I like high speed trains myself. They can run off the power grid, which means they can run off wind/solar/nuclear/hydro, and they are actually in some ways more convenient than cars.
When I lived in a big city, I enjoyed train commuting. I could just get on the train and not think about it. I used to hate daily commuting by car. Now that I live in a smaller town, I picked a walkable one where I can walk to work. (Yeah, not everyone can do that.)
I do like cars for vacationing. I consider a car a recreational vehicle, but can't stand them for routine commuting.
I like trains and commuting by train too. I can't stand traffic either.
But cars remain awesomely effective, because they can go from point to point, and they're so competitive that trains are only really competitive if:
* you're going to be traveling for very long distances (but not long enough for airports to be faster), or
* traffic is going to be utterly miserable, or
* the train is RIGHT THERE and very convenient
or, ideally, some combination of the three. (Driving to the commuter rail and having your office be Right There is an acceptable incarnation of point three).
Notice where trains are most effective: the northeast corridor (really dense population, traffic problems, city centers with workplaces served by train/metro), big cities on the west coast (e.g. SF, Seattle).
There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city. "A future without cars" looks like some of those cities and those city's problems - in particular, really expensive housing, especially if you want to raise a family and have multiple bedrooms (or, God forbid, a yard). Remember that median household income in the US is only $44k. If you're reading Hacker News I'll guesstimate you're probably making double that, maybe triple.
Anyway. Gas prices and the relative prices of train commuting/car commuting/real estate may change the dynamic of transportation in the future, but I don't think the densification that it entails is an unabashed good for the common man or that my preference for trains is a substitute for comprehensive realistic transportation policies. And if we must go down that road (so to speak) we're going to need to do a better job of making effective, useful, cost-efficient transportation projects than we have over the past few years.
Knowing that the median household income in the US is $44k, I am continually shocked at the amount of money spent on cars.
"Slightly less than one-third of households said they had one personal vehicle1 available for use in 2001. A little more than one-third of households (40 million out of 107 million households) had 2 vehicles and slightly less than one-quarter had 3 or more vehicles available."[0]
This is an unimaginable number of cars. Given that a car costs, on average, $28,400[1] - and lasts around 8 years[2] - holy shit.
That doesn't even take into account the cost of running and fueling a car. At an average of ~15k miles per year, the total cost PER CAR is around $8,776 per year.[3] To our 'median household', which is more likely than not to have one or two cars, that's either 20% or 40% of their income. Since average spending on housing is 30%, that doesn't leave a whole lot left. No wonder we're all in so much debt.
The worst part is, US urban planning means that people are likely unable to work without access to a car.
Imagine a 20% increase in income tax, with the money being used to subsidize an outdated and damaging industry. That's what this is. It is holding back the US economy.
"Buy a car to get to work, go to work to pay for car" is something that I'd bet a lot of people are familiar with. Suburban sprawl and the middle class.
I am amazed at the amount people spend no cars but again be wary of the thought that this inherent to cars.
It's about culture and keeping up with the Joneses.
My 15 year old 4 cylinder car costs not a lot to run and takes me everywhere. You can prise out of my cold dead hands :-)
Europe has been flooded in recent times with three cylinder cars, the Citroen C1, Toyota Aygo and Peugeot 107, VW Polo, Seat and a whole slew of others.
By American standards these are tiny but for EU commuting / shopping / city driving they're fine.
So you just choose one industry that's 20% of the economy to demolish and expect no side effects?
Get rid of the car industry, and the flying jetpack, massive underground subway, or whatever industry will come in to fill the gap. Economics isn't that simple.
"A future without cars" looks like some of those cities and those city's problems - in particular, really expensive housing...
NYC would be a lot cheaper if you could buy up some old brownstones, give the tenants end of lease + 6 months to find a new place, tear them down and build an apartment building. It would be very simple to fit a lot more people on manhattan if we just built taller buildings.
It's politics that makes dense cities expensive, not something intrinsic to the cities themselves.
If you're curious about this stuff, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High, and Ryan Avent's The Gated City, all of which discuss contemporary urban life and how restrictions on building height lead to suburban sprawl. In particular, based on their readings, I'm not sure this is true: "There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city." Some parts of cities scale sub-linearly and others don't; see here: http://www.creativeclass.com/_v3/creative_class/2007/05/26/c...:
Quantities related to a city’s infrastructure, such as the number of gas stations and the length of paved roads, did scale "sublinearly", meaning that the larger the city, the less of these were required per capita. But measures of economic output and innovation – the number of patents, total wages, GDP, even the pace of walking – scaled "superlinearly", showing increasing returns with size (see Graphs). "The scaling laws say that on average, as a city grows you can predict its output and input, its energy consumption, its wealth creation, its level of crime," says Bettencourt.
The real problem with cars is they directly kill 100's of thousand people and people waste 100's thousand lifetimes worth of mindlessly driving them around EVERY single year world wide. They also cost of resources and environmental costs to build, fuel, maintain, and create roads, but so do all their replacements. We can have different trade-offs when it comes to those costs but massive transportation networks are always going to be expensive.
I have always thought the future would have personalized self driving subway cars. But, it's all about what you value.
When I lived in a big city, I enjoyed train commuting. I could just get on the train and not think about it. I used to hate daily commuting by car. Now that I live in a smaller town, I picked a walkable one where I can walk to work. (Yeah, not everyone can do that.)
I do like cars for vacationing. I consider a car a recreational vehicle, but can't stand them for routine commuting.