Comment by jaxbot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaxbot | Hacker News Reader

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To be fair, though, we theoretically don't need the car industry at all. Tesla is building an electric industry to solve the emissions problem created by a transportation industry that does not need to exist.

Take NYC for example. MTA enables transportation to just about anywhere in the city, all through an electric, mass-transit trolley system.

If we look at the history of municipal transportation, it looks pretty clear that trolleys were winning over the majority of the car industry up until GM took over trolleys[1] and shut them down to essentially require people to own cars to do any transportation outside of biking and walking.

I think what Tesla is doing is wonderful, but I feel like the problem they are having to solve didn't need to exist in the first place, and the petrol car industry got us in a bad situation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi...

You do realise that not everyone is living in big vivid cities with perfect transportation?

For people in rural/urban areas cars are essential.

And don't get me wrong, i agree with everything you say, but that problem won't be solved so easily.

Absolutely, but the car industry didn't need to innovate there much because demand already existed. The point I was getting at is that we ripped out municipal transit systems, then built spread out cities where implementing mass transit would not be cost effective (i.e. Orlando, FL) but work well with cars. I'm no expert, though. It's just a thought I frequent on whenever looking at the state of transit and where we're going.

> we theoretically don't need the car industry at all

Oh, so we reached the new milestone of 100% people living in urban centers and nobody has let me know ? :)

Obviously a ton of people need cars every single day to actually move from their home to their work place, because, you know, there's not just public transportation everywhere (and even when there is, it can be crappy and inefficient as hell, too).

> Take NYC for example. MTA enables transportation to just about anywhere in the city, all through an electric, mass-transit trolley system.

From my time living in a suburb with a car and living in NYC with no car, the MTA is really really inconvenient and filthy. I wouldn't want to have a car in NYC, but I also wouldn't want to be there in the first place.

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