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> You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails. We should just really build rails. Self driving cars are dumping billions of dollar

> You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails. We should just really build rails. Self driving cars are dumping billions of dollars onto a problem better solved by rails. Several cities already have self driving trains including London, Singapore and Kuala Lumpar, and they transport millions of people every day without incident: http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol... Self driving car research is asinine. It won't even being to solve the transport problem in America and it's round-peg/square-hole tech. It has the cool factor but there are existing tech that are insanely more useful for a fraction of the cost. American hate public transportation (thanks GM) that we'll never see real/good transport implemented in America.

Aunche 9y ago
Most people don't live in a dense enough city to justify rails.
gscott 9y ago
It would be easier to put a small transmitter in the middle of each lane run on solar power. This would keep the cars centered in the lane except for when they are executing some action.
cle 9y ago
Rail isn't something you can solve solely with tech, though. It requires building new infrastructure, which requires enormous political cooperation, which is an intractable problem in our current political climate. Self-driving cars do require some political cooperation, but it's much less because it purportedly doesn't require new infrastructure.
- ramphastidae 9y ago
  From my experience, relative to the rest of the first world, American highways and streets are dilapidated and neglected. I don’t see how that doesn’t get worse when self-driving cars start using those streets more efficiently than humans.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    How can you expect your experience to be meaningful when road maintenance is the responsibility of local governments? I've traveled a lot and I don't think I have a good understanding of the condition of average US roadways much less those in other countries.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  Right. Which is why tech companies are the wrong people to solve transportation. When you only own a hammer, everything is a nail.
TN412 9y ago
>We Should really just build rails The beauty of cars vs rails is that cars can go more than just a set in stone angle or path defined by a rail. Cars can go in and out of parking lots and dirt roads. Rails would be more automated, yes, but not as versatile.
- mozumder 9y ago
  Wherever there is a road, there can be rail. Autonomous cars aren't a viable tech until the roads are reengineered with rails built in. It's just way too big of a technical problem to solve with computers alone. Right now the death rate of autonomous cars is far higher than human drivers and it is never going to catch up given that it hasn't advanced technologically recently.
  - stickfigure 9y ago
    As someone preparing to lay down a small (1/5 scale) railroad - you vastly underestimate the expense, difficulty, and maintenance requirement of rail. Switches and diamonds (intersections) are especially troubleprone. 2% is considered a serious grade. And derailments happen, more frequently with higher speeds and deferred maintenance. If our rail network was as potholed and badly maintained as our roads, people would die in train accidents every day. Rails are great for intensive, carefully manicured routes. They are not a substitute for roads.
    - jsgo 9y ago
      There seem to be fairly regular (at least, more regular than one would like) AmTrak derailings in the US. That isn't to say I think it is AmTrak's doing specifically, I think it is like you said a maintenance issue coupled with everybody else who isn't on the train interacting with it. Then there are the cases of engineers who are distracted and what not, but I'd imagine we're talking autonomous so that (hopefully) wouldn't be an issue.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    We're not talking actual rails, right? Just some kind of marker / beacon with information (like a RFID for the roads).
test6554 9y ago
Due to geofencing, we are building a sort of rails. We're creating cars that are only useful in a limited, well-mapped area.
rocqua 9y ago
Rails don't work for the last mile. The great thing about cars is that they don't suffer from the last mile problem. It seems like a much better plan is to separate drivers from other people more rigorously, and maybe mandate people drive the last-mile themselves (with AI help, obviously).
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Roads aren’t free! With the technology available today, I bet a rail based solution could be more economical.
- wastedhours 9y ago
  Rails definitely do work well for the last mile in very developed cities (i.e. London), but it's probably an unsustainable infrastructure cost for most places. That being said, it's easy to just change where that last mile is in the future (i.e. mixed zoning, flexible working environments, increasing mega-cities etc...).
  - eggpy 9y ago
    I don't think "very developed" and "unsustainable infrastructure" are mutually exclusive. I would argue the manner in which a city developed is far more important than the "degree" of development. Phoenix is a young, developed city but the efficacy of public transportation here is very different than London.
- CalRobert 9y ago
  For what it's worth, it doesn't really need to. Feet work well for the last half mile or so, and a well-designed city can get stops this close.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    Yeah, but converting all of our cities to 'well-designed' cities is not really an option at this point. Not only that, but millions and millions of people live in places that aren't cities.
liquidcool 9y ago
I would love public transportation like I've experienced it in Europe, but train tracks have exceptionally tight tolerances and high costs to build/maintain vs. roads. I hope Musk will fix this, but probably not before "good enough" self-driving cars arrive. Also, trains get into accidents pretty regularly. First Google hit: According to the US Department of Transportation, there are about 5,800 train-car crashes each year in the United States, most of which occur at railroad crossings. These accidents cause 600 deaths and injure about 2,300.
DanielleMolloy 9y ago
I don’t oppose public transport at all and the US has a lot to improve in this area. But e.g. East Asia and Europe have plenty of rails, and people still want to drive their own cars, and there are still an unbelievable number of accidents. We should require that every traffic participant gets a sensor, and connect all in a (local) network, instead of only relying on machine learning and its vulnerability to the unpredictable situations where accidents occur. Pure autonomous self driving won’t be the final answer here. Please correct me if I’m not up to date here, but to my last knowledge self driving car machine learning lacks the most important data, that of dangerous situations. I’m surprised that Uber considered it ready for roll out.
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  We can’t even standardize on a format across browsers without severe inconsistencies and bugs, yet you expect vehicles of all types and pedestrians to cooperate in a network? That’s not even taking into account the outliers who refuse to conform (or worse, those who try to hack it).
  - DanielleMolloy 9y ago
    It’s not me alone who expects that, communication between vehicles has been in discussion for long time: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/09/magazine/tech-design-autonomous-future-cars-v2v-traffic-peloton.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/09/magazine/tech... Every car has plenty of communication and localization systems today. Nearly every pedestrian carries an electronic device with potential for exact localization. It makes no sense to not use that data, and solely rely on still-not-perfect computer vision. The optimal system will necessarily be a combination of both. As for standardisation, maybe realizing what an enormous number of fatal and many more forever life-altering accidents we currently consider normal will finally get people off their backsides. I wish somebody would start a media project revealing how insane the current situation is..
    - jsjohnst 9y ago
      Wanting/needing something to work and it actually working is two entirely different things. Again, refer to my point about browsers. Happy to give a lot more examples if that's what is necessary.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
daphneokeefe 9y ago
My great-grandfather was killed by a streetcar (on rails) on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.
dfee 9y ago
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I then realized why your comment doesn’t make any sense - you’re effectively arguing “if I could master-plan society and the economy for a while, this is how I’d decree it to be.” Maybe some people don’t want to live in dense urban areas, maybe they don’t want to ride on a rail, maybe they want privacy. But looking out the window, I can say American society has soundly rejected the rail as the ultimate solution. Short of understanding your perspective as a longing personal desire for trains, your conclusion is so far removed from reality that it’s nonsense.
- dnautics 9y ago
  I wouldn't say society has rejected the rail in America, but rather that the political structure has rejected the rail. There's a dominant paradigm in public transport that it must be run by the government (which ironically is somewhat counter to the broader american ethos). Yet there are places like Singapore where the public transport is run via (in the past fully, but currently partially) for-profit, publically traded companies, where the QOS is far higher than the US, and the service is markedly cheaper, and I would say, generally more accessible than it is in the US. There would be considerable US pushback against such a system, sadly.
- zanny 9y ago
  How can you reject something you never had or used? Almost nobody alive in the US today has ever engaged with general commuter rail. Trains as a common mode of transit died off with the rise of cars and planes post WW1 and had them near-eradicated post WW2. You can't say people reject something they don't even know is a possibility.
  - tnorthcutt 9y ago
    I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I agree with your comment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- derefr 9y ago
  > maybe they want privacy Every sci-fi movie of the last 50 years has solved that problem: you don't use trains; you put the cars on the rails (by grouping them together into roller-coaster-looking setups.) > maybe they don’t want to ride on a rail Same here: cars on rails can, in most conceptions, signal to the rail system to switch them onto an offramp that dumps them back onto a road. Basically, here, "rails" are serving as safer replacements for highways. Every road that isn't a highway would still be a road. You're just enabling people to, effectively, "have their car take the train", rather than having to leave their car at the train's parking lot.
lisper 9y ago
> We should just really build rails. How will that help? The reason that the trains in London and Singapore don't kill people is not that they are on rails, it's because they're underground.
- TraffigDoge 9y ago
  Jawohl! Our Straßenbahnen kill people all the time, because they take part in regular traffic. If you walk in front of one, it can't steer away! You need to put the trains below ground, or well above!
Bluestrike2 9y ago
You're right. There's a lot of research and experience that suggests a well-developed rail network would have all sorts of benefits. We could take it a few big steps further and point to other problems like suburban sprawl in America, dying small towns, etc. But there are a couple of really big, really massive problems. We have trillions in existing infrastructure and trillions more in existing property that's been developed over the course of decades. A lot of that development has come with unintended consequences. Just look at Houston after Hurricane Harvey and how their development and zoning practices took the insane rains Harvey deposited and magnified their negative consequences.[0] Decades of short-sighted decision-making took a hurricane and made it worse. Some changes will likely be made, but they won't solve nor likely keep up with a problem that's only going to get worse. That'll happen because the alternative, demolishing huge portions of the sprawling concrete city, isn't economically viable. The city can't be moved. It's baggage. And there's so much more. Tens of trillions of dollars worth. Then there are existing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure connecting all of it. Designed for cars, and much of it legacy infrastructure that doesn't take into account modern infrastructure design principles. Add cities and towns, some of which are (charitably) in less-than-optimal positions. Towns, strip malls, and other structures that wouldn't exist if it weren't for suburban sprawl. Baggage. And then there's the people. People with ideas on what their lives ought to be like and where they want to live. There's a town, Centralia, Pennsylvania, that is literally on top of a massive underground fire that's been burning for over half a century. There was a massive relocation effort with federal and state funds. The town has no services, its zip code was discontinued in 2002, and it's still burning with all of the potential health risks that involves. There are still five residents there today, who have fought every attempt to relocate them. They will continue to live there until they die, at which point their homes will finally be taken and demolished through eminent domain.[1] If we can't bulldoze a town like that, we sure as hell can't take a bulldozer to normal ones. Baggage. What it means is that we can't simply replace everything. It can only be done piecemeal, which means new infrastructure must take into account the need to accommodate everything that was developed under the old. High speed rail can be built out in the United States, and I genuinely hope that it is. But it literally can't replace the car in its entirety. Self driving car research is--compared to the cost of major infrastructure replacement, let alone an alternative that simply isn't feasible--practically a rounding error. It doesn't hurt us, because the option was never a binary choice: self-driving cars OR rail. Self-driving cars give us the ability to deal within existing legacy constraints as they're slowly adapted, modified, and/or replaced. They also offer some long-term possibilities that will allow us to make radical changes in urban design. And yes, those changes are ones can accommodate rail, pedestrian-friendly city design, and other options that can drastically improve quality of life. 0. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/09/563016223/exploring-why-hurricane-harvey-caused-houstons-worst-fooding https://www.npr.org/2017/11/09/563016223/exploring-why-hurri... 1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pa-residents-living-above-mine-200344503.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pa-residents-living-above-min...
triviatise 9y ago
in my area, our rail proposal was 1 billion for 9 miles of trail. Good luck putting everything on rails. Ridesharing algorithms will 100% solve the problem of underutilised mass transit. Self driving isnt necessary. Imagine shuttles that hold 10 people using uber pool algorithms and funded by the city. People will be able to make their request and a nearby shuttle will pick all the people up in that area. The shuttles could do ad hoc transfers with other shuttles so people wouldnt even have to be going to the same area. The algorithm would minimize the average ride time for everyone. The #1 issue with mass transit is lack of convenience. Rideshare algorithms will eliminate that lack of convenience.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  Ride sharing works for young professionals who aren't moving around with kids. I grew up in a public transit city. I then got a car in the US. The car is a strictly better experience, and only marginally more expensive. Ride sharing can reduce the problem, but "100% solve the problem" is off by about 95 percentage points.
dang 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621507 since it has become its own separate discussion.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
saurik 9y ago
There was an episode of Darkwing Duck (which shared a couple characters and I presume a lot of writers with DuckTales) that serves as an amazing parable for why vehicles are usually better off adapting to the environment than the other way around. The episode is called "Extinct Possibility", and might (or might not) be watchable at the following URL. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uAqZ_jMmGAk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uAqZ_jMmGAk

Aunche 9y ago

Most people don't live in a dense enough city to justify rails.

gscott 9y ago

It would be easier to put a small transmitter in the middle of each lane run on solar power. This would keep the cars centered in the lane except for when they are executing some action.

cle 9y ago

Rail isn't something you can solve solely with tech, though. It requires building new infrastructure, which requires enormous political cooperation, which is an intractable problem in our current political climate. Self-driving cars do require some political cooperation, but it's much less because it purportedly doesn't require new infrastructure.

ramphastidae 9y ago
From my experience, relative to the rest of the first world, American highways and streets are dilapidated and neglected. I don’t see how that doesn’t get worse when self-driving cars start using those streets more efficiently than humans.
- weberc2 9y ago
  How can you expect your experience to be meaningful when road maintenance is the responsibility of local governments? I've traveled a lot and I don't think I have a good understanding of the condition of average US roadways much less those in other countries.
IgorPartola 9y ago
Right. Which is why tech companies are the wrong people to solve transportation. When you only own a hammer, everything is a nail.

TN412 9y ago

>We Should really just build rails The beauty of cars vs rails is that cars can go more than just a set in stone angle or path defined by a rail. Cars can go in and out of parking lots and dirt roads. Rails would be more automated, yes, but not as versatile.

mozumder 9y ago
Wherever there is a road, there can be rail. Autonomous cars aren't a viable tech until the roads are reengineered with rails built in. It's just way too big of a technical problem to solve with computers alone. Right now the death rate of autonomous cars is far higher than human drivers and it is never going to catch up given that it hasn't advanced technologically recently.
- stickfigure 9y ago
  As someone preparing to lay down a small (1/5 scale) railroad - you vastly underestimate the expense, difficulty, and maintenance requirement of rail. Switches and diamonds (intersections) are especially troubleprone. 2% is considered a serious grade. And derailments happen, more frequently with higher speeds and deferred maintenance. If our rail network was as potholed and badly maintained as our roads, people would die in train accidents every day. Rails are great for intensive, carefully manicured routes. They are not a substitute for roads.
  - jsgo 9y ago
    There seem to be fairly regular (at least, more regular than one would like) AmTrak derailings in the US. That isn't to say I think it is AmTrak's doing specifically, I think it is like you said a maintenance issue coupled with everybody else who isn't on the train interacting with it. Then there are the cases of engineers who are distracted and what not, but I'd imagine we're talking autonomous so that (hopefully) wouldn't be an issue.
- protomyth 9y ago
  We're not talking actual rails, right? Just some kind of marker / beacon with information (like a RFID for the roads).

test6554 9y ago

Due to geofencing, we are building a sort of rails. We're creating cars that are only useful in a limited, well-mapped area.

rocqua 9y ago

Rails don't work for the last mile. The great thing about cars is that they don't suffer from the last mile problem. It seems like a much better plan is to separate drivers from other people more rigorously, and maybe mandate people drive the last-mile themselves (with AI help, obviously).

Spooky23 9y ago
Roads aren’t free! With the technology available today, I bet a rail based solution could be more economical.
wastedhours 9y ago
Rails definitely do work well for the last mile in very developed cities (i.e. London), but it's probably an unsustainable infrastructure cost for most places. That being said, it's easy to just change where that last mile is in the future (i.e. mixed zoning, flexible working environments, increasing mega-cities etc...).
- eggpy 9y ago
  I don't think "very developed" and "unsustainable infrastructure" are mutually exclusive. I would argue the manner in which a city developed is far more important than the "degree" of development. Phoenix is a young, developed city but the efficacy of public transportation here is very different than London.
CalRobert 9y ago
For what it's worth, it doesn't really need to. Feet work well for the last half mile or so, and a well-designed city can get stops this close.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  Yeah, but converting all of our cities to 'well-designed' cities is not really an option at this point. Not only that, but millions and millions of people live in places that aren't cities.

liquidcool 9y ago

I would love public transportation like I've experienced it in Europe, but train tracks have exceptionally tight tolerances and high costs to build/maintain vs. roads. I hope Musk will fix this, but probably not before "good enough" self-driving cars arrive. Also, trains get into accidents pretty regularly. First Google hit: According to the US Department of Transportation, there are about 5,800 train-car crashes each year in the United States, most of which occur at railroad crossings. These accidents cause 600 deaths and injure about 2,300.

DanielleMolloy 9y ago

I don’t oppose public transport at all and the US has a lot to improve in this area. But e.g. East Asia and Europe have plenty of rails, and people still want to drive their own cars, and there are still an unbelievable number of accidents. We should require that every traffic participant gets a sensor, and connect all in a (local) network, instead of only relying on machine learning and its vulnerability to the unpredictable situations where accidents occur. Pure autonomous self driving won’t be the final answer here. Please correct me if I’m not up to date here, but to my last knowledge self driving car machine learning lacks the most important data, that of dangerous situations. I’m surprised that Uber considered it ready for roll out.

jsjohnst 9y ago
We can’t even standardize on a format across browsers without severe inconsistencies and bugs, yet you expect vehicles of all types and pedestrians to cooperate in a network? That’s not even taking into account the outliers who refuse to conform (or worse, those who try to hack it).
- DanielleMolloy 9y ago
  It’s not me alone who expects that, communication between vehicles has been in discussion for long time: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/09/magazine/tech-design-autonomous-future-cars-v2v-traffic-peloton.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/09/magazine/tech... Every car has plenty of communication and localization systems today. Nearly every pedestrian carries an electronic device with potential for exact localization. It makes no sense to not use that data, and solely rely on still-not-perfect computer vision. The optimal system will necessarily be a combination of both. As for standardisation, maybe realizing what an enormous number of fatal and many more forever life-altering accidents we currently consider normal will finally get people off their backsides. I wish somebody would start a media project revealing how insane the current situation is..
  - jsjohnst 9y ago
    Wanting/needing something to work and it actually working is two entirely different things. Again, refer to my point about browsers. Happy to give a lot more examples if that's what is necessary.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

daphneokeefe 9y ago

My great-grandfather was killed by a streetcar (on rails) on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.

dfee 9y ago

I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I then realized why your comment doesn’t make any sense - you’re effectively arguing “if I could master-plan society and the economy for a while, this is how I’d decree it to be.” Maybe some people don’t want to live in dense urban areas, maybe they don’t want to ride on a rail, maybe they want privacy. But looking out the window, I can say American society has soundly rejected the rail as the ultimate solution. Short of understanding your perspective as a longing personal desire for trains, your conclusion is so far removed from reality that it’s nonsense.

dnautics 9y ago
I wouldn't say society has rejected the rail in America, but rather that the political structure has rejected the rail. There's a dominant paradigm in public transport that it must be run by the government (which ironically is somewhat counter to the broader american ethos). Yet there are places like Singapore where the public transport is run via (in the past fully, but currently partially) for-profit, publically traded companies, where the QOS is far higher than the US, and the service is markedly cheaper, and I would say, generally more accessible than it is in the US. There would be considerable US pushback against such a system, sadly.
zanny 9y ago
How can you reject something you never had or used? Almost nobody alive in the US today has ever engaged with general commuter rail. Trains as a common mode of transit died off with the rise of cars and planes post WW1 and had them near-eradicated post WW2. You can't say people reject something they don't even know is a possibility.
- tnorthcutt 9y ago
  I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I agree with your comment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
derefr 9y ago
> maybe they want privacy Every sci-fi movie of the last 50 years has solved that problem: you don't use trains; you put the cars on the rails (by grouping them together into roller-coaster-looking setups.) > maybe they don’t want to ride on a rail Same here: cars on rails can, in most conceptions, signal to the rail system to switch them onto an offramp that dumps them back onto a road. Basically, here, "rails" are serving as safer replacements for highways. Every road that isn't a highway would still be a road. You're just enabling people to, effectively, "have their car take the train", rather than having to leave their car at the train's parking lot.

lisper 9y ago

> We should just really build rails. How will that help? The reason that the trains in London and Singapore don't kill people is not that they are on rails, it's because they're underground.

TraffigDoge 9y ago
Jawohl! Our Straßenbahnen kill people all the time, because they take part in regular traffic. If you walk in front of one, it can't steer away! You need to put the trains below ground, or well above!

Bluestrike2 9y ago

You're right. There's a lot of research and experience that suggests a well-developed rail network would have all sorts of benefits. We could take it a few big steps further and point to other problems like suburban sprawl in America, dying small towns, etc. But there are a couple of really big, really massive problems. We have trillions in existing infrastructure and trillions more in existing property that's been developed over the course of decades. A lot of that development has come with unintended consequences. Just look at Houston after Hurricane Harvey and how their development and zoning practices took the insane rains Harvey deposited and magnified their negative consequences.[0] Decades of short-sighted decision-making took a hurricane and made it worse. Some changes will likely be made, but they won't solve nor likely keep up with a problem that's only going to get worse. That'll happen because the alternative, demolishing huge portions of the sprawling concrete city, isn't economically viable. The city can't be moved. It's baggage. And there's so much more. Tens of trillions of dollars worth. Then there are existing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure connecting all of it. Designed for cars, and much of it legacy infrastructure that doesn't take into account modern infrastructure design principles. Add cities and towns, some of which are (charitably) in less-than-optimal positions. Towns, strip malls, and other structures that wouldn't exist if it weren't for suburban sprawl. Baggage. And then there's the people. People with ideas on what their lives ought to be like and where they want to live. There's a town, Centralia, Pennsylvania, that is literally on top of a massive underground fire that's been burning for over half a century. There was a massive relocation effort with federal and state funds. The town has no services, its zip code was discontinued in 2002, and it's still burning with all of the potential health risks that involves. There are still five residents there today, who have fought every attempt to relocate them. They will continue to live there until they die, at which point their homes will finally be taken and demolished through eminent domain.[1] If we can't bulldoze a town like that, we sure as hell can't take a bulldozer to normal ones. Baggage. What it means is that we can't simply replace everything. It can only be done piecemeal, which means new infrastructure must take into account the need to accommodate everything that was developed under the old. High speed rail can be built out in the United States, and I genuinely hope that it is. But it literally can't replace the car in its entirety. Self driving car research is--compared to the cost of major infrastructure replacement, let alone an alternative that simply isn't feasible--practically a rounding error. It doesn't hurt us, because the option was never a binary choice: self-driving cars OR rail. Self-driving cars give us the ability to deal within existing legacy constraints as they're slowly adapted, modified, and/or replaced. They also offer some long-term possibilities that will allow us to make radical changes in urban design. And yes, those changes are ones can accommodate rail, pedestrian-friendly city design, and other options that can drastically improve quality of life. 0. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/09/563016223/exploring-why-hurricane-harvey-caused-houstons-worst-fooding https://www.npr.org/2017/11/09/563016223/exploring-why-hurri... 1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pa-residents-living-above-mine-200344503.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pa-residents-living-above-min...

triviatise 9y ago

in my area, our rail proposal was 1 billion for 9 miles of trail. Good luck putting everything on rails. Ridesharing algorithms will 100% solve the problem of underutilised mass transit. Self driving isnt necessary. Imagine shuttles that hold 10 people using uber pool algorithms and funded by the city. People will be able to make their request and a nearby shuttle will pick all the people up in that area. The shuttles could do ad hoc transfers with other shuttles so people wouldnt even have to be going to the same area. The algorithm would minimize the average ride time for everyone. The #1 issue with mass transit is lack of convenience. Rideshare algorithms will eliminate that lack of convenience.

IgorPartola 9y ago
Ride sharing works for young professionals who aren't moving around with kids. I grew up in a public transit city. I then got a car in the US. The car is a strictly better experience, and only marginally more expensive. Ride sharing can reduce the problem, but "100% solve the problem" is off by about 95 percentage points.

dang 9y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621507 since it has become its own separate discussion.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

saurik 9y ago

There was an episode of Darkwing Duck (which shared a couple characters and I presume a lot of writers with DuckTales) that serves as an amazing parable for why vehicles are usually better off adapting to the environment than the other way around. The episode is called "Extinct Possibility", and might (or might not) be watchable at the following URL. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uAqZ_jMmGAk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uAqZ_jMmGAk