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Public transit is incompatible with all that.

Wrong. Dubai's transportation system has a gold card that lets you access an exclusive cabinet on the underground and on trams

"Take that, you lowlifes! I don't stay in same cabin as you filthy people, because I am have a gold card that lets me travel to work with way more comfort than you!"

to be fair the current italian government are also fascists

I don't know what book that was or what metrics its using, but my local intersections could easily pass 3x the current number of cars per green light if they accelerated together, and right away.

The number of people who poorly merge and cause traffic shockwaves, how slow cars drive in the fast lane, the accidents caused by human error. Really curious how they came to that 75% number.

I don't think cars are ever going away, even if public is the main transportation method. Which obviously sucks, but it's the way it is.

I've always imagined a protocol that lets cars communicate their planned speed. I'm pretty sure this is how cars will work in the future. A decentralized mesh of coordinated vehicles. This means that cars can:

• Maximize constant speed time, improving energy consumption and traffic flow.
• Minimize distance between vehicles based on speed and acxeleration while complying with safety standards.
• Connect to devices such as semaphores in order to tell if the vehicle will pass or not, to make a better decision.
• Connect to other mesh devices such as AI cameras that feed events to the vehicle mesh.

Public is obviously the best option though. Imagine a city with no streets, only subterranean public transportation. You wouldn't even need such a large public transportation system, cities would be a fraction of the current size. I wonder what percentage of the area of a city is wasted on streets.

That is 100% a streetcar.

77a? I guess that'd be okay. But I want 77b on the T-T-TTC

Which is from a song about a bus

T R A M

the line between train and tram is very blurry

It takes me a good 15 minutes just to walk out of my large subdivision. And then we're outside of city limits and down a country road (there are corn fields), so it would probably take me another half an hour to 45 minutes just to get to a place where a train is feasible, let alone has a station there. And there's no sidewalks.

There's a city bus now. If we wanted to ride it, and we would, it's a 5 mile walk. And crossing a four-lane highway would be required.

I would love a robust U.S. train network, but it wouldn't help me get groceries from the supermarket to my house and I sure as hell wouldn't want to make that walk in the middle of February around here. Cars are just going to be needed in the U.S. for all the people who don't live in cities.

Indeed, that's also partially a problem outside of the US in more rural parts of many countries. If governments made moving closer to the city center more compelling then I'm sure that lots of people would do so naturally with time. But that would require some actual thought, lots of planning, time and money. It's not easy to un-fuck decades of bad city planning, especially in the US with it's myriad of other, connected problems.

The last mile problem exists for cars too, we just don't think of parking in that way.

This description of self-driving cars sounds like taxis, but less resource efficient, more error prone, and exclusive to those who can afford to own one.

Additionally, trams/streetcars have been solving the last mile problem since the 1800s. Sure, you run the risk of needing to walk 5 minutes instead of being driven straight to your destination, but I really don't see how that justifies paving over millions of acres of land merely to have a convenient place to stick our cars.

Or it could be solved by good city planning. Or hell, even bad city planning, just not this down right malicious shit we have now under car culture.

the last mile problem is trivially solved by bus lines, bicycles, and just walking using the legs god gave you

It'd make more sense for it to give other people rides to/from the station when you're not using it. Public self driving cars.

They could if people funded them well enough to do so.

Yes. There even used to be a robust public transportation infrastructure here where I live in South Dakota, long ago before everything became so car-centric. Buses and trains. I used to ride the bus to Minnesota to work in the fields. Get off my lawn!

Don't believe the people who say we can't sustain it. That's their carbrain talking. It's been done before. We just need to prioritize it.

Most routes do not run just 1 way.

If it’s nationalized, yes.

We must stop all progress until we can come up with a solution that includes less than 20% of the population.

rural trains are amazing, on the branch line near me there are stations in the middle of nowhere with like maybe 50 people tops within bike distance of the station, it's absolutely idyllic.

imagine living like that and being able to just step into a moving building that takes you to a big city full of amenities, it's so good.

This is a problem of design. You're saying PT is bad because cities make shit choices.

Sure! But like I'd happily pay the 2k per year I pay to maintain a car + amortised cost of a car + insurance to have better PT with like room for cargo and shit. Also not like nearly die every day because of insane tailgaters et al. and free up road space for housing or parks or whatever.

my mom brings home our christmas tree from her SO's forest every year, takes it on the train and on the bus without issue.

1 delivery vehicle delivering packages to many addresses does not still leave the problem of cars on the road, it can make it a lot smaller if people then cycle walk and us PT more.

Corporate propaganda is the "some people." Electric/self-driving cars are more profitable than fixing or expanding public transit.

Lemmy faces selection bias, of course most people here are more partial towards public transit

But the general public is more mixed, and the technosphere of silicon valley etc very much favours the former.