseshit.