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Comment by borisk | Hacker News Reader

Car industry haven't made enough progress in the last 100 years, but your 1% is way off. A modern car diesel engine (like the one in BMW 320d ED) can exceed 45% efficiency.

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Car weight = ~4000

Average person = ~200

That's not a problem with the efficiency of the engines or other parts. That's a social issue of people who drive with no passengers.

Once you've overcome the social issue of each person wanting their very own vehicle, you don't need cars at all. You can use buses and trains.

Except where you want to go where buses and train don't go...

Funny, no one ever complains about the times you want to go where highways don't go.

Seriously, though, countries with functioning infrastructure have trains that go nearly everywhere, or at least close enough you can walk or bicycle the rest of the way.

I'm in the US. The closest bus stop to the college I work at is > 90 miles away and the closest train stop is 13 miles away but is unstaffed and not for local transit. Roads are the base transportation infrastructure in the US, so using that existing infrastructure is a good bet.

I'm in the US too, and it sucks. That's why I said "countries with functioning infrastructure" (because with anything bigger than a small town, driving around isn't functioning infrastructure). But you're not going to have any kind of sustainable infrastructure when it takes a 1-2 ton vehicle to move a 100-300 pound person any distance, whether or not the vehicle is automated.

We are going to have to come up with something "sustainable" with only 1 or 2 people in the vehicle, because the US still has a lot of rural areas.

Rural areas make up very little of the population. Although there's some improvement there--I live in a rural town that's quite navigable by bicycle and has a good bus system.

The real problem is the suburbs.

Uhm, there are no buses here (see other posts) and bicycles don't work in certain conditions (high winds, snow, -40F below weather). Plus, let's also remember that a lot of places don't have facilities for people to bike into work (like showers), not to mention the people who can't use bikes.

So what? We live in the sticks. There aren't enough of us to matter. If we keep driving around with one SUV per person it doesn't add up to much, comparatively. The low hanging fruit is fixing the metropolitan areas. Most people live there, and demographically, people are still moving there. So fucking around with making cars and rural areas more efficient isn't going to make much difference compared to making metropolitan areas more efficient and reducing car usage within them.

That said, rural college towns can have pretty awesome bus systems that run all year, even during subzero temperatures, and they can also have bike paths that go mostly everywhere, which are usable for nine months of the year. Because mine has all that. I'm sorry yours doesn't; but obviously, there is room for improvement, which is exactly my point.

>Seriously, though, countries with functioning >infrastructure have trains that go nearly everywhere, >or at least close enough you can walk or bicycle >the rest of the way.

Oh you mean those countries without poverty, unemployment, corruption that built pollution free cities where everybody is happy?

Seriously.

First not everybody can or wants to use a bicycle.

Additionally you can't possibly hope to give access train to every part of the "country", that would be 1/extremely expensive 2/extremely uncomfortable for people living close to lines.

You need a density threshold. You can't have a bus line for two people once a week. You can see the density threshold problem in action in the USA.

Lastly comes the problem of service time. It's impossible to offer 24/24 7/7 service except for the most busy lines.

But perhaps you're willing to put 50% of the GDP into public transportation?

I live in a city with outstanding public transportation (Paris). Metro, buses, mini-buses, taxis, bicycle rental, you name it.

Yet, if you have several appointments within the same day in the city, it's not doable by public transportation because of the waiting and walking time that adds up extremely quickly.

If you go out to see friends that live outside the city, it's not doable to come back after midnight.

If you want to visit someone that lives outside the city, it might take a lot of time to use public transportation.

You're dreaming if you believe you can build a public transportation system that solves all transportation problems for everybody. If your system is good, you'll help people to go to and back from work and move around the city for a decent price.

But you'll always need individual transportation (In my case I ride a motorcycle. It saves me a lot of time and headaches and it's just damn cool and fun!).

Welcome to the real world, where things are difficult.

OK--you need personal vehicles a lot less. Seeing the nightmare of gridlock and freeway my country is, though, cutting out the easy 80% is something Americans have tragically left undone. (The USA has low density because of vast areas of flyover country where virtually no one lives--most Americans live in metropolitan areas.)

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