Why we need fewer driverless cars and more carless drivers
Why we need fewer driverless cars and more carless drivers
Driverless cars are an impressive technology, but we're overlooking the fact that electric bikes can already do it better, and already exist.
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Once self driving cars are perfected, car ownership will plummet.
I already don't want 'em now. Fuck cars that're so loaded with tech, you can't do shadetree repairs, and have abysmally bad sightlines requiring more safety tech to offset shit design.
This may be true, but reduced car ownership will not solve many issues with cars, like the vehicle miles travelled. If we don't change our lifestyles, we will still emit a lot of CO2. Here is a Dutch graph (maybe you can translate it, otherwise let me know!) showing that only that the production of the car causes less than half the CO2 emissions for EV's (the second to last one in the graph).
If we want to reduce emissions more than that, which we really need to do, we need to find something else, like biking, which is way cleaner.Cities need to be designed to be bikeable. Yelling at people to bike more while living areas that designed to kill them is unproductive.
I completely agree with this and I would never blame anyone who doesn't bike without good infrastructure. What I meant was that instead of hoping that self-driving cars will solve all issues, we should be pushing for better alternatives, beginning with improving infrastructure. Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous comment, because as a Dutchman I am used to safe bike infrastructure (public transit is not so great). To summarize my opinion: we need policies that support safe infrastructure to create alternatives to driving, because cars are never the solution to climate change. Biking should be made safe and convenient, so people will actually use it.
Sorry I didnt mean you specifically. I had the many posts telling americans to just bike more in mind when I was saying this.
In the US, a significant amound of land and road in cities is devoted to parking, with a drop in parked cars and cars ownership, that land can be more easily repurposed to better bike lanes and denser housing.
So... Never?