Comment by infecto

These become such silly arguments. Why are you arguing against autonomous vehicles in America? Your examples on a base general case are not applicable and while I agree there are areas where things can be improved, for most American cities it does not make sense. Most all European examples including Switzerland are not applicable. Yes yes you have 5k population towns but they are all connected to very few arteries and in probably most cases it’s a single major road and commuter rail. Your summers are much more mild and winters (in the plains) around slightly warmer at the extremes. Doesn’t something like 60% of the Swiss population live in flats? You live in a small town probably in a flat and you take a train a few miles away to another larger city that is also relatively small and compact and you have much nicer weather if you walk around. These are such silly comparisons. What works in your geography because it’s small, highly concentrated in apartments, lack of sprawl, usually only one major road, more mild weather, makes it a lot easier to solve.

Let’s say you have redesigned a road in DFW, the question is so what? What does that accomplish? There are definitely pockets of improvement to be had but largely nobody is commuting via bicycle in DFW unless you have an extremely short commute. Those few miles of road won’t help a bus and again highlighting it’s a distribution last/first mile problem. The Swiss and most of Europe just by historical design, lower growth and cultural differences don’t have to solve for last and first mile (keep in mind a last mile could easily be 5 miles). There is no solution at scale short of rebuilding and designing an entire city. Autonomous vehicles are a nice solution here. They may support first and last mile allowing cities to implement concentrated transit options but they will also just get some number of cars off the road and create safer and better traffic.

I am happy Switzerland has a natural fit for commuter rail. It’s simply not happening in most of America so we should not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.