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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Do we have to have this conversation in every single thread that mentions driverless cars?

We get it, an extremely vocal subset of reddit/HN who lives` in downtown cities likes public transit more than cars.

If you believe that AI cars are snake-oil in a near peak hype-cycle, then there would be a real concern that that non-solution is distracting from the very real problem of how to move people at scale.

Yes, and every time AI comes up, the downsides of AI are also brought up. Because they're important to talk about.

Anyway, the driverless car pilots are happening in our dense city downtowns. If it was all confined to Palo Alto and other techie suburbs then maybe we wouldn't care as much.

It's a technically impressive technology that's right at a key inflection point with potentially huge ramifications to how 15% of the economy is structured.

I think I'm an outlier because I like trains, bikes, and cars, but you have to pick the right tool for the job. In the US, new train lines are almost never the right tool.

Or rather, it is the right tool, but the constituents are so uneducated about urbanism that they flatly reject it. Kind of an interesting dynamic when you think about it.

It probably is not the same people having that discussion in every thread. Also, people may have views that can change overtime.

Hope so. It's actually the first time I've seen it, but glad it's being raised, and hope it gets raised every time.

As far as I see, this isn't solving a problem as much as it is getting in at the ground floor on a technology that will take even more autonomy away from people.

Most people on earth live in cities. Most of those cities have working public transport.

Focusing on cars so much is to the detriment of all of humanity, hence the common pushback.

And bikes. My first thought was “oh god here comes the pro-bike bullshit again”.

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