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Comment by HALtheWise | Hacker News Reader

I spouted this line for a long time, but was recently corrected by commenters pointing out that 2-3 occupancy electric cars actually beat the vast majority of subways and trains in practice, because you don't need to accelerate and decelerate every passenger at every possible stop. Cars are designed to be remarkably aerodynamically efficient, especially compared to motorcycles or bicycles, and an electric battery+motor is much more efficient at producing power than your muscles.

Delivering on this requires some sort of "Uber Pool" like algorithm to put a few people together in a vehicle, but doesn't require large busses.

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In cities where space is at a premium, a bunch of people standing, or on a bicycle, will always beat out people sitting down with room for an engine and a trunk.

Average occupancy of a car is 1.5 in the US, and that number shrinks as household size declines.

(It’s also worth noting that there’s no reason that automated technologies wouldn’t also spread to buses and trains. In fact, you can already automate trains. The big win there, is that buses represent massive fleet commonality.)

> In cities where space is at a premium, a bunch of people standing, or on a bicycle, will always beat out people sitting down with room for an engine and a trunk.

It depends. For example, you can theoretically fit more people into crowded bike lanes than you can into crowded streets. But around here at least, bike lanes don't get a lot of people. I lived by one for years that I don't think I ever saw a bicycle on once. But even when not in use, all of that space is still being set aside for cyclists.

Most of the time the issue with bike lanes is really an issue of a bike lane network.

Where a wide high-quality network is deployed quickly, you do often see high ridership increases, but usually in the US what you see is a bunch of scattered lanes that barely reach anywhere in an unbroken link, and no one wants to ride a journey that is even 5% dangerous.

But for example, London has seen 25% growth since pre-COVID by deploying more lanes widely: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-cycling-covid-...

As a regular, enthusiastic, urban cyclist, there is nothing I want more than widespread use of autonomous vehicles. With well-behaved (i.e. not human) drivers, every street becomes safer and less stressful than a dedicated bike lane.

I think we're quite a ways away from that.

Also, there was that case with the Uber self-driving car hitting the person crossing the street with a bicycle in Phoenix, because they had turned off the bicycle detection resulting in automatic braking.

Keep going with that thinking. What if trains were autonomous, electric, exactly/efficiently sized to what they were transporting, didn't require expensive/dedicated tracks, and could go directly between any 2 points? You end up with autonomous vehicles.

Trains are nice because they don’t require massive reconfigurations to hold varying crowds of people and the things they carry. People move furniture on subways all the time. There isn’t really a ‘perfectly sized’ personal vehicle; even now, just the simple bifurcation between a normal and XL taxi leads to longer waits for the latter, and god forbid you need special accommodations like for a wheelchair.

Car-like vehicles have massive inefficiencies, because the act of merging into and out of other lanes is inefficient.

A train line can carry up to 80k people per direction per hour. The FHWA’s estimate of a car lane car capacity is 2k people per direction per hour. And because cars have to eventually dump onto a surface network that requires timed cycles so that pedestrians and cyclists can cross the street, these low capacity segments are actually the bottleneck.

Driving in the city is not cruising. There are way more stoplights than subway stations.

Maybe in some type of energy efficiency, but the push for public transit is not really about energy - it's about making cities pleasant places.

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