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Comment by mathieuh | Hacker News Reader

You’re not the only one. It seems to me we should be trying to get rid of cars in favour of mass transport or two-wheel personal transport. Having personal transport in the form of cars makes little sense in cities where space is at a premium.

Where I live, to get across the city on public transport takes 40 minutes and a bus change. I can cycle it in 20. Replacing human-driven cars with driverless cars is going to make no difference to that.

When I think back to the covid lockdowns and how much nicer and more spacious the city felt with no cars on the roads, that’s what I think cities should be like.

And for rural areas, I understand in the US they have arrow-straight and wide roads pretty much everywhere, but where I live the rural roads even 10 minutes out of the city are very narrow and winding, I’m not sure how well a driverless car would be able to handle that.

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The limiting factor for increasing bus frequency and adding new routes is the lack of operators.

Having self-driving buses will obviously help in cities. And given the higher momentum, the margin for error is lower for self-driving buses and it's better to start with cars.

I’m not sure self driving buses are possible with out something approaching general AI. The bus driver needs to be able to respond in real time to questions like does this bus go to X. They also need to be able to communicate nonverbally with passengers waiting at bus stops.

The limiting factor is money. Plenty of people are down to drive buses. But if you think about it a bus is just a gimped version of a light rail / subway. It holds less people, is less comfortable, more expensive to maintain and operate, and being a bus gives it no benefit at all over rail. The only reason buses exist is because we made some terrible design mistakes with cars.

Ah this is first comment on HN I see that ever acknowledged two-wheel personal transport. In Asian countries which have even denser community and worse infrastructure, it's practically the miracle answer. I'm actually a bit surprised when I discover that western countries just, doesn't use it at all, or if they do it's the big variant that's almost as space-filling as a car anyway. It's the densest we can pack people together on the road while still caring about human dignity...

If we ignore the question about safety anyway

One big problem with two-wheel motorized transport is the emissions: motorcycles and scooters have horrible emissions. They're also really dangerous.

E-bikes are becoming really popular though, in some places. They're about the same speed as regular bicycles, but much easier and less tiring (/sweaty) to ride for most people, especially on hills. Here in Tokyo, every mother with small children has one now it seems.

It's fortunate that electric scooters have decent range and the (small) battery can be replaced easily, which matches the common petrol scooters with a canister of fuel at home. The overall tradeoff is much better than with cars.

Check out the Netherlands:

• https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=895

• https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=305

• https://youtu.be/ZsrVP7p33Ng?t=605

• https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=807

• https://youtu.be/VWDFgzAjr1k?t=664s

• https://youtu.be/bMJaMy-0ChA?t=268

• https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54?t=448

Freiburg, Germany is nice as well: https://youtu.be/6Vil5KC7Bl0?t=827

> When I think back to the covid lockdowns and how much nicer and more spacious the city felt with no cars on the roads, that’s what I think cities should be like.

Me too! Short of another global pandemic, the best thing to have on the ride beside "no cars" is self-driving vehicles.

I don’t follow why that’s the next best thing.

It seems like making cars more convenient would induce demand (i.e. add more cars), opposite of what the parent comments desire.

My expectation (from what I know of Waymo's current behavior) is that cars will be perfectly safe and predictable road citizens, no more threatening or dangerous than a Roomba.

Which completely fails in any dense city because all it takes is one random pedestrian to cut you off - and you won’t be moving for hours. Because no one is going to yield if you don’t make them. And waymo won’t try to make them because that is how you get accidents.

There is a reason city drivers are aggressive, and it’s not just because they’re stressed out. It’s literally necessary to make any forward progress in many cases.

Seems like the cars all need to talk to each other then these interactions can be auto negotiated ahead of time

Ah, the classic engineering approach.

When the cows don’t behave, it’s because they aren’t spherical enough.

Good luck with that. It works, to some degree, when you can control all the variables.

Good luck with that approach when you’re dealing with NYC pedestrians, or Midwest winters, or cyclones/hurricanes, or auto rickshaws, etc. etc.

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