7 ms·

> The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking abo

> The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category. You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries. > to run bus routes That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing. Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero. The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work. In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent. Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.

vel0city 1mo ago
> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. And you think I live in fantasy land. > if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again. It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen. > Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent. This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc. I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.
- robomartin 1mo ago
  >> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. > And you think I live in fantasy land. Yes, you do. https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/ https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/ > So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again. You must be a software guy. Moving atoms is very different from typing words into this textbox. Also, in the US, the 1950's to 1970's was a very, very different time. That was probably the peak of our industrialization phase. You had millions of men who came back from WW2 ready to work all kinds of jobs, an industrial based that had exploded due to WW2, massive entrepreneurial drive at every level and the ability to get shit done without the nonsense that kill even the most basic projects today. Yes, a few decades can change things radically. In the decades since the period you use as the reference for this fantasy the US, Europe and other nations have deindustrialized to an alarming degree and China has become the world's factory. We make nothing here. To be able to to things you have to make things. On top of that, our political system has welcomed bat-shit-crazy ideologies, like the current push for down-right socialism/communism who's only recorded history is the destruction of nations. So, yeah, yours is a fantasy. This is not the United States of the 1950's, 1960's or 1970's, not by a large margin. To understand things at this level you need contact with reality. I've you've never tried to get a non-trivial project done in the real world, moving atoms, not bit, I can see how waving a magical wand and thinking we can do what was done five to seven decades ago might be possible. It is not. I've been in manufacturing my entire life. I assure you this is not the 1950's. > This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments Sure, but that's a different problem, isn't it? What we can change --over time-- is the relationship between where people work and where they live. If you take the greater Los Angeles area, the massive concentration of job centers in centralized "hubs" as I call them is tragically destructive. You have people driving into these hubs from every possible angle and you end-up with shit like the 405 freeway being a parking lot all day, every day. This isn't about public transportation. It's about politicians being politicians (which I use to mean: incompetent) wasting decades of valuable intelligent planning. In the town I live in they absolutely refuse to grant permits for the kinds of job magnets that would have people from this town work here. As a result, if you are unfortunate enough to not have found work in this area, you are eating a one to two hour commute every day. So, if you want to solve the housing and congestion problem, you need a long term intelligent planning policy that will incentivize businesses to build in areas that will reverse some of the flows. To use a company I am very familiar with, SpaceX, just look at where they are in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the worst locations one could choose. And like that, probably hundreds of large employers in that area and a few miles north, south, east and west. A good policy would have looked at the concentration and created intelligent plans to incentivize companies to find locations that would balance flows and spawn new housing developments surrounding these centers of employment. Instead of doing that, what you end-up with over time are companies leaving for other states where they have more favorable financial climates as well as the ability to, in some cases, build what they need and where they need it. Moving atoms isn't easy. Some things we can do. Others we cannot. Public mass transportation is not likely to be some thing that will take over the US. Exceptions here and there, sure. I've completed non-trivial construction projects that don't even begin to approximate the zoning and political complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about, and every single one of them has been an expensive nightmare purely because our system has devolved into something that prevents progress rather than encouraging it. Note that I am not at all opposed to the image you paint. I have travelled and worked in European and Latin American cities where public transport is wonderful and love it. I am just being realistic about who we are and we can actually accomplish in the US. We can't build a single new nuclear (or whatever) power plant while China is building a hundred. That should tell you something.

vel0city 1mo ago

> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. And you think I live in fantasy land. > if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again. It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen. > Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent. This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc. I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.

robomartin 1mo ago
>> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. > And you think I live in fantasy land. Yes, you do. https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/ https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/ > So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again. You must be a software guy. Moving atoms is very different from typing words into this textbox. Also, in the US, the 1950's to 1970's was a very, very different time. That was probably the peak of our industrialization phase. You had millions of men who came back from WW2 ready to work all kinds of jobs, an industrial based that had exploded due to WW2, massive entrepreneurial drive at every level and the ability to get shit done without the nonsense that kill even the most basic projects today. Yes, a few decades can change things radically. In the decades since the period you use as the reference for this fantasy the US, Europe and other nations have deindustrialized to an alarming degree and China has become the world's factory. We make nothing here. To be able to to things you have to make things. On top of that, our political system has welcomed bat-shit-crazy ideologies, like the current push for down-right socialism/communism who's only recorded history is the destruction of nations. So, yeah, yours is a fantasy. This is not the United States of the 1950's, 1960's or 1970's, not by a large margin. To understand things at this level you need contact with reality. I've you've never tried to get a non-trivial project done in the real world, moving atoms, not bit, I can see how waving a magical wand and thinking we can do what was done five to seven decades ago might be possible. It is not. I've been in manufacturing my entire life. I assure you this is not the 1950's. > This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments Sure, but that's a different problem, isn't it? What we can change --over time-- is the relationship between where people work and where they live. If you take the greater Los Angeles area, the massive concentration of job centers in centralized "hubs" as I call them is tragically destructive. You have people driving into these hubs from every possible angle and you end-up with shit like the 405 freeway being a parking lot all day, every day. This isn't about public transportation. It's about politicians being politicians (which I use to mean: incompetent) wasting decades of valuable intelligent planning. In the town I live in they absolutely refuse to grant permits for the kinds of job magnets that would have people from this town work here. As a result, if you are unfortunate enough to not have found work in this area, you are eating a one to two hour commute every day. So, if you want to solve the housing and congestion problem, you need a long term intelligent planning policy that will incentivize businesses to build in areas that will reverse some of the flows. To use a company I am very familiar with, SpaceX, just look at where they are in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the worst locations one could choose. And like that, probably hundreds of large employers in that area and a few miles north, south, east and west. A good policy would have looked at the concentration and created intelligent plans to incentivize companies to find locations that would balance flows and spawn new housing developments surrounding these centers of employment. Instead of doing that, what you end-up with over time are companies leaving for other states where they have more favorable financial climates as well as the ability to, in some cases, build what they need and where they need it. Moving atoms isn't easy. Some things we can do. Others we cannot. Public mass transportation is not likely to be some thing that will take over the US. Exceptions here and there, sure. I've completed non-trivial construction projects that don't even begin to approximate the zoning and political complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about, and every single one of them has been an expensive nightmare purely because our system has devolved into something that prevents progress rather than encouraging it. Note that I am not at all opposed to the image you paint. I have travelled and worked in European and Latin American cities where public transport is wonderful and love it. I am just being realistic about who we are and we can actually accomplish in the US. We can't build a single new nuclear (or whatever) power plant while China is building a hundred. That should tell you something.