Here's my argument: in terms of saving the environment, gasoline use is a small component of the damage cars cause.

What would be best is if people were to use biotic transportation for short trips, communal transportation for medium trips and light freight, and large scale surface transportation for long hauls, while also minimizing these trips as much as possible.

Cars, which comprise mostly local and medium length personal and light freight transportation, have a high energy cost of production, high accident rates, require large, high maintenance thoroughfares comprised of oil rich blacktop, and use an overwhelming amount of power to move relatively light loads. The unpredictability of the individual driver requires all sorts of expenditures, from oversized highways to street lighting.

The system causes significant death and destruction. It is polluting and inefficient.

Making the cars themselves less polluting is nice, but if cars charge on peak hours, they will still be burning coal. When they wear out and crash the more complex cars are harder to recycle. People will still die, roads will still be a significant cost. All those parking lots and roads contribute to the albedo effects known as 'heat islands.'

We need to move away from passenger aircraft, yes, because they burn fuel like basically nothing else; but we also need to abandon personal transportation. More efficient vans and trucks/buses for local light freight and medium distance passenger travel; yes, this is probably necessary and a great innovation. But merely perpetuating the car and making people feel good about it? Awful!

I suggest that you spend some time in medium-sized communities which have adopted public transportation in the form of buses and see what the average passenger load looks like. Cross-town buses in Manhattan in the middle of the day might look like the greatest ever in terms of fuel efficiency, but those same buses, when carrying one or two passengers, suck! In order to make the buses useful, they have to operate on a reasonably dense schedule with reasonably dense geographic coverage and, except for some few prime locations, will usually be empty or nearly so. The real answers lie in other directions.

I would suggest the following approaches as incremental solutions:

Reduce the normal workweek from five to four days. This, of course, must be coupled with some sort of pr to keep people from using the additonal day off of additional driving - better daytime TV might help.

Build up a database in each community which allows people to identify jobs which are comparable to their own but are located nearer to home. Then, whenever two people discover from this database (which should have suitable tools for this discovery) that they would both benefit from the trade, use whatever form of coercion is needed to get the employers to go along with it. Because of the large number of employers which now exist with numerous facilities in each community, this exchance could be made without even needing to change employer, and could indeed be initiated by the employers themselves before any community program was even initiated. I am sure there are numerous Safeway (for instance) clerks driving past each other each morning on the way to work who would find this arrangement beneficial.

Ration fuel. I don't have to provide any arguments here. The idea always stirs up sufficient discussion (and name-calling) anyway,

Modify traffic laws so that there is a clearly delineated protocol for the way automobiles and bicycles will operate on the same roadways. This needs to be reinforced by requiring (modified) driving licenses for cyclists.

Well, I guess that's enough for the moment.

I would agree with your observations of communities which adopted buses in the past. Either the community was high density or it was so poor that people couldn't afford cars. If we let the cost of car ownership devolve upon actual owners, we would see more of these communities that couldn't afford cars - but that's another story. Regardless, you are right, empty buses patrolling fixed routes is a waste.

But we currently have the means to resolve this problem. It comes this way:

1. Dynamic routing of transportation options in response to live customer demands. Only use enormous buses on fixed routes along paths which are high near constant demand. In those cases, actually, you are probably better replacing big buses with subways or light rail. Other places, use the new information gathering and processing capabilities we have to have 7-10 passenger vans that can carry people and light freight (luggage, basically) along dynamic routes. Essentially, have them play 'zone' covering a neighborhood door to door, ferrying people to and from the higher density routes.

2. Separate most light freight out from passengers. Use something like UPS or USPS to deliver packages and goods from shops. Some shops can become 'showrooms' for goods, with a central distribution hub in the city or town, but most will continue to operate as they usually do - except that customers don't leave with more than they can reasonably carry. Instead, it gets tagged, picked up, and dropped of at their homes later that day. Once again, dynamic routing and high information flow can optimize this; and people won't need cars or light trucks to do their shopping. They can shop on foot, on bicycle, on public or shared transportation...

3. Remove all Fear, Doubt, and Uncertainty about the availability of public and shared transportation. Give the user information so that the user know how long it will take to get from A to B, even across multiple services, and how much it will cost. Max times and prices are particularly important.

4. Remove fear, doubt and uncertainty about tipping drivers. Local routes today (cabs) are dependent largely on tips, which are unstable at best. Make tipping default in absence of registered complaint, and taken off a credit card or debit card before the vehicle arrives. Eliminate the rude behavior of passengers who make the cab/van/limo wait 15 minutes while the passenger collects his/her things. Behavior that is merely inefficient and impolite in a single passenger setting would crash a shared transportation solution. Encourage people to enter the transportation service provider market.

5. Create a clearinghouse for transportation options that automatically stitches them all together for efficiency. Use our IT power to save society and the environment, even in areas of moderate density.

Caveat: This would never work in rural or wilderness areas. However; those areas contribute relatively little to accidents and pollution.

A better solution may be to privatise the road network. Sell every road, including parking spaces and let the company charge every time a car or truck travels. If more roads are required, let the company build them and recover costs from those who use them. A bus or truck can more easily pass the costs on to is many users than a car with a single passenger, while maximum profits can be extracted from less roads and bigger loads. The problem in transportation is communism. A government is providing a service by tax, and allowing use without charge. Naturally, there is no limit to how much of this free resource is consumed. Let car owners pay the real cost of their motoring. Let market forces prevail,

How much did the chicken pay to cross the road?

Advocating that all roads be privatized is utter lunacy for more reasons than I can possibly list in a single post. I will settle for listing three of my favorites. First, it grants virtual a monopoly at the local level, second individuals have little choice in whether they utilize roads in some manner, and third it would send travel back to the middle ages.

1. A significant portion of homes and businesses are accessible by only a single road and will have no choice but to use it for transportation. As the sole provider of this service, the owner of the road can charge whatever they want for its use. Think how much you would be willling to pay once the groceries run out. Of course, there is also the possibility that instead of Road Corp, Enviro Corp will purchase the road and only let you drive on it every other Tuesday.

2. You might think you could avoid this by either riding a bicycle or walking, but it would seem logical that the sidewalks and roadsides would also be owned by the company. In the case of Enviro Corp, they might permit you to walk or bike for free or a small maintenance fee. Road Corp would charge you what the market would bare, which given its monopoly position would be as much as you could afford.

But let us consider a situation where the government maintains possession of the sidewalks and roadsides. You're going to have to cross the road at some point, at which point Road Corp will be within its rights to charge you. The government will need road access for maintenance of the sidewalks and roadsides. Hello taxes.

3. It is unlikely that the roads within this country will be initially purchased by a single entity, in which case there will be a patchwork of companies providing the service. It will be like overland trade in the middle ages, but instead of steap fees for each duchy, principality, province, free city, etc. you'll pay usage fees to the multiple companies' roads you utilize on your travels. Say you're going to work. You may have to pay a nice toll to your neighbor who wisely purchased the road surrounding your block, and then the Walmart that purchased the major local roads, and then the Insurance company who bought all of the highway onramps, then the International Banking firm who purchased all of the highways in the region, then the Saudi Prince who purchased the highway offramps and the investment club who purchased the major road near your workplace. Fortunately for you, foresited company managers purchased the roads directly abutting your workplace and permit workers to use them free of charge, provided they perform pothole filling duty once every month.

To top it all off, many roads in areas of low competion will fall into complete disrepair as there is no incentive to maintain roads where the customer has no choice but to use them.

If you want the drivers to feel the full cost of their driving, I would recommend either maintaining government control and taxing gasoline to cover all the costs, or transfering control of the roads to government regulated utilities.

You seem to have misunderstood: this was an article about things which could reasonably happen.

Actually, some things are beginning to move as zipcar and other companies are making progress in reducing the total number of vehicles (by sharing) or encouraging shared use transportation systems. Information technology will make this a more and more reasonable solution, perhaps not so much by reducing the amount of driving being done, exactly, but more by reducing the number of vehicles required, their idle time, etc.

BenK:

What would be best is if people were to use biotic transportation for short trips, communal transportation for medium trips and light freight, and large scale surface transportation for long hauls, while also minimizing these trips as much as possible.

Biotic transportion (I assume you mean human-powered) would create more air-polution than personal anti-perpirants can handle. :-)

Seriously, though, what would old or crippled people do? Also, after you get to a certain age, bicycle crashes tend to cause permanent injury.

As for communal transportation, I fear it puts too much power over our comings and goings into the hands of a few people. Consider for example Amtrak, MARTA (in Atlanta), the Houston bus system, commercial airlines -- ALL of them forbid even permit-holders from carrying concealed handguns while using their services -- even in luggage. I DON'T want to have to choose between my right to travel versus my right to deter and stop muggers.

(This is also a fear I have about the prospect of nationalized healthcare. Seeing the rules already applied to the post office, schools, national parks, government buildings ... I likewise wouldn't want to have to choose between receiving healthcare versus my right to deter and stop muggers. Until and unless the Supreme Court does away with these restrictions, I cannot trust communal solutions.)

One thing that might help would be a system whereby cars and trucks could link their computer-controlled brakes and accelerators to allow safe ultra-close tailgating. This will vastly reduce the use of energy during highway travel -- and it will provide much of the safety you desire. It will be more complex to do that in the city -- with much shorter periods of cooperation, but if successful it could vastly increase the amount of traffic that our city streets can handle.

One thing that might help would be a system whereby cars and trucks could link their computer-controlled brakes and accelerators to allow safe ultra-close tailgating

This is exactly the kind of thing that Left and Right should be getting together on. I posted the same sentiment over in the article on Walt/Mearsheimer, where everyone is busy blaming Israel for the woes of the Middle East. Really those woes are largely the result of the severe distortions of oil economics. Left and Right can both agree that oil harms the world - the Left will focus on its environmental effects, the Right on the kind of regimes it supports, but both are right and should find common cause.

Same thing with cars. Instead of clowns like BenK, who seem to actually believe that people will stop driving cars, we need people who can innovate our way out of the problem. Put American ingenuity first in the world again. The idea of computer-coordinated braking is a good one, an implementable one, and one that could be usefully combined with a hybrid system. A pluggable hybrid with computer-controlled traffic management could transform the roads, the environment, and global politics while positioning America for technological dominance. Why can't we focus our national efforts on things like that instead of throwing vitriol at each other? (and instead of advocating with a straight face for a world without cars?)

Thanks for calling me a clown; my innovation might make it to market, however, while the 'innovation' you suggest has more than enough problems to put it in league with the Segway, personal aircraft, and electric sidewalks; not to mention that it doesn't solve most of the problems.

Now, I understand the general issues that the original poster has; and I don't have an easy solution for countering the apparent trend towards paragovernment monopolies acting like the government half the time and private agencies the other half, so they have governmental power when they want it but shake free of the bill of rights, etc, when they don't. The federal government has gained power every step of the way and I don't see that power being recalled any time soon. Besides, I'm not entirely sure that an armed populace is enough to restrain tyranny when that same populace is addicted to the monopolies over which the tyrant holds sway.

However, my plan came close to being capitalized and initialized by a group of transportation engineers and was discussed by at least some members of the transportation committee in a major US city. If anything, it is more an issue that there is currently promising competition ready to move along similar lines, not the inadequacy of the plan, that makes it difficult to execute.

All of this puts the red nose on your face, while you stamp all over your floppy shoes trying to find a way to salvage the least efficient, least safe form of transportation.

Two points:

First, throwing vitriol is much more fun and much easier than coming up with thoughtful arguments and refutations.

Second, why are we so obsessed with "light" rail? There are rail tracks all over the place that are only used by freight trains. Why not experience by purchasing some good used locomotives and passenger cars and making certain that there is demand for rail where politicians want to put it? the only problem I can see with this approach is that such "heavy" rail could be operated on a comparative shoestring, getting people used to paying reasonable costs for transportation. What would then happen to all those who would make tons of money from expensive light rail?