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Comment by backpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

If you'd ask the people in 1900s, they'd say the "right solution" is faster horses.

Public transit SUCKS. And I don't understand why people are pretending that it doesn't. Space efficiency and throughput are not the only important variables here. How about freedom? Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere nearby work?

There's a reason cars exist. In your imaginary world, trains might be better than cars, but in the real world, cars are way better, even in those higher culture societies with planned cities like Scandinavia. Cars exist there too. Why? Because they do solve some problem, which I'd imagine could be comfort, freedom, privacy, hygiene, and many others I'm sure.

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Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere nearby work?

Then you walk or take a train there?

You may say "But my area doesn't have good transit", but if you're going to spend billions of dollars building relatively low capacity car tunnels, you could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit.

The car only offers a certain type of freedom. When you take a train (or cab) from work to go across town to meet friends for dinner/drinks (since you don't want to drive during commute traffic or try to find parking in a busy downtown), why should you have to make that same trip all the way back to your office just to get your car so you can drive home? Just hop on a train from the restaurant and go directly home.

At least that was my biggest discovery when I first moved to an area with good transit -- without the car I had a lot more freedom to go where I wanted and didn't have to structure my activities around where I parked my car. Also I didn't have to pay for (and protect) a $20,000+ car and the transit pass was less than the monthly car insurance alone.

>> "... you could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit."

Former tunnel boring engineer here.

This is true, but the real elegant solution is to build everything closer together by an order of magnitude, thereby raising the number of destinations in an N minute walking radius and eliminating the need for tunnels. If your urban design depends on cars-in-tunnels, it's a "code smell" that you've made a grievous system-scale architectural error.

We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with mostly little 10-foot wide (building-face-to-building-face) streets and a very few larger boulevards. This is how Venice works. This is how Tokyo works. This is how lower Manhattan works, and it's awesome. LA's streets are probably ~100 ft between building facades, on average, so we could infill a bunch of little narrow streets of buildings in each one, raising destinations-per-acre by ~an order of magnitude or maybe more.

This destroys demand for transit by inspiring a modal shift to pedestrianism, and now you have a much smaller problem to solve. You can take all the tax revenue from the new buildings in your newly-densified city, and the money you saved on paving/traffic lights/street upkeep, and use it to build a real 12-trains-per-hour, quad-tracked, express-and-local service, 24 hour subway. Elon's Boring company can dig the tunnels for these if you want.

If you have money leftover you can build through-core commuter rail, that comes from the northern suburbs and goes through downtown out the other side to the southern suburbs, with a one-seat ride. If you still have money leftover you can give it to the homeless or something; under no circumstances should anyone ever spend money on putting cars in tunnels, which is one of the all time dumbest ideas and a prodigiously ugly solution to a prodigiously ugly problem.

> We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with mostly little 10-foot wide

To do that, first you need to forget about all best practices and problems that have been fixed and issues regarding quality of life and even safety.

No one bothers building little 10-foot wide streets because that's an appalingly bad idea. Slums aren't known for their quality of life, and no emergency service can pass through 10-foot wide streets.

You're a former boring engineer talking about issues that you know nothing about.

People bother to build little narrow streets all the time in non-slum areas, and their emergency services work fine. It just doesn't happen in North America.

> This is true, but the real elegant solution is to build everything closer together by an order of magnitude, thereby raising the number of destinations in an N minute walking radius and eliminating the need for tunnels. [...] We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with mostly little 10-foot wide (building-face-to-building-face) streets and a very few larger boulevards.

That's what we have in Europe and it doesn't solve anything.

I only works when the size (diameter) of the city is small. Then a single point in the centre of the city can irrigate the whole city. And a point to point transportation between the centres of several such cities is highly efficient.

But cities have spread, so now the problems are the same as in the USA, except that when the city keeps repeating the same pattern of density while spreading, it makes those problems even worse (infrastructures are more saturated, because there are more people using them and because they are smaller and rarer). Dense or not, your job is nowadays unlikely to be in the same part of the city and generally not in the same suburb either.

There is no benefit in having density on a wide area. What worked when the city was built (or slowly developed into) and was 1-2 km wide was challenged when it grew to 3-5 km wide, and stopped working now that the city is 10-20km wide.

The denser the area, the slower the transportation: be it cars, buses, trains, bicycle, foot, whatever: everything moves slower in dense areas. And there is only so much that happens to be closer and more or less compensates the loss of speed. The rest suffers the density slowdown penalty in full.

I very often read Americans here, who write the same thing you did. It sounds like you all think there is a magic bullet: densification of your suburbs and suburb-like urbanisation. Let me tell you that if you densify this way, you won't solve anything, you will even make everything worse, for you will concentrate more people everywhere around the centre, in a neverending slick of density, and all those people will need or want to commute to other neighbourhoods daily, and you won't be able to offer efficient mass transit for most O-D in those newly densified areas.

You often have a rose-tainted view of European and Japanese urbanisation. Problem can have a different nature, or a different reason, but they exist as well and are as important.

On Tokyo, what are your thoughts on the massive 6 lane freeways that cut through and above it, that serve the little streets?

This works especially well in areas like Boston with multi-layer transit. Take the subway under the city to one of the stations and if you need to go somewhere local, hop on the light rail that runs above ground and has stops placed much more frequently. Beyond that, you have buses and taxis all over the place as well. It's driving in that city that's inconvenient...

Yep. I would actually prefer to just drive on the weekends / to places without trains, hopefully out in the mountains or something. Europe even has trains which go to remote locations. Having to park a car is terrible in cities. Combine this with the social acceptance of alcohol consumption plus the danger (and laws) of driving intoxicated and public transit is fantastic. Public trans like trains also avoid traffic, so they can be significantly faster than driving. Pollution-wise, it's also no contest. Hong Kong has a great subway system and because of it, most people there don't need personal vehicles. Taxis are also cheaper and much better service-wise than in the US. Busses service more remote routes, like to the beach (which is kinda far on HK Island).

Closer with the opening of the South Island line! I was there just a few days before opening so I didn't get a chance to ride it >.< I was very disappointed. Maybe this year!

Everyone keeps saying this is a bad idea that makes no sense, but it's exactly what I want. I'd love to not have to commute with my car, but have my car. My car, with all my stuff in it, not somebody else's car.

> Everyone keeps saying this is a bad idea that makes no sense, but it's exactly what I want.

My take is that the only people who ever claim that it's a bad idea happen to be US citizens who have been conditioned to see a car as a sort of extension of their own body and even a social tool, and don't have any first-hand contact with working mass transit systems operating in urban areas.

The rest of the world knows that a working mass transit network greatly improves quality of life in multiple aspects of everyone's life. Anyone who experienced the metro system in cities like Berlin or Paris or Madrid, with a city-wide network criss-crossing the city with stops every 300-500 meters and trains passing by each 2-10 minutes, knows that it works well and does wonders to everyone's life and even personal disposable income.

Well, consider me for a second and you know have met, or at least heard from, someone who massively prefers to use their own car in European cities.

I assure you there's a lot of people like me.

By the way "citizens who have been conditioned to see a car as a sort of extension of their own body and even a social tool" describes me, half my friends and most of my colleagues pretty well.

"US citizens", "don't have any first-hand contact with working mass transit systems operating in urban areas" don't apply so much to us. We're consultants and I assure you. We have first hand experience with mass transit systems in every EU capital, half the US state capitals, and a lot of others.

And none of them match having your own car. Most of us have a choice taking mass transit systems or doing an hour plus of being stuck, going almost walking pace, on the highways. When traveling public transport tends to be the easiest to find, more reliable and quickest way to quickly get to your hotel. Taking a car into a plane, while possible, is sadly not within budget limits for travel. Taxis are, but opinions are divided on them. I think they're generally more trouble than they're worth, and they make you miss all the stuff you want to look at.

I suppose my main reason is that I can actually shop where I want, and take useful quantities of food, supplies etc plus all my work stuff home with me. There is no way to do that with public transport. Aside from the comfort, this actually saves a lot of money, and more generally even allows for more economic opportunity (due to reasonable and speedy access to more goods. I help organize a music mini-festival. That's not doable without a car, mostly because I can go get needed things quickly).

Second reason is that while public transport, where it works, only connects the spokes with the hub. It does not connect neighboring small cities in any useful way, if at all. Even if public transport has connections, they run 4-5 times per day. And they're mostly empty, so every time the public transport bigwigs play with the schedule (every 6 months in France) we live in fear (or my kids do anyway), if the connection will still be there or they won't be able to visit their friends.

Public transport is -barely- tolerable to connect people to their jobs. It is unusable for almost anything else. Not even for regular groceries. Not for going to IKEA and get some furniture. Not for having a party at a friend's place. And so on and so forth ... And please don't start the argument that it's cheaper. It is not, as soon as you consider how much more a car lets you do, and that public transport just isn't a replacement.

Electrical bikes help. Or at least, they're better than bikes and sometimes more useful than cars.

That's fine when a few people want a car in the city, but when millions of people in a busy city want the same thing, then it's unsustainable, there's literally not enough room for everyone to have a car since (even ignoring the amount of road space you need for everyone to drive around after they get off the high-speed car-train) you need two spaces for every person (one at home, one at work) -- the size of a person's required parking spaces (and the travel lanes to get to them) approach the size of an urban housing unit, so parking alone cuts urban density by 1/2.

The kind of low to mid-density area that can support everyone owning a car is not the kind of high-density area that can afford to pay billions of dollars for high-speed car tunnels.

If you want to use your car, use it outside of the city, don't displace housing in the city so you can park your car for the 22 hour a day you're not using it.

I may find it very convenient to drive every where in my 40 foot motorhome so literally all of my stuff is with me at all times, but that's not going to happen.

I think it's an American thing. ITT everyone is complaining about the last mile stuff and the logistics of it all, but fundamentally everyone just hates it for cultural reasons. In you head, you just see images of plastic seats covered in hobo urine and a train car that smells like disinfectant of some sort. In places where it's actually practical as a complete transportation solution, the conditions are also somewhat better.

It is a very american thing. In most european cities public transport works very well and people don't really mind walking 10-20 minutes if needed.

Yea, that and the HN bubble is strong here. Transport is one of those issues that's divided along class lines. As you go up in class, you become more segregated from your fellow city goers and this plan exemplifies that. A person at the poverty line takes the bus, a little more money, a car that you park and walk to, maybe a plane ticket somewhere, but at a certain point, your driver drops you off at the entrance to your building and you have a personal jet on standby at the nearest satellite airport fueled and ready to take you anywhere in privacy.

Grandparent talks about freedom but it's only freedom for the upper and middle class. That's not freedom, that's privilege.

In cities where public transportation is expected, places you want to go tend to be clustered better, so you can walk/bike/bus/train to several things at once.

"Location location location" has to consider foot traffic.

> Grandparent talks about freedom but it's only freedom for the upper and middle class. That's not freedom, that's privilege.

Nonsense. Just because some people are unable to exercise their rights it doesn't mean that others should not, let alone that those rights suddenly become mere privileges.

You should try your best to improve the life of everyone around you, not drag down those who are better off just to force them into everyone's misery.

Cars make you broke, average cost of car ownership for an American is $8K per year.

This is because many European city were designed in a time preceding pubicly-accessible transport and thus were - and are - designed to be almost completely traversible on foot.

This makes coverage gaps in public transport less obvious or problematic than in the US. Cities modernized around the car are best traveled theough by car.

In many but definitely not most.

There are a lot of European cities and even whole countries including fairly developed ones with pretty shitty public transport.

You also need to check the walkability of many cities. In Europe it's better in the center of old cities but gets pretty bad, in the US the cities tend to sprawl much more especially newer cities like LA. You won't have a highway crossing a city in Europe in the US it's much more common.

NYC is in the united states and has one of the best subway systems in the world. Also culturally the subway has be come part of all New Yorkers day, from CEO's to yes homeless people.

Oh my god Musk is the one pitching the "faster horse" solution here.

He wants to travel faster and doesn't want to deal with congestion, and so he comes up with this zany idea for cars on sleds in tunnels.

Maybe the real problem here is the car. Car oriented infrastructure simply doesn't scale well as demand increases.

His solution is going to run into all the same issues of induced demand just the same as highway expansion has.

Running a bus to pick up a single person is far less efficient than having that person own a car since the most effective part of a bus is the driver.

Cars scale in smaller increments than most public transit and that is important areas that are not densely populated or during off-peak periods. You can build a nation/culture around public transit, but the path dependencies with the US are pretty deep at this point.

>Car oriented infrastructure simply doesn't scale well as demand increases.

Self-driving cars scale in very different ways than piloted cars. The biggest problems with piloted cars is accidents, congestion and parking. All of these problems fundamentally change with self-driving cars. What Musk is building is self-driving car infrastructure.

> Running a bus to pick up a single person is far less efficient

What buses pick up a single person? They are far more efficient than cars precisely because they can move many people on optimal routes.

Lots of rural counties have demand response buses that do indeed pick up one person at a time.

I imagine if you measured by passenger mile they don't account for a lot of public transport, but they are the transport of last resort for quite a lot of people.

So it the car is the problem, what if you could build out new train rails everywhere and get people to use them?

What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then?

Yeah. that's pretty zany. As long as I'm not forced to pay for it, why criticize? I'm curious to see which zany idea out there proves itself.

>What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then?

Because the "private mini-car" isn't as space efficient as just having one person. Space efficiency is a major point of public transportation, and the "scary, dirty, stinky" aspects can and have been solved in other parts of the world like Europe and Asia. What public transport advocates are worried about, I think, is that just like freeways, we are potentially going to create an enormous strain on the surface road system... the cars are going to have to come out of the tunnels some time, after all, right?

The reason criticism is warranted is because unfeasible, far out ideas like Musk's distract the conversation from proven and viable solutions and undermine their implementation.

Musk is providing ammo for persons that oppose public transit spending for political and idiological reasons that can be used in the political arena to argue to decrease public transit spending and slow down or stop implementation of public transit expansion.

Well, to be fair, he proposed pneumatic tubes first and people poo-poo-ed that idea.

In London or several other major cities, public transit is amazing. It's clean, reliable, fast, efficient, cheap, safe, and everywhere.

If you have to go somewhere near work, walk, bring a bike, or Uber. But chances are, there's a tube stop less than a 10 minute walk away.

The problem isn't public transit. The problem is its implementation.

Aren't London commute hour trains just as crowded as those in the US? Whether the train shows up and departs on time, or goes where you want it to, is rarely the problem for existing systems in major US cities. It's about the experience of being inside the train for an extended period of time.

I'm about to double my rent and halve my square footage to get away from BART. It has noting to do with reliability and everything to do with standing on a crowded moving vehicle for 90 minutes a day.

Modern cars are palatial. Even the best (fast, frequent, good coverage, reliable) train systems are squalid and cramped when they are needed most.

You could make the case that modern, palatial cars are the problem though. As far as I know, rent for places along the BART/CalTrain lines are much higher than away since it opens up living in outlying areas to people who work downtown.

Obviously some people prefer trains, but if the problem you want to address is winning over the people who don't, you'll need to engage with what makes trains unpleasant to them.

"Your commute is too comfortable, let's make it miserable" doesn't win elections.

> I'm about to double my rent and halve my square footage to get away from BART.

The BART is renowned example of how not to design and implement a mass transit system.

Furthermore, the reason why BART sucks is not because it's a mass transit system. It's because the service has no capacity to meet demand and fails to cover the urban area.

Traffic is worse and gas is more expensive in London, so public transit is comparatively better

Do those cities heavily subsidize or give free tickets to the homeless and unemployed? Unfortunately LA Metro seems to do their best to give out free tickets to anyone who is willing to urinate or start a fight on board a train.

In the center yes, but as soon as you get to even Zone 3 you can easily find areas with 15-20+ min of walk to a tube station.

Public transit doesn't suck, but the biggest problem as you say is that it fails to solve the last mile. Public transit is incredible if you live very close to the designated routes. For now.

Once cars are fully autonomous and become cheaper, faster, and more efficient than current forms of public transportation, current low speed trains and buses will become unused and obsolete. Except for the hyperloop and air travel, I see any investment in public transit infrastructure (trains, buses, subways - hell even parking lots!) to be a complete waste of money. In the 10 years it would take to build a new train through a city, cars will make it completely useless.

Public transist in LA is akin to mild torture. I feel for those who have to take it every day for work.

Aside from the haphazard and oblique bus scheduling routes, the ride itself is jarring and agnozing. Unnecessary repeated montoned annoucements bombard your trip with sudden jerking stops.

Of course, the homeless and drug addicted use the bus and trains for temporary shelter. The train has even more mind numbing announcements with a ridiculous annoucement system that could be replaced by screens.

And if you want to go anywhere beyond one bus route, your trip time will be 3 to 4 times that of driving.

We're supposed to commend those who take public transist, but the City of LA doesn't care. Corrupt, incompetent, indifferent -- whatever it is, they don't have a clue what they are doing.

The audio announcements are also for people who can't see the screens, due to blindness or just people in the way. They're typically repeated so you don't miss what was said. It's potentially annoying for frequent riders but most people just wear headphones if they know where they're getting off.

The homelessness thing is a much bigger problem. Shelters are always full, and even if you do have a job, rent is totally out of control, and the wait for section 8 housing is >a decade in some places. It's not surprising that people end up on the streets, and yet rich people in this country want to further cut back on social safety nets while offering ever more subsidy to the wealthy. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeowner... discuses this.

> Of course, the homeless and drug addicted use the bus and trains for temporary shelter.

The problem is not the public transit, the problem is how homeless, drug addicted or mentally ill people are treated in the US.

Fix this and suddenly public transit will be viable again...

>Once cars are fully autonomous and become cheaper, faster, and more efficient than current forms of public transportation

You state this as if it is inevitable, but I don't see this as true. Take, for example, the density in cities in, say, China. If we took everyone who took the buses and the subway trains and moved them out to cars today, Shanghai would be a perpetual traffic jam.

In addition, you have pedestrians to deal with at surface level, which of course will slow cars down. The laws of physics also dictate that things must slow down during things like turns, and when you exit the tunnel. Unless we create dedicated interchanges and acceleration and deceleration lanes... That already exists and it's called a highway. Traffic is rarely made slow on the highway because of the cars traveling on it or the number of lanes, it's made slow by the cars wanting to get off and slowing down. Yes, you can make the cars move faster, but the bottleneck is precisely where the cars decelerate, even today. I fail to see how making a bunch of tunnels solves the issue.

You could make the case that trains are just autonomous, faster and more efficient cars.

How many people fit in a train car? How many people fit in cars that occupy the same space as a train car? Realistically, how many people will actually be in each car? (hint: 1)

Even if you fix the Two Second Rule by perfect automation, you still need order of magnitude more space.

I can absolutely guarantee you that public transit doesn't suck in Stockholm. Most people don't even own a car here, I don't and the people that do complain all the time about how it's expensive to pay insurance and have it parked 99% of the time. Cars don't get used more than twice a week or so and if you take your car everyday into the city to just go to your job you are pretty much frowned upon.

Public transit can be awesome once you scale it enough. You basically want one subway stop per 4 blocks. With the upside being you don't have to park and unpack your car or deal with traffic, or stop lights.

However, you want a train every 3 minutes in both directions and 2 train lines per stations. Which takes a lot of effing trains, but means your average wait time is 3 minutes per trip, and you generally only need to use 2 trains to get to any point in the city.

Also, you want a nice layer of cabs for short hop trips.

Small Correction: if you have trains coming every three minutes I think your average wait time should be 1.5 minutes.

1.5 minutes for first train, get off that train 1.5 minutes wait for second train. You can now get to any point on an XY grid with ~3 minutes of wait time. 1.5 minutes works if your only going down one line but that's not a huge number of stops.

Anything less than 5-10 minutes is generally considered to be "frequent service", where it's no longer necessary to worry about hitting a specific train, since the next train will be along fairly quickly regardless.

There is a large quality of life difference based on maximum trip time.

If I need to make 2 trains each way with an max of 15 minutes of wait time each. Then I need to add 1 hour of padding to cover that worst case over the day or risk being late. Further, if anything happens that can go well past 1h of just waiting. Cut that to a daily 12 minutes 'worse case' makes a massive difference.

That could also be improved with timed connections.

Those are hard to pull off across a full XY grid as soon as something happens like a line is single tracking or your grid is missing a stations it's a mess. You also really want some slack in the system for cases like single tracking if the average train is 4 cars, but you can send 6 cars trains when demand is up that makes a huge difference.

So, yea that's one way to lower the average wait time, but again just sending more trains and the system becomes more stable.

Sorry about the snark - if you ask an American, they'd inevitably say they'd want better roads as well. Cars have a place in the world, for sure - just not for daily commutes and inner-city travel. There are model public transit systems throughout the world. It's not just possible it actually exists.

When I look outside of my window I can see that cars in the city are mostly useful to generate traffic and block ambulances. Car is a fine tool if you do not live in the centre. This tech aims to alleviate this, obviously, but still for me this seems like a huge waste of energy.

I am not going to downvote you on this but using Scandinavian cities aren't great example. Think about the amount of people they are transporting everyday compare said a city in China, in Japan, in Indonesia?

Hong Kong MTR is one of the busiest in the world, it's also I believe the timeliest in the world (three 9's [1]) and serves 1.6 billion per year. These things definitely work. MTR does such a good job operating in HK that they were tapped to run the new Elizabeth line in London as MTR Crossrail.

[1] http://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/main/performance_201407.ht...

How many people actually used horses though? A good portion of the trips done by car today simply would have been on foot with towns built accordingly, and in larger cities, trams and streetcars were popular. Complaints about horses probably would have revolved around their upkeep, and maybe their endurance rather than their speed.

Though driving can be fun, I’ve much preferred commuting in the subway to having to drive to and from work every day. I think there is some snob element in different impressions of public transportation. People go to coffee shops when they have coffee machines at home and in their office, because they enjoy the social aspect. Perceptions of public transportation are influenced by wait times and how they are treated by transportation employees, but probably more importantly by whether the other riders look like their coworkers and peers.

...and if you ask Americans in 2010s, they'd say the "right solution" is more roads.

Convincing Americans that public transit sucks should be studied as one of the greatest PR coups of the 20th century.

Cars are fine, so is transit.

Transit sucks in the US because we don't invest in it, and our land use regulations are largely hostile to anything that isn't a car.

There's a reason why public transit sucks.

"...what if I have to go somewhere nearby work?"

I work in a metro core area. I can walk to anything within 5 mins. Even in my residential neighborhood everything is a 15 min walk. It's actually faster by bike since I can avoid traffic issues.

This is some ranty stuff. Of course cars solve a problem, but so do buses, trains, etc..

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