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.
"The problem with buses," writes transportation planner Nithin Vejendla in Work in Progress, "is that they are slow." The same thing could also be said about other surface transit routes like Toronto's streetcars, including some of our new lines. Now, there are lots of ways to speed up surface routes. Dedicated lanes and signal priority are two obvious ones. But an even simpler one is to just get rid of some stops!
North American cities tend to be plagued by too many transit stops. I think we do it because more stops sounds better than fewer stops. It creates the illusion of servicing more people. But too many stops can make routes painfully slow, by increasing dwell times. According to Nithin, buses in the US spend about 20% of their time just stopping and then starting again. Obviously the more stops you have, the worse this downtime gets.
Here's the average spacing between bus stops for various US cities taken from the above article:
If I convert some of these numbers into the system of measurement used by the rest of the planet, you'll find the following average stop spacings:
172 m in Philadelphia
205 m in Chicago
210 m in San Francisco
240 m in New York
260 m in Miami
350 m in Seattle
425 m in Las Vegas
European cities tend to have wider stop spacing, somewhere closer to 300–450 m. And as a further point of comparison, AI tells me that the current average streetcar stop spacing in Toronto is about 250 m, but that the official target for both streetcars and local buses is between 300–400 m. This is better. 400 m is a 5-minute walk. And if you're on the transit corridor, it means you'll never have to walk more than 200 m, or 2-3 minutes, to the next stop.
Consolidating stops has been shown not to have a meaningful impact on coverage area, but the benefits are significant. To give just one example, Los Angeles saw its operating speeds increase by 29% and its ridership grow by 33% on the Wilshire/Whittier Metro Rapid corridor by doing exactly this. So, if you're looking for a way to speed up your surface routes, one starting point would be to just do less.
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:
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