Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

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I still have to facepalm at the sheer lengths we’ll go through to avoid building rail or better transit. Yes, let’s have hundreds of startups squandering billions of dollars in investment to replace the lowly bus driver. That’s way better than spending that money in, say, light rail and trolley car systems, expanding existing subway networks, completing desperately needed infrastructure projects, or modernizing and automating existing rail service.

Putting the soap box aside for just a moment however, I could see this being feasible for static bus routes, assuming your city maintains the roads and signals along that route so the ML algorithms piloting the multi-ton death machine on open roads isn’t distracted by a new pot hole or missing road stripe. Since no city in America actually does this though, these things seem about as reliable as the “self-driving” Teslas under Vegas. Then you throw in the need to retrain the algorithm every time the route changes, and the millions in expenses that’ll cost versus the few thousand it takes to retrain a human driver on a new route…

Yeah, nevermind, breaking out the soap box again. Stop trying to short-change infrastructure investments and just invest in the infrastructure already. It won’t make some SV VC fund richer, sure, but it’ll at least go towards something useful and necessary for the city’s occupants.

Many urbanists seem to have a severe case of "train brain" where they can not see how expensive and impractical trains are for contemporary transportation needs. Trains are a solution to a problem from a century ago, and fair very poorly when evaluated capability and cost per passenger mile basis to alternatives. I'm am extremely optimistic about the future of public transportation, but that future is right-sized autonomous vehicles and not fixed route hundred ton trains that move a lot of empty seats.

Most of all, train routes are not adaptable, bus routes are. Trains are definitely nicer from a ride experience though. I feel there is room for improvement in the design of buses.

Jane Jacobs argued that trains are suitable for well established routes of travel. First the bus, then the train.

> Most of all, train routes are not adaptable, bus routes are.

Totally, and this is true on a microscale too. 1,000s of train commuters are regularly delayed by a "sick passenger" on a rail line. With buses, following busses can go around any stopped bus.

I have light rail literally a 5 minute walk from my house in an inner ring suburb, and I never use it. It was built to go downtown 100 years ago, and I never go downtown for anything. It's completely stuck, has to still cross over streets and follow traffic patterns, and then only runs every half an hour l. Instead I just drive. Yes I hate it too.

So light rail or trolleys is the same but worse and more expensive (plus they also still have drivers).

For this to get used, it needs to:

- not be beholden to traffic or congestion. Like a subway or the L? Or dedicated lanes for busses could work and may be drastically cheaper

- needs to be able to service lots of destinations and changing needs. Subways do this by building new lines and stations (again, $$$)

-needs to be relatively clean and safe. This is an actual concern people have that has to be addressed.

> Or dedicated lanes for busses could work and may be drastically cheaper

This is discussed a bit in urban planning circles, one of the reasons trams or light rail is preferred is political, it's much harder for some austerity government to come into power in a city and remove tramlines than remove bus and bike lanes.

Literally this right here. For all the folks jumping in and downvoting my OP by screeching the same tired talking points Capital uses to grease the wheels of politics (“it’s cheaper per passenger mile”, “no more empty seats”, “nobody goes downtown anymore anyway”, “adapt to the dynamism of your urban development”), the reality is that trains are damn near impossible to cut through BS austerity versus flimsy bus and bike lanes. That’s the point. We’re a grown-ass species that still behaves like chaotic toddlers when it comes to urban planning (we don’t really give actual planners the resources, authority, and timelines they need to execute), letting Capital dictate where to build fancy neighborhoods and malls in the middle of nowhere because it’s cheaper for them, rather than forcing and incentivizing modern development near existing transit infrastructure. In other words, we literally permit the developments they then use to justify dismantling mass transit projects in the future, and then a whole bunch of goldfish swarm the comments to go “NoBoDy CoUlD hAvE pReDiCtEd ThIs!”

The brutal core of this argument remains those who demand we take urban planning and development seriously to benefit the masses, versus those who seek fortune and riches bootlicking those who would benefit from chaos and disorganization. I hate to be that blunt about it, but I think the HN crowd can swallow that bitter medicine better than most.

If you’re all-in on a car-focused city, then you’re going to be disappointed. If you have gripes with your current mass transit (like Boston’s infamous Green Line), then it’s better to address those gripes directly than throw the baby out with the bathwater in favor of something newer, shinier, and worse.

Great you've got your trains. Where I need to go is 3 miles away from the station. How do I get there if I don't want to haul a bike on the train? What about when the austerity government comes into power and cuts this last-mile connectivity? Does everyone who doesn't live within half a mile of a train station not matter?

This bus-hate is irrational and self-defeating. A successful mass transit system has multiple modes of transport. Making one of them cheaper than it is now can only be a good thing.

you already put me off reading your comment with the lead. when you lose on logos, retreat to pathos i guess

Yeah I think my complaint still stands, which is that they already tried this where I live, and having a literal train straight downtown did not incentivize building there at all.

growing up is realizing that solving self-driving is an easier problem than getting rail built with the current American political process.

Google has spent less so far on building fully self-driving cars than the state of California has spent on HSR and they have only built 22 miles out of 171, never mind that the selected route is clearly the outcome of some stupid politicking.

Light rail also kinda sucks if I am being honest, at least in every city I have lived in.

Well, in developed countries the wage cost of the busdrivers are >50% all other costs. So you could almost double the number of buses, making it much more attractive to take a bus.

Kind of a weird take. Don't places that are considered to have great public transport have lots of buses?

Just as driverless trains are a thing, it seems obvious that buses should also mature to be driverless?

Driverless trains are still only used on a minority of railways, and typically only on networks specifically designed for them. I would be very hesitant to support driverless buses with the currently available level of artificial intelligence: buses run on roads of various surfaces and dimensions, navigate around unpredictable diversions and share traffic with hundreds of other road users in a frighteningly complex system.

Plus, even once you've designed a system that can do all that safely, you'll still need staff on board if you want to collect fare revenue.

Waymo is pretty safe already and there's no reason to think technology won't keep improving.

Fare evasion is an interesting point. Of course you can't completely avoid it, as it happens on rail too. But you could install a turnstile on the bus.

in sf, even very wealthy people frequently fare evade bc enforcement is close to nonexistent

And I articulate that position at the bottom of my screed. It could be, but only if cities actually maintain the infrastructure those driverless busses run on - and since no city in America does, all we’re really pitching here is eliminating a job to make service worse to justify cutting it entirely later.

It’s the same blinders I see time and time again: you cannot solve an inherently political problem through technology alone.

> maintain the infrastructure those driverless busses run on

One of the innovations of modern self driving systems is not requiring any accomodation from the infrastructure. It's the same idea as "smart endpoints and dumb pipes".

> only if cities actually maintain the infrastructure those driverless busses run on

You mean roads? Yeah I guess if a city isn't up to maintaining its roads, it's pretty f*cked anyway.

> you cannot solve an inherently political problem through technology alone

Often technology moves a problem away from the realm of politics. Politics is a game of allocating limited resources. If technology brings abundance, the question of allocation is way less important.

The problem as always is NIMBYism. It's not the desire to improve or the budgets that pose a barrier, rather it's the individuals whose housing arrangements would be negatively affected that raise a fuss. They rob all political will from the movement.

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