Jonathon English at Bloomberg wrote an excellent analysis on the difficulties and opportunities of mass transit. Here is the link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-31/why-is-american-mass-transit-so-bad-it-s-a-long-story.
One of the luxuries of science is that it allows us to bypass debates that may not matter anyway. It’s a good article, if you look around, you can find it without necessarily having to navigate Bloomberg’s pay wall. And there are good analyses of Jonathon’s work, for instance on Wit’s End.
But before I shove my two cents down this hole, I did notice that Jonathon could be the name of a person, and also an event, like an Americathon, or Marathon, or Telethon, where the participants celebrate either someone named Jona, or possibly the ingestion of human beings by large fish in biblical times.
Now, as to mass transit … Jonathon mostly nails it; mass transit generally sucks unless you happen to live in a dense area, where you might not want to deal with traffic, parking, or even have to own a car. But regardless what he writes about the relatively low cost of light rail, it just isn’t a reality. The current costs of light rail in anything other than a rural area with lots of open land tends to start at about $20 million per mile, and rise from there. It’s expensive to nudge existing roads, build crossings, build foundations, set up infrastructure and modify stuff that is already in and on top of the ground.
Buses work because they create a double use of existing infrastructure; public roads. But who rides a bus? People who either don’t have a car, or people with lives so well organized that they can set up a repeating transit schedule with mass transit while they listen to their podcast and read some book that Amazon just mailed to them in a cardboard box that will realistically rot in some landfill somewhere.
Cars work because they present a level of flexibility that public transit rarely has. And since I don’t need to discuss the solutions and problems of mass transit, I can just open my eyes to the reality that the car makers are winning this war. They’re putting vehicles on the road that run on electricity, that can navigate themselves with their driver listens to their podcst and reads some book that Amazon just mailed to them in a cardboard box that will realistically rot in some landfill somewhere.
Mass Transit is sometimes excellent, but it sucks more often, so people drive instead. Jonathon noted this.
Therefore, I believe that mass transit can now be effectively framed as an “ill posed problem.” We no longer have to solve this problem, because it can’t be solved. We instead need to redefine mass transit: The immediate future of our lazy asses is inside of our cars. Those cars are our mass transit, and even with telework, those cars will destroy our souls.
So instead of changing mass transit, we should change cars.
Inthefuture.com, cars will be a fraction of their current size and mass. They will take advantage of segregated roadways, where full size vehicles and trucks are in those lanes, and “speedies” (my name for these new vehicles) will be in these lanes. Speedies will essentially be built like giant motorized motorcycle helmets, with the main body made of high-density, impact-absorbing foam, and with a thin plastic shell to protect the foam. Can we build these things without adding to our disposable economic culture? Yes. We can use foaming agents with low global warming potential gasses like CO2, we can potentially melt and refoam the cars’ bodies.
Speedies will be electric vehicles but with capacitors instead of batteries, to keep them very lightweight. The design envelope of these vehicles will be determined by the public policy that decides on the parameters of the segregated roadways. The limitation will be the specialized low-mass on-off ramps. This will place an upper limit on the speedy mass of approximately 160 kilograms. This will require only one small battery, arrayed capacitors, and a small 30 cubic centimeter ultra-high-efficiency two-stroke gasoline engine that is rev-tuned to act only as a generator for the speedie’s electric motor, with regen braking piped to the capacitors. They will likely include some human-powered drive, likely a recumbent-style cycle connection to add charge and increase range while decreasing mass. Driver, passenger, room for some stuff, a fan to help stay cool, perhaps some electrically-heated seats for the winter, a good sound system, and that’s about it. That’s the new mass-transit, and the previous ill-posed problem has been corrected for the conditions.