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Comment by rwhitman | Hacker News Reader

If silicon valley put it's weight against a new investment boom in mass transportation (of any kind) it would do this country a world of good.

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It has. The twin bets are called Uber and driverless cars.

I know that's not what you meant, but that's absolutely what silicon valley had put its weight behind to solve that problem.

Hyperloop as well, down in SoCal (though still super early).

And electric cars.

I really want to see what could happen if we could take the principles and lessons of uber and automated vehicles and apply them to mass transit use cases, like on-demand buses to fill in situations where rail lines are deficient, agile new strategies for restoring or expanding rail service in places it's been neglected etc.

Use the knowledge gained from the uber on-demand logistics revolution to fill in the gaps in car-free transportation options to get us on par with europe. And so forth

Why does it need to be car-free... if uber were actually ride sharing, it would pool people based on destination, cut relative per-person costs, and work pretty well.

There's no reason localized governments couldn't get behind a localized initiative, that was more volunteer driven.

The Uber CEO described his vision for a 'perfect uber' last year, and what he described was a bus. I'm sure he sees it differently, as some revolutionary concept, but the description was definitely of a bus on a loop.

Heh, I know what he means, but the quote still makes me want to give him a shake and say 'this is a bus, the thing you're describing is a bus'

> Uber CEO Travis Kalanick often talks about his dream of the perfect Uber trip. "It's the perpetual trip, the trip that never ends," he said at the Digital-Life-Design conference in Europe last October. "The driver picks one passenger up, picks another passenger up, drops off the first passenger, but then picks up passenger number three and drops off passenger number two."

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