07-07-2018, 11:03 AM
A story I found in the online edition of In These Times presents opposing views on the arrival of self-driving cars, referred to as autonomous vehicles, or simply AVs. Following my own comments I post a link to the story for discussion purposes only. On the old forum I had a thread dedicated to whether we ever will be motivated to reduce auto dependency. Not only has not much changed since many had to wait in long lines to get gasoline nearly a half-century ago, but the expansion of what became known as the exurbs actually tended to increase auto dependency. This is something we really need to do but don't seem to have the political will to do so.
I began to feel angry and anxious as I was reading this story. Our overwhelming dependency on the automobile has in many areas made it more difficult to breathe despite the pollution saved when many of the once ubiquitous smokestacks began to disappear from the landscape during our conversion from an industrial to an information and services based economy. Less car ownership would release a lot of pent-up physical energy through physical movement, one of the things many health and wellness gurus kneel at the feet of.
A few years ago when gas prices shot up substantially, I was beginning to explore the idea of just how high they would have to get to produce a significant drop in consumption. Most said the price would have to get to at least $7 per gallon before you would begin to see this happen. Suburban areas would need to embrace higher density housing in order to make mass transit feasible there; something they have resisted all along. We obviously can't continue to build our way out of congestion forever.
http://inthesetimes.com/features/self-dr...bolish-ice
I began to feel angry and anxious as I was reading this story. Our overwhelming dependency on the automobile has in many areas made it more difficult to breathe despite the pollution saved when many of the once ubiquitous smokestacks began to disappear from the landscape during our conversion from an industrial to an information and services based economy. Less car ownership would release a lot of pent-up physical energy through physical movement, one of the things many health and wellness gurus kneel at the feet of.
A few years ago when gas prices shot up substantially, I was beginning to explore the idea of just how high they would have to get to produce a significant drop in consumption. Most said the price would have to get to at least $7 per gallon before you would begin to see this happen. Suburban areas would need to embrace higher density housing in order to make mass transit feasible there; something they have resisted all along. We obviously can't continue to build our way out of congestion forever.
http://inthesetimes.com/features/self-dr...bolish-ice