[Bruff]

[quote=EA;43472197] High speed rail is attractive because 2 hours to California instead of 5 hours+ if there is traffic is much better.

2 hours if you live at one station and your destination is the other. Lucky you.
Getting from home to your start station, parking and lugging your stuff to the wicket, waiting for the next train, then getting from the station through traffic to your destination station just added at least another 3 hours to your 2 hour California train trip. Total 5 hours and $100 each passenger.
Still excited about taking the train?

[EA]

Not having to risk life and limb on the roads with other drivers = priceless.

[BBMW]

If that's the only way they'll be able to make that mark, the rules will be changed. Automated vehicles are coming, but as an option. Anything that forces it on drivers is going to be squashed.

Originally Posted by EA

By 2025 cars have to get 54mpg. Taking humans off the gas pedal is about the only way they are going to do that. Computer controlled acceleration can save quite a bit of fuel as it can measure how much gas is being used and adapt.

In my last 2 new cars I managed to get better mpg than the epa rating on their window sticker just by paying attention to throttle modulation. Autonomous cars can look at terrain and change driving style to suit.
That is, of course, if we haven't switched to electric by then. Tesla is making some good progress despite a couple hiccups. Tesla has a lower cost version and suv set to hit the market (suv already landed I think) Ford and Chevy have electric cars on the roads. Even Kia has put out an electric car. As more and more companies produce them, the technology is going to get cheap enough we can have sub 20k electrics affordable to most people.

There are far too many accidents and injuries and deaths to not push for autonomous cars sooner than later.

Same as above. Even here is car hating NYC, if the city pushes too hard to make driving difficult, it gets shot down. Out in the autocentric rest of the country, of which Vegas is definitely a part, this will never happen.

In Denmark they tax the dog crap out of cars. A Honda civic will run you 80 grand after tax. They do this to make public transport and biking more attractive and it works. They've done the math and it costs less to provide public transport than repairing damage caused by cars. So they still allow cars, you just have to pay a premium to cover damages.
An intelligent tax plan could make autonomous cars happen before the 2025 mark.
Tesla already released software for it's cars that allows them to be able to self drive for the most part. Stop signs and redlights are an issue, still impressive nonetheless.

High speed rail is attractive because 2 hours to California instead of 5 hours+ if there is traffic is much better.
NY to LA in a few hours instead of 2 days.

I think in the end, the majority is not going to agree with you.

The benefits of intelligent travel far outweigh the small freedom of piloting your own car. I'm a car guy that loves to build and drive cars by the way.

[EA]

Of course the majority are against it, it's intelligent.

[NLVgal]

Originally Posted by EA

Not having to risk life and limb on the roads with other drivers = priceless.

Amen, bro.

[ScoopLV]

Originally Posted by EA

The benefits of intelligent travel far outweigh the small freedom of piloting your own car. I'm a car guy that loves to build and drive cars by the way.

The big-picture problem is we must drastically reduce petroleum consumption. The obvious strategies to do so include self-driving trucks (7% of our fuel goes to air-conditioning semi-truck cabs while the truck is stopped for the evening, idling); transitioning to more public transportation; reducing consumption of plastics; and reining in the Air Force.

Really getting tired of the "trains are so 19th century" whinging from the troglodytes. They're still one of the most efficient ways to move population from a fuel-use standpoint. That's what matters.

I don't know exactly when this country was taken over by a bunch of Disney Princesses who are too good to wait in a line, or sit with strangers, or walk a few blocks. But those who want to "make America great again" should start by telling these princesses to get over themselves.

[BBMW]

Around the edges I agree with some of this. Self driving trucks are a no brainer. But more for economic reasons than anything else. Human drivers are a huge inefficiency. One other thing that could be looked at is liquid biofuels. Does it matter much if cars are running on biodiesel vs gasoline? Not really. But as of now, the cost is prohibative.

But what your missing, and what is never going to change, is that the topology of most of the communities in this country was built around the automobile. Look at Vegas. Other than the strip, most of the employment is scattered fairly randomly around the valley, as is most of the housing, and at a fairly low density. This just doesn't work for public transportation. This is especially true in a place where the climatic conditions can be as extreme as Vegas, and most placed have similar seasonal extremes (if maybe the opposite temperature ranges.) Outside of a few large, and usually old, cities (and not even the entire metro areas), the car based transportation is completely baked in, and the investment, both in building public transportation systems, and they retopologising the communities around them, it so huge it will just never happen, no matter if global warming is a much of an issue as advertised or not.

In the end nothing trumps politics. If people are willing to vote to keep their cars, they're going to get to keep their cars.

And really, MIL be damned, you need to sell your properties, move to Europe, and give up your American citizenship. You'd be much happier. You don't seem to like very much about this country. If you don't I think at some point you're just going to give yourself a stroke from how much being here seems to aggravate you.

Originally Posted by ScoopLV

The big-picture problem is we must drastically reduce petroleum consumption. The obvious strategies to do so include self-driving trucks (7% of our fuel goes to air-conditioning semi-truck cabs while the truck is stopped for the evening, idling); transitioning to more public transportation; reducing consumption of plastics; and reining in the Air Force.

Really getting tired of the "trains are so 19th century" whinging from the troglodytes. They're still one of the most efficient ways to move population from a fuel-use standpoint. That's what matters.

I don't know exactly when this country was taken over by a bunch of Disney Princesses who are too good to wait in a line, or sit with strangers, or walk a few blocks. But those who want to "make America great again" should start by telling these princesses to get over themselves.

[EA]

Vegas was built for a few cars, and having so many cars is causing problems. Downtown was built for, what, 20k people a year?

When the cd replaced the cassette everyone thought that was the be all end all. Everything switched to cd. Everyone loved cds and thought nothing could be better. Here we are in 2016 where a lot of bands don't even produce cds. Digital media replaced cds, rather quickly. Same thing is going to happen with transportation. Transportation has progressed slower than just about everything else. Transportation is due for a major overhaul.

[BBMW]

Yes, but "Vegas" left downtown long ago. The Strip was more built around car use (and if you know what your doing, you can get in and out of it fairly easily, not matter what the traffic situation directly on The Strip is. And once you get off the strip, and particularly to the newer areas around the beltway (which from a non-tourist standpoint, is where "Vegas" really is now, it's entirely auto-centric.

Cities grow up around their transportation systems. When the NYC subways were built, a lot of the outer areas they reached were still farmland. This was before cars were popular. Any city that blew up after WWII, is largely auto-centric. The housing, retail, office and industrial developments were designed to work with people moving around in individually controlled vehicles that can go wherever they want. Recasting that work with group transportation (thinking trains of various types, or even bus lines), with centralized routes, is just never going to work well. It requires more density than the car centric areas were built to. It would cost more to develop the transit systems, and rebuild the cities and towns around them, than it would be to just figure out how to deal with the issues that cars create, or just live with those issues.

Originally Posted by EA

Vegas was built for a few cars, and having so many cars is causing problems. Downtown was built for, what, 20k people a year?

When the cd replaced the cassette everyone thought that was the be all end all. Everything switched to cd. Everyone loved cds and thought nothing could be better. Here we are in 2016 where a lot of bands don't even produce cds. Digital media replaced cds, rather quickly. Same thing is going to happen with transportation. Transportation has progressed slower than just about everything else. Transportation is due for a major overhaul.

[ScoopLV]

Originally Posted by BBMW

But what your missing, and what is never going to change, is that the topology of most of the communities in this country was built around the automobile.

Most of the communities were actually built around light rail. They were retrofitted later. So it is no big deal to put things back. What we lack is political will.

When the wealthiest Americans start losing their beachfront vacation properties to rising sea levels, watch how fast things start changing.

The big-picture societal problem is lack of empathy.


PS -- As for your suggestion that I quit America, I have already considered it. I'm far too invested in this country to pull stakes and leave. Thankfully, there are parts of the country that aren't completely overrun with nitwits. Las Vegas isn't one of them. But they're out there.