Safe street designs don’t affect emergency response times. People can have other opinions without evidence if they want (and they will), but assertions made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
These things are basically just helicopters. What makes them new and different is (1) they are electric, (2) at least some are intended to be autonomous (no pilot), and (3) at least some models (like the “Wisk” from Boeing) are planned for release in the next few years.
Yes, they will crash at some point and a few people will die and it will be a huge deal, and thousands of children will probably be killed on that same day by cars, trucks, and motorcycles, and it will barely be mentioned.
High speed rail is actually inching forward in the United States, with a private company planning to connect the two urban areas starting in 2028. Here are some factoids from this article:
All in all, sounds like a great project for the U.S.
NASA and Lockheed Martin claim to have a prototype supersonic jet whose sonic boom sounds “like a car door slamming heard from inside”. This could open the door to commercial supersonic flight over populated areas. Well, we don’t even have commercial super-sonic flight over the oceans at the moment, which would be helpful to long-haul travelers. The article doesn’t say when this might happen, but it doesn’t sounds soon. The article does mention that there is at least one other company working on a supersonic passenger jet which “it hopes” could be “in the air” (for testing presumably?) “later this year”.
Automatic speed regulators on private vehicles – YES PLEASE. This is an idea that will save lives, and its time has come. Won’t somebody please think of the children?
The article suggests limiting speeds to 100 mph, but come on! Why not limit them to the local posted limit? Or if saving lives that way is too interventionist for “‘Merica”, then install the technology and let insurance companies massively penalize people who choose to turn it off. This could be a middle ground between self-driving cars and people who insist on the preventable mass murder of letting human beings continue operating deadly highway vehicles on city streets, once it is no longer necessary.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: “the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth“. Green growth, in my own words, is the state where technological innovation allows increased human activity without a corresponding increase in environmental impact. In other words, this article concludes that technological innovation may not be able to save us. This would be bad, because this is a happy story where our civilization has a “soft landing” rather than a major course correction or a major disaster. There are some signs that human population growth may turn the corner (i.e., go from slowing down to actually decreasing in absolute numbers) relatively soon. Based on this, I speculated that “by focusing on per-capital wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.”
Most hopeful story: Autonomous vehicles kill and maim far, far fewer human beings than vehicles driven by humans. I consider this a happy story no matter how matter how much the media hypes each accident autonomous vehicles are involved in while ignoring the tens of thousands of Americans and millions of human beings snuffed out each year by human drivers. I think at some point, insurance companies will start to agree with me an hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.
Every minor autonomous vehicle incident is headline news, while meanwhile we just accept 40,000 Americans (and something like a million human beings worldwide) per year dying in and around cars operated by human drivers. It’s not that we should accept the risk posed by autonomous vehicles, it’s that we should recognize that it something like an order of magnitude lower than the risk of human-operated vehicles, which is huge. Every time the news reports one of these incidents, they should tell us how many people, including children, were killed and gruesomely injured since the last time they reported such an incident. We also need safe street designs and we need to stop pretending vehicles designed to be safer in highway collisions are also safe in urban environments with pedestrians and bicyclists. Something like golf carts traveling 15-20 mph would be a much safer, cheaper, convenient, and less polluting way to get around in the city.
This thing is a major serial killer of around 40,000 Americans every year, including children, and gets away with it! Essentially, it sets the design standards that determine what road and street designs can get federal funding, and it ends up flowing down to a lot of state and local design standards. Making the relative modest changes recommended here by the National Association of City Transportation Officials would help, but really I feel like this is thinking pretty small. Maybe if we held the known serial killer, the Federal Highway Administration, to account it might deter the many copycat killers known as state and local transportation agencies.
This also reminded me of this Freakonomics podcast: The Perfect Crime. If you want to kill somebody and get away with it, just run over a pedestrian with your car.
The other day I lamented that the nation’s population and economic center of gravity seems to be moving toward less walkable and sustainable areas. So if people and companies are voting that way through their market transactions, what do we make of a survey where a majority of people self-report that they do in fact want to live in walkable communities, and real estate markets tend to reflect this. It’s a logic puzzle, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.
First of all, when people are polled on what they want in a house and a community, they also say they want ample free parking. It sounds great to have ample free parking AND walkability, but the laws of geometry simply don’t allow this. This is because most cars are sitting still most of the time, you need large amounts of parking to accommodate peak demand (for example, a mall during holiday shopping season), and cars need a lot of room to maneuver in addition to the space they take up when they are parked or trying to get from point A to point B. People do not understand this – when everybody has a car, the space required to accommodate the cars requires things to get too far apart to also have walkability. People walk less and less gets spent on walking infrastructure, and it becomes a vicious cycle.
Geometrically speaking, the only ways to solve this conundrum might be alternative vehicles such as bicycles and golf carts which don’t need so much room to maneuver and can be parked very efficiently. The problem is, these vehicles are not safe to be in around high-speed highway vehicles and trucks. So all these forms of transport really need their own lanes and signals to make it work. This is way too much change and perceived expense for America’s can’t-do urban planning crowd. And the public tends to turn on anything they see as infringing their freedom to drive fast and park anywhere they want for free. No matter what they say in a survey.
Linear cities might theoretically work. This seems very science-fiction, but you could maybe have a nice skinny walkable city with a sea of parking lots on one side of it, so everybody is within easy walking distance of everything they need including their car. But in this case, the only reason to own a car would be to go on an inter-city trip, and rail or buses would make more sense. If anyone knows of a previously undeveloped continent where this can be tried, let me know.
Gentrification, perceived and/or actual, is another issue. What I see in Philadelphia is that clean, safe, walkable, green neighborhoods with good schools are in very short supply. Prices get bid up for things that are in short supply, so wealthier people live in these areas. Wealthier people are also more vocal about demanding infrastructure and services from their government. So they demand, and they get. Meanwhile, less well-to-do neighborhoods notice all this, and they complain. The government can’t or won’t spend the money to provide excellent services and infrastructure to all neighborhoods, so a very convenient and cheap solution is to provide them to nobody. The only beneficiaries are slum lords and owners of nuisance businesses like junkyards and building material warehouses in the middle of residential neighborhoods (yes, I have somewhere very specific in mind when I bring this up), some of whom are politicians or in bed with politicians. This is all a downward spiral.
I have gone through a number of emotional stages with Philadelphia’s bike lanes, from denial to anger to apathy. They are poorly designed, maintained, and almost completely unenforced. This article talks about the state of Chicago’s bike lanes, which sound and look about the same. No, this doesn’t make me feel better about Philadelphia. Two times as much poor design and children dying is twice as bad. But this article at least does have some ideas, some of which Chicago is at least trying on a limited time frame and in a limited area.
Adding an anecdote about a crushed toddler is a nice touch in this article. We are all against that right? Or do some of us only care about babies before they are born?