6 ms·

Trains don't pick you up where you live and drop you off where you work. Self driving cars can do this.

carbocation 9y ago
Imagine a combination of self-driving cars and trains. Perhaps the self-driving car can take you to the train station that is nearest, if there is a train that is coming in a reasonable amount of time.
- intopieces 9y ago
  For trains to be truly useful, we needed to not build our cities around the highway, around sprawl. We didn't do that. So self-driving cars will prove to be far, far more useful than trains, especially since trains require long term public investment, which Americans generally do not favor.
  - ecshafer 9y ago
    We can change that. The current city is built around an combination of parking minimums, subsidized free parking, and a system that supports building detached single family homes and not dense mixed use housing. If we change the policies that ruin the cities and design them around the human and not the car, we can make transit work more.
    - intopieces 9y ago
      We absolutely can change that and we absolutely won't. Rich people don't like transit, they like personal vehicles and sprawling neighborhoods, not loud trains and dense apartment blocks. Rich people write laws.
      - wbl 9y ago
        So no millionaires live in Manhattan?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chrisseaton 9y ago
> Trains don't pick you up where you live and drop you off where you work. Trains manage to do that in most countries, given a few minutes walk to and from a station. I don't commute now but I used to commute two hours in the UK, and I walked 3 minutes to a train station, and then took a couple of trains all the way, and then a 3 minute walk at the other end to my office. And I lived in a small village not a major area. Why can't they do it in the US?
- mainguy 9y ago
  Because the UK is a bit over half the size of California. Many folks in Europe tend to under appreciate the sheer size of the United States. To your point though...certain metro areas are largely this way...(NY/Chicago)...but others (LA/Detroit) are not... Not sure why some cities invest and others don't.
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    Everyone says it's due to the size difference. That doesn't make any sense to me! Take just the Northern California region, then, around the same size as the UK. Now there's no argument about size difference. The population is around a third of the UK, so while that's less and so lower density, it isn't a crazy difference and the major areas of population themselves where you need the stations are high density. I can go from any city in the UK, to any other city in the UK, via a couple of trains pretty effortlessly. Why couldn't that be replicated in an area of the same size and more of less the same population, in California? Why can't it be replicated just in the Bay Area even! Why aren't there lots of trains there?!
    - intopieces 9y ago
      >Why aren’t there lots of trains there? 1.) The Bay Area is made up of 100 cities and towns and several counties. There is not a single “Bay Area government.” Every single transit project has to be approved by several levels of government and funded by the state and federal government. Moreover, that funding and consent has to last for decades to keep the project on track. It rarely does. Every train line in the Bay Area was the result of a fight. 2.) Trains require density to be feasible. Density increases the supply of housing, driving down the value of existing single family homes. Owners of single family homes store a significant amount of their net worth in the equity of those homes. Municipalities rely on the property taxes from those high value homes. 3.) The Bay Area is not zoned for density. Trains will not catch on here because 60 odd years ago the people who designed the highway system did not consider the possibility that many people would need to live close together to make the place affordable. No one was thinking of affordable housing then.

Imagine a combination of self-driving cars and trains. Perhaps the self-driving car can take you to the train station that is nearest, if there is a train that is coming in a reasonable amount of time.

intopieces 9y ago
For trains to be truly useful, we needed to not build our cities around the highway, around sprawl. We didn't do that. So self-driving cars will prove to be far, far more useful than trains, especially since trains require long term public investment, which Americans generally do not favor.
- ecshafer 9y ago
  We can change that. The current city is built around an combination of parking minimums, subsidized free parking, and a system that supports building detached single family homes and not dense mixed use housing. If we change the policies that ruin the cities and design them around the human and not the car, we can make transit work more.
  - intopieces 9y ago
    We absolutely can change that and we absolutely won't. Rich people don't like transit, they like personal vehicles and sprawling neighborhoods, not loud trains and dense apartment blocks. Rich people write laws.
    - wbl 9y ago
      So no millionaires live in Manhattan?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

chrisseaton 9y ago

> Trains don't pick you up where you live and drop you off where you work. Trains manage to do that in most countries, given a few minutes walk to and from a station. I don't commute now but I used to commute two hours in the UK, and I walked 3 minutes to a train station, and then took a couple of trains all the way, and then a 3 minute walk at the other end to my office. And I lived in a small village not a major area. Why can't they do it in the US?

mainguy 9y ago
Because the UK is a bit over half the size of California. Many folks in Europe tend to under appreciate the sheer size of the United States. To your point though...certain metro areas are largely this way...(NY/Chicago)...but others (LA/Detroit) are not... Not sure why some cities invest and others don't.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  Everyone says it's due to the size difference. That doesn't make any sense to me! Take just the Northern California region, then, around the same size as the UK. Now there's no argument about size difference. The population is around a third of the UK, so while that's less and so lower density, it isn't a crazy difference and the major areas of population themselves where you need the stations are high density. I can go from any city in the UK, to any other city in the UK, via a couple of trains pretty effortlessly. Why couldn't that be replicated in an area of the same size and more of less the same population, in California? Why can't it be replicated just in the Bay Area even! Why aren't there lots of trains there?!
  - intopieces 9y ago
    >Why aren’t there lots of trains there? 1.) The Bay Area is made up of 100 cities and towns and several counties. There is not a single “Bay Area government.” Every single transit project has to be approved by several levels of government and funded by the state and federal government. Moreover, that funding and consent has to last for decades to keep the project on track. It rarely does. Every train line in the Bay Area was the result of a fight. 2.) Trains require density to be feasible. Density increases the supply of housing, driving down the value of existing single family homes. Owners of single family homes store a significant amount of their net worth in the equity of those homes. Municipalities rely on the property taxes from those high value homes. 3.) The Bay Area is not zoned for density. Trains will not catch on here because 60 odd years ago the people who designed the highway system did not consider the possibility that many people would need to live close together to make the place affordable. No one was thinking of affordable housing then.