Fixing the Present with the Past

Originally published on Tumblr.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to look at the past for solutions to current problems, and sometimes it’s not.

I live in Austin. Austin has a traffic problem and not a few politicians are peddling light rail as a solution. It’s hard to believe they’re serious.

Light rail is a 19th Century solution to a 19th Century problem, on another continent, a continent densely populated, and cities designed for that density. It’s never been a good solution in the US, except in a few cities. Austin has never been one of them.

Even if Austin were more of a “European” city, it would still be completely daft to consider light rail at this point in history. We’re on the verge of self-driving cars. They are going to change our transportation landscape completely. They’ll give us the ability to get from point A to point B cheaply and quickly. A light rail, on the other hand, may get us from near point A to near point, if we’re really lucky.

Vehicles that aren’t constrained to fixed rails will turn train lines into an abandoned relics overnight.

Austin has a traffic problem. Self-driving cars won’t solve it tomorrow, but they will solve it. Light rail won’t solve it tomorrow or in the future.

In the mean time, we need to do everything possible to make sure vehicles are shared. We need to encourage car2go-style sharing, and Uber-style sharing. The more people use a car, the fewer cars on the road. Austin has been working with car2go, and the experiment seems to be working. A lot of people use them. On the other hand, Uber and Lyft are illegal in Austin. And our very efficient police force has been doing a great job discouraging people from using them.

I’m disheartened. I’m disheartened that our politicians aren’t doing a better job thinking long-term. I’m disheartened that they want to spend public money tearing up streets and embedding fixed rails.

It’s quaint, but it’s an expensive quaint, one that I’d rather not pay for. I’d rather our city take that same money and work with Tesla, Mercedes, and their ilk to make sure our roads are as friendly to autonomous cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians as possible.

It’s OK to consider past solutions to problems. It’s even OK to admire those solutions. But it’s important to understand why they’re admirable, and to not confuse problems of another time and place with today’s.