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Comment by adamkrez | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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