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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to a solved problem: trains.

You know what, in some parts of the world, they're automated! Driver-less trains, arriving every 3 minutes, running 24 hours with no union strikes or bad software that accidentally runs them into a kid or semi truck (if they walk out onto the rails it's really their own damn fault).

Individual personal transport is really a waste. I mean there's nothing wrong with having a car, but you shouldn't need it. It should be there in case you need to haul something or go way off the beaten path. All these single capacity cars taking people to and from work every morning is insane.

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i read stories about Uber/Lyft and i'm convinced that the authors just don't even consider bicycles - is this a US-Valley blind spot or something? i mean seriously - the problem of getting 3-4 km without a car? quelle horror... i'll grant you until recently it was annoying and having a train do the heavy lifting was a great combo but e-bikes are changing the way this stuff works. even in Auckland we're seeing them and the hills in this city are everywhere (we built it on a volcano field...) but e-bikes and some bikepath friendly investments are changing the 5-km radius of the isthmus. Uber in NZ will probably do just as well as Starbucks - I think there's one at the airport...

Er...have you tried biking around America's cities? Some are decent. New York and Chicago have a couple of dedicated paths along their respective bodies of water, and biking can be faster than taking the train. And both cities are big enough to support well-paved/painted cross-town roads.

But going off of those designated streets can be dicey. In New York I feel relatively safe because traffic is such a crawl anyway that, aside from getting doored by a inattentive taxi passenger, you probably won't get run over at a high speed.

And then you have many of the other cities in America. Dallas in particularly strikes me as a city especially un-optimized for bicyclists despite the huge amount of land there. I mean, there's plenty of lanes for cars, and just about nothing for bikes.

An initiative to change America's non-car culture would probably take as long as it would take to make self-driving electric vehicles mainstream. And automated vehicles are probably more viable when thinking of the future, as America's population continues to age and fewer people can physically bike (or even walk).

yeah agree - and i'd have said the same about Auckland until about 2-3 years ago. i guess the wider point is that it is weird that so much time/effort/treasure is being devoted to eliminating an entry level job and not investing in some pretty basic infrastructure. Auckland has just about had a heart attack trying to push through some planning rules that allow 3 story apartments and bike paths/PT in the city... i think that's the blind spot. check out the US civil engineers report card on infrastructure - seems to be a thing around the world. maybe if fewer deciders flew on private jets we'd have bridges that stay up? still disagree on future viability - sounds like tech for tech sake.

Small or midsize towns don't generally have the political will - or budget - to massively rework lots of basic infrastructure. Larger ones definitely don't, and the political history of ramming through such projects is often pretty ugly.

So time, effort, and treasure is spent on changes that can be politically accomplished instead.

When they launched a bikeshare program in LA, the local weekly welcomed it with a cartoon where the aspiring biker is welcomed with "Here's your metro card, here's your bike, and here's 50 pounds of protective gear you better have on you when biking in LA".

We're not really talking 3-4km here. We're talking 20-30km, perhaps each way, for a daily commute.

The level of density required for a bike to be a good daily commuter isn't the way a great many Americans live.

Once, in St. Paul, I was biking on a road as close to the curb as I could, so cars could pass me. A car stopped to yell "I HOPE YOU DIE" because it was slightly inconvenient to pass me (it was a one-lane road).

Unfortunately, I had nowhere else to be; there was no shoulder, no bike lane, and biking on the sidewalk is illegal there.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, biking in the US kind of sucks.

I don't understand why biking on sidewalks is illegal. Its much safer. I can understand why not in NYC, but in most US cities?

It's actually much less safe in most places. The speed differential between bikes and pedestrians is too high, and drivers can't see cyclists as easily when making turns or pulling into/out of driveways.

Writing as a cyclist who rides in the street, and used to ride on the sidewalk occasionally.

As a casual and unfit cyclist who doesn't break 10mph i think there should just be a "you can ride on the footpath if you're going at less than running speed" rule.

Fine, but people that bike as a principal mode of transport are not going to stay under 10 mph.

Can't really agree. You need to have your head on a swivel when cycling in any event, and since walking in the US is as unpopular as cycling for commuting, sidewalks in my suburban area are generally empty as far as the eye can see. But even in the case of a bicycle vs. pedestrian accident, both parties will generally survive. Car vs. cyclist, I lose.

It's not about you seeing the car, but the car seeing you. Consider, for example, cars turning right across a crosswalk while a cyclist continues straight through the intersection on the crosswalk. The driver's visual scan will catch pedestrians but not you, since you are nowhere near the intersection at the time they look but in front of them by the time they start accelerating. If you were in the street, you would appear in the right side mirror.

That's a cultural thing that needs to change. because it can work and works very well elsewhere.

I think most people just don't want to get sweaty at all costs :(

To be fair, this is a definitely a cultural thing, not "people are bad thing". I personally tend to walk a hurried pace when alone even when in no rush, but I think that's atypical.

This is what e-bikes solve. You can pedal at a very gentle pace and still cover a big city with no congestion and no parking. It's really a game changer.

I'm sure it's got better in the UK since cycling has become more popular. Twenty years ago I would get some abuse on every ride, now although people still drive too close I can't remember the last time I got any abuse.

It's not just that the distances are larger (My shortest commute ever, which people saw as luxuriously short, was 9km!), but also weather: We have an average of 90 days a year below freezing, and 40 over 32C. I don't know about you, but I don't call either one of those to be nice biking weather. So we have bikes, but they are for recreational purposes, in the times and days of the year you want: Heck, most people put the bicycles IN THE CAR, go to the place where they want to ride, typically a very large park and then they do the riding!

San Francisco actually has some decent support for bikes, and a lot of my coworkers that in the SF office go by bike, but that's because they are both dense enough and have such nice weather.

Any bad weather argument is likely to apply to Copenhagen, which doesn't prevent it from being a paragon of bike-friendliness, bike usage per capita, etc.

No, I just looked up Copenhagen's climate, and it's less extreme than many US Midwest cities. Thank the Gulf Steam.

> even in Auckland

I just went and looked into Auckland's climate[0]. The record high is 87F/30.5C; the record low is 25F/-3.9C. The most-heavily populated parts of the US regularly experience summer weeks where every high is higher than that record high, and winter weeks where every low is lower than that record low. Hell, there are heavily-populated parts of the US that have weeks where every high is lower than that record low.

If anything, Uber/Lyft will increase bicycle usage, by providing a backup when the weather doesn't allow for riding.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auckland#Climate

Someone needs to solve bike theft... I watch as friends routinely get bikes stolen in SF. There's no way I'd take my bike (from SouthBay) up into the city, because I just don't want to have it stolen. So I just rely on Uber once I'm in the city.

There are some robust bike-attached immobilizer locks [1][2], but I'm not sure as to their efficacy.

Some of the same properties that make bicycles easy to power and easy to carry (say, up to your apartment) make them easy to steal; and there's little defense against crude and destructive methods like detaching the secured wheel or worse.

We could have full-bike lockers or other bike-parking corrals or contraptions that physically move them into an inaccessible space: bicycle goes into a slot, only comes out when verified by some means (physical or digital); but this requires space, delicate moving parts, and maintenance. But when compared to a single car parking space, the space requirement doesn't seem insurmountable.

[1] http://linkalock.com [2] http://www.ilockit.bike

Yeah, that's not really going to solve bike theft. I'm not sure what kind of theft we're talking about in SF, but in Denmark, bikes go into the back of a truck heading for eastern Europe, for the most part.

I worked for a company that had the entire bike rack stolen. A truck just pulled up an few guy threw the entire rack, including all the bikes locked to the rack into a large truck.

Again, I don't know about SF, but Danish police don't really deal with bike thefts. That's an insurance problem, not something you waste police resources on. Of cause this makes it extremely frustrating to get your bike stolen. If you have GPS tracker in your bike you get track your bike leaving the country, the police is only rarely going to attempt to stop the thieves.

>is this a US-Valley blind spot or something?

As a Wisconsinite: bikes are great. They are a seasonal and recreation activity. There are a handful of people willing to bike their 6-7 mile commute year round, rain or shine, snow or sleet. They are the elite badass club. This is not a trait urban planning can expect from the masses.

It's certainly a Bay Area blindspot to forget that most people in most of this country experience extremely unpleasant heat, cold, rain, snow, etc. a majority of the time, and see dry temperate days like our daily reality here as a rare treat.

We're talking spread-out, low-density areas. Trains are great for moving people point to point where there's a certain level of density. But, guess what, even in Europe and Japan, there are a significant number of places that you can't get to by train.

That's the problem isn't it? The US's obsession with personal automobiles allows it to build these sprawling suburban ghost towns, only to realize in post-boom-times how terrible of a system it is.

I live in an exurban town on a number of acres. Nothing about the area between here and a major metropolis resembles a "ghost town." Nor is it "terrible" nor has it been so through a number of economic cycles.

And I've traveled to many different places in the world and my observation has been that, even in areas that have generally good train service, it by no means serves as anywhere to anywhere transportation.

Is it the US obsession with cars that causes sprawling suburbs or the fact that we have such a radically lower population density inherent in the country? Think about countries with good to great train systems. I think Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Netherlands. Population density of 226, 196, 336, 498 people per km^2.

United States is 33 people / km^2. Take all of Alaska's area away and make them all move to CONUS and it's still only 40 people / km^2.

With a lower natural population density, it would be surprising if people didn't spread out, and with that sprawl comes the car over the train. It's hard to make the train work when the population is 5 to 12 times more spread out.

What you are saying is true and not true. Most people in the US live in a few urban areas. Interconnecting these urban areas with trains is super hard. However, inside these urban areas the situation doesn't have to be that different from other countries urban areas. However, I believe that US suburbs are uniquely spread out and unwalkable largely due to boneheaded zoning.

You chose rather dense European countries for your example. Sweden has 21 people/km^2, Norway and Finland has 16 people/km^2. Both have working public transport. Which should show that the average population density of the country as a whole is mostly irrelevant.

Yes, I chose rather dense countries, but I also chose countries where I've found that having a car is more of a liability than an asset. That's a rough metric I use for "is the rail and public transport system good?" Did I choose dense countries and declare that they had good public transport, or did I choose countries with good public transport and discover they were dense?

I've never been to Scandinavia, so I have no experience to fairly judge.

Average population density is irrelevant when the population isn't evenly distributed.

It's also the terrible zoning. Residential areas must at all cost be devoid of shops, cafes, restaurants etc!

The suburban ones you're thinking of are actually too low density for that solution to work.

A more Japanese approach (as mentioned several other times on HN within the last year and probably more before that), is roughly to zone by the 'nuisance impact' and also to plan local commutes along slopes of density (nuisance).

So you can have a mixed commercial / high density residential district around the transit hub, and a casually walkable (for fit adults/kids) commute from there to lower density housing.

Jena Germany. <100k people. Four tram lines and 3 intercity rail stations.

American could have the same, even for rural areas. It's just been a matter of money, priority and the auto makers lobbying a lot to shift both of those two things.

They're trying to build a train system in my town (Seattle.) I live in the middle of the city in a major neighborhood. If there are no cost overruns (hah) or schedule slips (anyone want to bet on that?) then I will have access to one train stop, about a mile away by foot down an extremely steep hill. That station will, admittedly, connect me to interesting places I can go in the city, after two transfers and about an hour's travel time.

I will have this station, at the cost of $54 billion, in _nineteen years_. If everything goes exactly as planned.

Uber can get me anywhere I want to go, for $8 or so, in fifteen minutes, today.

I don't like cars much either, and because of the calculus above, traffic is only getting worse. But you want to know why we don't have trains? Because America can no longer build infrastructure. In any sane country we could do this in five years at a tenth of the price, but for whatever reason, we can't. This is the only reason Uber exists at the scale it does: because it's a workaround for the fact we can no longer build anything requiring fixed infrastructure.

(By the way, talk about an industry ripe for disruption. What I wouldn't give for a good construction startup.)

Which part of the world is that? Driverless, 24/7 train networks are relatively rare. The only one I can think of (outside of the ones that run inside airports) is the Copenhagen Metro. And being automated/driverless certainly doesn't prevent union strikes from shutting the system down.

Singapore. Kula Lumpa, Malaysia. London DLR. Parts of the London underground. Almost all American airports (Atlanta comes to mind)

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

None of those are 24/7, and only a few of the lines are automated.

And anyone who points to some of those locations--such as Kuala Lumpur--as examples of low-car public transit cities should really visit them sometime.

Vancouver, since 1986

Not 24/7

(Although it is an excellent train system)

Trains are like a monolithic architecture while cars/roads are like micro services. A failure in part of the system can't affect other parts as easily.

There are many good reasons why cars have won over all in the US.

Whether people should need a car is not(and shouldn't be) determined by your arbitrary moral judgment. It depends on their actual circumstances.

> There are many good reasons why cars have won over all in the US.

Given how trains have won over in Europe, its got more to do with city planning.

That's oversimplification, Europe is a very different place with different history/geography/cultures. For one thing, everyone in Europe is squished together (relatively speaking) and has been for centuries.

Just because we could plan all our cities around trains doesn't mean Americans will want to. I think a lot of people here are overconfident about how much better it would be if we just build trains all over.

Not all of us want to wait around everyday to be packed into a smelly, dirty disease distribution system that can shut down your commute for hours or take away your ability to get anywhere for days when they have maintenance issues.

Yeah trains are so superior. I mean all it takes is for one guy to decide to off himself or one failure and an entire city is unable to get anywhere for hours!!!

Personally I can't wait to move back home where I could own a car, and live in a nice house in the beautiful suburbs where everything I need is 5-15 minutes away and I can go shopping at any time of day without worrying about being robbed.

I live a block from the train station. The store is less than a block from the next station. It still takes FOREVER to go there and back. I don't know how people who live farther out do it.

Not to mention you have no privacy. Cars let you have a lot more privacy than trains. Most people on hacker news care about online privacy,why they are so biased towards something in meatspace that preserves a little of the privacy we have left is beyond me.

I've read all the arguments and I just don't think it's superior in terms of privacy period, for convenience; public transit is only better in the most dense cities, even then it's convenience varies greatly by person depending on where you live and where you need to go.

What are you doing that you need privacy while driving?

There are a lot of great rebuttals out there to this attitude. I think Snowden voiced a great one about privacy - "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say,". I hope you can figure out how that can be applied to this too...

But to point out the obvious it's not just about what you do/say while you are driving but also where you go, when, and with who to name a few things.

But you're in public, why would you have any expectation of privacy?

Oh wow, you have me there.... Except we somehow still allow legal action on people for stalking others, even if they are just following them around in public spaces. I can imagine you as the defense lawyer saying "but she was in public your honor...". To be clear I'm only addressing the moral aspect of your point. I don't care about the legality.

For example, It's very different to argue that since I am in public I don't have the right to not be photographed compared to arguing that I don't have the right to not be tracked. These public transit systems have tracking built in from the start. At least stuff like traffic cams that are just bolted on to infrastructure can be fought

I really have a hard time understanding this kind of attitude.

No one is advocating that you _don't_ own a car. Cars were a great invention, they've reduced the size of our world, and genuinely made life better, no doubt.

But an entire world undertaking clown-like 40 mile commutes each way, or getting into their tin boxes just to drive down to a store 3 miles away to buy some dishwashing soap because they're too lazy for bikes is no panacea either. Because what you're saying that your store is literally less than two train stations away, and you can only make that journey in a car.

And that hyperbole about the "little of privacy we have left" is exactly that. Hyperbolic. What exactly are you doing in a car during your morning commute that requires levels of privacy that trains simply cannot offer? Listening to music? Reading a book? Working on your laptop? News flash. You can do all of that on a train, and no one cares.

What I will concede is that the US is particularly idiotic in not offering even a semblance of reliability in their public transport. I stayed in DC, and the metro their is prone to failure, with the buses being even less frequent and late. However, a well functioning public transit system is a blessing and every city/suburb lacking it is the worse for it.

Yes, I have read plenty of comments arguing that when we are all 'enlightened' nobody will own cars.

I addressed the privacy point below, but to repeat myself, what you do during the commute is not my main worry, its where you go, when and with whom. I would think thats obvious.

"And that hyperbole about the "little of privacy we have left" is exactly that"

As to whether that is hyperbole, after the things that have come out in the last few years I think many people would agree with me not you.

The hyperbole here is your '40 mile commute'. Very few people have commutes that far. Its funny I would argue that those two situation are particularly convenient to do in a car. If you are one of those suckers with a super long commute you probably want the freedom to run errands on the way or have the freedom to stick around at one place until late ( after the stupid trains stop running for example) Quick store runs a mile or two away are actually quick when you don't have a 5-10 min walk to the train/bus stop and 5 - ? minute wait with the slow commute in between.

I just love this silly attempt all over hacker news and reddit to shame people into riding bikes. Why don't you stop lazily using that phone to communicate with people and go find them and tell them in person, or how about you throw out your oven and start roasting your meals over a fire. What is considered lazy is very subjective. Using technology that makes things easier/quicker is not something I consider lazy.

Um, I get the idea that you're arguing that the government is tracking your movements when you're in public transit? You're a bit on your own with that level of tin-foil hattedness I'm afraid. Dealing with such severe paranoia problems are above my pay grade unfortunately. Especially when you're likely carrying an iPhone or Android in your pocket anyway, which is a far more sophisticated tracker than your train ticket receipt. It certainly is far from being "obvious" that Big Govt. tracking our movements via public transit is a significant problem.

Also, I admit that my 40 mile commute was also a hyperbolic statement designed to achieve the same effect as yours. But, indeed, if you somehow contrive to create a lifestyle involving a 40 mile commute, I agree that the car is a superior solution. My contention is that we should strive as hard as we can NOT to end up with a long-ass commute.

And, again, far be it from me to shame you into anything. Enjoy your car if you do. Perhaps you're even one of the responsible ones who drives a fuel efficient hatchback, and only when he needs to. However, there is a good chunk of America that takes massive loans to buy $60,000 F-350s or something and then runs themselves into bankruptcy and zero retirement savings.

Also, using technology to make things easier is almost the definition of laziness. A scythe, as an example, cuts grass better than a manual lawn mower, which is better than an internal combustion-propelled lawn mower, which requires frequent maintenance, is orders of magnitudes more expensive, and makes you fat and lazy. Yet how many people use scythes? Laziness. Convenience.

I was in no way arguing that I am personally being targeted. A society where people only oppose these kinds of abuse if they are personally targeted is screwed. Just because you and I aren't the victims doesn't mean we shouldn't speak up. I'm not paranoid, you are in denial. FBI spy planes ring a bell??

"Especially when you're likely carrying an iPhone"

You can power down (or remove the battery if possible) from your phone.

And yes the risk is more that city and state governments will use it. And since many have been caught using and abusing stuff like stingrays and license plate readers it's not a stretch by any means to assume. Who wants to live in cities that are under a microscope like London.

Your right though, nobody is trying to force me. Now I'm going to go turn on my robot mower. Enjoy cutting grass with your scythe. Watch your legs! And have fun cleaning up all the clippings. I'll be with my family, being fat and "lazy"

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not (Poe's law), but here are two rebuttals anyway:

1. 5 minutes to drive anywhere in the suburbs---bwahahaha, you must be joking. When everyone lives in the suburbs, it's all sprawl, and some left turn lights take 5 minutes. You know, if I had to sum up one reason why I left the suburbs, it's the left turn lights in Silicon Valley: the roads are so large, they don't trust people to yield on left turns, so they make you wait for a left turn arrow whether there is traffic or not.

2. License plate recognition is much simpler and more reliable than face recognition. And it's already deployed. Just sayin'.

1 just like you example I was only referring to the suburbs where i used to live. I think anywhere in Silicon Valley is a crappy place to use as an example for suburbs. I also said everywhere I "need" to go not everywhere I want to go. (I'm of course not including going to work) grocery store, gas, heck even city hall, all the regular places. I was of course exaggerating the time. But it's still a maximum of 20 minutes for the few that aren't

2 license plate readers traffic cams etc, are all things that are bolted on top of the road/car system. People can and are fighting them. But trains are the perfect transportation system for surveillance. All the data is there built in. While getting rid of surveillance on the road will be hard, pigs will fly before they remove cameras and anonymize payments on trains.

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