- All of them
- I don’t know
Yeah hard to tell if Berlin is better designed than Los Angeles …
It really isn’t, but it’s a whole field of study. It’s not going to be easily described in a few lines or paragraphs.
Sorry my post was missing an /s
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I’ve never been to Berlin. How would I knkow?
I would guess most major cities have layouts, at least at their core, that were designed before the invention of the automobile. Has any professional urban designer described how they would built a city from scratch optimized for a population where most people own a car because they refuse to use mass transit and all cars are self-driving?
One thing I would imagine is that if all cars were controlled by some AI that planned traffic flow, you could have more efficient traffic patterns and reduce the number of lanes on major roads and highways.
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Oh lord yes, lots and lots and lots of people have drafted all sorts of proposals about how to built the ideal city optimized for pedestrians. And optimized for automobiles. And public transit. And pneumatic people movers. And every possible combination of the above and many other things. Over and over and over again. With great, passionate intensity.
Problem is most cities aren’t really designed. Parts of them are, to some degree, but for the most part it’s a hodgepodge of human chaos that happens over decades and centuries.
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Fair enough - pretty large hurdle to cross for just about every technology, but I see your perspective.
I like Salt Lake City’s grid system and how the streets downtown were designed to be wide enough for a wagon team to turn around.
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My niece has worked for Aptiv for quite a while now. They had self-driving cars on the Strip in Vegas for years now. They still have an operator in case of emergency but rarely, if ever, needed them. I think they were partnered with BMW but are now partnered with Hyundai for self driving, no operator taxi.
If all you know about self driving tech is Tesla, then yea, it feels like it’s a ways away. If you look at some of the other players, we’re likely only a handful of years away from having quite a few self driving vehicles on the road.
All true, but the sheer scale of cities means that seemingly small changes are actually pretty impactful. A lot of cities have adopted policies to achieve things like a +2% usage of non-car modes of transportation. That may seem futile, but it’s still thousands of people changing the way they behave every day.
The grid systems that were put in place all across the mid-west are one of the great examples of how short lived most urban planning is. Grids are great. They’re easy to understand and navigate, and as the railroads spread west grids were tossed down at every stop along the way, with the exact same orientations and even the same street names, with little regard for topography or anything else. And every one of those towns that grew to have a population of more than a few thousand people has abandoned the original grid, instead growing organically to suit the needs and desires of later developers with little concern for any coherent city plan.
I’m definitely not saying people shouldn’t try to make cities better or that it isn’t possible. Just pointing out that grand urban planning visions don’t last very long or have much effect beyond their original footprint. They also remain very persistent and difficult to change once implemented.
Am I constitutional originalist? No. I am a constitutional textualist, in that I think constitutions primarily exist as guarantees of individual rights, liberties, privileges, and immunities, that enact immutable principles that require supermajority consensus to change.
I think a woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby (at all times, with no State or parental or spousal involvement, including the right to access a safe abortion procedure) is absolutely a constitutional right that cannot be taken away by any State or by the federal government. Dobbs is wrong, but the dissent does not go far enough in vindicating the underlying constitutional right, which concerns consent, sexual freedom, and reproductive choice.
Not sure I’d recommend watching, but in case you have nothing better to do and are interested in the full Musk Twitter spaces (apologies if already shared):
I don’t disagree about the design in North America not making it easy for self
driving but I think that cities in Europe and Asia are probably even more difficult to deal with
Acknowledged but that’s accurate yet misses the point. It’s very 'Merican to incinerate gigantic piles of capital in the elusive hope of have “technology” paper over the fundamental flaws of city design. Obviously we can’t just design better cities, that would be SOCIALISM!
Yeah most of the issues I see in Europe are related to having really old city centers, way more bike lanes, and non vehicle traffic in general. Not like shitty planning but artifacts of a long evolutionary process.
it’s almost like autonomous cars are inherently the wrong way to approach the problem
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Also artifacts of significant differences during a shared history. Western Europe’s population only grew at half the rate of N. America’s during the 20th century, and it spent much of that period either at war or broke because of one. There was both relatively less need for new development, and less ability to develop at scale.
