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Comment by AeZ1E | Hacker News Reader

Can we make sustainable public transport attractive again - an stop hyping gadgets for the rich?

Those are not mutually exclusive endeavors.

Please be aware though, that there's always going to be a large population segment that will desire to proceed directly from point A to B in comfort.

Unless by "public transport" you're including "government owned autonomous taxis", public transport will never be attractive to that population segment.

> Please be aware though, that there's always going to be a large population segment that will desire to proceed directly from point A to B in comfort.

How large do you consider this population segment to be?

Quite large, certainly a good chunk of the population that currently drives. There's also a segment of the public transit riding population that would prefer personal transit, but do not have the option.

People generally prefer to a) be comfortable, and b) proceed directly from point A to B with no interstitial bullshit.

You almost never get b) with public transit as commonly realized today.

Order of magnitude as large as the group that commutes by car today.

A high-speed train can connect inner cities just as fast as this gimmick jet. It is orders of magnitude more efficient and scalable, and much more safe. A good train could easily be more comfortable, if there is a market for that. Do you think that jet will have dining rooms, sleeping cabins, ample room for luggage? Do you think it will even have a toilet?

Just. Build. A. Train.

High-speed trains are awesome. We absolutely should be building more of them for the people who'd like to use them.

But if someone wants to go directly from point A to B in a "gimmick jet", why should we try to prevent that?

I'll reiterate with your example. Building high-speed trains, and developing "gimmick jets" are not mutually exclusive endeavors. It's clear that you are not personally interested in a "gimmick jet", but there are people who would be. Why exactly should we be stopping those people?

If we put a higher regulatory burden on some means of transport than others, we'll distort the market.

I'm all for letting everyone with an idea try it. But we need to apply our safety etc. standards consistently. A lot of these new transport startups are really just regulatory arbitrage where they're relying on not being regulated because they don't fit existing categories. Make it legal to build high-speed trains with the same (low) safety, noise pollution, interoperability etc. standards as gimmick jets, and we'd see a lot more practical transport getting built.

I would not want to stop these people. As an engineer, I find the technology very interesting and cool. And it is electric, so it is relatively less harmful than normal jets and helicopters.

I do think that there are big challenges in people transport (mainly around cars and planes) and this does not solve any of those challenges, as it does not scale. So I see it as a gimmick: cool tech to show off.

I like trains too (and short-haul aircraft frighten me), but it's much easier to find an unobstructed path for a small aircraft than a high-speed train. There's also more latitude for experimentation with these piecemeal private sector experiments. I would expect a high-speed rail line between San Jose and San Francisco, for example, to cost far more than Lilium's current market cap. I'm not even sure where you'd put the track, without killing an existing train line.

Lilium Jet has 600 employees. What do you think they could contribute to sustainable public transport that the millions of people employed across the globe directly involved in public transport can't do?

Pretty sure NovaBus has a comparable number of employees. So does Lion iirc.

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