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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

We can also improve coverage by building faster roads. How about a dedicated fast lane with a minimum speed of 120 mph and modern-car requirement? Add toll to reduce congestion.

It might improve emergency response, local commerce, far-away commute, tourism, and availability of all services, including healthcare.

Short of that, maybe next-gen VTOL aircraft (robotic octocopters) for transporting the ill at a fraction of the cost of a helicopter.

Here’s one for $200k with a 70 mile radius. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/307065

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Building new, faster roads in rural areas would be outrageously expensive per capita and would rarely be used, there is no economy to justify the expenditure. There are 2.2 million kilometers of unpaved road in the US. Even for the paved rural roads, many of them are relatively low-speed or circuitous because it is cheaper to go around myriad engineering obstacles than through them. It is difficult to justify tunneling 20 kilometers through a mountain range with a high-speed road so that 100 people can shave an hour off getting to the other side of that mountain range where there might be a fast highway.

Helicopters and similar have problems of limited range and operating ceiling, which are particularly relevant in the western US, in addition to requiring safe landing areas that may not be readily available. It is a challenging problem to solve, the US is quite large and many areas where people live are rugged and remote.

I would beg to differ -- the vast majority of rural roads in this country west of Pennsylvania are mile by mile grid, wide, and 55 MPH fast moving. They don't get you anywhere nearly as fast as freeways, they often slow down through tiny hamlets and they have lots of stop signs, but they're already very fast compared to a lot of places.

Edit: Which is to say that I agree with you more than the grandparent.

Those grids are not a problem, they drive relatively fast for unpaved roads, but the grids completely disappear once you reach the mountains in the western third of the US, even in large unbroken crop areas like The Palouse with proper rural roads. Many parts of the South are similar, though in those parts the meandering rural roads are defined more by water obstacles.

The major highways in the rural west, on the other hand, are very fast (90 MPH is normal) once you get to them, but the geographic distances between places that resemble civilization on those highways are often quite large even at that speed.

So you are saying that my copter solution will not work in parts of the country and given a low-capability copter. Ok, I concede on this point.

Do you think it will work in other parts of the country, and with a more capable copter?

> a dedicated fast lane with a minimum speed of 120 mph and modern-car requirement? Add toll to reduce congestion.

You've just described a railroad.

Railroads are spaced much further apart than highways, and the train schedule may not be that great when you're in a hurry to get to the hospital.

The idea is interesting but your "minimum speed of 120mph and modern car requirement" is not. Remember, this is rural America we're talking about, that is having trouble keeping hospitals running.

If it costs $100m/year to run a single hospital, it will probably cost, what, 1/10th of that to maintain a fleet of self-driving high-speed ambulances?

The highways will need to be built on the state/federal level, most transportation is that way.

The amount of construction needed for that kind of project that would only benefit a small number of people... It's just absurd. Rural people would rather that money go into more important projects.

Did it seem equally absurd to build the East Coast - West Coast railroads in the 18xx? Only a small group of the Wild-West settler would benefit from it.

And did it seem absurd 100 years ago to expect a nation-wide system of 55mph highways?

I'm pretty sure that it did seem absurd, and yet we're all better off for it in the end. Transportation infrastructure has a huge long tail of benefits.

A 120mph minimum in rural areas is probably a way to get more people into rural hospitals in those areas...

More like graveyards. There is a reason that most crash tests don't exceed 40 MPH.

The two of you have missed the part of my post about "modernized car requirement" (that would be something like autopilot), and "dedicated lane" that prevents other cars from getting in. I'm pretty sure this road, if built, will have fewer deaths on it than a regular highway.

So a thing that doesn't exist should be anticipated by cash-strapped governing bodies and should have massive capital expenditures poured into it, to solve a problem that does exist in the here-and-now.

Or not.

Yes? That's pretty much the story of every single capital-intensive project in history: first there is a present need, then goes the massive expenditure, then comes the completed project, then appear various positive and negative unintended consequences.

Some things can be boot-strapped, others cannot.

Let me be more specific. You are saying that they government should anticipate a thing that doesn't work and has no realistic timetable to be adopted at any scale. Further, you don't take into account such little things as car tires rapidly deteriorating at your proposed speed (and for just that one little thing you must ignore that that any changes to composition just for your wonder-roads will increase cost and decrease other valuable aspects of tires, like road grip, which matter more in inclement weather in more rural areas).

And it should just...happen, because you said so.

A sibling commenter had it: you're badly reinventing trains. What is with the obsession amongst the tech set to reinvent mass transit poorly? (See also "Loop," by one Musk, Elon.)

High-speed roads are the most proven thing in the history of proven things - if you make them people drive on them with high speeds. For example, Germany is doing just fine with high speed roads [1]. In particular the car tires are not coming apart at all, nor does any other part of the car.

Hardly a re-invention.

[1] The lowest speed I observed was 100mph, and that was me in a clunky economy Opel wagon. Everyone else was going 120mph+, and a few cars flew by me faster than I could see them, I think at least 160mph.

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