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Comment by ttfkam | Hacker News Reader

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ttfkam·

Someday… someday… (sub)urban dwellers will wake up to cars being the problem, not the type of car.

Yep, EVs are better than ICEs. Public transportation and proper infrastructure is far better (and cheaper overall).

Get the public transit in order, and you don't need so many charging stations.

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How about self driving cars as public transport?

Doesn’t solve the underlying problems that are caused by having car-centric cities. Walkable cities where most people’s needs are meet within walking distance and the mass transit for times you need to further is the real solution.

Agree on walkable, although I really like the idea of personal public transport that would be door-to-door and on-demand. I expect it would distribute cities more, and alleviate the hub-and-spoke model that public transport is sometimes built to, e.g. Dublin, Ireland.

Which would still cause traffic issues, wasting public land on building more roads and wasting energy and resources. Plus propping up the auto industry that caused the problem in the first place.

What if you don't want to live in a city as dense as that?

Cars are carry less people per area of road than buses do and it's even worse for self driving cars that are empty half the time.

My car is empty 99% of the time, it could be very highly utilised by the general public.

Given the current lower bound of one passenger in personal vehicles the process for using driverless cars needs to incentivize car pooling to the point that the average occupancy of traveling cars is considerably above 1 to make up for all the cars taking up road space while empty.

There is a possibility of municipalities having many mid to large vans that do routes at higher frequencies because they don't need drivers.

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