Personal automobiles are the worse possible thing for the environment. End cars. Let's get real public transit back. Hyperloop is a lie to kill existing public transit efforts. So many people have documented that so many things have issues. Yes electric cars are good, but not much better than Plugin Hybrids.
The US shrugs at such an idea and keeps buying 17 million cars a year. Even Norway buys cars (although most are electric cars now). When cars are sold, they should be EVs.
I guess those of us that live in rural areas should just bike 100s of km everywhere then.
It's always amusing to see these hyperbolic, clearly unrealistic statements on here. I wonder what's going through the head of someone like you...
(Among other things, they have road topologies that make buses and bikes completely infeasible.)
If the hilly San Francisco can have lots of bikes and buses (…and cable cars and street cars and light rail and commuter rail) then so can most cities.
But downtown doesn’t need bikes. There’s amble public transit and everything is close by. Most people I know who bike use it for longer distances, eg the base of Bernal Heights to downtown via mission+market. Or going from Caltrain to sunset.
SF is compact, and has a few main drags where it makes sense to have trollies / bus lines. It also has a well-defined city center, so a hub and spoke transit system mostly works there.
In contrast, public transit doesn't even really make sense in South Bay. It was (mostly) laid out when public transit was common, but now there are multiple mini-downtown areas without train service, and many of the tracks have been ripped out.
If the edge cases mostly only affected people you didn't like how much would you care about solving them.
Exactly.
You forgot the tiny detail that public transit sucks bad in most countries (and you won't fix it with government and unions) and it won't get you where you need to go unless you live in the very center of a city.
Getting a job at Tesla to accelerate electrification of cars is a lot more within someone's personal control than somehow enacting the political will to change legislation and funding away from personal vehicles and towards public transit.
But I guess just making HN comments about it is a more feel-good easy solution.
I'd also suggest examining your perspective. Highways and roads are also public transit. It's a non-sequitur to suggest that highways aren't public transit yet something like bikes or bike lanes are.
Unfortunately we've been convinced by big government that we need highways, highway builders, giant departments of transportation, car insurance, tires, gasoline and gas stations, the actual cars themselves, oil changes, AAA, and all of these other industries at the scale that we have them now. It's just a giant jobs program.
If we built medium-density, mixed use neighborhoods you wouldn't need a gasoline or electric car to walk a few blocks to a local grocery store. It's manufactured spending. That's why there are so many advertisements and BIG GOVERNMENT programs.
If we cared about being efficient or cost-effective we'd just build things differently. But we don't care about that. While electric cars are "better" for c02 emissions than gasoline powered cars (and more fun to drive IMO), it's like doubling down on a solution for a problem that we can just not have by not driving so much and having cars.
It's really frustrating when I read comments where people act incredulous at the idea of not spending billions and billions of dollars every year on cars and associated government programs when you could just walk down the street instead. Can you still have a car to drive to the countryside? Yea definitely. Do we literally need to design society around a gigantic SUV so you can drive to Costco and pretend you are saving money buying in bulk? No.
I suggest exploring outside cities and widening your horizons. You apparently don't know much about the world.
Also even if implemented, hyperloop isn't for transport inside cities. It's for intermediate distances that are only a little too short to travel by plane with but too far for rapid travel on train/car. Elon was never interested in implementing hyperloop anyway. So this is a red herring.
Car companies has a huge history of damaging public transit infrastructure goals in cities to further their cars. In LA car companies literally bought rail car lines and turned them into buses.
Hyper loop is absolutely an interest of Elon but yes it is a red herring. He’s doing it to distract from other goals so more people want teslas. Eg the Las Vegas tunnels that use teslas instead of train cars.
https://inhabitat.com/what-happened-to-los-angeles-streetcar...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musk-s-boring-c...
I said he had no interest in implementing it, not that it wasn't an interest. He doesn't have the time and the level of interest in his other tasks is much higher.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_incentives_for_pl...
Personally I don't find this to be super constructive. It's similar in some ways to taking credit away from the founder of a company and saying that a VC firm was a much bigger driver of the company's success.
Anytime I had a question about a random area I’d get to meet the lead engineer for 30 minutes to an hour and they give an in-depth breakdown of how their tech work. I was always encouraged to help others and it reflected well in performance review.
When I had my interview with Tesla, the engineer sounded incredibly burnt out and was honest about how horrible it was.
(Make Elon/Bezos/Zuc/etc Richer)