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Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

Nashville's airport suffered gridlock yesterday: https://fox17.com/news/local/what-caused-the-over-14000-vehi...

Autonomous cars are not the solution to traffic issues. At best, the may make some driving situations slightly safer because humans are terrible drivers.

What we need is trains. Trains everywhere. We had this once in fact; we had passenger rail to every corner of europe and north america. Turning that back on would massively improve traffic.

We also need buses and mini-buses and taxis to get people to and from train stations. Autonomous driving makes this cheap and feasible.

The USA has proven to be... incapable of completing any public transport infrastructure anywhere near on budget or on time. This is a deeply rooted problem. Until this gets solved autonomous electric vehicles could theoretically just leapfrog the problem altogether. Point to point transportation also mostly solves the last mile problem.

Point to point transportation is not sustainable with a vehicle as large as a car. The physics are simply quite poor and there are too many people to move, at least in cities with real traffic like LA or NYC vs small edge case backups.

I disagree. Building trains in America is next to impossible in the modern day. Obtaining the property for the railways would be extraordinarily difficult, because America has such strong property rights and is such a legalistic society. It's a recipe for way over-budget and behind schedule projects. Just look at the California project. There's also very little expertise in the rail industry in America due to underinvestment in recent decades. Furthermore, the built environment is so spread out because it was built for cars, so you don't get the clustering effects of density around train stations. Rail isn't that helpful if you have to walk another 30 minutes from the station to actually get to your destination.

Also, I think your assertion that autonomous cars don't solve traffic is partially wrong. If entire fleets of cars can "think" as a whole, you can avoid some traffic problems, such as traffic waves, that occur due to individual decision-makers.

> There's also very little expertise in the rail industry in America due to underinvestment in recent decades.

we could solve this by importing entire crews from Europe or Asia, but knuckledraggers insist on cREaTinG lOCal UNioN jOBs

I don't believe that anyway. The USA has a very robust rail network, it's just all dedicated to freight. Building and maintaining railroads is not some forgotten capability; it's very high tech with robots/automation doing a lot of the work now.

Even with traffic waves, the capacity of a road is not infinite and trains beat it hand over fist, simply because of physics. Imagine a crowded highway with invisible cars: people would be sitting 30 feet x 15 feet apart. That is why there is traffic more than anything, the limits of that capacity with that really loose packing that cars enable.

Walking 30 mins from the station is no issue. Try walking through a far flung terminal at DEN or ATL or the new TBIT at LAX, you will walk 30+ mins from the gate before you hit your rideshare point I expect. Also, rail stations do not exist in a vacuum. They often interface with bus lines that go parallel or perpendicular to the rail routing, so that 30 min walk could just be a 2 min ride.

We also do have railbuilding experience in this country. LA metro has built out their entire network of over 100 rail stations within the last 35 years. This is the fastest rate of railbuilding on the entire continent, not just in the U.S., in a high land value land labor cost area to boot. As we speak multiple concurrent rail projects are being planned or actively built. Much of the build out is paid by a 1 cent sales tax measure that local voters approved with 71% in favor.

I agree that rail still wins on the capacity front by far. I was just pointing out that self driving cars should offer some improvements over the current state of traffic.

I don't think that walking for 30 minutes is "no issue". Of course at airports you have to walk 30 minutes because those are a special case, and you have no other option. Also, trips to/from the airport do not make up a large portion of the average person's trips.

A better and more common example would be going to a friend's house or grocery store. Compare:

Home>self driving car>destination

Home>bus>train>bus>destination (with likely higher amounts of walking between each)

Admittedly the car performs much worse our traffic score, but cars are essentially point-to-point which I think is a huge advantage. Additional advantages include privacy and cargo space.

Like it or not, our built environment has been made for cars. Metros still offer value for high density areas, but for the huge number of Americans that live in suburbs/exurbs, self-driving cars are the answer.

I am not arguing the car isn't supremely convenient. Even in Tokyo, drop two arbitrary point A or B about 5 miles as the crow flies apart and the car will win 9/10. That is beside the point. I am arguing against the idea that transit usage is impossible. Virtually everywhere that people take transit en masse, the car is faster. Seemingly there is some culturally learned impatience surrounding transit that is deep rooted in north american culture, to the point where the idea of taking a little extra time is an outright impossibility to most people. This is a highly individual culture where tragedy of the commons externalities are handwaved away in favor of a supremely convenient individual experience, as the climate of the earth is more damned by the year.

Tokyo (and a lot of other cities) has basically priced parking so that it is a luxury. You save a lot of money by taking public transport even if you own a car.

Unfortunately, our airport traffic is getting a Tesla Tunnel instead of a real train.

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