Woo: self-driving cars
New Driverless Car hits all the news sites. Everyone is touting how great this invention is: you can get to work and read the paper or text or blog! I've been doing that for years on my commute. [flatly] It's called taking the bus.[/flat]
Do we really need and love our extremely inefficient, extremely bad investment, extremely underused individual automobiles? Or can we just have a robotic public transportation service? Whatever happened to the cablecar? That seems to be an incredibly efficient form of transportation: the only energy you need to put into the system is the friction entropy in the system. I guess public/robo/contract cars are a better system than what we have (and presumably safer, unless of course your GPS or cellular service works like the one on my cellphone). But from a greenhouse gas perspective, this is marginal at best, isn't it? This is 2 steps backward from public transit, isn't it? I guess it depends on where you live and where you work...
Of course I recognise that public transportation doesn't work for everyone. But that's partially because Google isn't getting involved in the research and development of that incredibly thick, inefficient system. I live in one of the most transport-friendly environments in the country (at least on the West Coast), and really, Tri-met is only usable for people who commute downtown or from inner neighbourhoods to suburban areas on the MAX line. If I were to take the bus to work now, it would take me 3X longer than my 15 minute walk. I can do it by bike in about 7 minutes (there are a couple of messy intersections where the lights hold me up). The bicycle, by far the most efficient (with respect to energy) has caught on a lot in my wet, hilly city. The reason it hasn't elsewhere, again, is a matter of research and development as well as laziness/aversion to change.
I've now been riding my bike for 6 years and it has radically changed my notion of what is 'far'. M and I walk to places now that were only accessible by bike before. As one ditches their car (and therefore the maintenance, parking, worry, etc.) for a bike, there are certain things that you get accustomed to that in a car, you never noticed. We then started walking, and again, there are things that are positives with walking that you miss while riding a bike (such as even more exercise, a pace of life and a relief of stressful rushing, and not having to find parking). Walking and Tri-met give you that freedom where you can start and end in different places. It feels like that I'm always ahead of the game here. For the past 6 years, I've had a hard time finding bike parking. Now, Portland adds a new bike corral every week, it seems, and I still have a hard time finding bike parking (it's caught on hugely). So I gave up and started walking more. When I work downtown again, I'll likely walk... It's a lot of fun.
It seems to me that a lot of these problems aren't difficult to solve. But it requires effort and thought. Which, I suppose, is too much to ask for many of our systems?
Do we really need and love our extremely inefficient, extremely bad investment, extremely underused individual automobiles? Or can we just have a robotic public transportation service? Whatever happened to the cablecar? That seems to be an incredibly efficient form of transportation: the only energy you need to put into the system is the friction entropy in the system. I guess public/robo/contract cars are a better system than what we have (and presumably safer, unless of course your GPS or cellular service works like the one on my cellphone). But from a greenhouse gas perspective, this is marginal at best, isn't it? This is 2 steps backward from public transit, isn't it? I guess it depends on where you live and where you work...
Of course I recognise that public transportation doesn't work for everyone. But that's partially because Google isn't getting involved in the research and development of that incredibly thick, inefficient system. I live in one of the most transport-friendly environments in the country (at least on the West Coast), and really, Tri-met is only usable for people who commute downtown or from inner neighbourhoods to suburban areas on the MAX line. If I were to take the bus to work now, it would take me 3X longer than my 15 minute walk. I can do it by bike in about 7 minutes (there are a couple of messy intersections where the lights hold me up). The bicycle, by far the most efficient (with respect to energy) has caught on a lot in my wet, hilly city. The reason it hasn't elsewhere, again, is a matter of research and development as well as laziness/aversion to change.
I've now been riding my bike for 6 years and it has radically changed my notion of what is 'far'. M and I walk to places now that were only accessible by bike before. As one ditches their car (and therefore the maintenance, parking, worry, etc.) for a bike, there are certain things that you get accustomed to that in a car, you never noticed. We then started walking, and again, there are things that are positives with walking that you miss while riding a bike (such as even more exercise, a pace of life and a relief of stressful rushing, and not having to find parking). Walking and Tri-met give you that freedom where you can start and end in different places. It feels like that I'm always ahead of the game here. For the past 6 years, I've had a hard time finding bike parking. Now, Portland adds a new bike corral every week, it seems, and I still have a hard time finding bike parking (it's caught on hugely). So I gave up and started walking more. When I work downtown again, I'll likely walk... It's a lot of fun.
It seems to me that a lot of these problems aren't difficult to solve. But it requires effort and thought. Which, I suppose, is too much to ask for many of our systems?