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> Believe me, there is nothing in "physics" that says that fixed-rail tracks are optimal for anything except transferring people from one place where they don't

> Believe me, there is nothing in "physics" that says that fixed-rail tracks are optimal for anything except transferring people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be, and for transferring large sums of tax money from one set of pockets to another. Now that is a goalpost shift. An incredibly bad argument with an entire planet's worth of falsifying evidence, but it was an excellent goalpost shift.

CamperBob2 10y ago
Now that is a goalpost shift. No, it was a bare assertion. Different fallacy altogether. :-P An incredibly bad argument with an entire planet's worth of falsifying evidence Wait, I thought you were saying that networked self-driving vehicles on surface streets not only weren't ready for prime time, but won't be able to compete with multi-decade fixed rail projects that haven't even been approved for construction yet. Now you're saying that there's already an "entire planet's worth" of evidence that proves they can't? What planet are we talking about, exactly? Certainly no such evidence exists on this one, unless you put all kinds of constraints on the problem that aren't necessary in real life. Obviously self-driving cars can't replace rail transit if we do what most critics in this thread seem to think we'll do, which is simply replace our existing personally-owned vehicles with them. Transit is a system-level problem that requires system-level thinking, no matter the modality. For instance, take half the surface streets in the city and turn them into boarding platforms. These are the only places where the self-driving cars ever stop. On the other half of the streets, they never stop moving. Cars merge seamlessly in and out of these lanes. Routes and following distances are adjusted on a centralized basis to accommodate entrance and exit schedules. There are no human drivers to hesitate or misjudge speeds and distances. It's simply unthinkable that a system like this couldn't move as many people from their actual point of origin to their ultimate destination than fixed rail. Only by artificially constraining the problem can you make "physics"-based capacity arguments that support rail transit. Fixed rail is literally all about constraints. We need fewer of those, not more. IMHO we should spend $30-$50 billion doing something radically different in this transit-planning cycle, instead of building more of the same old trains for the same limited population of users.

CamperBob2 10y ago

Now that is a goalpost shift. No, it was a bare assertion. Different fallacy altogether. :-P An incredibly bad argument with an entire planet's worth of falsifying evidence Wait, I thought you were saying that networked self-driving vehicles on surface streets not only weren't ready for prime time, but won't be able to compete with multi-decade fixed rail projects that haven't even been approved for construction yet. Now you're saying that there's already an "entire planet's worth" of evidence that proves they can't? What planet are we talking about, exactly? Certainly no such evidence exists on this one, unless you put all kinds of constraints on the problem that aren't necessary in real life. Obviously self-driving cars can't replace rail transit if we do what most critics in this thread seem to think we'll do, which is simply replace our existing personally-owned vehicles with them. Transit is a system-level problem that requires system-level thinking, no matter the modality. For instance, take half the surface streets in the city and turn them into boarding platforms. These are the only places where the self-driving cars ever stop. On the other half of the streets, they never stop moving. Cars merge seamlessly in and out of these lanes. Routes and following distances are adjusted on a centralized basis to accommodate entrance and exit schedules. There are no human drivers to hesitate or misjudge speeds and distances. It's simply unthinkable that a system like this couldn't move as many people from their actual point of origin to their ultimate destination than fixed rail. Only by artificially constraining the problem can you make "physics"-based capacity arguments that support rail transit. Fixed rail is literally all about constraints. We need fewer of those, not more. IMHO we should spend $30-$50 billion doing something radically different in this transit-planning cycle, instead of building more of the same old trains for the same limited population of users.