People are joking about how this is trains or busses, but I think you hit on something fundamental:
- engine tech is now such that we no longer need one huge engine and lots of passenger to get good efficiency: many small engines works just as well.
- removing the need for everyone to stop where any one person needs to go ("bus stop") improves the experience drastically.
- the one remaining problem is density: cars would have to shrink a lot before they can reach the density of busses or trains.
So perhaps: a single-lane highway only accessible to self-driving vehicles driving in formation and where the vehicles must be below some specified size.
This gives us great last-mile experience, high throughput, and good safety.
> we no longer need one huge engine and lots of passenger to get good efficiency
Larger ships and planes are more efficient than smaller ones. Longer trains are more efficient than shorter ones. No matter how efficient your propulsion is, it’s always more efficient when installed in bigger vehicles. Unless we figure out free energy, I don’t think we should stop at any arbitrary “good efficiency”.
How will these very shrunken cars be survivable in a crash at highway speeds?
Plus modern crossovers are already very size efficient, A 2024 compact crossover like the Rav4 is pretty much already the smallest possible space that can comfortably accommodate 4 adult men in seated positions and 4 large suitcases.
Why would that be any metric for the 99.9% of drivers that need something like that perhapd twice in a decade and shouldn't base their purchasing off that?
With sufficiently dense urbanisation, and dedicated transit rights of way (heavy rail, light rail, trolley busses, trams, ...), the "getting to and from the bus stop" and "on the busses schedule" problems both disappear. The bus stop is nearer than your car park would be, and the schedule operates with headways of 1--8 minutes such that waits are minimal.
With dedicated rights of way, transit doesn't compete with private or delivery vehicles for road space. Further enhancements give priority signalling to transit vehicles.
Sufficient density also means that services and functions are located nearby: school (for the kids), shopping, entertainment, healthcare, government services, and employment (assuming you still need to go to an office or similar space).
"Sufficiently dense urbanization" has a similar scent to "sufficiently smart compiler". It does exist for some cases, but I'm not going to count on it showing up for me.
The greatest impact on private automobiles hasn't been on commutes, sex lives of teens, or the lore of the road trip. It's been on land-use patterns of urban regions (writ large, think metropolitan statistical areas rather than strictly city limits within the US).
With automobiles, low-density sprawl residential, commercial, industrial, educational, and recreational developments become not only possible but largely inevitable.
The corollary is that to change land-use patterns, it is necessary to change transportation economics.
The other factor is, of course, that there is tremendous inertia in land-use patterns, and urban regions which pre-date automobiles have preserved at least some of their earlier densities. One sees this in the old cities of Europe, of the Eastern US (largely east of the Mississippi, though most notably along the Atlantic Seaboard), and in a very few of the original West Coast US cities such as San Francisco (spatially constrained by its geography) and Seattle (old town regions). Los Angeles and San Diego which both saw explosive growth after about 1920 far less so, likewise for most of the Southern US which grew following both the automobile and air conditioning.
How rapidly this works in reverse, and whether or not low-density cities, towns, and urban regions can reconsolidate is a quite interesting, and critically important, question. I suspect that it may be possible, though we'll see some strange hybrid / transitional land-use patterns initially, and there will likely be much opposition (NIMBY / landowners / pull-up-the-drawbridge types).
We're beginning to see much higher costs of automobiles as EVs hit the roads, leading in part to the increased popularity of electric bicycles and motorcycles (though to a very small extent). Point remains that it's much easier (and cheaper) to electrify small vehicles than large ones. There are congestion tax proposals, enacted in London, on hiatus in New York City. Higher fuel costs can have an impact.
I believe that simply sprinkling majyckal transit pixiey duste over urban sprawl fails miserably. I also agree that changing urban density patterns takes time. However there are existing regions with those patterns, and they may well start to see increasing appeal to those who don't wish to be car-bound. That's already part of the explanation of high housing costs in cities such as SF and NYC (though that's another complex matter and is hardly specific to those cities).
But my point remains that density and transit go together like bees and honey, utterly addressing your initial objection.
Possible future scenarios, even highly plausible ones, do not "utterly address" my immediate practical objection about where many of us actually live. And I still don't think busses will ever be a perfect substitute for having your own vehicle. Indeed, per your arguments, if I'm ever living in "sufficiently dense urbanization" I very much expect to rely on an ebike or somesuch.
I'm strongly in favour of e-bikes, they're a highly appropriate solution.
They don't suit all needs, however. The elderly, young, disabled, or ill, for example. There are circumstances in which transit fits needs better, particularly for longer-distance or high-volume commutes. Bikes need less parking space than cars, but still require parking. Bike-share or similar solutions only partially address this given high-demand peaks and low-demand troughs. Weather and geography work against bikes in many places, electrified or not.
Low-headway rail, trams, and busses are still one of the most effective means of moving large numbers of people and baggage over intermediate distances.
Yeah, but then imagine if we took all these separate vehicles and stuck them together to increase efficiency. And now we could regularly send such vehicle groups, making travel predictable for everyone.
It's a bit like some people were complaining about the "Covid dictatorship" at the time. Apparently seeing only what's right in front of their noses, not all the other government actions and policies that are on a spectrum from less to more important than Covid policies and which happen for worse to better reasons as well. At least that's how I think one "notices" a sudden dictatorship of democratically elected parties.
