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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

> I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday.

We could put them on rails and have overhead cables providing electricity efficiently, and make them go up to 300kph too, damn the future looks bright !

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Yes, if trains had roughly the frequency of hopping in your car whenever you want, and the density of roads, they would be used a lot more and many more people would not have cars.

Cf. The London underground.

I traveled to Tokyo for twenty years.

The Tokyo rail system is an official Wonder of the World.

I never looked at schedules, and the trains were reliable and cheap.

Crazy good.

Switzerland too - I was there for the first time for a couple of weeks last month. Didn't even think of hiring a car, using Uber or anything - the public transport is just too damn good. Even though I had a pretty good idea what to expect, I was still amazed.

The subways in Japan are fantastic. Interesting that they make a loss on the trains themselves and more than compensate in profit from retail and real estate.

>I traveled to Tokyo for twenty years.

Longest. trip. to. Japan. evar.

NYC subway used like that too. Didn't look at schedules, just hopped on and off at whatever station. Didn't feel like crossing under the east river in a tunnel so hopped off a red train and switched to a yellow train to use a bridge instead. All on a whim.

I wish public transport providers would take advantage of the possibilities of apps more aggressively. I'm in London and I rely entirely on CityMapper to use public transport (mostly) and some Uber. I don't have a drivers license - never got around to learning to drive (I'm 47... maybe one day) as I've always lived places with excellent public transport.

Apps like CityMapper revolutionised that in making me resort to Uber/cabs far less, but there's some really obvious improvements in terms of leveraging journey data to both offer "virtual" bus services where you can offer higher frequency than you have buses to service by filling in with on demand minibuses and cars from car hire companies, and in using the end-to-end journey data to adjust schedules more dynamically.

There are plenty of on-demand shared services (e.g. London's Dial-A-Ride) but most seems to be operated in isolation and/or targets people with limited mobility for end-to-end transport rather than to fill in smaller gaps in other services.

I saw one of these the other day in Cambridge, MA. Looks like they’re out of service here, but that kind of 10 passenger small electric shuttle bus seems great for filling gaps in transit networks: https://www.ridecircuit.com/about-us

I suspect the cost structure isn’t that great compared to a full size 60 passenger bus, though. The drivers per passenger ratio is pretty low, which probably more than counterbalances the lower operational cost of the vehicle.

Good one!

I've always been a fan of trains. I seem to be in a minority, in the US, though...

Trains are awesome. My thinking is that the implementation sucks.

I've been on a train twice in the last ten years.

On the one ride, it was hot so it expected to arrive about 45 minutes late. You can't go full speed on hot tracks.

On the same ride, there was construction, so we sat and waited for about 45 minutes in the middle of no where, in the dark. It was long enough they told us to just let our kids run around and brought the snack cart around for free.

That's a lot of delay for a 3.5h ride.

Ontario, Canada.

My in-laws use trains to travel between cities a fair amount. More delayed trips than not.

If you’re not talking about long distances, don’t get me started on the LRT in Ottawa and the months of downtime it has had.

I was on a trip to Switzerland last month - across a couple of dozen train, tram, trolley-bus and regular bus rides, I had just a handful that were delayed - three to four minutes late (mostly on intercity trains that I'm going for an hour or so journey on, so it was basically nothing). But mostly they were bang on time. It's ridiculous, they're absolutely nailing punctuality, cleanliness, frequency, interchanges, mode changes etc.

And if you happen to miss the connection, no worries there's the next train in 30 minutes.

If you are in Tokyo, it's more like 3 minutes.

Oh by I mean anywhere in the country, not only in the capital. But maybe it's the same in Japan, I don't know.

Depends on where you are.

Tokyo is like Type A++, so the trains are constant.

Other areas, probably not so much.

But you can get pretty much anywhere in Japan, via train (and maybe a short-haul flight in a 747).

Unless you live somewhere that the next one isn't coming at all, and now you have to wait twice as long, and jam twice as many people in.

Make them bigger so they can hold many people for one trip, while we are at it.

It’s likely profitable and better for the environment if we get electric self-driving trucks on private highways. 70% of freight is moved by trucks.

https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data

This analysis is immensely US-specific

It would also work in China, of course. In fact, I would expect them to implement it first.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/28/self-driving-tech-compan...

Trains are an order of magnitude more efficient, however, and there’s a huge cost & environmental impact to building those extra highways. What we should be doing is more intermodal work where long-distance trucking is replaced with rail & local delivery.

Yes, everyone knows trains are more efficient. They’re at full capacity and have been for decades.

It’s very difficult to add train capacity.

So, let’s not derail the conversation with your better idea that’s never gonna work

This is not even close to true unless you’re going to rescope your comment to focus on a few very specific chokepoints. There’s tons of unused mainline capacity because years of crew efficiency improvements mean the railroads are running fewer longer trains.

More importantly, however, climate change means that we can’t continue to ignore externalities. Redirecting road expansion projects into rail construction would be necessary even if it wasn’t cheaper.

Find a way to eliminate mode switching and you might be on to something. Even transit activists recognize the high cost of mode switching and how much of a negative it is for practical use.

It is technically possible, but every time someone suggests self driving trams/trains/metros here, the public transport union threatens a strike.

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