Ah yes, the technocratic Administrative State “experts” that get bewildered when we Normals blow them off? Once again, a sterling example of the wide divergence of opinion of Who Is In Charge from Treehugger – that bastion of Environmentalism crossed with Big Government:
Eric Reguly on how self-driving cars will kill cities, not save them
I lived in Boston for 7 years as I went to school and I also have family in Southie. However a “walkable” town it may have been, I have no compulsion to return – too noisy, too dirty, too smelly; country folks are nicer, the pace slower, and the wide open spaces allow for, wait for it….., quiet. The woods, the lakes, the mountains, and the open fields – sorry, city folks and Treehuggers! Anyways, this was a post about autonomous cars that would wreck ALL of the “urban planners” that know better than we do are now seeing their vaunted transportation plans for the rest of us about to go out their collective tailpipes (emphasis mine):
However since that time a lot of skepticism has crept in. Being seriously into walkable urbanism and cyclable cities, I began to worry about how self driving cars will interact with pedestrians. Whether they would promote sprawl. Whether they will be the worst thing to hit our cities since, well, the car. Whether Jon Orcutt is right: a car, whether uber or self-driving or electric, is still just a car. Others are worried about the same thing; Patrick Sissons talked to a few planners for Curbed. Don Elliot, a planner in Denver, tells him:
“I’ve seen the blood run out of people’s faces,” he says when talking about the impact of automated vehicles on transportation, land use, and real estate. “For years, planners have been fighting for a 1 or 2 percent change in transportation mode [getting more people to use transit or bike instead of drive]. With this technology, everything goes out the window. It’s a nightmare.”
Sissons worries that “the convergence of three new technologies—automation, electrification, and shared mobility—has the potential to create a whole new wave of automation-induced sprawl without proper planning and regulation.”
Oh God spare us a future without the guiding hand of Government experts (many of which reject the guiding hand of God, or so studies show)!
Get this part, too:
He also thinks that it could kill public transit, and actually affect human health.
Even in the centre of big cities like New York, Toronto, London and Paris, you often have to walk 200 or 300 metres to the nearest metro or bus stop. It’s easier to have a car come to your doorstep. But that would clog secondary streets. It would also make you fatter—various studies have shown that public transportation promotes better health.
Is there ANYTHING Public Transportation can’t do (memories of waiting 45 minutes in a snowstorm for the “T’s” Green Line trolley to come by waft through my brain cells)??
My response:
Heh!
“planners have been fighting for a 1 or 2 percent change in transportation mode [getting more people to use transit or bike instead of drive]. With this technology, everything goes out the window. It’s a nightmare.”
Really, do the rest of us think it “a nightmare” that we all wish to do what makes sense to US rather than please planners? I don’t think so. Do we exist only to make the planners happy or do planners have an over-broad sense of their mandate “do THIS, I tell you!!” in telling the rest of us how we will live our lives?
Methinks more the former than the latter. Heaven forbid that we do what we want and not follow “the best laid plans….”
Perhaps the planners should realize that perhaps they are off the mark?
Naturally, the response was negative and I found myself, once again, in the minority that perhaps WE should make the choice rather than Government for us. And while the T has been touted as one of the better ones, it costs more than it brings in, breakdowns are rather frequent, the maintenance backlog is humongous because they always skip doing the required budgeting for it, and keep screaming for more and more tax dollars from people outside of the T’s operational area.
I think this is GREAT! Autonomous vehicles out of the grasp of Government (I just hope that the “Kill Switch” says out of its hand!) scurrying around doing what WE need versus what Planners want. Choice, not arbitrary decisions by others.
