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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

Everywhere and everyone is different, obviously, but I would love to see autonomous electric vehicles become our future. I really don't care for public transportation, I find it uncomfortable in many ways, and I don't see any way that it will ever not be about half the speed of a private point-to-point transport.

So a highway filled with self driving cars zipping along bumper to bumper may not technically be able to carry as much as a fully loaded subway train, but it's so much more useful. Take away the casualties and pollution, and it's as close to perfect as we are likely to get.

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> and I don't see any way that it will ever not be about half the speed of a private point-to-point transport.

Subways / trains in Tokyo are faster than driving, same in London.

No stop lights, no intersections, no delays on the road.

Buses aren't faster, but once you go underground, the speed improves dramatically. Even if there is a 2 minute stop once every mile, that is still less time waiting than comparable stop lights in a car.

As far as I can tell, that's only true in fairly unique situations, though, in the super-cities. I live in a decently sized city (metro population of perhaps 3 million people, around 25th in the US I believe) with a transit system mostly regarded as 'pretty good' (but no subway, just light rail and buses) and it would be rare even at rush hour for a car not to be faster. Usually signficantly so.

I think what it comes down to is that if you have a subway system, that will probably beat cars, in the limited area it serves. Once you have to do transfers to buses, it gets much slower. In the places I've visited with subway systems (SF, DC primarily) this is definitely the case.

The US, even cities with “pretty good” transit by local standards, had appallingly bad transit and car-optimized cities.

Here's an interesting overview of US cities mass transit by an urban planner from Houston (an admittedly vary car centric place.) https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/7/18131132/public-tran...

US transit is heavily optimized for cars, even in places with pretty good mass transit. Don't let your personal experience with US metros color your expectations for what public transit can be.

> with a transit system mostly regarded as 'pretty good'

That's probably US bias, because as far as I can tell by reporting US public transport is generally very bad and far worse in big cities compared to much smaller cities elsewhere.

How about once you factor in time to walk to and from the station.

You have to count that against time spent at the gym, not against commute times. :)

Doing this in chicago winter sucks. I did that for many years and now I drive.

Still quicker in London, doubly so if you're including walking to and from the car park.

Can you explain to me how it's more useful than a train that carries more people with less energy?

Because, to me, it sounds like you just don't want to be uncomfortable, and that's fine, nobody does, but it doesn't make something more useful.

Being more comfortable is useful to me.

Trains can be extremely comfortable, actually. You can have things like food/drink service on them, not to mention WiFi.

The lack of comfort people refer to usually involves the other passengers, not the amenities. But everyone knows you're not supposed to talk specifically about that aspect of public transportation.

Ha, I will! I once had a guy behind me on the train whip out his penis and pee on the floor. Looked right at me in the reflection of the window as he did it. He wasn't even crazy, either, as far as I could tell, just antisocial.

And yes, before you say it, that isn't an everyday occurrence. But jackasses refusing to take their bag off the seat so you can sit down is. As are people who can't be bothered to take a shower, or think that cologne will make up for it. The list goes on. Many people are just unpleasant to be around, and I don't see any problem with that observation.

For me, public transit comfort comes down to a couple things. First, the hard plastic seats make my butt hurt, and standing makes my left foot ache. Sorry, I'm getting old :). Second, the 2x time it takes to get anywhere means I'm on that terrible seat for even longer. And third, because yes, it's absolutely true, I find that perhaps one in ten people is unpleasant enough that I want to be out of visual and/or aromatic range.

> First, the hard plastic seats make my butt hurt,

Yeah, same for me. And I've heard that the ~80s crop of NYC subway cars were made in Japan. Except there, they have upholstered seats. But that wouldn't work out well in NYC, so they got hard plastic. But on the other hand, the oldest LIRR cars (refurbished for the 1966 World's Fair) had upholstered seats, and they were ~OK.

Never in my life have I experienced a puddle of urine in my personal vehicle. This happens about 5% of the time with my city’s public transport.

Similarly, never have I been given religious literature or panhandled. This happens about 90% of the time.

Sounds like you just have poor public transport. It doesn't have to be that way, and I've never experienced anything like it in Europe.

Or maybe a dysfunctional society :(

Yes,precisely. I found Vienna and Tokyo’s subway pretty immaculate. But London, Paris, Bilbao, Amsterdam all had some experiences similar to my other post. Much smaller sample so hard to say how frequently it occurs in any useful way.

5% is a staggering number! I rode the trains for four and a half years in NYC and just avoided the empty cars and never had too many issues.

Also people seem to focus exclusively on the negative interactions which is a very human thing to do, but this discounts the positive interactions.

It can be really nice seeing people offer their seats to the elderly, or kids meeting and playing, or the occasional furry companion in a cute bag.

But I enjoy people watching in general. It can be neat to try to imagine a persons world and how it looks.

I still think public transport is a net positive. But completely understand the allure of my own car. Or an Uber managed self driver where each rider rates the past.

My car has WiFi, and it is not even automated yet. And food & drink are perfectly feasible as well, remember we're talking about automated cars now. All kinds of options suddenly make sense when you don't have to worry about the chore of driving.

Some Finnish trains have play-areas for children on them. I was pleasantly surprised the last time I rode a train with my 1.5 year old child. He had a lot of fun going up and down the slide, sitting in the toy-train (on a train!) and reading books in the "library".

Because trains don't go door to door. Obviously.

Except in lucky places with great underground railways you basically have awkward last-mile journeys where you have to take a taxi or hit a car or take a bus and that adds a lot of time to the journey.

It would be great if there were trains everywhere but frankly that's even harder than making a reliable driverless car.

Which is why driverless cars are great for bringing people from and to public transport. They are a great ingredient for improving public transport, but they don't replace it (at least as soon as road capacity becomes an issue).

How do I get from my house to the train? Do I have to make transfers? How long will they take? What if I have to carry groceries, or take young children with me, or my elderly grandma?

If I have a car, I load everyone and everything up, and we go. We get to our destination and unload, ta-da! Is this not an order of magnitude more useful than taking a train?

Sometimes I think HN is filled with young people with uncomplicated lives :).

>Sometimes I think HN is filled with young people with uncomplicated lives :).

No, if these are big issues for you, you likely live in an American low density area where public transportation is scarce. In large metropolitan areas (which is after all, where most of the world already lives, and will live), getting on and off public transport is usually not a problem.

I have relocated to Tokyo for example about a year ago, and for me, a trip to the grocery store is usually done by foot (same is true for other appliances), and multiple forms of public transport are in walking distance.

I live in a city with about 700,000 residents inside the official limits, and 3,000,000 residents in the metro. The nearest bus stop is approximately a quarter mile away.

With all due respect, the number of people who live in cities as dense as Tokyo are the minority, most of us don't.

No offense but if you think walking a quarter mile is a hindrance to access public transport then the car culture has done even more damage than I thought.

On the contrary, I think a quarter mile is perfectly reasonable for a public transit stop in my city. Sorry to suggest otherwise.

However, when I think about loading up my young children with all of their stuff, loading me up with everything I need, etc, and then dragging that down the street a quarter mile, then waiting for the bus, boarding it, riding to the transit center, transferring, riding another bus to the light rail station, riding that downtown, and then doing it all again the other direction... well, I'm pretty confident in my original point that the car is a hell of a lot more useful. Sure, you can exist with only the public transport option, but I was not asserting otherwise. But a lot of people on HN seem to think that not only is it possible, but that it is the superior choice.

So, no offense taken, in fact I appreciate you affirming my original comment about so many folks on HN commenting from the viewpoint of someone with a young, uncomplicated life :-).

I think you're making it more complicated than it is in many places. In many you'd need not get in a bus at all, because the rail stations are dense enough to always be a couple blocks away. That requires having more than just 1 train line though, which is only really true in NYC (and maybe Chicago? You have to squint really hard for but to be the case even in sf) if you're looking in the us.

Many people with kids do what you describe in cities. It's far better for everyone, and even if it's not the superior choice for an individual (though I'd contend it is when you adjust your lifestyle), it is the superior choice for everyone together as it avoids pollution, traffic gridlock and huge fuel inefficiencies.

As it is those with cars push off these negative externalities onto those who choose not to have them, or can't afford them. So your comfort does have a cost, which you don't pay directly.

Nailed it.

Perhaps I'm sheltered or naive, but it seems to me that in a well designed system you shouldn't really have to take two bus connections to get to your nearest light rail station. More like zero, or one max if you live on the outskirts. This is how it is in London, and while I realize that's not a typically sized city, it's not unusually dense either. I think that kind of system is possible anywhere, it just requires motivation.

¼ mi is a 5min walk. Often you need to walk as far or further to and from the parked car. I literally yesterday just took 2 kids, a toddler and a baby, on a multi connection trip, and it's easy, simple, and less stressful then driving.

Also, tour last paragraph just makes you sound pompous and liek you have no intention of having a discussion but instead only wanting to put others with a different point of view down.

A quarter mile to the closest route typically means a far more complex combination of transfers, each with its own delays, to actually get to your destination of choice.

A quarter of a mile is a long distance for a bus stop in a city with good transport. But sounds like your city doesn’t have enough transport density. Tokyo is pretty dense but its still not abnormal.

> What if I have to carry groceries, or take young children with me,

I exclusively use public transport, and regularly do both of these without any problems.

I doubt that a train is significantly more energy efficient than an electric car with 3-4 people in it. Most people will probably use pool type autonomous cars which get you to your destination door to door much faster than trains.

Trains can fit far more people than cars.

I admit that I'm only doing rough math in my head, but it seems to me that cars bumper to bumper at 100kpm is definitely going to have a greater carrying capacity than intermittent larger vehicles that stop a lot. (Or at least a similar magnitude)

I don't expect self-driving cars to drive much more densely than current cars, though, because all or almost all the same reasons we drive with separation still apply for self-driving cars. Where you might think you get some advantages, they will also have disadvantages, too, like being able to compute exactly how risky their behaviors are. People making the cars and writing the car software aren't going to want to stand in court and explain why their car crashed the 50-car dense train because their car software left no possibility of the brakes going out at that exact moment (i.e., no previous sign of brake failure), and caused a huge crash because none of the cars had any buffer for failure.

Personally I expect self-driving cars to drive a great deal more conservatively than humans as a result, and I think self-driving cars are going to end up demanding a lot more space and buffer on the freeways. And if they don't at first, one day you'll way up and they suddenly all will, because somebody won some lawsuit and a software update was pushed overnight to double the buffers.

I tend to agree, I expect that as a practical matter autonomous cars will be conservatively driven, e.g. with large buffer zones, gentle acceleration, safety-above-all-else.

I think other drivers will adapt to this and start taking advantage. Think of what happens when you leave a legal following distance in front of you now, in traffic. Now imagine an autonomous car in the same situation. It would probably end up stopped.

Might as well imagine autonomous-only lanes while we're speculating.

I'm not sure this is a bad thing. Often times, traffic jams are caused by not enough spacing, or unobservant drivers resulting in sudden breaking, and a knock-on effect. Would need to simulate to confirm, but I suspect that more vehicles giving enough stopping distance, and accelerating smoothly would improve traffic flow, even with the addition of more defector (defective?) drivers.

The fundamental difference between human and automated drivers is that humans aren't going to get any better. Software based systems will get to human level then continue to improve to the limits of computing and physics, which is certainly better than humans.

And we haven't even considered networking. When the cars are all talking to each and routed together then it's fundamentally a single machine.

The laws and systems will evolve with capabilities rather than getting stuck on supporting the earliest generation of self driving vehicles and norms.

The major reason we drive with the space between cars that we do is human reaction time. That is at least an order of magnitude better in autonomous cars.

The primary reason we drive with separation is our reaction time. Computers can react must faster. In addition they can actually talk to the cars around them. They could literally form a train. We won't switch to self driving cars until they can drive better than humans. If they have to leave a larger buffer, then the work isn't done.

I don't think it applies that easily.

There's still a chance an automated car encounters something that couldn't be spotted / reacted to. For example a deer/kangaroo/whatever jumping right in front of it. If the cars keep their distance, only the first one crashes. If they form a minimum-spacing train, the only message they can send to the following ones is "you're screwed now".

A deer would be unlikely to jump into a train of cars. They usually get caught by cars that have space in front of them. I know you are just giving a single example, but anything that applies to an actual train would apply to a virtual train as well. I don't understand why not having a physical latch between cars makes any real difference.

A deer doesn't affect a real train that much due to the mass difference. In case of cars though they cause serious damage. If the following cars don't keep a distance they end up immediately crashing into the first one, multiplying the damage.

I don't have much experience with deer behaviour, but kangaroos will happily jump right into anything moving. They will even hit the side of your car sometimes (which they should've obviously seen coming)

Cars driving bumper-to-bumper at 100km/h would be extraordinarily unsafe.

Anecdotally I commute to work because it's faster and much less stressful. Granted I do need to cover the first leg by car due to the public transport in my area, but the little bit of walking and the free time I get in the train are so much better than sitting alone in city traffic.

Sounds like a friend of mine who loves the time to read a book or work on his laptop.

I look out the window of the train, though, because otherwise I get motion sick. It's lost time to me.

> I don't see any way that it will ever not be about half the speed of a private point-to-point transport.

Private point-to-point loses out mostly for long-distance already, short-distance currently either allows last-mile, station overhead, and related concerns to big down shared transportation or suffers from sharing infrastructure optimized for private point-to-point.

Ubiquitous automated (on-demand, not personal cars actually make the station problem easier, since you need less parking at stations, making station footprints smaller, and reducing delay from arrival at station to boarding.

They could also merge with buses: instead of fixed routes and schedules, vehicle sizes and routing are demand driven for efficiency (perhaps allowing you to pay a premium to guarantee a dedicated vehicle for your party.)

I would be comfortable saying that subways and above (e.g. high speed rail, airplanes) are a special case of public transport that will always make sense and will nearly always beat out a car for transit time.

Aside from that, I agree with what appears to be your premise -- that we could invent public transport devices that mitigate and perhaps mostly erase the advantage of the car.

But then I'd ask ... why? Why are we supposed to hate cars? It's okay to like scooters and bikes, but nothing larger until we get to a bus? I imagine a future with all sorts of automated cars that never get into an accident and roll silently along emitting not a whiff of noxious fumes, while being big enough to carry just the right amount. If nobody needs to own their own car, then they can call a car that is sized for their exact needs. One passenger or ten. They efficiently get to exactly where they are going in the minimum time possible with minimum effort. What a dream!

Cars take up massive amounts of public space. Look at a car dependent suburb vs. a train dependent suburb.

> I agree with what appears to be your premise -- that we could invent public transport devices that mitigate and perhaps mostly erase the advantage of the car.

That's not quite my premise.

Rather, it is that shared self-driving automobiles (cars through vans through buses) with centralized automated dispatch are the missing element of the mix of public transport devices that, alongside existing options, does that.

> Why are we supposed to hate cars?

Recognizing that public transport has social benefits does not require hating privately owned cars, much less cars more generally.

> It's okay to like scooters and bikes, but nothing larger until we get to a bus?

Size has nothing to do with anything (well, it has to do.with efficiency for long-distance transport.)

> I would love to see autonomous electric vehicles become our future. I really don't care for public transportation, I find it uncomfortable in many ways

I imagine (edit: many) people who use public transportation would agree with you. You now, since they're usually using it out of necessity and not enjoyment.

For lots of people maybe but no way all. A lot of public transport is faster than driving and it avoids having to park.

Is that true for anything less than a subway/metro train? Light rail is slow, buses even worse, there are many benefits to public transit but speed is rarely one of them. And in the rare cases when it is faster, it's in a handful of extremely dense cities that only represent a fraction of the population, and only for specific use cases.

> I really don't care for public transportation

Right. We get that. It's very obvious that much of the hype around self-driving cars is premised around people who simply reject mass transit outright and therefore believe that somehow, somewhere, they'll get to ride around in a spacious, individual vehicle in the middle of a packed city and so will everyone else and somehow it will all work out because "technology".

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