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Self-driving cars are a solution for a problem that has already been solved. Build trains. But of course, this doesn't benefit automakers, requires a move towar

• DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  Explain how trains solve the last mile problem? The thing that roads already solve?
  • salmonfamine 4y ago
    Walk. EDIT: or just drive, as you do now.
    • rnk 4y ago
      so we build giant parking lots at our metro train stations? We need different transportation. The us is terrible at building needed train infra. But just like in Europe, you need different solutions at diff levels.
      • SECProto 4y ago
        > so we build giant parking lots at our metro train stations No. The comment you're replying to specifically said "walk", while the comment at top of thread specifically mentioned that building trains "requires a move towards high-density housing". High density housing, trains, and walking is a solved transportation solution for cities with much higher/denser populations than we have in North America. Getting there from here is not such a solved solution, but the general process many places are working on goes: build train (with park and ride at outskirts for current ridership) --> build high density mixed use near stations (which now doesn't need parking for each unit) --> rinse and repeat until city is more sustainable without blowing $$$,$$$,$$$ on road capital projects every year to deal with ever-increasing traffic
        • eric-hu 4y ago
          What cities or countries did this successfully? Were they as dependent on cars as American cities tend to be?
          • scruple 4y ago
            What does past success have to do with anything? We need to solve this problem. For crying out loud, it doesn't have to look like something else that someone else did. We can be innovative! It isn't our first time!
          • SECProto 4y ago
            > What cities or countries did this successfully? As I said, "the general process many places are working on". Look up cities in Can/US/Aus currently building light rail systems and you'll see who is working on it (with greater or lesser degrees of commitment, which will have corresponding outcomes in a decade or so). North American cities successfully built themselves to be car dependent when no one else ever had, now they just need to work in reverse. The problems aren't functionally different whether it's cars jammed in stop-and-go on an interstate, trains overcrowded on a regional rail, horse and carriages clogging a bridge in medieval england (eg like discussed in the historical fiction World Without End), or individual people jamming the gates at Mecca or a large concert entrance/exit. The root problem is vehicle lanes can only accomodate a few thousands of vehicles per hour at most (1800 at 2s following distance), while trains can easily accomodate tens of thousands of passengers in the same right of way. Even a sidewalk can (but generally don't) accomodate more users than single occupant vehicles on a highway lane.
      • squarefoot 4y ago
        No need for giant parking lots at trains stations, just rethink the whole thing so that for traveling bigger distances the driver climbs on the train without leaving the car, not unlike what we already do with ferries.
  • tmcw 4y ago
    Sure, so I’m from a tiny town in New Jersey. I was used to having to drive 30 minutes to the train station as a kid, and there are no buses there, so car ownership is mandatory. Took a long time to realize that next to one of the buildings in town was a train station. And twenty years ago there were buses, too. Anyway, solve the last mile by funding transit and rebuilding trains. We had them before, we should have them again.
    • mertd 4y ago
      Zoning needs to change as well. Exclusionary zoning has resulted in very weird town layouts in the US. Make small errands (coffee, dining, convenience items) reachable by walking and the rest reachable by transit.
    • mmazing 4y ago
      Why can't efficient self driving cars also be public transportation? What if we had a publicly funded self driving car network? No more drunk drivers mowing down children, no more gigantic parking lots everywhere (like uber, you wouldn't likely get in the same car that took you there). It would also almost certainly reduce traffic fatalities to near zero. In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT spending X hours of your own mental bandwidth and focus worrying about crashing a deadly vehicle. You could spend that time reading/learning, relaxing watching a movie, or any number of activities other than driving your metal coffin around. Obviously there are a lot of hurdles to get there, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
      • tmcw 4y ago
        Sure, so the most direct answer is that a belief in self-driving cars that are safe and reliable and accessible isn’t grounded in any current evidence. We’ve spent a few billion on development and spun up dozens of companies and so far accomplished - relative to expectations - almost nothing. No self-driving trip across the country, like Musk thought we’d do years ago. The self-driving fleet in SF keeps breaking down. Maybe in the future it’ll suddenly go from bad technology to good, but in my mind it’s like betting on generalized AI or small-scale cold-fusion nuclear: it could happen, but not a great idea to bet the farm on it. Second. Car form factor is inefficient. Are we doing 1-seaters? 4 seaters with 3 empty seats usually? So every car has four wheels, its own computer, its own engine, and so on? In intersections, even with self-driving technology that does not exist currently and is showing no signs of existing any time soon - even with that technology, you’re still threading individual cars through each intersection? It’s not great. Third. I’ve seen no evidence that the people talking about self-driving cars as a shared or car share-like resource actually believe in it. Remember Musk talking about how public transit is gross because other people breathe on you? Or the tendency of Americans to treat their cars as sacred property, so much that they’ll get in a fistfight with anyone who touches them? Transforming self-driving cars to some sort of public-ish transit requires just as much worldview shifting as actually using public transit, but none of the benefits. So: if self-driving cars suddenly exist, sure. But right now, there is no baby. There is only bathwater.
  • simne 4y ago
    It is possible, and it could be extremely effective, but not straight way. 1. exists concept of linear city, and exists few implementations, most known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd 2. In linear city, possible to create just one line of train, and station every mile, and all other transport muscular, or something like pneumatic-mail and open conveyors. In some cases, could be effective to make rectangular network of train lines. Sure, for old cities with lot of legacy, only train transport in many cases impractical, because usually their logistic network is not linear and even not rectangular. And train largest problem, is large radius of turn. Currently in most large cities exists underground train or light city train, in different countries named tube, metro, underground.
    • nradov 4y ago
      The concept of a linear city only works if you completely ignore real world geography like hills, rivers, etc.
      • simne 4y ago
        Exists geographies, very well suited for a linear city concept. Not too many.
  • simne 4y ago
    BTW in western Europe railway network is very dense, and in some countries train is more popular than taxi. But I think this is mostly because there high density of population, so they long time ago faced problem of transport large number of people, before appear large city buses.
  • anonuser123456 4y ago
    You get off the train onto your segway.
• AlotOfReading 4y ago
  How do you plan to get permission/funding to build trams, metros, and trains in every city in America? The minuscule commercial deployments we've already seen in cities like Phoenix and SF cover vastly more area than the last 50 years of passenger rail construction in those same cities.
  • salmonfamine 4y ago
    Well, that's the problem. Self-driving cars does not solve that problem.
• aetherson 4y ago
  I am willing to bet that if self-driving cars come along, they will see strong sales/rental/deployment, however they end up working in Europe, or Japan, or wherever else you have in mind as some place that has "already solved this problem."
  • salmonfamine 4y ago
    That only raises more questions. People will buy them, of course. People buy cigarettes, heroin, and NFT's. Will they actually meet high enough safety standards in these places? Will they reduce commute times? In other words, are they actually going to deliver the long-haul, end-all-be-all transit solution that many of its proponents imagine they will? Or is it just a nice-to-have feature that will make driving a little safer and a little easier for some people? And if so, is that value really worth the incredible amount of effort that's gone into making it a reality?
    • aetherson 4y ago
      I don't know that anyone believes that driverless cars are a long-haul transit solution. Will they be the end-all-be-all? I mean, that's an easy question to answer: no. Universally. For anything you want to bring up. Nothing is perfect. It seems to me that you're making very weak claims dressed up in very strong language.
      • salmonfamine 4y ago
        Ok.
        • aetherson 4y ago
          Let me put it a different way for you: All of this conditional on self-driving cars really being actually solved, such that an autonomous car is, say, better than the 75% driver on the road. I expect the overwhelming majority of long-haul (say, >200 miles) passenger transport to happen via planes and trains, just like today. I do not expect that commute times will be substantially shorter -- indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if they were mildly longer. I DO expect that people will be able to use their commute time productively (they could work during it and either increase their productivity or decrease their hours) and/or be able to spend less money on transit, because they're using shared vehicles. I DO expect that short-haul public transportation would suffer a significant decline in ridership, as it would be outcompeted by driverless carss. I do NOT expect that short-haul public transportation would be entirely killed, it will still have some advantages, especially in very dense areas. I am agnostic about how wise the investment in autonomous vehicles will end up being -- it depends on how much additional investment is needed to get to this (hypothetical) mode of full self-driving, and to what extent many actors are able to reach full-self-driving at the same time and drive commoditization of self-driving cars. But who cares? It's not my money, this has overwhelmingly been paid for by private actors. Do you disagree with any of that?
• CamperBob2 4y ago
  Ah, yes, fixed rail. Great for locking assumptions about population and labor distribution over the next 50-100 years into multi-billion dollar financial commitments that have to be made today. And unmatched when it comes to moving people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be.
  • salmonfamine 4y ago
    As opposed to highways, which magically have none of these problems.
  • ROTMetro 4y ago
    It does seem sort of iffy from this article (though I have not researched if the article is just FUD yet) https://eurasiantimes.com/a-whopping-900b-debt-chinas-once-profitable-high-speed-railways/ https://eurasiantimes.com/a-whopping-900b-debt-chinas-once-p...
  • opportune 4y ago
    This also describes a road
    • CamperBob2 4y ago
      No, it doesn't, in either the financial or the last-mile senses.
• Tade0 4y ago
  Not going to happen as long as energy is cheap in the US. The rest of the developed world didn't shift back to public transport because they enjoy the company of strangers so much, but out of necessity. Without domestic production of fuel a transport system is vulnerable to fuel price/availability swings.
• syntheweave 4y ago
  I hate seeing this premise. It is railfan navelgazing. I like rails and ride them frequently. Rails are not the future for passenger commuting, outside of the middle-long distances that heavy rails serve. What AV addresses is primarily a last-mile problem. Last mile is all about the personal transport solution, and cars are just the largest of those. The physics and geometry of cars means that they are more expensive because they are literally more mass being moved around. Bikes and scooters have become much better personal transport recently because they now have electric assist options, and so are more accessible for more situations and capable of pulling heavy loads. So the problems of cars are already being addressed from one end; bike-friendly infrastructure is lagging behind in much of the world, but it's also one of the cheapest changes you can make to a road, and far cheaper than adding a new metro stop. Once AV is adopted, the physical economics remain the same, but the economics of rental change; you don't have to go where the fleet is, it shows up at the door. But that doesn't result in everyone riding a personal limo. Smaller is cheaper for personal transport in the last mile, and that does not change just because you replaced the driver. Cost reduction will take place in shared rental fleets. Cost reduction means cars get smaller, so car infrastructure can get smaller, so last-mile alternatives gain space, so transit gains space and ridership. AV is not in conflict with transit, rather, it redefines the bottlenecks of transit modalities. If you need a sit-down vehicle with a cabin for your trip, you still don't need additional empty seats - unless you pay a premium, you will be crammed into the lightest, smallest thing that is roadworthy. Only an enthusiast will bother with lugging a huge vehicle around town if you can rent that size on demand. That goes for the car and it goes for the train. You still want to have transit to cover longer distances along major corridors, but the effective coverage of all stops is bolstered if you can pick up a bike or scooter share at either end of the trip.
  • salmonfamine 4y ago
    There is no reason that self-driving will create a transit modality that is more conducive to smaller vehicles. That is an energy cost “problem.”
  • maccam94 4y ago
    The last mile is only a problem because people live in single-family housing zones, where there is not enough density for mass transit. We created this type of land use for several mostly not good reasons. Trains are far more efficient than car infrastructure. Why do commuters need a self driving car if there are trains that run by your block every 5 minutes, and get you to your office block in 10-20?
• mrshadowgoose 4y ago
  Build trains...on every single road in existence? Neither my house or workplace is adequately serviced by public transport, and even if they both were, I wouldn't use it unless legally or financially forced to. I enjoy proceeding directly from point A to B in the comfort of a private space, and so do very many other people. The waste of personally-owned automobiles is admittedly abhorrent. Electrification and self-driving systems (and the resulting fleets of cheap automated taxis) will go a long way towards reducing the waste inherent to automobiles.
  • wizofaus 4y ago
    Can you give an example of a large metropolis anywhere in the world where it's realistic for a significant percentage of the population to all be able to enjoy "proceeding directly from point A to B in the comfort of a private space" without any significant externalities? Or are you suggesting we need to massively decentralise?
    • tuatoru 4y ago
      If Point A is your desk at home, and Point B is the fridge, there are a few. Only one or two nationalities would insist on using a vehicle for that trip, though.
  • opportune 4y ago
    You could probably put a streetcar on every other street in many dense locales. In fact historically that’s how they were set up The problem is after the 50’s, in much of the country, development consists of large residential-only suburban developments feeding into highways. So streetcars won’t work for that
    • jefftk 4y ago
      Street cars are not much easier to automate than driverless cars, though. It's only fully separated trains that we automate currently.
      • 4y ago
• onionisafruit 4y ago
  I’m not sure what real problem self driving cars are supposed to solve aside from some people aren’t able to drive. Some might say that self driving cars would be safer than human driven cars, but that fails to account for the fact that any safety improvements from self driving cars can be built into active safety features in regular cars.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    I don’t want to drive but I still want to go somewhere
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    > I’m not sure what real problem self driving cars are supposed to solve aside from some people aren’t able to drive there could presumably be large improvements in the ratio of cars to people.
    • onionisafruit 4y ago
      The ratio would be improved by more people sharing cars. It seems like that can be done regardless of whether that car is self driving. If Car2Go hadn’t been driven out of business by VC money subsidizing Uber rides, it would be improving that ratio for us today.
• SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
  Fast forward ten years. They are trains, sans every major problem with trains: almost no fixed infrastructure, no last mile problem, no expensive human driver/conductor, yet similar vehicle construction cost per seat. Eventually they'll block off a lane of every major freeway and you'll be able to go anywhere in the country at an average of 160 mph, with no need for bulldozers, eminent domain, new viaducts, years of environmental review, etc.
  • sschueller 4y ago
    I would argue that asphalt has a much shorter life span than rail infrastructure.
    • incone123 4y ago
      Can you explain that further? In my area, both require frequent maintenance.
• concordDance 4y ago
  Trains are incredibly expensive. Both making the lines and using them. Judging by HS2 it costs around £200 million per km of track. And it also costs around £0.5 per mile to use and door to door travel times are generally 2-3x higher on public transport. Trains are NOT a solution.
• rdsubhas 4y ago
  Oh yes. Delete everything and build a new city from scratch.Easily solved. /s