As a naive tourist, I did not know this. I drove up to Sequoia National Park in March 2011 hoping to camp. The roads were plowed, with eight feet tall snow on either side of the road. I drove up to a visitor center and asked where to camp. The park ranger said I could camp anywhere I wanted. Maybe he assumed I knew what I was doing. But I did not. After walking around the parking lot for a bit, with nowhere else to go, I drove out.
Public transportation solved this before cars were commonplace. Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0]) and you'll save billions from not having to manufacture (and store!) cars.
For public transportation to be broadly appealing it has to be clean, safe, and fast. Which means that you have to prevent people who are antisocial (playing loud music, etc.), violent, or just have terrible hygiene from boarding. You can't expect the bus driver to double-task as a security guard, so you have to somehow figure out a different way to implement security enforcement on the vehicles. You also may have to be ruthless in optimizing overall transportation value, of which speed is a factor, which may mean cutting some stops.
You have to have the political will and support to do all this even as the almost inevitable controversial videos hit social media: people being manhandled by security guards while protesting their innocence, people complaining about how there used to be a stop on their street but now it's gone, etc.
Don't disagree that public transportation is necessary however one size does not fit all people. There are elderly people that have difficulty navigating public spaces for many reasons. Having a car drive up to your home or pick you up at the doctor is a game changer. A Waymo making tens or hundreds of trips per day has a utilization rate far exceeding the average car.
If my city kneecaps bus and metro service bc Waymo swindles them into cutting the transit budget I swear I’m gonna riot. America is almost too far gone as it is, but the ubiquity of self-driving cars will almost certainly cement in all the poor decisions we’ve made
> Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0])
In, or between? Like your link tells, urban is defined by 2,000 houses. At that scale, in-town transport doesn't really make sense. You can already walk just about everywhere in five minutes. A single train station to get you to other towns makes more sense, but...
- We already had exactly that in the past. Perhaps service ended because nobody wanted to use it? ...
- After all, the town already has the town things. The whole point of living in an urban area is so you can walk to all the things you need on a daily basis. If you are leaving the walkable bubble, you're most likely headed to a rural point to access that which cannot be offered in an urban setting. Transport isn't about where people live, but where they are going.
I just visited the closest one to me during lunch. There was just a single dot in the middle of a huge county building. I had to walk through security to get there. I asked if there was a payphone around and the guard said no. Luckily someone else knew. One out of two phones didn't work. The other did, so now my best clean original joke can be heard by anyone.
There are three other phones in my city, two in a hospital, one in potentially a corrections facility? I'll stop by on my way hope.
Yesterday I had two hours to work on a side project I've been dreaming about for a week. I knew I had to build some libraries and that it would be a major pain. I started with AI first, which created a script to download, extract, and build what needed. Even with the script I indeed encountered problems. But I blitzed through each problem until the libraries were built and I could focus on my actual project, which was not building libraries! I actually reached a satisfying conclusion instead of half-way through compiling something I do not care about.
Yup; it's a neat daytrip if you're in the area. But then Capt. Gillmore showed up with rifled cannons and showed why we don't use cannonballs any more. :-)
VMI has a number of cannonballs embedded in the turrets on the backside of Old Barracks as well. They're more placeholders now than anything, but were left in situ after General Hunter shelled and burned the then-arsenal during the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign. One of my favorite points of intrigue as a cadet tour guide long ago.
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