Good public transit > self driving cars
Good public transit > self driving cars
23 comments
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I read this in the voice of Adam Something.
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@yogthos How about a city like NYC that bans human driven vehicles altogether and has a network of autonomous vehicles of varying sizes constantly available on the street for both cargo and passenger travel. You need to get from brooklyn to an address in midtown? You call up a ride on your phone. One immediately drops out of traffic, picks you up, and takes you where you need to go. No human behavior caused traffic jams or accidents. For less specific destinations, bus or van sized vehicles.
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No. That only solves some of the issues, and creates brand new ones.
You haven't solved the inherent inefficiencies of having everyone sit in their own cars. The same bottlenecks will still exist and will still cause congestion, only with automation you can have slightly more capacity because it's taking out the delays between one driver moving and the driver behind reacting and starting to move as well.
All the issues with tires rubbing asphalt creating micro rubber particles will stay, as will the massively cost ineffective infrastructure needed to support mass car travel like freeway interchanges, as will the fact that you need orders of magnitude more materials to manufacture enough cars to do the job of just a few hundred trains.
And having the cars autonomous will make them even more vulnerable to cyber attacks than modern cars already are.
Also, trains are even easier to automate than cars. I live in Vancouver and we've had autonomous trains since 1986.
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@HiddenLayer555 In NYC, my example, how many more train lines do you suppose you would need? Above ground? Underground? Are you going to lay track on every street? underground? Are you sure this would be more efficient than a network of smaller vehicles? There is no need for everyone to sit in their own car if it is all electric and automated. A single person vehicle, if if even existed, could be much smaller.
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thats just cars with extra steps.
good public transit does exactly this, except more efficiently.
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@umbrella "good public transit does exactly this, except more efficiently." Not really, if it is al on one electric grid. Think of it as one giant train with the cars broken up and separated.
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Why not make these cars bigger, so they can pick up and drop off a chain of multiple parties of travellers more efficiently?
Once demand's been established, we could even do away with the phone app and just run the cars on a schedule.
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This idea sounds really bussin
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@Cevilia That's why I said varying sizes of vehicles. The app would just be to enter your destination and pay, assuming there wasn't a universal charge or tax for usage. You don't want them to stop everywhere, just where they are needed.
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I don't think automated vehicles are necessarily bad, there are some trains that are autonomous that work well as far as I know, but this in no way means that autonomous cars are a good idea. Not Just Bikes has a very interesting (albeit long, but you don't need to watch much of it to get the gist) of how autonomous cars could make cities an absolute nightmare, I recommend it!
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Sounds good, and if you don't own the autos personally then the space needed to store them can also be partially mitigated. But it's so so so much more environmentally damaging (which directly translates into money, as it's more materials, more labour, more transport, more machines, etc) than a train where the equivalent of one auto can pull several cheap cars with a ton of people. And it's so much more complicated to get right, you don't have a successful model to copy from. It's not that it's a bad idea, it's that trains and buses are a much better idea.
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@Aria Between cities, I am all about the train, and in smaller towns a trolley.
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The practical problem with this is that individual transport is (1) horribly space-inefficient, (2) doesn't scale well at all. Self-driving vehicles improve both slightly, but it still sucks ass compared to a light rail line. It also sucks from the environmental perspective, putting microplastics from rubber everywhere, overproducing hundreds of tons of lithium-ion batteries, etc.
There are other issues too.
You call up a ride on your phone.
What if you don't have a phone for whatever reason? E.g. it's dead or you've lost it?
With public transit, if you have some cash or a plastic card, you can board. And I'm a proponent of making public transit free (at the point of use) in cities, so you don't need anything at all to travel.
One immediately drops out of traffic
How would a pedestrian cross this "traffic"? Do we cover everything in crosswalks and stoplights, making the system grind to a halt at rush hour (just like cars), or do we force everyone to take those pods? In any case this is just awful urbanism.
No human behavior caused traffic jams or accidents
... instead we will inevitably get much worse outages because someone hacked the control system or the internet is down. I'll stick with human tram drivers thank you very much.
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@balsoft 1 - Who says public transport can't coexist in this imagiunary world?
2 - bridges for pedestrians or tunnels for vehicles.
3 - because nobody can hack the streetlights. The internet is already everywhere. Luddites are irrelevant.
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@balsoft Also, this whole system could also be free (i.e. tax funded)
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23 comments
We won't get railways to every door. But the title says Public Transit. So various sized rail vehicles will connect with various sized road vehicles for the last mile. Everything electric and everything autonomous.
Nobody will need to own a car in urban locations. Many places won't allow access anyway.
We'll all pay less for ownership. Less per mile transit. Less for goods due to reduced transport costs.
We'll enjoy our streets as a place to socialise once the danger, noise and parked cars are gone. Multi lane highways will be replaced by parks and cycle routes.
We'll enjoy our time not wasted sitting in traffic jams.
All this won't stop the greed merchants peddling their lies and duping the gullible though.