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Comment by ipunchghosts | Hacker News Reader

There should be a "robot road" which is autonomous driven cars only. There are so many reasons to support this. Robot cars and humans do not belong on the same roads yet.

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Agreed. You could also maybe have special tracks in these roads that the cars could attach to so they would not need tires. Additionally I bet you could link them together so the robots could carry hundreds of people at once. I bet you could even run them on a regular schedule so people can use them to commute on the regular.

That'll never work. People would have to move, using their feet, from where they are, to the common stationary meeting points that this special vehicle met at, which makes them far less convenient than taking a car which picks you up and drops you off right where you need to be. In places where things aren't very dense, this "stationary common meeting point" is liable to be far away from where the person needs to be. Furthermore, this "schedule" you talk about. In order for this proposed system to work, the "schedule" would really have to be more of a frequency than a set schedule. This means that there will need to be a large number of these special cars in order for them to run frequently. This will cost lots of money, far in excess of what any one rider could pay. So then it needs to be subsided by the government, who are reluctant to spend money on things, so it needs to be well supported as an important expense by the whole population. A population that already owns regular cars. So it might work in dense locales with a consencious population, aka Europe, but I don't forsee such a system gaining popularity in the US outside of dense urban environments, and even then.

Besides, self driving cars, which are already here and work thanks to Waymo, don't need special roads or rails to run on.

I think the poster was being ironic. ie let's reinvent the train.

Poe's law strikes again!

And the reply was a list of problems that trains aren't solving well.

Then improve efficiency by adding rails to reduce friction, and then connect multiple cars together. Finally, remove the battery and use overhead wires or a third rail to power this “robot car.”

Most autonomous cars can also drive non-autonomously with human control. In your example, those cars could then disconnect and go on their merry way, like cars on a ferry. The last mile (or several miles) has always been the shortcoming of mass transit.

More like rental cars at an airport. There are Park n' rides, taxis, busses, bikes, scooters, friends with a car, etc. fully capable of delivering the last mile.

The last mile is only a shortcoming in underfunded transit systems of sprawling suburbs.

Yes and when those shortcomings exist, a robot lane added to existing route sounds like a fine idea.

See: HSR in the California Central Valley.

The I5 is too narrow already, it needs widening and the HSR won't fix that. Adding car rental and expanding the local transit solutions at each station along the route will balloon its cost to extremes. It's already unacceptable.

Ah yes, highway projects are cheap, transit projects are expensive. Classic.

If trains don’t take cars off the road, we have to explain why Chicago doesn’t have a 26 lane highway but Houston does despite being a similarly sized metro area.

Where do all the cars go when over 20 million passenger trips take place on Chicago public transit every MONTH? Houston’s numbers are at least 4x less from what I can tell.

California needs to withdraw from the cat drug, not up the dosage.

Even in California. If you compare the Transbay tube to the Bay Bridge, you really see how the Bay Area simply could not function as currently without BART. The tube services around 27,000 people at peak hour per direction, while the bridge only services just over 14,000 people (in 9,000 cars).

Without the tube you’d need two additional 10 lane bridges to service peak demand. And that just wouldn’t be possible.

https://youtu.be/HbZXtSnabWc?si=-mWIkQg3gTV-ZSMe&t=227

The last mile was only a shortcoming when we started building for cars instead of people.

The transition to full AV-only roads will be slower and quicker than most people think. It will take a long time still for AV technology to be perfected, but once it is proven we will see various bans on human drivers coming in rather quickly. Texas has already been talking about dedicated corridors for AV trucks.

Funny because I keep being driven around by an autonomous vehicle without issue

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