alt Hacker NewsIn addition to condos next to transit, California should be fixing roads, so people can move further from their job.
I know it’s unpopular nimby opinion but hoping people in these homes won’t be driving cars is misguided. Give them parking, fix roads for further commute and let people live where they want.
Save money by reducing regulations on elevator size, allow for single egress buildings and ensure we aren’t kowtowing to labor too much.
Future Waymo like technology makes driving your own car even less stressful and furthers the gap between public transit and cars.
“ California Senate Bill (SB) 79 reduces or eliminates parking minimums for new residential developments located near Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) stops”
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People who pay a premium to live in a condo close to transit will almost certainly have vastly lower VMT than people who live in a SFH in a non-walkable area. Do they need more roads than the handful of houses that condo building replaced? Sure, so I can't disagree with you there. But they're all going to have massive underground garages, so a spot per unit on average is probably plenty.
People who want to live in less dense houses farther from the city can already do that!
> furthers the gap between public transit and cars.
It doesn't have to. If Waymo (and other autonomous taxis) were clever -- and maybe they are -- they would spend their lobbing money on high speed trains and then capture the "last mile" market.
Some years ago I was riding with a friend north on the 15 (San Diego, after a decade+ absences) and my noticeable wtf face prompted a "yeah, they built a freeway in the center of the freeway". It's an abomination. When I was there, I-15 was generally for the longer drives. My friends that lived in Temecula/North County etc would spend hours of their life driving (or slowly rolling) into SD for school/work/play.
A high speed train would have fit where they put the supplemental freeway. Now there is no more room to expand once they need more capacity; extra trains or cars could be added to a train to solve the same thing and placed along the freeway there is minimal to no neighborhood inconvenience. Then companies like waymo can take people to their final destination.
Robotaxis are good, but everyone owning a driverless car is bad.
Imagine you get to your destination, there’s no parking (or no free parking), so you tell your car to just circle the block while you’re inside. You spend an hour there at the tanning salon, and the car has just been circling, using the street as a parking lot and creating congestion. What happens when everyone does that?
I’m a big proponent of driverless cars, but we will need laws that ban individual private ownership. We’re going to have to experience the tragedy of the commons first because people really won’t want to give up their cars.
More roads just does not scale. Look at LA. Look at San Francisco. More capacity isn’t just going to magically appear.
Waymo is only going to increase overall utilization by reducing the marginal cost of running a car. They aren’t magic traffic-solving devices, they are traffic-adding like DoorDash and Uber have been.