Comment by goodcanadian
9 years ago
Or how about moving trains on rails?
I am of two minds about self driving cars. From a technology point of view, I think its great, but I don't really see what problem they solve that would not be better solved by ubiquitous public transportation (trains, mostly). Now, Musk wants to carry cars on sleds through tunnels under LA? Why not just build some damn trains?
EDIT: the real news is that he wants to improve boring machines which is not a bad goal. There will be more and more tunnels regardless of what you actually put in them, so faster, more efficient boring is a worthwhile goal.
Shared self-driving cars would essentially be an ultra-efficient bus service. Instead of huge (often half-empty) vehicles driving set routes, you have small custom electric vehicles (remember, the interior could be anything) going exactly where they're required.
Keep the trains, but replace buses, taxis, and probably quite a lot of private cars with an automated fleet. It would be a huge change, a huge improvement in many lives.
I thought this too completely inefficient for your transport dollar. I actually thought maybe this was satire.
It's about the last mile connectivity. People don't want to walk/uber from home to the train station and from the train station to work. Having a car on rails solves this problem.
When public transport is ubiquitous, the last mile is really just that, a mile, tops (in urban environments). The difference between public transit somewhere like Japan, where everything is linked and you have intermodal hubs efficiently connecting higher speed and lower speed transit and what we have in US cities is staggering. It's downright easy to cross the entire country in the span of a few hours, only stepping foot outside for the very short walk to the nearest metro. Then you usually just have metro -> shinkansen -> metro, all connected to eachother, to get to where you have to go. You might need to change your metro once, but that's hardly an inconvenience when the connections are in the same building and you just walk a few feet from one platform to the next.
Compare that to Seattle, where my friend got lost trying to get from the light rail to the incredibly slow train up to Vancouver because they're several blocks apart. And then had to do the same on the Vancouver end for the same reason. To make matters worse, the train between the two cities is actually slower than the train between Tokyo and Hiroshima, with roughly 3x the distance.