50 people pureed and pressed into high-protien calorie-dense tiles:

It's always relevant!

Hilarious 🤣!

see how efficient cars are (relative to human sized hampster balls)

Finland: Oh look, tourists.

Are you saying that you DON'T walk that close to other pedestrians?

"Quick, say hello in Latin!"

They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!

Cruise’s robotaxis created a traffic jam in Austin, here’s what went wrong

According to the team at Cruise, the fleet ended up in a high-demand area, which also brought with it a slew of pedestrian and passenger vehicle traffic. As you can see in the video, one of the Cruise vehicles got stuck in an intersection while committing to a turn, thus further congesting traffic in three different directions.

Unfortunately, more and more Cruise robotaxis flooded the narrow Austin street to meet the peak demand, only to join in the traffic jam. But why were there so many robotaxis in this one specific area? Cruise states that at the time, there were limited routes going north and south through the city, and a detour from an alternative route led the EVs to the same doomed parkway.

Unfortunately, Cruise could not manually reroute the vehicles quickly enough, so there was nowhere for them to go.

Unfortunately, what you end up with automation is often more of a thing than what you actually need, as surplus saturates the market even when it isn't desired. Rather than a single dedicated lane operating at maximum available capacity on a predictable schedule, you get a flood of functionally independent actors all congregating within a small area in an effort to maximize individual revenue.

Autonomous means you get more cars than there are people all contributing to the traffic that the people are looking to escape.

Does that make him tramsphobic?

Uh, they're not? The cars are in fact much closer to one another than they could possibly be while moving at speed. They would only get this close to one another during a traffic jam. On the other hand, the walkers are entirely capable of moving in exactly the way they are pictured.

If you've ever tried to drive a car you'll discover that you need to keep a relatively large distance between other cars, particularly when moving at high speeds in order to avoid crashes.

By contrast, when you're moving through a crowd, you can get practically on top of someone else without risk of bodily harm.

The cars and walkers are both as close as they can safely be while moving?

Not sure where you drive, but those cars aren't spaced at all- they're very close to bumper-to-bumper, which you can only do at extremely low speeds that unrealistic for travel. Meanwhile, the people that are bundled together ARE actually capable of moving like that, though the average american (who has a larger 'personal bubble' that other cultures) would probably not like it.

Moreover, the car example could actually be worse than it appears- because they're taking up all lanes of a road, so you're assuming they're coming AND going, which none of the other examples are assuming. If you did it properly, the line of cars would be two wide and twice as deep!

1. No one is expecting someone in Montana, hours away from others to give up their car. Although incorporating more of the externalized costs might incent some people to make other decisions.
2. There’s always something we can do better.

Even the most remote area has some sort of gathering points that can be concentrated into a walkable area. Basically - when you drive your car to church, you should have the option of walking to a brunch place and a grocery store, picking up your niece arriving on Greyhound, and yelling at your local councilman, before driving back. You should have the option to do more with fewer trips

Hey fellow Montanan! Check out Big Sky Rail Authority's arguments for implementing a southern passanger rail service, or think of the benefits of increased bus service connecting the larger Montana cities. We have main travel corridors across the state that could be greatly improved by a public transportation network, linking rural communities and connecting them to larger city centers. Combine that with local bus service, walkable communities, and biking infrastructure in places where it can be supported like Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, etc can improve traffic and livability of the towns. Also, think of the improvement to traffic conditions for people coming into town from surrounding rural communities if you can divert a good portion of traffic to public options. In a rural state like ours, there's always going to be some need for personal vehicles, but there's still lots of places where having more public transportation options could improve our communities and lessen our climate impacts. Sure, it's going to look different than in other parts of the country, but still a lot of room for improvement around here.

Oddly enough, rail served more rural communities earlier on in the 20th century than they do now. This is due to disinvestment and the prioritization of personal vehicles. So not only is transit realistic, but it was the way for many railroad towns to be connected to each other and the rest of the country. Obviously that’s historical evidence, life is more complex now, but things can still be made to work with transit. Increasing bus frequency and coverage sounds like it would help your community.

The issue is solved at scale in cities. There is no need to change rural centers at the moment until the pressure is relieved where it will have the most effect. Maybe even freeing tax dollars for the state to help with rural areas instead of millions of intercity roads being damaged daily by large vehicles. Every dime you save in the city can be subsidized for rural areas if it is no longer needed. Or can be used to further assist struggling populations in the city. Everything that benefits people will find its way to also benefitting you in some way.

Two facts:

1. The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
2. Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars. They will circle empty with no passengers and drive to pick up passengers empty (dead heading) even with a fully rideshare system. If there is widespread private ownership of autonomous vehicles (and you bet your butt that car companies will campaign for this aggressively to keep sales up), the dead heading problems only multiply. If you don't believe me, look up any recent literature on the topic: by most accounts it will be worse, not better. Dead heading is only the tip of the iceberg of problems there.

You can use cars more efficiently but by and large they aren't.

Also, you think people are gonna share a car? Fat chance. People would need to work out shared upkeep, time slots to have it, etc.

We simply need to stop subsidizing cars which is the whole point here.

Doing 50 that close to other cars would also be very uncomfortable.

Stay away from the Netherlands you'd have a heart attack