Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Relevant xkcd:
https://www.xkcd.com/2684/
fun fact: it is illegal to not credit xkcd!
Imagine seeing 69 random strangers walking down the street, densely packed in like that, for no reason. Just comin at you.
A lot of those “highway programs” include things like removing barriers to aquatic organism passage, reducing congestion and emissions from the movement of cargo, and other things that don’t suck. It’s still weighed too heavily in favor of cars and highways for sure, but there’s more getting funded by the IIJA & IRA than just, like, freeways.
Are you not into trains trams?
That’s WRONG! That’s not how autonomous cars work!! They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!
They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!
Cruise’s robotaxis created a traffic jam in Austin, here’s what went wrong
According to the team at Cruise, the fleet ended up in a high-demand area, which also brought with it a slew of pedestrian and passenger vehicle traffic. As you can see in the video, one of the Cruise vehicles got stuck in an intersection while committing to a turn, thus further congesting traffic in three different directions.
Unfortunately, more and more Cruise robotaxis flooded the narrow Austin street to meet the peak demand, only to join in the traffic jam. But why were there so many robotaxis in this one specific area? Cruise states that at the time, there were limited routes going north and south through the city, and a detour from an alternative route led the EVs to the same doomed parkway.
Unfortunately, Cruise could not manually reroute the vehicles quickly enough, so there was nowhere for them to go.
Unfortunately, what you end up with automation is often more of a thing than what you actually need, as surplus saturates the market even when it isn’t desired. Rather than a single dedicated lane operating at maximum available capacity on a predictable schedule, you get a flood of functionally independent actors all congregating within a small area in an effort to maximize individual revenue.
Autonomous means you get more cars than there are people all contributing to the traffic that the people are looking to escape.
Agree. Transportation is a problem of flow maximisation. We won’t optimise the circulation in our system if we flood it with transportation machinery instead of focusing on the people.
Ah, but congestion creates scarcity and drives up prices. So there’s a perverse economic incentive to flood the system with machinery.
You actually need about half the cars if they are public.
People wouldn’t need a personal car if those autonomous cars were like taxis. Just tap a button and the nearest car will pick you up and deliver you exactly where you need to go, 24/7 from everywhere to everywhere.
It would be considered public transport.
I disagree. If you look again at the pictures, you will see that the subject is not car owners and their cars but rather people trying to move independently from their mode of transportation. If everyone is entitle to access an autonomous vehicle, then at any given point, you will need as much car as there is people. Despite the fact that some of the same people are not in a car but waiting for one. With personal car when the car is not used, it is kept away of the passage. Where an autonomous car, especially when use as public transport, will roam around town, clogging its arteries while empty.
You can reduce the problem by having the car stop for new people until its full (some countries taxies does that) but that’s not how the solution is sold to us. Self-driving car is sold as a way to keep moving in a five-seated vehicle even when along and having the vehicle kept driving even when fully empty.
