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  • honestly trains that are more affordable than airplanes is super exciting for me

  • Honestly, I want both. I live in Germany and my city has pretty decent public transit. But there are still way too many cars in the city, most streets have parking spaces on both sides, leaving only a small sidewalk. I want people to not be dependent on owning cars anymore. I want personal cars in the city to be replaced by self-driving cabs that you can just order when you need them. Imagine how cool that would be. There would be centralized (underground??) self-driving car storages and if you need a car, you just order one via an app and they just come to wherever you are autonomously and drive you wherever you want to go. You could basically get rid of all public parking spaces, it would be awesome.

    • I really like this idea! How would you get parasites to not use the self driving cabs in lieu of public transit? It’s a great idea for disabled folks and others who have a more difficult time using mass transit, but it seems like something rich people would monopolize.

      • How would you get parasites to not use the self driving cabs in lieu of public transit?

        Pricing. Taxes on robo-cabs that partially fund the cost of public transit. Subsidies for disabled people who need a robo-cab and can't use public transit.

        IMO there should also be an additional tax on self-driving cars for private use. It's ridiculous right now that many people use their cars for maybe 2 hours a day, and the other 22 they just sit parked somewhere.

    • The issue with the self-driving-cab concept, as a cure to car infrastructure, is it doesn't really fix the problem. Sure, maybe parking becomes less of an issue, but not roads. If anything they are worse. Not only is it still one person per car (usually), it also now has to drive around empty to pick up new passengers. At least a personal car never occupies or damages road infrastructure when it isn't in use.

      Busses are a legitimate solution for shorter distance travel that reduce infrastructure requirements. You can fit potentially dozens of people in a single vehicle, and they can be made to get you almost anywhere you need, with only a short walk required.

      • it also now has to drive around empty to pick up new passengers

        If it's picking up new passengers, that means it isn't sitting around parked for 8 hours.

        Additionally, how much time is spent looking for parking? How much time is spent disrupting traffic while trying to parallel park?

        While it's true that a car might end up driving around empty for a certain amount of time, it's only doing that in the short space needed to get to the next passenger. The empty trips will be much shorter than the trips with a passenger onboard. And, every time that happens it saves 2 parking spots. One for the passenger it just dropped off, and one for the passenger it's currently picking up.

        At least a personal car never occupies or damages road infrastructure when it isn't in use.

        You live in a place without on-street parking?

    • I can see a lot of possible futures if self-driving cars become common.

      In some, people use self-driving taxis whenever they need a car. In places like NYC where owning a car is a real hassle, self-driving cars mean you can ditch that annoyance and still enjoy the benefits of a car when you need one. That means urban living is much more popular, and high-rise building don't need to be built with obscene amounts of parking attached. Because nobody has to park their car when they're not using it, parking spaces and parking lots completely disappear. This opens up space for bike lanes or other uses. Because nobody has to worry about parking anymore, pedestrian malls are more common. People can just be dropped off and picked up in a small area nearby. In this scenario, mass transit might also be more common. People could take self-driving cabs from their homes or workplaces to the nearest transit hub, switch over to mass transit, and then get a self-driving cab on the other end to get to wherever they're going. This would be less convenient than taking a car the whole way, but if the pricing was right, and the mass transit was nice enough, people might want to save money this way. This would work especially well if you have things like express subway lines that go very quickly between two very popular spots.

      Unfortunately, there's the other end of the spectrum. In this one, people decide they want to own their self-driving cars. The fact that they can get to work, working while the car drives, means they want to live out in the middle of nowhere. So, instead of reducing urban sprawl it makes it much worse. Because everyone owns their own car, you still need lots of parking for the self-driving cars to use while the owner is at work. One possible benefit of this is that you don't need the parking right next to the associated building, so at least you can do away with parking scattered everywhere, ruining cities. OTOH, you will end up with some dystopian hellscape parking structures where 10k cars wait for their owners to call.

      It could get even worse too. If the rich all move deeper into the suburbs and self-driving cars make traffic more efficient, I could easily see cities passing laws that give cars much more priority even than they already have. Jaywalking might be considered an even bigger crime because not only are you interfering with the driving of one or two human drivers, you're disrupting the algorithm-optimized flow of traffic.

  • I know many don't like this but i'll say my opinion again:

    Public transport should be built on the coastlines, which coincidentally also are blue states, because there's a high population density and public transport makes sense there because of the frequency.

    Public transport does not and never will make sense in the midwestern and rural areas of US. The major reason for this is that people there simply largely (70% of people) don't want it. You can't get something through against the will of the local population. Just deal with it. You won't be able to take a train from the East Coast to the West Coast, you'll still have to fly (or drive) that distance.

149 comments