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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Self-driving cars are going to turn America's car-centric "hellscape" into a superpower with untold second order benefits.

Everything will be connected and commutable, especially the suburbs. Automated, on-demand delivery will become a part of everyday life.

Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.

All the clamor for trains and rail will go away when our roads become an even superior version of that. Private commuting to any destination, large homes with lots of land, same day delivery of everything.

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Self-driving cars are the magic pixie dust of transportation planning, brought out to justify noninvestment in public transit.

As a mode of transportation, self-driving cars already exist--they're basically a taxicab service, the main difference being that some people hope that self-driving might magically make the cost of providing a taxi service cheaper.

> Instead of busses and semis, we'll have small pods for smaller cargo and small parties. Highways will turn into logistics corridors, and we'll route people and goods seamlessly.

"Lots of small things going point-to-point" is a much more difficult problem to route, especially at high throughput, than "bundle things into large containers that get broken apart near their destination." In the space of transit, your idea is known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), and PRT systems have invariably underwhelmed every time they've been built, as they struggle to live up to their promise.

Rail transit is incredibly efficient at moving large numbers of people--a metro line can easily move a dozen lanes of highway traffic--and there is nothing that you can do to roads to make them approach that level of efficiency, in part because the routing problems are insurmountable.

China is going to reap more benefits from self driving cars, but they also have (in many cities at least) mass transit in place to truly do multi-modal trips (self driving cars at the end tips of subway rides).

The problem with self driving cars is that they can only optimize road bandwidth a bit more than they are now (and even then, only if you outlaw human drivers), they aren’t a magical shortcut to increasing bandwidth beyond indicated demand (like mass transit can).

The multi-modal hassle is why cars are so popular in the first place.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I just got back from Beijing and long journeys across the city in a taxi...they aren't really feasible. Yes, comfortable, but no, the traffic is still really really bad. Subway is much quicker, but the routes are often indirect and require one or two changes, but at least you know you'll get where you need to go.

If you ride the subway enough in Beijing or Shanghai, eventually you will come to the conclusion that both cities are just way too big. No matter how many subways that you build, getting from one place to another takes a minimum of 45 mins (including some walking on both ends). New York, London, Seoul, and Tokyo all suffer from similar problems -- giant metro systems, but these cities are huge.

At least you can often sit down in Tokyo if you aren't traveling on peak. In Beijing, you never get to sit unless you are clever about your route (e.g. taking the line 10 the long way around when going to West Beijing, rather than transferring to line 1 in guomao). A 1 hour+ trip standing feels a lot longer than 1 hour.

As you say, the solution of course is to not go that far on a daily basis. You can make your life convenient, as long as you are living alone.

That’s why you often end up with ‘cities within a city’ (ala wards, boroughs, districts, etc) and in those cases it’s easier to mentally model the overall city more like a small state.

If you’re sensitive to commute time, you’ll want to live in the same ‘city’ as you work, for instance, or at least nearby. But it will cost you a lot of money, and you’ll get a closet.

If you want the ‘big house with a lawn’ experience, you’ll pick a distant ‘city’ or even another ‘state’ (in this case, a city in a nearby suburb).

Typical case, it’s an hour+ end to end from one side to the other even on the fastest transit for Tokyo or London, and they have really good transit systems.

Singapore similar when it’s busy (which is actually quite a feat considering how small of an island it is).

It’s been awhile since I’ve been in Manhattan, but I remember it being roughly 1-2 hrs too.

Mega cities like Mumbai? Double that.

just one more lane bro I swear that's it it's just one more lane then the traffic will go away

Road lanes are like CPU cores. And like CPUs, adding more cores does not linearly scale up traffic capacity.

In the case of CPUs, there's sync and communication overhead; for highways, there's more turbulence and slowdown generated by lane-switching.

Adding more lanes encourages more driving. That's why it never reduces traffic

Same with computers. More power and bandwidth and storage space has largely meant our apps and websites have grown to fill it.

That's why we are focusing on adding GPU cores instead, but they can only do the same operation on a lot of data in parallel (much like mass transit).

lol

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