Hacker News Reader

Comment by GaryNumanVevo | Hacker News Reader

I would much rather we invest billions into existing public transit solutions as a community. A light weight electric train doesn't need advanced LIDAR + AI to navigate, it can transport 100x people than a single car.

View on HN

Well, that depends on what problem you're solving. Self-driving vehicles aren't solving mass transportation. They're solving ubiquitous personal transportation. They may also solve mass transport by being cheap, ubiquitous, and by performing an end-run around the piles of local regulation that restrict mass transit.

Density + mass transport is the solution to the problem of ubiquitous personal transportation.

This is the answer, but it opens up another line of questioning: do we force people to live in dense urban areas? Sometimes I wonder if pro mass-transit commenters (I'm pro mass transit, FWIW) have ever lived outside of a major metro. There are so many places where people live where mass transit is never going to be viable in way that replaces the car. Who gets to decide when/if we invalidate their way of living? Maybe I'm not seeing all the angles here.

Self-driving is largely a reaction to the single-person-single-car scale problem. When you're trying to transport millions of people on a weekday, cars will never be able to meet demand. Look at China trying to vertically scale their highways resulting in 40-lane wide highways and multi-day traffic jams.

"Self-driving is largely a reaction to the single-person-single-car scale problem."

What in the world? No it is not.

Username ... does not check out.

> the piles of local regulation that restrict mass transit

Yes, that's what's stopping local governments building more mass transit, it's all those regulations imposed by the pesky local government!

Yes. Take SF, for instance.

EDIT: Rate-limited, so read response to request to elaborate below

San Francisco has multiple entities involved in the process of policy relating to transit. So, while the SF MTA and Jeffrey Tumlin may want more rail (perhaps underground), more buses, and fewer car thoroughfares there are also supervisors in charge of local districts who may oppose construction on grounds that they will hurt constituents.

As an example, supervisors David Campos and Hillary Ronen at different times opposed the bus-lanes along Mission St. on various grounds including (paraphrasing) "speeding up transit does not improve things for the local community", "the transit lanes lead to gentrification", "local merchants will see decreased foot traffic".

That's just an example and the details are too numerous to list here but consider also that the SFFD opposes Vision Zero.

For someone who knows nothing about SF laws, please elaborate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com