Hacker News Reader

Comment by gessha | Hacker News Reader

People will come up with the craziest solutions to problems solvable with 200 year old technology (trains). Why you need these heavy metal boxes instead of taking a train is beyond me. Cars are optimal for trips below 100-ish miles. Anything above is high speed train and airplanes.

View on HN

You're making a very big assumption that once you get dropped off by the train at your destination that you aren't going to need a vehicle once you're there.

Rent one?

Have you rented a car recently? I'd rather drive my own car for 3 hours. Then I'll also have an easier time securely bringing a whole bunch of stuff, which I sometimes do also.

It's definitely worth reminding anyone that this is why you need train stations to have good bus service to the surrounding area. You can't even take a commuter rail (in a city with decent rail transit) unless your destination has good bus service or a friend to pick you up.

These things come hand in hand, if you want to make it work things either need to be walking distance from the station or with reasonably frequent buses. If a bus comes once an hour (actually the case in my city off rush-hour) it may as well not exist.

Or you take a folding bike with you. Brompton even make an electric version for those that need it.

Such an easy solution, all we need to do is raise every city and suburb in North America to the ground and rebuild them around a massively expanded rail network which we also need to build. It would be nice if NA cities were already amenable to walking and public transit and served by ubiquitous passenger rail but there’s a century of car infrastructure instead that nothing but a century of overhaul will fix.

> raise every city

raze = tear down

Absolutely, instead of actually fixing the problem, let’s invent muskisms like creating underground highways by boring tunnels underneath cities or ferrying said cars across long distances with a train.

That’s the public infrastructure equivalent of technical debt.

A better solution imho is to create a plan for building train capacity where it makes sense (high traffic areas where trips are such and such - Boston-NYC-Philly-DC) and fund them through public-private contracts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com