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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

The US would benefit much more from a good railroad system.

Everybody can drive a car. They have solved the wrong problem.

Trains do not solve the same issue as Waymo/Rideshares/Taxis. For example, if I want to go from SF to somewhere in the East Bay, I would walk to my nearest bus stop, ride the bus to the train station, then hop on a train to Berkeley. But now I'm a couple miles from my friends' house. Relatively few people want to go to my friends' house each day, so it doesn't make sense to put a train station there. Maybe there should be a bus stop, but if everyone there owns cars anyway, the city might have other priorities. But I, the dude visiting, don't have a car. So I hire a cab/Uber/Waymo to bring me the last couple miles.

Yeah I agree. I'm very pro public transit -- I live in NYC and didn't get my license until my 40s -- but there is absolutely a need for last mile connections once you leave transit dense parts of a city. Or the occasional errand that requires hauling some stuff around. Or a number of other reasons you'd need a car a couple times a month.

The reality is we decided to invest mainly in car infrastructure for the past 100 years and it's going to take a long time to fix that. In the meantime, I'll be happy with an automated car and diminishing car ownership.

Funny enough, Miami is one of the few US cities that does have a pretty large rail system. There are several types of rail and it is fairly fast and effective. You can even take the Silver Meteor to NYC with an average speed of 51 mph. That's a better average speed than many European lines over a similar 1400 mile distance. Compare: Brussels-Athens 41mph avg, Stockholm-Paris 54mph avg, Amsterdam-Lisbon 47mph. The fastest EU route over that distance is probably Berlin-Madrid at 65mph, and the Amtrak is cheaper, has no changes, and is usually more comfortable than any of those.

If you want (relatively) high speed, you can take the Brightline to Orlando, 236 mi in 3.5h aka 67 mph average. That's on par with Brussels-Amsterdam (68mph), Amsterdam-Paris (80mph), but indeed far below the marquee EU/Chinese/Japanese HSR routes of 150+ mph average speed.

More generally: large parts of the eastern US had a developed railroad system (and often still do, for freight.) You can look up old maps and see how widespread they were. The economics mostly just didn't work out because as car ownership rose, the population density wasn't high enough to justify them over cars.

I'm thinking that as prevalence of self-driving cars increases, demand for trains is going to increase. People will quickly start to enjoy not needing to drive, and flying sucks. It's a lot of investment up front, but trains become an obvious cash cow. Not to mention if you can pair it with real-estate deals at stations.

> They have solved the wrong problem.

Human drivers kill >30K/year.

So displace human drivers with public transportation?

Precisely, Waymo is a form of public transportation.

Buses driven by a robot are cheap public transportation.

I've heard this argument a lot, but is the bus driver really more than a rounding error on the balance sheet of the transportation company? I have no experience in this field, but I would imagine the infrastructure for buying and maintaining a fleet of busses, creating a route network, dealing with ticketing, dealing with disruptions, etc, etc, makes up most of the costs around running a public transport company?

I think the benefit to transportation companies would not just be about salaries, but also about predictability in staffing. I've experienced a few times in the past that a strong flu season causes specific bus lines to be serviced with reduced frequency due to staffing shortages.

But concretely, regarding the staffing costs, if I roughly read the financial report section correctly, it looks like for the Berlin transport agency, salaries make up half of all expenses[0]!

Given that that's such a big portion, I think autonomous buses could likely unlock a lot of mobility in big cities by having more flexibility in creation of additional bus routes (as you don't have to consolidate multiple routes into one because you have to pay drivers for each).

[0]: https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:67ef63fc-3fd1-4e95-aae6-2ab8c8c2b...

> is the bus driver really more than a rounding error on the balance sheet of the transportation company?

Yes. For my suburban bus system, about 30% of the total budget (operating AND capital) goes to drivers (and related support like HR, managers, etc.).

Disagree. Sufficient robotic cars will essentially act like trains and will drop you off to your door.

> Everybody can drive a car.

Not everyone can/wants to own a car, though.

> Everybody can drive a car.

I can't.

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