The tools we need are right in front of us. If we have any hope of mitigating the effects of transportation on our health, climate, and our very lives, the solution is simple. Bikes and other micro-transit, and buses/mass transit are obvious answers, and the elevator has also enabled people in cities to do more in less space, while in suburbia buildings are limited to one or two stories, requiring that residents are dependent on motor vehicles to get to work or for any services. This article covers every aspect in detail of why we must cut dependency on motor vehicles, while the industry continues to create ways to get more cars on the roads. Besides the critical health impacts from emissions, “last year, 36,560 Americans died in car crashes, not including 6,283 pedestrians killed by cars.” The auto industry has anesthetized us to these statistics, but we can wake up.
The Hyperloop and the Self-Driving Car Are Not the Future of Transportation
The bus, the bike, and the elevator are.
“The tools we need to change transportation are right there in front of us. It’s not the lack of bleeding-edge technology that has stopped us from building cities where a person can live without owning a two-ton, $25,000 vehicle, or from designing a high-speed rail network to sap carbon-spewing domestic air routes like the one between New York and Chicago (the nation’s first and third cities are no further than Beijing and Shanghai, which are now joined by a 4.5-hour train). It’s not for want of “innovation” that we aren’t turning parking into parks, or traffic-clogged arterial roads like New York’s smoggy crosstown arteries into multimodal streets. It’s not the deferred promise of automation that stops us from charging people for the full, ice cap–melting cost of driving. The future of transportation is not about inventions. It’s about choices.”