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Comment by philip1209 | Hacker News Reader

I strongly support public transportation (specifically, rail), but:

> I wonder if American society will ever come up with a solution for this since the problem is so widespread.

I think the answer will be something having to do with self-driving cars.

If you look at companies like Glydways, they're starting to provide transit-like services to governments.

The reason I think self-driving cars will perform better in the USA is that it is high in OpEx, but low in CapEx, which I think translates better to how Americans fund things (immediate results, no big investment that can unravel)

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The "self driving cars" are the future prediction is probably correct, but it makes me so very sad. A self driving centric city is still a car centric city, and it's not really a city. It's just a sprawling space with moving adult strollers.

The optimist in me says there will be less parking which opens up land for housing and 3rd spaces. I also think that the self driving cars will eventually create self driving private bus lanes. And then cities will probably realize they can just build a permanent line there.

One interesting thought experiment to do: what happens if private car ownership went away tomorrow and everyone took Waymos instead? Let's assume there's enough waymos to handle the load. It would be mayhem. There would be waymo depots everywhere and there would be an outbound traffic spike from the depots on their way to pick people up in the morning. It's simply not scalable unless you shared routes. So I don't think car ownership is going away. I think people will own waymos. At that point you might as well buy 5 waymos so that each kid can be "independent."

I'm optimistic, but the future of the American city is grim (with some outliers who are embracing urbanism)

I agree, but based on my daily encounters with Waymos in San Francisco, they leave me far more optimistic than human drivers. They yield to people in crosswalks, they don't honk and create unnecessary noise because they're having an emotional reaction to something they can't control (like a person jaywalking). They don't get drunk and smash into things.

And biggest of all, they don't take up a ton of public space for parking. Yes, they do require depots, but they don't require the continued existence of things like minimum parking ratio laws.

Self-driving cars only look like high OpEx/low CapEx because there are a trivial number of them on the roads. At scale, they require vast investment in road infrastructure to manage congestion. Adding many more vehicles to roads that are already congested will not work.

So in practice, they will be high OpEx/high CapEx. Which makes sense in a country fully captured by Capital.

Unless autonomous cars are accompanied by step-function changes in the ability to build new roads cheaply, they are not the answer.

America has and likes roads, so the marginal capex here is low.

Half of the country lives in suburbs and that's not going to change overnight. So roads are an unfortunate reality of keeping America functional.

Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads, though, because they don't gawk at accidents and potentially could drive in denser formations with less separation.

This isn't about the suburbs, where by and large people don't take transit today. Shutting down transit entirely wouldn't affect most suburbanites directly. But when folks talk about transit, they generally are not trying to tell suburbanites or rural residents to live differently. They should keep their cars and drive or let self-driving get them around.

But places where people take transit are a different animal. These places are characterized by higher density and higher levels of road congestion.

> Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads

Yes, in the suburbs and exurbs. A gridlocked highway in a city does not have a much higher throughput possible; cars are generally tightly packed and/or stopped.

Remember that for all the gawkers at an accident on one side of the highway, there are also drivers on the other side of the road who are physically blocked by the accident. Autonomy does not help this either, for medium-term penetration levels of autonomous vehicles. (Making the great assumption that at near 100% penetration, accidents could be nearly eliminated.)

I think the suburban angle does matter because the general life cycle of a suburb is that they start rich because they have 0 maintenance costs, but after 20-30 years require money to pay for road + sewer + water maintenance.

So they start with a massive budget surplus which creates well-funded schools that attract rich people. But after 30 years, they cannibalize education to fix potholes. And the socio-economic landscape changes to reflect this.

We're starting to hit a lot of suburbs in the USA around that 30 year mark, and they're attracting progressively lower income residents for whom transportation costs become an increasingly important factor in their home buying decisions.

Just thinking out loud here, but the Third World also works like that. (High OpEx, low CapEx.)

America makes more sense if you think of it as a developing country that happens to be rich.

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