[extropy-chat] Public Transportation (was suitcase nukes)

[J. Andrew Rogers]

Brian Lee wrote:
> I think that for commuting to and from work, nothing is better than public 
> transportation. This takes into account time quality, cost, environmental 
> impact and safety.


Only in theory, if one makes certain assumptions about the nature and topology of cities.  
For most regions of the US, there is nothing more efficient than individual motor vehicles 
because the assumptions about topology that make public transportation useful are invalid.

The irony in these parts being that the very same people who insist on spending inordinate 
amounts of tax money on public transportation and on incentives so that people might 
hopefully use it also adamantly refuse to allow the cities to be built in such a way that public 
transportation would even make sense.  So we spend billions upon billions of dollars for 
public transportation that very few people can reasonably use, outside of tiny areas where 
the design of the city for transportation purposes is grandfathered in because it is so old.

It would certainly be possible to build cities that greatly reduced the need for private motor 
transportation, but zoning and regulations make this nearly impossible as a practical matter.  
That the environmentalists on city councils (at least in these parts) view tall buildings and 
high density construction an ideological afront to the peaceful coexistence with nature does 
not help either.  This latter bit really is one of the more irritating contradictions; they force 
urban sprawl by fiat and legislate relatively low population densities, and then refuse to 
recognize that this necessarily makes all that other hippie goodness like public 
transportation economically intractable and spend gobs of money on it anyway.  They need 
to stop trying to pick and choose features for their city, picking a system instead and living 
with the consequences.

Personally, I wouldn't mind a city built as a dozen or more small high density "centers" with 
relatively little in between, which would allow some locality without having to deal with 
scaling problems.


j. andrew rogers