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Comment by r3bl | Hacker News Reader

Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!?

The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.

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From a physics standpoint, what is your argument that a giant car with transfers to a number of smaller cars is more efficient than just using all smaller cars?

Public transit seems really wasteful to me: empty busses running up and down the same main streets, people going out of their way to get to a train station, subway cars stopping in the track and blocking the passage of all other vehicles, all movement stopping at a certain time due to low demand... it’s a mess.

Again, from a physics standpoint the optimal solution to me would seem to be a variety of different size autonomous cars, with 100% occupancy, which can draft each other, and tunnels that allow you to go direct(ish) to your destination with an IP-like routing plan.

What am I missing?

Is there a city that you think is close to optimal so I can study it?

Try Shenzhen. Super low cost ubiquitous underground train transport, augmented with super low cost electric taxis and buses for last mile. Occupancy is very high, and trains go every few minutes. Metros stop going at night because the taxi and bus system has sufficient capacity to cover nighttime demand.

We try to avoid it in the US because it costs us 5-10x as much money to do it. If it cost Madrid $4.5 billion to build a two mile subway extension they wouldn’t do it either.

So the solution is to still build a tunnel... but smaller... and move hundreds of people through it really fast in separate, quite heavy vehicles with no possible way of escaping the tunnel when something goes wrong? And something will go wrong.

I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.

Americans seem to avoid social contact at all costs. Yesterday there was a comment on HN where a user said they throw things out instead of selling them because they don't want to interact with understandable people who buy second hand items.

Cars, drive throughs, home delivery food. Its all tools for avoiding social contact.

Every city I've ever seen has a large amount of personal cars on the road. Sure some people in some cities ride in shared public transit, but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't. You might want to look closer to home and solving your own problems instead of attacking the US.

> but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't.

Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place.

It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that.

But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.

Right, because there is no car traffic in London or Tokyo or Paris or Hong Kong or Berlin, even though they are all noted for having some the best public transit.

I have stepped outside of the US. I saw a lot of car traffic in Barcelona Spain. I saw a lot of car traffic in Frankfurt Germany even though I was only in the city for a few hours. My friends in Sweden got around by car for every trip when I visited them.

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