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Comment by barbariangrunge | Hacker News Reader

We’ve actually had nearly self driving vehicles for over a century. They’re called trains. We should invest in some. The navigation problem gets way easier

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Most trains are far from self driving; training to operate one is easily 6-12 months work, depending on the line, with strict licensing as well.

Driverless trains are actually a pretty new thing, being on tracks is not as set/forget as people assume.

If you mean "transportation where I'm not driving" then sure but taxis also fit that bill.

Paris had it's first fully automated subway line in 1998.

Today there are 2 fully automated ones and one other mixing manual and automated.

The sofware was developped by Matra transport international (now Siemens Mobility).

It can even dynamically add/remove trains in service to best match the demand !

It also apparently uses a 48 bit cpu architecture.

[0] https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_d%27automatisat...

Sky train in Vancouver bc has been driverless for near 40 years now

Proportionally, they are far, far closer to self driving even with multiple people driving the train. A ratio of just 1:100 drivers:passengers is a vast improvement on personal cars which would probably be what, 1:1? Maybe 1:2 on average?

Subway trains have been able to be autonomous since at least a decade.

Paris Metro introduced driverless on all their MP 55 train sets in 1967.

I seem to remember there being a number of drain derailments lately. Hardly a great safety record compared to either Mercedes' or Tesla's systems.

Let’s see the fatalities per billion passenger km:

Rail: 0.09

Car: 2.52

https://international-railway-safety-council.com/safety-stat... (eu data)

How many fatalities have the aforementioned car systems had? Also European trains seem to run much, much safer than American ones (the derailments I was talking about were in the US), so doesn't seem like the best comparison either.

Indeed, it seems the ratio of fatalities for rail/cars is around 1:25 in EU (see above) and 1:10 in USA [0].

Comparing those data, driving is also much safer in the EU: death rate per 100M passenger for cars in 2021: 0.57. Multiply par 10 (100M to 1B) and divide by 1.6 (miles to km) = 3.5625. Rate in EU = 2.52.

Your right to point out those numbers aren’t split by driving assist options. Until that (still imaginary) future with +95% AV it seems hard to beat that 1:10 ratio, even more with vehicles weight steadily increase [1]

[0] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

[1] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/explore-automotive-tre... (select « weight » then « cars » for regulatory class and vehicle type)

Do you have a train station in front of your house and any target destination you can imagine wanting to go to? Because most people don't.

Yes. And yes.

I live in the Netherlands and we have this. Because it is what people want and need. And because it's been invested in for decades. And because it has a way higher ROI than car infra.

> I live in the Netherlands and we have this. Because it is what people want and need. And because it's been invested in for decades. And because it has a way higher ROI than car infra.

That would be those incompetent Eurocrats....

Well the road infra has also been invested in heavily. Dutch highways are the best

Yup. It's not an either/or as many seem to think. Public Transport works best in addition and next to cars, bikes, and such. It's mixing and combining that offers the true value.

Maybe the all the money invested in self driving and EV insentives and insane highways and stroads maybe you could afford decent public transit.

Maybe if we built more of those, more people would be within walking distance of them.

Trains for local transportation make no sense. Trams for high-throughput and buses for everything else is the only sensible thing for local public transport.

> Trains for local transportation make no sense.

Plenty of people take trains for local transportation every day.

> Trains for local transportation make no sense

Depends what you mean by "local".

For the :last mile", well duh.

But for journeys over 20km there is nothing like trains for efficiently moving vast numbers of people.

I’ve kind of just considered trams, metros, and trains to be the same thing. Their just different scales of wheels following tracks/

Trams and metros however are quite reasonable.

Works well in Japan.

When I was in Japan a decade ago trains were only used between cities. I doubt that's changed.

I can't fathom how you got this impression. It would be like a visitor to the US saying that in their experience, cars are only used for travel between cities.

> Do you have a train station in front of your house

There is one 100 metres from my house. I cannot catch trains at it because some reason I do not understand the powers that be will spend zillions on roads and SFA on rail tracks.

I also know that the companies that run the rail system have not updated their logistics as if it is the twenty first century. I cannot pt a box on the railways, and pick it up in another city, faster than driving it be truck no matter how well I plan it.

I can track my goods on road transport close to real time.

Do you have a self driving car? Because no one does.

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