If you have a long, painful, soul-crushing commute, Tesla has a solution for you: Full Self-Driving (their autonomous, but still supervised, self-driving technology). And it makes sense that Tesla would position its product in this way. A great deal of our built environment (the vast majority of it in some geographies) has been designed around the car. We are dependent. And this is an obvious solution to its negatives.
To be clear, I'm excited about autonomy, which is why it's a frequent topic on this blog. But the urbanist in me can't help but think that positioning it in this way is in some ways a solution to the wrong problem. Here's an alternative solution: live and work in a walkable, transit-oriented community.
Imagine, for instance, pitching this Tesla positioning to a Tokyoite. Tokyo is reported to have the highest railway modal split in the world. According to some measurements, only something like 12% of trips in the city are done by car. So if you said, "FSD is the solution to your long and boring commute. Now you can just sit, relax, read a book, do work, or play on your phone!" it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine Tokyoites saying that they already do this on a train.
Of course, Tokyo is a unique place, and there are lots of car-dependent cities where there is simply no other practical option. I also recognize that housing attainability is a major driver of sprawl. In these cases, FSD represents a meaningful quality-of-life upgrade.
Again, I support this happening, but at the same time, I worry about it placating us into thinking that we've solved one of the major negatives of urban sprawl. Yes, you have to sit in a car for two hours each day, but now you're not actually driving. Isn't that, like, so much better? In a best-case scenario, we maintain the status quo when it comes to our built environment. And in the worst-case scenario, it leads to even more sprawl.
This is an open question that we have on this blog: To what extent will self-driving cars increase our willingness to commute? Historically, new mobility technologies have promoted urban sprawl because they allowed us to travel greater distances in the same amount of time. Consider streetcar suburbs and then our car-oriented suburbs.
A big part of the AV argument is not that they will solve traffic congestion (they won't); it's that they will make your commute suck a lot less, and in an even rosier scenario, become a kind of "third space" where people work, relax, or whatever. This, in turn, will make sprawl more widely palatable.
But the more I think about this, the less I believe it. Marchetti's Constant tells us that humans have generally maintained a consistent "time budget" for commuting irrespective of the technology being used. Will this time really be different?
On the flip side, there are many who would argue that urban sprawl is a natural market outcome. Not everyone wants the "utopian, socially-engineered dream" that urbanists and YIMBYs like me want. And this is a fair response. I believe in individual freedoms. Give people housing options (we're very bad at this) and let them choose where they want to live.
But we should acknowledge the tradeoffs. Traffic congestion is a clear byproduct of urban sprawl and land-use patterns that leave no other practical option for getting around. Complaining about traffic is complaining about sprawl. One more lane or cars that drive themselves have not been shown to change this relationship.
Sprawl also contributes to greater loneliness and declines in happiness. In 2000, Robert Putnam argued in his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, that, roughly speaking, every 10 minutes of additional travel time leads to a 10% reduction in social connections. We spend less time with our families, friends, and communities.
There's little doubt that self-driving cars will make commutes more tolerable. But perhaps that's not ambitious enough.
There is a school of thought that elevated rail is bad, or at least suboptimal, for cities. The thinking is that it's a visual blight, it's noisy, it disconnects neighbourhoods, and it can even reduce surrounding real estate values. Having a train passing directly in front of your window is admittedly less ideal than not having a train passing directly in front of your window.
But there is no shortage of examples from around the world where elevated rail does far more to benefit a community than detract from it. Tokyo is perhaps the obvious place to look. It is decidedly rail-oriented city with the majority of its network above ground and countless examples of active commercial spaces being tucked under and adjacent to elevated rail.
Here, for example, is a restaurant that I visited on my last trip and that was immediately adjacent to a track:
Yesterday morning, I took the train from Toronto to Montréal. I'm here for one night for a few meetings. I love trains. You can show up right before departure, the seats are more spacious, and they go downtown to downtown. Plus, there's something romantic to me about whizzing through the landscape. But currently, this trip takes just over 5 hours once you factor in the above stops (see cover photo). That's too long in this day and age, so Canada is, as I understand it, working on a new high-speed rail solution called
If you have a long, painful, soul-crushing commute, Tesla has a solution for you: Full Self-Driving (their autonomous, but still supervised, self-driving technology). And it makes sense that Tesla would position its product in this way. A great deal of our built environment (the vast majority of it in some geographies) has been designed around the car. We are dependent. And this is an obvious solution to its negatives.
To be clear, I'm excited about autonomy, which is why it's a frequent topic on this blog. But the urbanist in me can't help but think that positioning it in this way is in some ways a solution to the wrong problem. Here's an alternative solution: live and work in a walkable, transit-oriented community.
Imagine, for instance, pitching this Tesla positioning to a Tokyoite. Tokyo is reported to have the highest railway modal split in the world. According to some measurements, only something like 12% of trips in the city are done by car. So if you said, "FSD is the solution to your long and boring commute. Now you can just sit, relax, read a book, do work, or play on your phone!" it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine Tokyoites saying that they already do this on a train.
Of course, Tokyo is a unique place, and there are lots of car-dependent cities where there is simply no other practical option. I also recognize that housing attainability is a major driver of sprawl. In these cases, FSD represents a meaningful quality-of-life upgrade.
Again, I support this happening, but at the same time, I worry about it placating us into thinking that we've solved one of the major negatives of urban sprawl. Yes, you have to sit in a car for two hours each day, but now you're not actually driving. Isn't that, like, so much better? In a best-case scenario, we maintain the status quo when it comes to our built environment. And in the worst-case scenario, it leads to even more sprawl.
This is an open question that we have on this blog: To what extent will self-driving cars increase our willingness to commute? Historically, new mobility technologies have promoted urban sprawl because they allowed us to travel greater distances in the same amount of time. Consider streetcar suburbs and then our car-oriented suburbs.
A big part of the AV argument is not that they will solve traffic congestion (they won't); it's that they will make your commute suck a lot less, and in an even rosier scenario, become a kind of "third space" where people work, relax, or whatever. This, in turn, will make sprawl more widely palatable.
But the more I think about this, the less I believe it. Marchetti's Constant tells us that humans have generally maintained a consistent "time budget" for commuting irrespective of the technology being used. Will this time really be different?
On the flip side, there are many who would argue that urban sprawl is a natural market outcome. Not everyone wants the "utopian, socially-engineered dream" that urbanists and YIMBYs like me want. And this is a fair response. I believe in individual freedoms. Give people housing options (we're very bad at this) and let them choose where they want to live.
But we should acknowledge the tradeoffs. Traffic congestion is a clear byproduct of urban sprawl and land-use patterns that leave no other practical option for getting around. Complaining about traffic is complaining about sprawl. One more lane or cars that drive themselves have not been shown to change this relationship.
Sprawl also contributes to greater loneliness and declines in happiness. In 2000, Robert Putnam argued in his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, that, roughly speaking, every 10 minutes of additional travel time leads to a 10% reduction in social connections. We spend less time with our families, friends, and communities.
There's little doubt that self-driving cars will make commutes more tolerable. But perhaps that's not ambitious enough.
There is a school of thought that elevated rail is bad, or at least suboptimal, for cities. The thinking is that it's a visual blight, it's noisy, it disconnects neighbourhoods, and it can even reduce surrounding real estate values. Having a train passing directly in front of your window is admittedly less ideal than not having a train passing directly in front of your window.
But there is no shortage of examples from around the world where elevated rail does far more to benefit a community than detract from it. Tokyo is perhaps the obvious place to look. It is decidedly rail-oriented city with the majority of its network above ground and countless examples of active commercial spaces being tucked under and adjacent to elevated rail.
Here, for example, is a restaurant that I visited on my last trip and that was immediately adjacent to a track:
Yesterday morning, I took the train from Toronto to Montréal. I'm here for one night for a few meetings. I love trains. You can show up right before departure, the seats are more spacious, and they go downtown to downtown. Plus, there's something romantic to me about whizzing through the landscape. But currently, this trip takes just over 5 hours once you factor in the above stops (see cover photo). That's too long in this day and age, so Canada is, as I understand it, working on a new high-speed rail solution called
But you don't have to travel all the way to Japan to find examples where elevated rail does little to detract from the urban experience. Here's Marine Drive station in Vancouver, integrated into a newish development:
And here's what the elevated guideway looks like as it heads toward the station:
The obvious advantage of elevated rail is that it's significantly cheaper than underground rail. According to global data collected by the Transit Costs Project at New York University, underground rail tends to be at least 2x the cost — often it's even more. Are the benefits worth this additional cost, and is it worth building less overall transit with the same capital budget?
Elevated rail is not without its drawbacks, but good design and urban sensibilities can help to mitigate many of them. As is the case with a lot of urban design, what matters most is how we treat the ground plane underneath the rail. So, to the extent that it remains out there, I think it's time we get rid of any stigmas associated with elevated rail. More transit is better than less transit.
Cover photo by Daiji Sasahara on Unsplash
The first phase will connect Ottawa to Montréal (construction is expected to start in 2029), and a subsequent phase will connect Ottawa to Toronto. The top speed will be around 300 km/h, which I'm guessing will result in an effective speed closer to 200 km/h when you factor in stops and any speed limits required near urban centers. With this, the goal is to bring the journey from Toronto to Montréal down to around 3 hours.
One thing to keep in mind is that Ottawa does not lie on the fastest route between Toronto and Montréal; it adds about 70 km. But it's of course necessary. In theory, an express route with no stops running TGV or Shinkansen-like trains could bring the journey time down closer to 2 hours. But that's not what is being planned from what I have read. Regardless, 3 hours is still a big deal and a meaningful improvement. It makes the trip faster than flying, and certainly faster than driving.
Could current drive times ultimately change with autonomous vehicles? Maybe, but it's unlikely to be by this much. I hate long road trips and the same would be true even if a robot were driving me. So I look forward to one day — in my 50s? — doing this journey in 3 hours. If we could get it down to 2 hours and change, that much better. That's a trip worth taking for a night out or just to stock up on bagels.
But you don't have to travel all the way to Japan to find examples where elevated rail does little to detract from the urban experience. Here's Marine Drive station in Vancouver, integrated into a newish development:
And here's what the elevated guideway looks like as it heads toward the station:
The obvious advantage of elevated rail is that it's significantly cheaper than underground rail. According to global data collected by the Transit Costs Project at New York University, underground rail tends to be at least 2x the cost — often it's even more. Are the benefits worth this additional cost, and is it worth building less overall transit with the same capital budget?
Elevated rail is not without its drawbacks, but good design and urban sensibilities can help to mitigate many of them. As is the case with a lot of urban design, what matters most is how we treat the ground plane underneath the rail. So, to the extent that it remains out there, I think it's time we get rid of any stigmas associated with elevated rail. More transit is better than less transit.
Cover photo by Daiji Sasahara on Unsplash
The first phase will connect Ottawa to Montréal (construction is expected to start in 2029), and a subsequent phase will connect Ottawa to Toronto. The top speed will be around 300 km/h, which I'm guessing will result in an effective speed closer to 200 km/h when you factor in stops and any speed limits required near urban centers. With this, the goal is to bring the journey from Toronto to Montréal down to around 3 hours.
One thing to keep in mind is that Ottawa does not lie on the fastest route between Toronto and Montréal; it adds about 70 km. But it's of course necessary. In theory, an express route with no stops running TGV or Shinkansen-like trains could bring the journey time down closer to 2 hours. But that's not what is being planned from what I have read. Regardless, 3 hours is still a big deal and a meaningful improvement. It makes the trip faster than flying, and certainly faster than driving.
Could current drive times ultimately change with autonomous vehicles? Maybe, but it's unlikely to be by this much. I hate long road trips and the same would be true even if a robot were driving me. So I look forward to one day — in my 50s? — doing this journey in 3 hours. If we could get it down to 2 hours and change, that much better. That's a trip worth taking for a night out or just to stock up on bagels.
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