Go on, I'll wait.
Still waiting.
Oh, there are almost no publications? Wonder why. And the ones that do appear tend to be relegated to rarely cited journals. E.g.: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2...
> We examined changes in counts and per capita rates of all, pedestrian, and bicyclist fatal motor vehicle collisions between 2007 and 2019 for 18 U.S. cities that took early Vision Zero pledges. Only 2 of the 18 cities have experienced statistically significant decreases in total fatalities since taking a Vision Zero pledge and only one city experienced a statistically significant decrease in pedestrian fatalities.
[–] jrowen 2 days ago
[–] cyberax 2 days ago
It's the root cause of all the current political problems in the US and Europe. It's a kind of pollution that offloads externalities (high living costs) from companies onto the population. Dense cities allow companies to more easily access larger pools of workers, without having to care about their long-term benefits.
> Would you prefer if we just focused on making car traffic as fast as possible and pushed aside other methods of transportation?
Yes. I would go as far as ripping out all the local transit (eventually). Self-driving cars have solved the only real problem with cars: people who can't or shouldn't drive (children, elderly, people with disabilities, etc.)
> Do you interpret these results as evidence that attempting otherwise is folly?
Yes. Quite simply: look at the stated goals of programs like Vision Zero. They are social engineering programs that simply use saving human lives as a justification to push their agenda. I hate that.
Other urbanistic programs are similar, and even urbanists admit that: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-m...
> That sounds like a pretty big win to me?
Sure. But at what cost?
> Yes these programs are designed to make other modes of transport more attractive
No. They are designed to make car travel intolerable. It's a zero-sum game, a bike lane almost always means removing a traffic lane.
> What do you make of all the data that shows that adding lanes to a highway doesn't decrease traffic?
It's a real phenomenon - induced demand. And it also applies to housing costs: increases in housing density do NOT result in lower housing prices.
And the fix is actually the same in both cases: eliminate the _need_ for more lanes or denser housing.
[–] jrowen 2 days ago
One other problem with cars is that not everybody can afford one, or really should need to have one in a big city. Even if Waymo were a free or cheap public service, it's still far less efficient and more disruptive than a robust public transit system. When dense cities are walkable and bikable, less people need cars for everything. That's hard to achieve with cars at 40mph everywhere. There's a place for cars but we've only created the problem by having them zoom around every inch of a city at the expense of everything else.
Also, tax the companies, easy. In America we've been manipulated to loathe the ideas of taxes. Taxes are what pays for things that are good for everyone.
[–] cyberax 2 days ago
That's incorrect. A typical bus/subway ride costs around $20, about the same amount as a car ride. We just heavily subsidize them, typical farebox recovery rate is around 15%, and that's not considering capital expenses.
Once shared self-driving cars become more common, we can just retarget the subsidies.
> Even if Waymo were a free or cheap public service, it's still far less efficient and more disruptive than a robust public transit system.
Self-driving cars with mild car sharing (2-4 people per car) will be more efficient than transit in almost all scenarios.
> When dense cities are walkable and bikable, less people need cars for everything.
Sigh. My point is that dense cities are now unliveable for the average person.
> or really should need to have one in a big city.
There shouldn't _be_ such cities. Giant metropolises are a failed experiment.
> Also, tax the companies, easy. In America we've been manipulated to loathe the ideas of taxes. Taxes are what pays for things that are good for everyone.
Yes. One good option is to tax the dense office space so that companies are incentivized to do remote work and/or offices in smaller cities.
[–] jrowen 2 days ago
I see what you're getting at now, but they're as popular as ever (arguably more so) despite the legacy flaws. With what we know and the tech we have now, the cities of the future could wipe the floor with anything we have today, if we had the gumption to do it right.
[–] cyberax 2 days ago
And the problem is that an average person _can_ _not_ avoid living in large cities. That's where all the good jobs are. My favorite example here is Tokyo: the housing market there is now completely unaffordable. In a country with _declining_ population.
This is not healthy. And this is _the_ reason for the recent unrest in the Western world. People are seeking easy answers: it's the fault of "corporations", migrants, NIMBYs, foreign investors, private equity, AirBnB hosts, etc.
> the cities of the future could wipe the floor with anything we have today
By not having any residents?
Imagine that you have an option to live in a single-family area with nice parks and plenty of personal space versus a closet-sized apartment on floor 11. What would you choose?
[–] jrowen 2 days ago
White flight and urban decay already happened though. Why are people moving back?
I believe the reason for the unrest is that technology and the attendant wealth consolidation have greatly outpaced our social systems and constructs. Life should be easier for people. We have the resources. We just don't have the collective will to make them work for the greater good. But yeah it's easier to point the finger at the bogeyman of the week.
You're referring to ideas I would consider to be in the tradition of the Garden City Movement. Certainly many people will always prefer the pace and the space of suburban life. But spend some time in the Eixample area of Barcelona if you get a chance. It doesn't have to be as crazy and inhumane as Manhattan or Tokyo. Some people figured out healthy city living 150 years ago and for some reason (cough, capitalism) the world largely ignored that information.
A reboot of those ideas with pre-planned modern infrastructure would crush. Move most high speed traffic underground. Make the ground level for people. Imagine an underground Waymo-Metro network that went in before the city above it.
They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
That sounds like a pretty big win to me? Yes these programs are designed to make other modes of transport more attractive. What do you make of all the data that shows that adding lanes to a highway doesn't decrease traffic?