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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Self driving cars my pick for best solution. You can have fewer cars services more people with higher efficiency. It's all wins across the board.

I hope the bloggers solution ideas aren't "better public transportation". Public transportation sucks, even in Europe. A pre-requisite to good public transportation is poor infrastructure for private transportation. I view asking for better public transportation as asking for a faster horse. We can do way better than that.

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> Public transportation sucks, even in Europe.

Although I've only visited, I thought the public transportation in France was very good. Those buses move super fast. In America it's common to have to ride a bus for over an hour to get to your destination that's not that far by car standards. Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say this?

Self driving cars doesn't change much.

Supposing that there would exist car sharing systems such that a single car may be used throughout the day by several people, then we could cut back on parking spots, but I'm sure there will be many that own their own self driving car and share it with no one.

During morning rush hour the only difference from now would be that commuters could do the crossword puzzle instead of focusing on traffic.

Incorrect. If you have self-driving cars, the entire flow of traffic could be much more efficient, virtually eliminating traffic jams.

You could drive at the speed limit with a lot smaller distance between cars, etc, packing in a greater density of people without sacrificing speed.

I think you'll see some gains in efficiency, but negligible compared to how efficiently we can move people via rapid transit. At the end of the day you're still going to be having most often a single person in a large vehicle that takes up a lot of room on the road.

This has yet to be proven. An efficiency gain does not mean the elimination of traffic jams.

With sufficiently good self-driving systems, it is obviously the case that you can safely drive cars more closely together than you can safely do with people. It is not obviously much smaller - you only get to shrink the portion of time it takes the human to react, not everything else involved in stopping or maneuvering the vehicle.

That's just not true, you can't say that about all european cities. Vienna has excellent public transport for example.

Public transportation sucks at a fundamental level. It's a graph with an extremely limited number of nodes on a completely fixed schedule. That's clearly inferior to free travel from any point to any point.

Given equal travel time I'd pick an autonomous car over train or bus 100% of the time. I'd pick a self driven car 100% of the time when not inebriated. For the most part faster travel time in a train or bus isn't a sign of their superiority but a sign of failure in proper infrastructure for cars. =I've been throughout Europe. Including two weeks in Vienna. I still think public transportation sucks and asking for more is asking for a faster horse.

In the United States I'd argue there isn't a single city with good public transportation. Not one. Some folks will list NYC as a good example. I don't consider a city with the single worst commute time in the entire country as a positive example. [1]

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/longest-...

Cars suck at a fundamental level too, because only a quite limited amount of people can move from "any point" to "any point". Otherwise there everyone is stuck for hours. That does not happen nearly as often with public transport or bikes. You also need to sacrify a fair amount of your cities to cars, parking alone takes a lot of space.

Your infrastructure argument works in both ways: The fact that there's no city with working public transport in the US is a result of communities who primarily plan for cars, nothing more.

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