Hacker News Reader

> I don't think it's wild Silicon Valley chatter to say that public transportation along fixed routes WILL decline as a result of new technology, and this is a great thing.

I do.

People are leaving rural and suburbs for cities. Cities are becoming more dense. Fixed line transportation offers significantly more passengers/area/hour than roads. Tokyo supplies 40M daily train rides. Nothing Lyft/Uber/Didi is doing suggests anything close to that amount of density.

Hyperloops are going to push maximum passenger density of fixed route paths even higher.

While you are correct in that technology like Hyperloops can solve the following issue, public infrastrucute, like the housing problem, is a political and social problem too. Take Chicago, for example. Musk and Emmanual talked about a Hyperloop between O'Hare airport and downtown. How is that going to benefit the average inter-city commuter?

That specific implementation won't help the average intercity commuter, but that doesn't mean that the tool is not useful for heping intercity commuters.

>Fixed-route 19th-20th century public transportation networks are inefficient because most of the vehicles are pretty empty most of the time. This makes these systems expensive on a passenger-per-seat-mile basis. Not to mention the colossal waste of people's time spent trying to accommodate their journeys to those fixed routes

You know what else sits empty most of the time? Highways.

Ok, I was being snarky. Couldn’t resist. Snark aside, this is not an insurmountable problem with public transit. The Vancouver SkyTrain operates on the assumption that frequent, automated, short trains are better than longer less frequent ones. Headways are about 90 seconds during peak commute hours and scale with demand.

> Example: LA's Metro system is subsidized to the tune of about 50 cents per passenger seat/mile, or was as of 2009

Hong Kong’s turns a profit. And who said transit systems have to turn a profit anyway? Just like our roads, they are provided for public benefit.

A large amount of transit money is spent building, operating and maintaining a dedicated transit right of way, needed to make any sort of rapid transit work.

Mass-market self-driven car commuting is more than 10-15 years out.

How does that affect those who have to take public transit due to finances?

Personally, I expect there will always be a need for high throughput fixed line transit in some areas. But, to answer your question, if some portion of the population requires transportation subsidies to participate in society then the best policy answer would seem to be to provide them with subsidies directly.

They’ll save money because they can now afford cheap self driving transport.

Also if you’re subsidising mass transit only for the poor, why not just give them subsidy directly?