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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Train-advocates being against self-driving cars will be recognized as being equivalent to environmentalists being against nuclear power. Fortunately, I don't expect train-advocates as being nearly as successful. Once someone has tried Waymo, there's no going back to the old ways.

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But you're ignoring the core point (in both your metaphor and in the argument at hand):

- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.

($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)

All take Waymo dedicated taxi - it sucks just like cars in heavy traffic.

All take Waymo shared taxi/minibus - it is better than current mass transit and almost as good as car during low traffic.

I'm not against self driving cars. Self driving cars are an improvement over not self driving cars.

But self driving cars are not public transit. That's a grift that the people making the self driving cars are selling, so they can sell a bunch of self driving cars. The most prominent example is the hyperloop in vegas.

Self driving cars will not solve the traffic, safety, time, or cost concerns around cars. They will help a little bit, marginal gains. But they will not solve it because it's not a departure from the status quo, it's just a continuation of it.

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