Honestly, I want both. I live in Germany and my city has pretty decent public transit. But there are still way too many cars in the city, most streets have parking spaces on both sides, leaving only a small sidewalk. I want people to not be dependent on owning cars anymore. I want personal cars in the city to be replaced by self-driving cabs that you can just order when you need them. Imagine how cool that would be. There would be centralized (underground??) self-driving car storages and if you need a car, you just order one via an app and they just come to wherever you are autonomously and drive you wherever you want to go. You could basically get rid of all public parking spaces, it would be awesome.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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I can see a lot of possible futures if self-driving cars become common.
In some, people use self-driving taxis whenever they need a car. In places like NYC where owning a car is a real hassle, self-driving cars mean you can ditch that annoyance and still enjoy the benefits of a car when you need one. That means urban living is much more popular, and high-rise building don't need to be built with obscene amounts of parking attached. Because nobody has to park their car when they're not using it, parking spaces and parking lots completely disappear. This opens up space for bike lanes or other uses. Because nobody has to worry about parking anymore, pedestrian malls are more common. People can just be dropped off and picked up in a small area nearby. In this scenario, mass transit might also be more common. People could take self-driving cabs from their homes or workplaces to the nearest transit hub, switch over to mass transit, and then get a self-driving cab on the other end to get to wherever they're going. This would be less convenient than taking a car the whole way, but if the pricing was right, and the mass transit was nice enough, people might want to save money this way. This would work especially well if you have things like express subway lines that go very quickly between two very popular spots.
Unfortunately, there's the other end of the spectrum. In this one, people decide they want to own their self-driving cars. The fact that they can get to work, working while the car drives, means they want to live out in the middle of nowhere. So, instead of reducing urban sprawl it makes it much worse. Because everyone owns their own car, you still need lots of parking for the self-driving cars to use while the owner is at work. One possible benefit of this is that you don't need the parking right next to the associated building, so at least you can do away with parking scattered everywhere, ruining cities. OTOH, you will end up with some dystopian hellscape parking structures where 10k cars wait for their owners to call.
It could get even worse too. If the rich all move deeper into the suburbs and self-driving cars make traffic more efficient, I could easily see cities passing laws that give cars much more priority even than they already have. Jaywalking might be considered an even bigger crime because not only are you interfering with the driving of one or two human drivers, you're disrupting the algorithm-optimized flow of traffic.
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God damn I’d love that. My country has been trying to build a ferry free west coast. A road from southern Norway, along the coast and up to Trondheim. Back in 2012 they decided to green-light the project, but it’s still being argued about.
One of my issues with the whole project is how we’re not building any form of infrastructure based around trains. It’s cars. The geography is really harsh here, but adding train tracks by the road would be more future proof than just highways.
I want a better distribution of walkable white collar work and more work-from-home jobs.
I used to live within easy walking distance to the light rail, and work was easy walking distance from the other stop. The stops were 20 miles apart through the center of the city.
I could drive there, around the beltway, around the whole damn west side in 30 minutes.
The train was over an hour on a good day.
I tried it:
Day one, there was some mid day stuff happening in town, the train was PACKED and spent 10m at every stop, that day was 2 hours.
Had a few decent days, then they hit a car. We were forced to stay on the train for an hour in summer heat, no AC.
Some days the train was every 10. Some days every 30, some days 2 in a row. It was supposed to change frequency with time, it changed rather randomly.
By the end of my first month, there was an outage, so they did a bus bridge. That trip home was 4 hours.
I know that the light rail here was just substandard. but that didn't make it any easier.
Trains need a specific ecosystem and population density to thrive. In the US, we seem to have an issue that installing train stops connecting suburbs to significant cities brings crime to the suburbs and pushes out boutique shops from the stops. Is there any of that in other countries, or does the train increase commerce in an area?
my town has the worst god damn trains, i swear to fuck they're not even trying
Anyway:
trains need a specific ecosystem and population density to thrive
Which is totally not just some unverified just-so story people fucking say because it sounds nice, in spite of all evidence.
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