Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

I say this whenever this topic comes up: we have public transport today, it's safer and cheaper than having a car, it allows you to make use of your commute time (read, study, eat a sandwich, have a coffee), it's better for the environment (electric doesn't come from nowhere), and it's faster and even more so if more people use it. Your city maybe lacks it, but then the solution is not to say "meh, public transport is crap" and go buy a car. But this is the answer I always get in this community of people who make a living finding solutions to problems.

On the road, an actor's actions do not merely affect itself, but all the others on that road. If you slow down at a point, that can cause the driver arriving at that point five, ten minutes after to stop. On the road, everything creates a butterfly effect. And just like you can't run around naked or listen to very loud music in residential areas, you can't just get on the road with your new toy which if fails, does not only put your life at danger, but also many others'.

That is if you live in a place with sane, safe, readily available public transportation which doesn't increase your commute time by 2-3 times.

It's not hard to find places where a 40min commute in a car turns into 2-3 hours using public transport.

Public transport is also not as reliable in places with extreme weather especially cold.

Have fun waiting for a bus in an open bus stop at -10c...

My old boss' master's degree in city planning was a plan to run a grid of 15-minute busses throughout LA. His analysis showed it would nearly eliminate the need for private cars. In LA. Good luck convincing anybody. But I believe it could work. Principally because the transfers wouldn't be an hour wait, so the wait time wouldn't dominate the total trip time.

Where I'm it goes down to about -5C in wintertime (-4C ATM). I'm actually fine with it.

Certainly in rural areas and in wider peripheral suburban areas public transport is less useful. But in actual cities (London, Paris, Istanbul, etc.) with a high density of people and their residences, public transport is the way to go. I don't know much about American cities, but if we got a comprehensive and functional system of metros, buses and boats here in Istanbul, where some of you would classify as a part of the third world, I guess you are capable of doing it in the US too.

London doesn't get to sub zero temperatures often, and with 2 flakes of Snow half the tube and the overground is in turmoil.

London is probably a "bad" example, I live in London and sure the public transport is probably in the top 5 in the world, so is Tokyo and Paris. But what many cities with good public transport have in common is that they had public transportation for a long time, were designed / rebuilt with that in mind when it was manageable and are relatively small for their population density.

I would not want to be the one that has to design a public transport system for a sprawling city like LA where the greater LA area covers nearly 90,000 square kilometers for a size comparison the entirety of England is 130,000 sq/km.....

Sadly, anything that requires taxpayer funding toward the common good is a political non-starter in the US (socialism!). The best hope we have in the US for decent bus network is probably Uber/Lyft:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-15/uber-and-...

Using public transport to get to work for me, would mean:

  - Walk to the next village
  - Take a bus to the next city (bus comes by every 2 hours)
  - Walk to the train station
  - Take the train to the next city
  - Take another train to the next city
  - Walk to the outskirts of the city to where I work

And I live in Germany, which is presumably the public transport heaven.

It would also take me several hours every day.

My car costs me maybe a maximum of 90€ every month and takes me to work in about 15 minutes.

I know what you will say. "Just live in the city and use a bike to get to work, faster and costs nothing! (apart from the bike)". But that would not only reduce my quality of living (let's face it, the countryside is nicer) but also let my rent costs skyrocket (average price per m² more than doubles).

> I know what you will say. "Just live in the city and use a bike to get to work, faster and costs nothing! (apart from the bike)".

Well I'd actually not say that, because I'm not really saying "kill all the cars". What I'm saying is that "in most cases most probably public transport is equivalent to if not better than autonomous vehicles, so the effort and the risks are not worth them". I live in Istanbul and my school and my home are 30-20 kilometers apart on a straight line. When there's no traffic it'd take ~30 minutes to drive there, and at my usual times it'd take 1-2 hours with traffic. Via public transport it's 30min fixed + 5-10min walking. And in that time I can have my morning coffee from my thermos flask and eat a simit, and I don't need to be alert at all (I'd probably be dead by now if I drove in the mornings).

So TL;DR: for me, I'm perfectly fine w/ your commute, I just say that self-driving is not really a necessary and fruitful burden, however cool it may be, in solving traffic jams and traffic safety problems.

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