That's right we're running out of fossil fuels and asphalt - so lets build more freeways.  You'd think that in running an engineering magazine that Leland would have some knowledge of the materials problem.  You'd think he would know that several materials are running out.  Ones that engineers like to use.  But no.

 Survey says - people prefer to live in a house with a yard .. and presumably a couple of giant honking SUV's and ride on mower and and ......

 Unfortunately with so many people on the planet this is not sustainable.

Besides - some people like mass transit because they cannot or because they don't want to drive.  Plus some like the fact that they can do other stuff and not get stressed out.

It will be a great day when Leland acknowledges that global warming is real and that this planet is being run in an unsustainable fashion. He could even read the editorials in European science and engineering magazines and see that his vision of the future is on totally the wrong track.  The Europeans and people in the Far East are eating our lunch because they see the future.
 

Bcstractor:

What do you use as a defintion of sustainablity?

S. Mraz

When you say

The Europeans and people in the Far East are eating our lunch because they see the future.

You mean, like, the fact that in China the number of cars per 1,000 people doubled between 2000 and 2004, and is projected to rise by 20% per year over the forseeable future? Or the fact that when China had a 'no car' day, Chinese drivers ignored it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7007893.stm

The evidence is that as people become more affluent, they drive more regardless of the mass transit options.

Bcstractor:

Yada yada yada

Long on noise but short on facts.  When you discuss transit and resources, don't forget to consider time.  Economics is the study of allocation of scarce resources.  In the market, people purchase free time by chosing fast food over slow food, automatic car washes over do it yourself in the driveway, and automobiles over mass transit.

Mr. Teschler points out that population AND job density are important.  In part that is because without a nearly universal destination,  the travel time for mass transit greatly exceeds that of an automobile.  This, in addition to the time lost waiting for the next departure time raises the COST in time to such a level that even that gas guzzling SUV is LESS EXPENSIVE to that individual, AND to society.  Lost time is lost productivity.  How many people do you know that spend more per hour on transportation than they earn per hour? 

It might very well be less expensive to drive a Prius than a Hummer, but both are more efficient in total resources than mass transit for most Americans. (by the way, if you search on-line, you will find some studies that found that a Hummer is lower in resource consumption over total vehicle life that a Prius.  The Prius needs LOTS of energy and resources to manufacture, and requires many more resources to maintain over it's shorter expected life.  Things are not always as simple as they seem.)

Viewed in this manner, it is obvious why the Chinese are buying cars.  As wages rise, the opportunity cost of the mass transit travel time makes automobiles less expensive..  If you want everyone to use mass transit, what you really want is everyone to be poor (so their time is less valuable) or live in New York type cities.

No Thank You!

I agree with another post that points out the time is money argument.  I'd like to point out another issue, is that part of the problem is the ready availability of highways is the very reason they end up congested.  This has helped push out the suburban area further and further from the cities.  I lived in a suburb of Philadelphia in NJ and had many neighbors who worked in New York City, which was about an hour and a half drive under good conditions.  I also have lived in southern Pennsylvania, where several neighbors worked in Washington DC, or Baltimore, each also an hour and a half away.  The common reason why these worked was that there were interstate quality highways that could get them to work quickly.  So, adding more highways or expanding existing highways would relieve today’s congestion and work for a while after they are installed.  But this would only attract more people to live further away, and eventually the highways would be back to being just as congested with even more cars.

 

Also remember why mass transit faded away in most Ameerican cities in the 1940s and 50s - totally inconvenient.  What do you do when the bus or subway isn't running and you need to go somewhere?

Interesting question... why indeed did mass transit fade away? At least in a number of cities (East San Francisco Bay, San Jose, Fresno, Stockton, Sacramento, San Diego and Los Angeles), it was because the automotive industry did to the rail industry, what the rail industry had done to the canals in the East - they bought them up and closed them down. Some evidence is presented in this web-site - http://www.moderntransit.org/ctc/ctc06.html. It is possible that they would have died anyway, but this is not certain, and they probably would not have disappeared as quickly or as completely, so ramboy's comment loses a lot of its force.

It is true that personal vehicles are more convenient, but only because they are also cost-effective. This may well be changing, so arguments that are currently quite valid may not be true in the near future. In fact we are already beginning to see the exurbs losing market value, and this is beginning to lead to a move back to the towns - http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/24/business/exurbs.php. This will make mass transit more viable.

So, is public transport more energy-efficient? There is still some debate on this, but increasing the amount that people walk (or cycle) is definitely a good idea. Does public transportation have to be inconvenient? I have mainly lived in cities, so I can only really speak to that, but often it was quicker for me to cycle to places in San Francisco than to drive, simply because I didn't have to worry about parking. Public transportation was best if heading to the East Bay by BART, but waiting for a bus could take anything between 10-40 mins. I now live in Hong Kong and here public transport is very convenient. Trains come on average every one to two minutes, which means that the average wait time is half that, and there are buses everywhere (with an average wait time of around 5 mins). Once you get close to your destination, you can either walk or take one of the many taxis that run on liquefied gas.

Yes, China is buying cars, but the government is already looking to the future and is investing in alternative sources of energy. They may just be the people arriving late at the party. Building more freeways may reduce wasted fuel due to idling, but if we can reduce the number of cars it would be a much better approach. It still costs a lot of energy to build freeways, even if they are cheaper than rail, and this may not be the best investment for the future. Bus rapid transit may be one way to go (since roads are cheaper than rail). Maybe we just need to change the image of buses. If they can be made clean and efficient, then ridership will rise. Evidence already exists for this - http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/28/business/wbspot29.php.

So the question becomes, if the cost of energy is going to keep rising (and I know that this is not yet proven, but most accept that the trend is upwards), then is there anything that we should start doing now? One of the concerns is that the later we leave it, the greater the cost of energy generation (e.g. extraction costs), and the greater the pressures of demand. Unfortunately all forms of energy generation require an "investment" of energy, and for most that investment is much higher that the cost of an oil gusher, which is what we have been relying upon. Thus it would be best to spend energy now in moving to more energy-efficient living, rather than leaving it later.

In conclusion, I think that all societies are going to have to rely more on public transport, cities are going to get denser, and everyone is going to take fewer trips, but some sort of private vehicles are going to remain. We should probably start preparing now for a future with less energy.

Please note - all this is quite independent of the whole green-house gases issue, and I shall leave it that way!

Yes people do drive more as they become more affluent, but that is based on a market situation that may no longer exist in the near future. Increasing energy costs will probably force more away from private trips. See my later comment for more details.

Yes, China car ownership is rising rapidly, but from a very low base. That will cap out at a level much below that of the US, so it cannot be used as an argument for more cars in the US. The cap level depends upon economics, as you have already pointed out, and the general trend is for increasing cost of car ownership, so this is likely to drop in the future.

Many American cities are becoming less dense as people move away.  Detroit and Cleveland, for axample, have significantly fewer citizens today compared to the 1950s and 1960s.  Another reason why mass transit in the US is not working.  Also, what do you do for public transportation if you live in a rural or semi-rural area?

It should be noted, Hong Kong = very high population density, very high job density. So not a surprise that mass transit is very convenient there.

Mass transit makes sense if you have enough population density.  When and as cities grow (some do), congestion reaches a point to where the benefits of having independent transportation is less than the benefit of mass transportation.  There are only a few places where this is an issue and China will or is projected to be faced with most of these challenges.  Here in the U.S. we have problems with safety and pollution.  In order to live farther from our jobs we need to make up time using speed.  Since we want our vehicles to multitask, our SUV-truck-road racer is oversized, unsafe, and consumes more energy than needed to get us to our destination 90+% of the time.  Since the latest memos from our government suggested that this non-sustainable lifestyle is both a birthright and an addiction that requires doing much more of the same I can understand why most would scoff at change.  Fortunately there is great hope and opportunity ($$$) in entrepenuers, progressive leaders and future technologies that are willing to do bold things.  Like any engineering project there are always those pessimists and naysayers who get in the way of the optimistic, idealistic "fools" but in the end we get to the moon and all is cool.

"Like any engineering project there are always those pessimists and naysayers who get in the way of the optimistic, idealistic "fools" but in the end we get to the moon and all is cool."

 

We got to the moon, but we basically had an unlimited budget to do it.

The City of Seattle has calculated their Busses average 3.8 MPG. A new Volkswagen Diesel Jetta is rated at 38 MPG. That means right off the bat the Bus needs more than 10 Passengers at any time to even equal the impact of 10 Jetta's driving the same route. But it gets worse. The Busses spend a portion of each day transporting the Driver further, all by himself to the Central Depot and back - very wasteful. Private cars begin and end at useful destinations; they never drive useless miles to a Depot with no one inside.

But it gets worse, fast. The Bus requires a massive support team and beaurocracy behind it. Scheduling, Budgeting, Security, Accounting, Management, Union Personnel, Cleaners, Mechanics, there are thousands of people employed in any Public Transit System. And to compare Apples to Apples the enviromental impact of each of these people must be counted. The private driver in his own car incurs none of these costs.

When all is said and done most Public Transit is far more expensive, and far more damaging to the enviroment overall that a private driver in a modest vehicle is. And if the private driver Car Pools the contrast in efficiency skyrockets in favor of the car.

Just think of a City Bus as an enormous, overbuilt HumVee driven by a Chauffeur.

It's a little like debating the Electric Car with a College Student. "Yeah, Electric Cars are kewl, man !" Then ask them where the Electricity COMES FROM. As their face grows blank, inform them that Coal-fired Plants contributed 48.3 percent of all electricty in the USA. So they're not Electric Cars, dude, they're Coal Cars !

Of course the Electric Car would be REAL in France, or in Scandinavia where the vast majority of Electricity is generated by Nuclear Plants. But here is the USA we have Jane Fonda, whose "China Syndrome" movie in 1979 has done more to ensure that our skies would remain polluted with the toxic emmissions of Fossil Fuel than any other person in history.

I agree with most of what you say about mass transit being inefficient.  

However, I'm not convinced that nuclear generation of electricity is the answer, or that an individual actress in a rather timely movie had much to do with why there aren't more nukes.  As to the public fear factor, I think more credit should go to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island than to Jane Fonda.

 I suspect the reason the USA stopped building nukes has mainly to do with the economics of construction, operation and waste disposal.  The final monetary cost won't be tallied until the radioactive waste transportation and storage issues are solved, if ever.