Most countries still do not mandate that new apartments include charging ports for parking spots. So densely-populated areas will still be plagued with non-EC compatible buildings for decades to come. That's what "city life" mean in several countries.
Cities shouldn't have to mandate carparks, let alone charging in them. Having no car at all should be viable and we should build toward that.
Pre-empting, obviously many places still require cars, but we shouldn't codify cars into the building code. It makes everything that bit more expensive, and it's a waste of valuable city real estate.
At the moment the cost per square meter in Melbourne and my city means a single carspace is worth more than my salary. That's ridiculous.
Electric self-driving taxis are going to be big in the medium-term. Or some other personal transportation method. Static routes and stations are not really up to the job.
(Edit: not that these necessarily need car parks, but they'll need to wait somewhere when they're not carrying passengers)
> Electric self-driving taxis are going to be big in the medium-term.
This claim has been made for years now and a number of big companies like Google, Uber and Tesla have tried to jump into this market, but does this hold up?
I vaguely recall a self driving taxi service being active in some areas, but how are they doing?
Anyway, static routes and stations work fine for big parts of e.g. the Netherlands, but you need a good structure of bus routes and transit hubs. It's a fact that it takes longer than driving for most trips though and IMO the cost should be a lot lower, but that's the tradeoff made.
In my regional UK city, most of my trips look something like: X minutes by car/taxi (although driving you need to park, and taxi you need to wait), 1.5-2X to cycle (direct but need to contend with hills, rain and much increased risk), and 2-4X to use public transport (total time, door-to-door, need to rush to get the thing and wait outdoors for 5-10 minutes) (2X being the ideal case of home to centre, 4X for point-to-point two places outside the centre).
It's not even remotely competitive, and for that reason private cars are used for some ridiculously high proportion of journeys (90% of passenger miles overall).
In the UK only 17% of commuters use public transport, and 5% use "other" including bicycle/motorcycle/taxi.
> 1.5-2X to cycle (direct but need to contend with hills, rain and much increased risk)
I think a lot of what you're saying can be solved with cheaper ebikes and better bike infrastructure. Even the rain :-)
If it rains a lot you put on a big bike poncho, which turns you into a big sail and slows you down, and that's where the <<e>>bike part of ebike comes in, since you pump up the assist and still go fast.
Your experience matches mine here in Australia, and it's fine justification for why we don't take public transport, but not why there shouldn't be more and better public transport. I would much much prefer to be taking a train from nearby into the CBD as it is faster point to point, more predictable and less stressful. The trouble is I live too far away from a station so every train journy starts with 30 minutes of car travel in the wrong direction.
The consensus seems to be on my side in spite of lower share of total commutes, because housing near stations is significantly more expensive. From that I infer two things, public transport is desired, and there's not enough of it to support demand.
I agree it's something that would be nice, but it's so far away - decades at the current rate. We can't even build housing in the UK, never mind infrastructure or industry.
"Having no car at all should be viable and we should build toward that."
Yeah its sounds great until you need mass transport system to support this idea which means only mega cities can benefit the most when tier 2 and tier 3 cities is having a hard time investment
Tokyo has a great subway system (for the most part--there are locations that aren't that well served) and there's good train service between many moderate-sized cities in Japan. But my experience is that, once you get to a city outside of Tokyo, the public transportation options aren't great.
You don't need a car, but you won't be able to reach everything outside the cities. It's fine since everything you need is in the cities, and you would never run out of stuff to see, do, survive with. So "need" is a strong word, but certainly if you explore further out you will want a car.
Not really a bad experience but I was able to walk as a tourist to where I wanted to go because the areas were pretty centrally located. The one time I took a bus to somewhere--don't remember location--it wasn't that convenient.
Kyoto has a lot of buses, so maybe that’s where it was. I’ve found that they’re usually on time and not too crowded, but maybe you had a different experience.
See: the Netherlands. Or Switzerland, for counterexamples.
If anything, properly built small cities and towns are actually even better for public transit, since they're small. You don't need to cover a lot of ground.
Heck, everyone talks about self-driving taxis. Self-driving trains and buses, that's where it's at, actually. A decent chunk of the cost (and limitations) for public transit is the need for human drivers. Self-driving buses could have longer routes, could drive around the clock, etc, etc.
Ah, forgot, they could also be much smaller, but still cost effective. Think 10-15 places for smaller routes. That would do wonders for connectivity in more remote places.
> If anything, properly built small cities and towns are actually even better for public transit, since they're small. You don't need to cover a lot of ground.
Agreed, with the caveat that everything is crazy expensive now so smaller cities struggle to afford to build even a small amount of rail. We had excellent public transport in the 1900s, it was torn up for the automotive revolution, and now we can't afford to put even a 10th of it back. We struggle to put an extra station into an existing line, let alone new lines.
One of the big issues is that property is so expensive in the modern west that buying up the land to build is prohibitively expensive. The old game of private rail companies making money off property around public transit stops isn't working here at least, because property is already so unaffordable, there's no room for price growth.
What they could do, if the political will is there, would be just to build lots of bus lines. The lanes for sure are there and buses are much cheaper. You can run a lot of bus lines for 1 tram/light rail/metro line.
Densely populated areas shouldn't have surface-area-inefficient cars as a main mode of transportation at all! Good public transport and the other 2-wheel modes should do just fine, but of course those aren't as profitable.
Good public transport is the key part and I can tell that in most European cities, not the capitals that everyone visits when they say they have been on country XYZ only hanging on the city center without even venturing into the suburbs, that is quite far from where they were supposed to be.
A lot of people look at Europe through the lens of the tourist areas of large cities. As someone who has spent a lot of time in the UK countryside and smaller towns, there is absolutely not a good public transit system even if there might be a few buses during the day.
Heck. I arrived by train from London to a town where I found the busses to the start of my walk were basically non-existent. Fortunately a taxi pulled up as I was trying to find a taxi service by cell as the train station didn't have any staff.
Bus deregulation wrecked public transport for much of the smaller places in the UK.
One of the positive things labour has done is allowed local authorities more control over this, which should help - I can also imagine them being very bad at communicating this if it does.
Of course I'd prefer a bunch more investment too, more train lines and go ahead with many of the previously touted tram schemes.
It’s a great ideal state, I just happen to think it’s several decades away. Most people reading this will never witness it. We’ve already heavily invested in what you say should not exist. Financial inertia is strong to keep things on that path. However if we, US, shrink our vehicles we can double or triple the throughput of current roads.
Agreed, but they're not that complex to retrofit to a parking space. I can foresee a future where each space has a port and an account card reader - they'd make the buildings more valuable, the supplier to that space has a basically guaranteed income stream, and the government has an easy emissions reduction. Wins all round, so why wouldn't it happen?
The operator could demand an exclusivity contract from the landlord, provide faulty equipment, then charge high fees to repair it, eventually leading to many stalls non-functional until the contract is invalidated in court or the two parties settle, the chargers are ripped out, maybe with purposeful permanent damage to the wiring to make it unusable, and another mildly more honest provider comes in and does something slightly better but not by much.
Or, an enterprising landchad could realize they can charge 10% more kWh than people actually pull (blaming efficiency losses), along with a healthy margin for "maintenance".
Sure, it's a market with massive abuse potential, but we have a world full of them and we regulate to control the abuses. The underlying service is clearly of societal benefit and would clearly be profitable to all parties, so it's worth doing and working out the regulation to make it viable.
