What's your city doing to fix transport?

We fixed the transit problem over a CENTURY ago. Trains are literally the most cost-effective and efficient way to transport anything between 5-2000 miles.

I saw a quote somewhere recently that said, "Electric cars arent here to save the planet, theyre here to save the car industry." I felt it was very apt. I definitely feel more dedicated bus lanes and cycle lanes would be a huge improvement, at least in America, anyway.

*15 years ago my city [Burgas Bulgaria] ripped up every road* narrowed them, widened the pavements and put in dedicated bike and scooter roads - NOT lanes, separate roads and they put on masses of extra busses at a flat rate of €0.75 pre-ride no matter how far you go It has utterly transformed the city. I no longer have a car - just don't need one even though I live 7km outside the city. Even my rich neighbors leave their SUV's here for days and use public transport, its just quicker and easier. The center is booming -all thos e people previously stuck in cars miserable are walking and buying coffee and food and other stuff. This year our high speed rail connection opens and then I can go anywhere in Europe

I used to be wooed by these techno transport solutions, but eventually and thankfully I woke up. Good urban planning, walkability, bikeability, and public transit are the cheap and available ways to improve transportation, quality of living, and environment.

Because for them it's not about fixing anything. It's about tax dodging, advertisement, or diverting attention from actual functioning alternatives. Musk's Boring Company is a prime example of doing all three in the most obnoxious way possible.

Techies simply can’t comprehend that public transit is already plenty inexpensive to build and run while also being able to provide great speeds. I got tired of hearing all the “trains are too expensive” arguments which led to me doing a video on the cost to build and run a light rail line vs a freeway. The light rail was $500 million cheaper to build and the cost to use the freeway was equal to the cost for LA’s ENTIRE light rail and bus system! It’s just no contest from a cost and emissions point of view.

I love how the solution to all transport problems is always just trains but no one wants to admit it

Insane that companies in the USA are trying things like hyperloop when they don't even have ordinary high speed rail

Way too many of the tech-bro solutions to traffic problems really just seem to be a distraction to prevent governments from building high speed rail. Or any kind of transit or cycling solution, for that matter.

Honestly, I believe e-bikes could make a HUGE impact on transportation, with a modest investment in fully connected cycleways. Cycling infrastructure is much cheaper than car and mass transit infrastructure, and people will voluntarily choose to cycle when there are safe routes. A majority of household trips are well within an easy bicycle or e-bike trip distance.

I think part of the problem is they are being blinded by their own affluence. They only travel in private vehicles (be it jets or limos) so they can't see that public transport would be better, because that would mean rubbing elbows with the plebeians

Trains, buses, subways, and trams have all been around for at least one century by now. They work, we know how to build them, plan for them, and how to operate them. And they are by now reasonably cost and energy efficient. Of course we should keep looking for new or improved ways of getting people around. But when a new technlogy is presented, it is always worth just comparing it to trains, buses, subways and trams.

I am convinced that the hyperloop hype was designed to shut down rail projects (by blocking right-of-ways in high traffic locations). This lets Elon Musk sell more cars.

Would honestly love to hear more hype around trolley buses. They can be a cost-effective way for cities to implement non-polluting public transit on a large scale.

Yep. These are not ideas for fixing transport. They are methods for profiting from transport.

I think trolley-busses like in Eastern Europe are a great solution. All electric... tried and tested technology.. and the new ones even come with small batteries so they can cross streets when you don't want electric lines (like at tourist sites).

I follow a lot of urbanist channels, and the answer always comes down to trains, metros, trams, and busses to support rail networks. On the topic of trains, if you are an EU citizen you can sign a petition to connect all EU capitals in a high speed rail network. Edit: KZfaq deletes my comments with links. You can google for "petition hsr eu" and it should point you to an official website from the EU

The biggest changes will be policies that allow and encourage density where people are able to walk to the things they need everyday. Elimination of parking minimums and much of single use zoning. Allow housing other than single family homes to be built.

Walking, Cycling and public transportation are really the only transport systems we should ever use in a perfect world, am example of very good cycling infrastructure is of course Amsterdam. It's faster to cycle than it is to drive, cycle culture is dominant with most people either walking or cycling to short distance destinations. The short answer is if you make something convenient and change the perception of something people will undoubtedly choose to use it.

Did you know that all trolley buses in london were electric up until de 50s? I find that discouraging. They were discontinued because they needed cables since batteries weren't as efficient but it was the perfect system that was replace by gas buses and diesel underground. The problem here is looking at the future instead of getting back what was great in the pass.

Why do they suck at lots of things? Impossible wealth convinces people they are geniuses who can do anything (and causes them to forget how much luck and help they received)

I knew I liked DW, but by bringing this to the mainstream you guys are my hero

IMO, more than transit tech, the goal should be to rethink our cities. Amsterdam, you mentioned it, is a great example of a city that undertook quite a transformation. The 15-minute-city movement in the US, even facing quite a resistance from the car-centric crowd, has a good point: The future of transit might be less transit and more walkability/bikeability.

*_Two Colombian cities mentioned in less than 10 seconds _**_12:21_**_ and for something good, it's like a dream, I think it's the very first time I see something like that in a foreign video_* 🤔🤗

That Vegas "commercial for Teslas" I think hints at one the more deeply entrenched systemic issues for why we don't have better transit options. The dominant companies in our economy have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. More efficient transit does not grant them higher profits, so they will not give up their control. Creating a culture of non-complacency to these factors is important if we want to see human-centric and climate-friendly changes implemented.

I believe the better urban planning and future planning is more impactful than any new technology. Eventually, the planning and changing people's perspective to transportation (opting out of car) and developing cities vertically would be a chance to it.

Its amazing how so many ideas can be impractical with simple but huge issues... like a hyperloop - keeping the tubes void of air would be very difficult, expensive, and easy to fail from a small leak or damage.

“Why tech billionaires suck at fixing transport”. Because they don’t use it?

Ebikes are a real game changer. I’ve had an ebike for years now and it takes me everywhere in the city faster than a car ever could, because I don’t get stuck in traffic nor do I get tired. I used to live in Porto, a super hilly city, and the ebike made the hills a breeze, whereas a normal bike was a real struggle and untenable for almost everyone. I park wherever i want and the extra electricity cost can be rounded down to zero. Maintenance is extremely cheap and biker insurance was 30€ per year. The only issue is peak winter, in Porto because of the deluge of rain which requires annoying to equip extra gear, and in Kraków because of salt on the roads which damages every component - so then i take the tram or uber - but a town in Finland has already solved this issue, we just need their solution (compacted snow paths) to spread to more cities. Trams are also great, but we need way more of them, and buses could be great but because they get stuck in traffic and are generally neglected in every city I’ve been in, they tend to operate far below their potential.

Finally a big channel is picking up this problem. Great video!

10:50 can you imagine the noise polution of such flying taxies if they became popular?

Biilionaires: Governments should interfere in private businesses as little as possible to foster an environment for innovation Also Billionaires: We'll have those sweet government contract and subsidy dollars thanks!

High Speed Rail. Why, because steel wheels on steel tracks have the least friction and therefore are easiest to move. It's why they had sand stations on earlier rail lines, to act as friction.

somehow some of the smartest people earth chose to invest in a technology over 100 years old that never worked.

So nice to see Colombia being mentioned for something positive every once in a while! I can attest that Medellin's public transport is awesome and truly has revolutionized the city. It also has a very good public perception in spite of all its flaws, thanks to the tangible impact that it has had on the people. As a result, its become very appealing to advocate for better public transport in the political scene, and thus the city keeps investing on these massive projects that are truly innovating.

I think e-bikes will be a huge mode of transportation in the future, especially in Asia. I think they will be an improvement from the current situation with the number of motorbikes, being more affordable and creating less pollution.

Instead of investing into a real metro or designing cities better- they give boatloads of $ to Elon to make another highway, but underground 🙄

Diesel trains, commuter trains, electric trains, passenger trains, freight trains, light rail trains and more.😢

Great video. Finally mainstream media applying some critical thinking to these technogrifts.

The mode of transport that you didn't show, are the trolley buses that are in use in many large cities. They are more efficient than busses with batteries.

I think more frequent busses and cheaper, faster connecting rail. Bike paths are also great.

just invest in public transportation, my god...

Private investors are interested in growing their money, not improving societies. That is why a robust public sector needs to exist.

If there's one thing that urban studies and planning have taught us over the last 60 years, is that cities are an extremely complex environment in which traffic problems are always fixed by a mix of innovations, logistical improvement, and planning (of course), and not by a single technological improvement or a sensational idea. For this reason, these bizarre innovations are doomed to fail when put in practice.

Thanks for spending the time to create and share this content awareness/perspective

JUST BUILD TRAINS

I live in the Netherlands and we have an ultra high tech solution to inner-city transport problems. It saves money, space and energy and it's now spreading to major cities around the western world, including Paris, London and New York. If you want to know more, we call them "fietsen", or bicycles in English.

Technobros do not take a metro. Most of these projects are like "just add one more lane for the rich".

You can't solve transport problems without taking planning into account. High density (not skyscrapers) mixed use cites are a must.

The ultimate reason why none of these solutions will work is that transport needs to be run as a public service, not as a for-profit enterprise. You put money in, you get transport out, as opposed to the other way around. For public transport to be utilised widely enough to make a difference to the climate it needs to be cheaper, faster or more convenient than private transport (and ideally ticking more than one of those boxes). Without major public funding, that is just not possible. The largest blocker (at least in the UK), is the perceived political consensus that services need to be profitable, instead of the service itself being of value. IE. The value of an effective, cheap public transport network isn't in generating profit, but in its effect of enabling the rest of the economy to function and make profit and generate taxes etc.

There's a lovely scene in the 1988 adaptation of Legend of the Galactic Heroes where one of the main characters gets stuck in an enormous traffic jam. He asks a nearby traffic cop what happened: "Someone input some bad code into the central traffic computer" and thus all the autonomous cars came to a halt.

After working 3 days a week from home office I see how much time I save (even though my commute is short 15-20 minutes). I now just need a grocery store with a good webshop solution that deliver to my area and I would reduce greatly how much I drive. So part of it is also avoid unneeded travel.

Thank you DW for maintaining a down to earth view of reality! I too work in vehicle design and manufacturing, and it pains me to see how these tech-gurus convinced even the most experienced professionals in my field how their "pie-in-the-sky" solutions are what they should invest their efforts on. Funny thing is none of these tech-gurus ideas are actually new. The main concept of vacuum or semi-vacuum tunnels for land transportation for example can be traced back to Robert Goddard who launched the idea as early as 1904! So much for these tech-geniuses, people never ask why weren't these ideas put into practice in the first place over a hundred years ago. I too think people should stop calling eVTOLs "flying cars". They are not. They are electrified ultra-short-range helicopters that will probably need 6 hours to recharge and hardly brake-even the investment. Much like the folk story of unethical tailors selling underwear to the oblivious king. These snake oil salesmen dream of great IPOs, huge investments through SPACs, and they keep feeding nice Powerpoint slides that will have oblivious incompetent investors and CEOs believe only the smartest people can see the potential on these slides. What people who are not familiar to our field fail to realize is that the main difference between the Tech industry and Transportation industry is the cost! Most tech companies make huge profit because paying a programmer to write a software is much more cheaper than paying an army of engineers, assembly line workers, and third party suppliers to build a car, a train, or an airplane. Also if your iphone fails, all you need to do is reimburse a low cost manufacturing unit to an annoyed customer, but if a vehicle fails, it can even cost the lives of the passengers, so that product testing is orders of magnitude more expensive to ensure safety.

The tech company "solutions" can be summed up as "a train but worse, a subway but worse, a taxi but worse"

Trams and trains. - A steel tracks last a long time. - Low rolling resistance. - Cheap to electrify. - Does not need batteries. - New technology makes them really quiet. - Kills way less animals than cars. - Easy to get materials to build, does not require exploitation and uncomfortable dependencies. - Can actually be automated and self-driving (unlike cars). - Infrastructure is more compact, saving habitats. - Solves traffic. - Can go up to 300kmph. - Can replace flying. - More comfortable than flying. - Can transport massive amounts of cargo. I could go on, but only problems it has is bad planning. Which is a bit more feasible to expect than hoping for a miracle tech.

I want tiny, walkable, tree canopied little towns of one to two hundred people, where we do our best to have everything a person needs within 3 miles! Every inch of town should be well-loved. Grow food in every spot in town it can be grown on, and food all around the outer rim of town🌳😊🌳

Tech billionaires are not urban planners or transport engineers who have actual skills and knowledge.

Biggest room for improvement is definitely rail + eBikes. Rail for city to city + ebikes for city transit. The next step would be to lower speed limits dramatically and enforce them since people would no longer have to take long trips by car. Then vehicles could get lighter while maintaining safety doubling the effect of less loss to drag. EX: Model Y Est 75 MPH interstate: ~347 wh/mile 55 MPH highway: ~208 wh/mile 40% smaller battery goes the same distance. Now for simplicity, image that the vehicle could weigh 40% less and still be as safe due the lower max speed. Now we're down to ~175 wh/mile. Slightly less than half the energy used for the same distance by just going the US national speed limit from the 70's. This of course would be a long term transition since these cars would still have to drive around 6000lb behemoths that probably shouldn't be legal in the first place since they do squat to maintain the safety of anyone not inside the emotional support vehicle.

I’m glad you mentioned Uber Bus, a project I worked on. You missed the innovation there though, using smart phones and clever algorithms to plan routes and vehicle schedules based on rider preferences in ways that weren’t possible before the smartphone era. I don’t place much faith in the flying car stuff but can see tech-enabled ride sharing maybe by autonomous car becoming a key future form of public transit.

"The Real Solutions Company" anyone? Fantastic job, as always. Thanks, DW!

Shared electric motorbikes and public electric bikes works awesome in Barcelona

why do so many people seem to think that large societal shifts come suddenly all at once rather than incremental steps with occasional pitfalls?

One more lane of traffic is one more lane whether it's above or below ground. There are always diminishing returns to adding lanes, above and below the surface.

What a lot of people like to mix up: What’s good for a business and what’s good for a economy. Not exclusively but also in transportation. A good public transportation system hardly good for any profit oriented business. But it is very important to a functioning society and the economy, because all the external costs of car dependency outweigh the costs of good affordable public transport by far. Roads, air pollution, climate change etc. But the best for short travels still is the bicycle. One the infrastructure is there it is easy and cheap to maintain and there are close to zero externalities.

Developping biking paths is really a necessity. Very glad you also mentionned Medellin's cable car system, it works magic and helped a lot of people living in favelas to get to the city center and have access to public services, jobs, etc. Works fine in other cities from what I've heard

They're not urban planners, they're just tech bros who just want to create futuristic tech the way they want!

Thank you for not being afraid of naming the issue open and clear.

Titanic 2-0 rich people

You had me at "why tech billionaires suck"

@DW great reporting! I love it that you provide a lot of quantitative analysis. Way to go DW!

„Oh, you reinvented the train?“ „No, it’s a fixed-track-multi-pod!“

10:16 The traditional helicopter design is cheaper, easier to control and more energy efficient than multiple small rotors.

Se a cápsula do hyperloop vazar dentro do tubo à vácuo, as pessoas podem morrer devido a queda de pressão brusca? Efeito contrário ao que ocorreu na cápsula do OceanGate.

A huge opportunity is in urban planning. I live in a small village in a small 2 story flat and I have a supermarket and other shops within 5 minutes walk of my home. That is literally ILLEGAL to build in most of America, where in suburbs only single family homes and no shops whatsoever are allowed.

Adding a charge to do LITERALLY the same thing. Absolutely DISGUSTING

No one thinks e-bikes can be sexy? You should go to Amsterdam

I want traditional rail trains.😢

Fort Lauderdale? In Florida? For a transportation TUNNEL? Easy to drill the Miami limestone, I guess, but the vehicles might have to be submarines :/ That's a level of crazy I hadn't expected to see... but then again, it's Fla.

My city (Brisbane) has a Veloway 1 which parallels Motorway 1, but once you leave it, you're on your own. It's a great spine but with no real ribs.

I want to keep all the trains all year and every year.😢

Great reporting with a right focus! Thank you for spreading awareness! Solving traffic is not a technical problem, but a political one.

TL;DW the single biggest hurdle ends up being the network not the invidual vehicle, the actual infrastructure e.g. roads, tunnels, tracks etc. This is generally a public good paid for and usually maintained by governments with taxes. No billionaires wants to, nor can find an effective way to bypass or monetize this.

The problem is any game changing innovation in public transport needs lots and lots of money and it's not that profitable, so Silicon Valley approach doesn't work there.

Tech bros think they can do anything but reality is hard. Yet we still think Gates or Musk is going to solve our energy, food or transport problems. We cannot afford to share in their delusions

The reason most of these things are destined to fail is because they have an effectively impassable barrier of needing to be profitable while being a public good. We take for granted that our road infrastructure is not profitable, and is the direct competition, so it's silly to think that an alternative will be profitable. Transportation is a public good and should be funded as such. Trains and busses cost money that will not be compensated fully by fares, just like roads cost money that will not be compensated fully by registration fees and gas taxes.

Buses are the best imo . With dedicated transit lanes they can be just as fast as a train for short distances, and unlike trains, they don’t require building expensive infrastructure.

California High-Speed rail.

I want to keep all the Amtrak trains all year and every year.😢

In my opinion the solution to most if not all transport issues is the U-Bahn: Just build the damn train underground, when above ground is not enough space. The only exception would be the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn, since it is easier to put the train above a river than below a river (and that thing is already build and works really well). For all those that have a car and want to keep it over park and ride at a reasonable cost. If you can just park your car outside the city and drive some kind of train within minutes into the city for about as much as parking would cost within the city, that is good enough for most people. Parking in a city can often even cost 5€, so it's not like you have give those train tickets for free.

Walkable cities with bike, skate, scooter, roller skates, dog sled lanes. Really that would fix multiple problems.

Yeah, if we could stop waiting for billionaires to save the day, that would be great. Nationalize public transportation and remove the profit motive.

Even though lots of the techy billionaire transit solutions (potential solutions) are likely to be just hype, they are helping to change our way of thinking about transit and also about mobility options. We need to have conversations about alternatives to single occupancy vehicles (cars). I am continually optimistic about Portland Oregon's streetcar system. It is continuing to expand on existing roadways, and is just as fast as cars drive yet without the stress and worry. Very good video, I am happy that we are acknowledging that car dependency is not in our best interest.

A lot comes down to hubris. They succeed in one industry, overestimate their abilities and assume that success will follow them wherever they go. Happens all the time when “business people” try their hand at owning a football/soccer club and end up getting humbled

The solution is not ONE transportation method, but a whole network of different methods (addressing different transportion needs): airplanes, trains, overland busses and ships for large distances; metro, tramways, busses, taxi, rideshares, bikes and whatnot for in-city transports; individual cars where nessessary; lorries and trains/ships for goods and so on. I could go on with dozens of other methods.

The sooner we abandon the whole fad "Battery EV" hype for everything and realize the rest of the civilized world uses cables over busses, trams, and trains, the sooner America will become a modern country.

Trains are underrated they really are, I've always been fascinated by trains there is something so mystique about them. They can link you anywhere. I'm proud to say I use train and light rail for university and work!

Basically, the problem is that people are like lemmings, placing far too much trust and hope in the hands of billionaires whose trajectory to success was often dubious. Pascal was correct when he said: All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Good luck humanity!

As big of a fan as I am of e-bikes as a real solution to the under-5 mile trip that is so much of daily travel, I have to vote for the classic catenary overhead power line and trolley poles. If we make the commitment to deploy this venerable tech, buses and trucks can be readily deployed using it for no tailpipe emissions and little to no battery weight. Also, really excellent torque for acceleration. No problem with hills either.

i think this is the best infotainments i've ever seen on youtube: honest, well researched and nicely put together factual information. thank you!