I mean in those areas where it just identical houses along a road in huge blocks.
How would you realisyicly solve it?
Smaller (6 passenger) buses running autonomously. We’re not there yet with the autonomy, but there’s no reason to stick with one size of bus. Sure, keep big ones on major routes, but use smaller ones for small routes. Heck, make those routes on-demand.
I’d say more like 15 passenger and security could be a bigger issue, but I completely agree with this.
Same general concept to replace large trains in metro systems. You just go to the nearest station and a single train car pulls up to pick you up and then takes you to any station in the system, with stops only when other passengers are getting off.
More of a tram or trolley? Simple automated things you might find at larger airports or some theme parks?
That’s called a ‘jitney.’
They can follow a regular route, or make detours for door to door service.
Much better with an actual driver to provide safety and assist the low mobility passengers
I wouldn’t use public transport. People have generally chosen to use cars, and doing so makes sense for the development type.
If you definitely wanted to take the public transit route, busses are probably the most well-suited thing that could be deployed tomorrow.
The best near-future public-transit thing is probably a fleet of self-driving cars; that’s well adapted to low-density housing, permits for transit to doorstep, and permits for a higher usage ratio than individually-owned vehicles.
You could have a bus route along the major street, bus stops every kilometer and a bus coming every 20 minutes.
That’ll take you to the city center or to a junction where you can jump on another bus taking you in a different direction.
Maybe make it cheap, and gasoline and taxes on cars more expensive so people are incentivised to use it.
You don’t need to make cars worse to have people use public transit. I visited Japan last year for a couple weeks and their train and bus infrastructure was so good I would have just taken the buss instead of a car if I had a car there. Google maps times were like a 3 minute difference between public transit and car times every single time I checked it. In cali it’s at least double the time if not triple depending on where I’m at. Both of these were in the middle of Metropolitan areas. They just need to make public transic as good, cheap and clean as it is in japan. Not an easy task granted.
Yeah, I kind of added that sarcastically. My view of the US is that it needs some capitalist nuance to it or people won’t like it. It’s not enough if it’s better, or just cheaper for society.
In reality, I understand that people in rural areas need their car. And it’s a hassle to do the shopping for a family of 5 without a car. Unless you can have that delivered…
I’m not sure if Japan is a good example for exactly this. As far as I know a parking spot in central Tokyo is more expensive than an apartment in other places of the world. And the city mandates that you have some parking spot or you can’t have a car in the first place. I suppose it actually is very expensive to own a car there. However I don’t know what they do outside of the cities or how they tax the cars and fuel. And there are cities in the US like NYC where they also don’t have space available to own cars.
But public transit in Japan is awesome. They’re on time, get you everywhere, are affordable and run every few minutes… The scenic train routes have cute mascots. Everything works. There are colored lines on the floor (in the big city) and you can get by without being able to read… And there are shops with nice japanese snacks just around the corner or within the station. I’d like to have all of that where I live.
It kinda depends on what you mean by “solved”. You could have a bus route stop at every person house. This would be expensive, frequency would be abysmal, and the routes would take forever and no one would use it.
This issue is that public transit thrives in areas with more density. Get rid of the density public transit ceases to exist.
A more realistic solution for most people would be to try and set up a bike network throughout the neighborhood. Biking, especially e-biking, is mode of transit that can be implemented almost anywhere in a city and have some big benefits to the citizens.
I wonder if this might be a situation where autonomous vehicles could really solve a problem. Like if there were like 2 or 3 minivan size vehicles that you could summon to ferry you from your house to the nearest real bus stop. The vehicle would only have to go like 20 miles an hour to make it safe for pedestrians and be compellingly worthwhile to make people take the bus instead of drive
who knows if when they will exist. if they exist they will probably work.
Could just have a human driver. I think the impromptu routing would be the thing that works best for suburbs.
You want the shuttle available as completely as the bus.
In a given neighborhood there could be many hours only a few / no people need the shuttle. It would be hard to staff.
Be cooler to make a protected shuttle lane where the shuttle operates under very strict controlled parameters.
People moved to the suburbs to get away from the city. I say we bring the city to the suburbs.
