Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

Public roads are a public transit system. A very useful and productive one. Before paved roads and trucks, many towns and farms were only served by a single rail line. If competing water transportation was not available, the private railroads would charge extremely high rates, extracting all excess production of the area. The coming of public paved roads and trucks was blessing.

Many roads are now past capacity much of the time, which makes them much less useful, and many modern cities have been designed only for people in cars (is there a word like bicyclist for a person in a car?) instead of people walking, which is definitely a mistake. But the high speed, point to point, on demand, variable cargo, transit system of public roads is a great thing. Deride and shame it at your peril.

We need to improve the road system in many ways. Some possibilities are congestion pricing, lots of tunnels, and public spaces people can walk to from their homes, but to believe some externally controlled system for transit is what we should shoot for as a society, I think, is mistaken.

"Motorist" is commonly used for people in motor vehicles.

The problem with cars is that they use so much space. Not only while in transit, but especially when parked. Look at how much prime real estate is devoted to parking in typical American cities. That reduces density and makes cars more important, a vicious circle. The most liveable cities are those where little transport is needed because most things one wants to do are within walking or cycling distance. Such city planning is at odds with car centric designs.

A single passenger vehicle could have a parking footprint about 1/10th of what they currently have. My hope is that we could have electric bikes that are like a mountain bike, can go in bike lanes (at slow speed) or on the street but can go fast enough to take on a freeway.

I'm still disappointed that Segway hasn't become more popular as a concept.

It's too slow. You can ride a bike faster than you can ride a segway. It's healthier for you, too. And, as I said to the parent, at least half the US is under snow 4-6 months of the year. A transit system that is not 100% enclosed, heated and air conditioned is a non-starter.

There's no way to make ebikes safe at 70mph. Plus, quite a bit of the US is under snow 4-6 months of the year.

You can achieve 20+% biking mode share in wintry places like Finland: https://torontoist.com/2017/02/what-toronto-can-learn-about-...

As safe as a smallish motor cycle? I would think so. But "safe"? The word describes a feeling a person has, so unless you specify some kind of measurable metric, like "50% of the population would feel safe using it" or fatalities per mile would never be less than 3 times that of cars, using it is just you personal feeling about things. Useful to you but not so useful to people that don't know what safe means to you.

> As safe as a smallish motor cycle? I would think so.

No. Compare even a beefed up e-bike like the greyp to a smaller motorcycle like a Suzuki DR-Z400 SM. The wheels, fork, frame, rear swingarm, geometry and rake are all different. They need to be to handle freeway speeds safely. By the time you've souped up an ebike to be as safe as a motorcycle at high speed, you've converted it into a motorcycle. Those same changes make it less nimble, and therefore less useful, as a mountain bike. I'm not sure I would mix even small motorcycles in with bicycles on a public road.

> Useful to you but not so useful to people that don't know what safe means to you.

I'm an avid motorcyclist, but most people are not. They don't feel comfortable going those speeds unless they have a cage lined with airbags around them. The fatality statistics suggest they're not crazy for wanting such a thing.

A single passenger vehicle could have this.

The (American) market has shown that people overwhelmingly do not like small personal cars when presented with other options, without the distorting effect of subsidies and tax breaks.

Unfortunately there has been a 25% import tax on trucks since the 1970's and only a 2.5% tax on import cars. Is it any wonder that somehow(marketing for decades) people have been convinced that only losers would drive a minivan (counted as a car).

If someone like Apple or another new company could make a one passenger car really cool looking and inexpensive (Say $5-10k), probably electric, small enough so a least two go into a regular parking space, and a way that those people can share spots, it might just take off. Imagine that when you went to the city, if you see an empty spot in your mini transport, you park. No spots? Well you can park with someone else with a mini (and share the price). Set this sharing up in software and let the cars automatically switch positions, if needed, and I think you could have a real winner. Maybe three or six could fit in one spot. Electric cars sucked and only really strange, low status, people drove them. Post Tesla, I would say that is not the case any more. Similar thing could work here.

I mean, there are still small status cars with good marketing (Mini) and those are not really that small, nor do they sell as well as large cars.

You can blame it on marketing, but it's still a problem. What you're proposing just moves cars into the "small, cheap, and shabby" category; people buy cars for status, not just economics.

The current MINIs' size is, for the most part, dictated by safety requirements. They don't sell as well as large cars because they're BMWs and are priced accordingly.

Kei cars (which are similar in size to the classic Mini) do sell large volumes in Japan and are quite cheap, but they don't meet the aforementioned safety requirements (in either the US or EU) and their sales numbers are heavily inflated because you don't need proof of off-street parking to register one.

Could have, can go, and most certainly do! It's spelled m-o-t-o-r-c-y-c-l-e.

And it's a wonderful way to get around both city and country. Motorbikes reduce overall traffic, can fit about 8-10 vehicles into a car parking footprint, have generally low fuel emissions (and can be even lower — lots of new small bikes get ~80 mpg in real world use), and never have trouble finding parking.

Speaking for myself, it makes commuting from the East Bay into San Francisco, not just tolerable, but something to look forward to. 21-25 minutes door to door at peak rush hour; park for free; the view from the bridge is superb.

Of course, the danger of cruising through a flood of slow-moving, angry, distracted, stop-and-go car traffic is considerable — but there's good reason to think (CA CHP motorcycle cop accident statistics) that it doesn't have to be much more dangerous than driving in the first place.

I ride myself. But having one that could transition into using a bike lane would be even better. I hope if automatic cars ever work, then requirements for getting a drivers license can be dramatically increased and riding a motorcycle won't seem dangerous to the general populaton.

> Look at how much prime real estate is devoted to parking in typical American cities.

Not just in the US, but everywhere. Given that most cars are in use for a tiny fraction of their lifetime, they occupy real estate somewhere. Dedicating public space to parking is a huge subsidizing for motorists not often discussed.

If parking was market priced on par with commercial or residental dwellings congestion would become less of a problem but not many people would be able to drive in the larger cities around the world. The latter is a very hard sell for voters for whom cars are of the bigger investments they've made. But in the larger scope of things it's probably akin to throwing good money after bad.

Problem is that point to point is not scalable. Automated platoons only work in highway settings, not in urban areas where pedestrians and cyclists need to cross traffic at regular intervals very frequently. (The American experience shows that even erecting large physical barriers to crossing roads does not work.) And you can't build more roads to get out of this mess, because we have tried and tried and tried and even 26 lanes is not enough to decongest a highway [1].

The new thing is congestion management. Schedule deliveries only for off-peak or evening/night hours. Charge tolls to maintain traffic flow, as high as needed (I-66's market clearing price for a single lane was at one point $46.75 [2]). And above all, stop mandating parking with buildings, and disallow bundling of off-street parking with rent.

[1] - https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/09/11/braess-paradox...

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/03/0...

You can scale with tunnels. I also suggested congestion pricing in my last paragraph. Having congestion pricing on highways is also a good idea because it can reveal the price people are willing to pay for uncongested travel. That gives people an idea on how much a tunnel could make and motivate spending money on building it.

Tunnels right now are way too expensive per lane mile. And you also need interchanges to connect surface with tunnels, which runs into the same space issues that exist above ground.

Yes, the Boring Company is suggesting we can somehow solve this expensive tunnel problem with sleds for cars and vertical elevators, but those are all proof of concepts, and in any case they would probably be less reliable than current infrastructure due to the addition of more moving parts.

I guess my point is that point to point, user initiated transportation is a great idea. It is what makes cities great places to live in. All the millions of possible people to interact with and become friends with, etc. I think we should try to enhance the transportation options of people, not force them to certain train stops or times of day.

You could just do this by walking and elevators, but more extensive transportation would give even more options. There should be 10 or 100 or a 1000 Boring Companies working on the problem with transportation in cities. It is one of the 5 or 10 biggest problems of our age.

Train stops are hardly 'forcing.' Is Lyft, Uber, et. al asking people to walk a few tens of meters and clump up at stops along a route 'forcing'? Because this seems to be the conclusion that even the market-oriented, point-to-point rideshares have come to for efficient transportation after burning through lots of VC money [1]. And if you're feeling social you can interact on the train or bus. The scope of interaction while you're in your own personal aluminum bubble barreling along is much lower.

If it were significantly easier to build tunnels, someone would've done it already. Unlike space, or solar energy, or batteries, or cars, tunnels have consistent market demand, and existing technologies are not meeting that demand very well.

There is already a very lightweight, space efficient transportation point-to-point option; the bicycle. Today with current battery technology, even the crappiest bikeshare e-bikes hit 20-30mph and have a 50+ mile range. If you really need a car, just get a Zipcar or a Reachnow or a Car2Go, etc. But by no means should we continue to favor the car at great expense.

[1] - http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/06/lyft-reinvents-the-bus.ht...

You can scale a lot better if you put trains in those tunnels.

How about trains of vehicles that are automatically driven, can spit apart and only pieces with people in that that want to stop, stop, and the rest of the train just keeps moving? You could even let people pay extra to have a train car just to themselves and their friends. It would never have to stop for other people and go directly to where the group of people wanted to go. These train cars could even be designed to run on public streets and you could take it from the train tracks onto the road system. People could maybe, if they thought it was worth it, even own their individual train cars. They might like to carry around lots of stuff or pick up some furniture or a pile of groceries. Who knows. With such flexible train cars, most people might like using the train.

That's a nice idea. However, it requires a lot of technology that we currently don't have. Given that building new underground lines in cities is already a project that takes more at least a decade from planning to finishing, I don't think waiting for a) self driving technology to mature (this includes regulatory approval!), and b) self driving technology becoming cheap enough to compete with rail, is a good idea if you want to prevent total traffic breakdown in the face of continuing urbanization.

Self-driving vehicles already work really great in a controlled environment like a well marked single lane tunnel. The tech to do this is already here.

The Boring Company has recently announced a Dodger Stadium to Red line tunnel project. Construction time estimated at 14 months. If it is running two years from now, that might get people think about new time frames for tunnel projects. Hope it works.

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