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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

In addition to the two advantages you’ve already covered, Americans regularly travel between points without sufficient density to support frequent and convenient public transit.

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There's no reason you can't have frequent and convenient public transit as a subsidized service. This also ignores how between the years of 1938 and 1950 National City Lines — with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks — acquired and dismantled the streetcar rail transit systems of 25 cities, including Los Angeles. We have worse transit systems in the US today than we did a century ago. All in the service of cars which we rebuilt our cities around.

While we fucked around for a decade the CPC built out a high speed rail network on the mainland. Similar landmass, similar geographical challenges, less wealthy nation. Guess Americans will have to wait until public transit is more profitable than making everyone get their own car with its very own JARVIS.

You really can't have convenient public transit that replaces cars in our current carcentric metroareas. The density isn't there. You'd have to totally dismantle the suburbs, which most people live in. Unless you mean point-to-point buses, but that's just uber.

You could slowly do it over decades in places primed for growth. Places like Arlington, Va are being urbanized.

You are underestimating just how empty large swaths of the US are. As someone who's driven cross country a couple times, its just too vast for it to make sense in a lot of places.

I'd imagine "Autonomous Bus that runs the same limited route every day" is a far lower bar to clear than "Fully Self-Autonomous Car" and would make a huge amount of public transit feasible in areas where it currently isn't.

That argument can also be extended to trains. Problem is that the unions just wouldn’t allow it.

I’d love automation of public transportation, but nobody wants to try because of the social hurdles.

Just go talk to a bus driver for a while about how absurd that claim is. "Same route every day" doesn't mean "It's the same things every day." You see some absurd stuff after a few years of driving a bus.

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