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Comment by shye | Hacker News Reader

If we're allowed to dream, make it public transit, as private cars, regardless of how they are driven, are a climate disaster we can not afford.

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I imagine the ideal situation would be a hybrid. Trains for the bulk of transport and self driving cars for the large tail of odd trips. When you want to get home from your friends house at 1AM there is no traffic on the roads, and taking PT is a 1+ hour trip while uber is 10 minutes. There will never be super fast PT connecting every odd route that runs frequently all through the night.

Cars could be radically reimagined for this use case to be much smaller and more efficient to be more like an ebike with a box around it for weather proofing.

Why not? Public transport follows static routes, but there’s nothing to stop personalised routes based on whose on the public transport, especially while off peak.

Personalised routes is not really much different than uber pool. Maybe the government should run a public version of this. But I think there will always be some trips that are so low volume (particularly late at night) that it makes sense to just have a single occupant car rather than a whole bus moving one person.

That’s fair. Or possibly some mixture of thicc transport for major routes which fragments into individualised rides at the edge

I guess we can use a bit of 44 petawatts of solar energy reaching Earth in electric cars.

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