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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

Self-driving municipal busses would be fantastic.

Also, a real nightmare for the municipal trade unions. (Do you know why every NYC subway train needs to have not one but two operators, even though it could run automatically just fine?)

Why?

Because the Transport Workers Union fought tooth and nail for it. Laying off hundreds of operators would be a politically very dangerous move.

Huh. I wonder if that makes any sense. It doesn't seem to make sense to keep employing people if you no longer need them. It sucks to be layed off, but that's just how it works.

It also shows a lack of imagination. If you have to provide a union with a job bank, why not re-deploy employees to other roles? With one person per train, re-deploy people to run more trains therefore decreasing the interval between trains. Stations used to have medics but this was cut. How about re-train people to be those medics? The subway could use a signaling upgrade and positive train control. Installing platform screen doors to greatly reduce the incidence of people falling onto the tracks is going to need a lot of labor.

Why would you need buses?

Mass transit is a capacity multiplier. If 35 people are headed in the same direction compare that with the infrastructure needed to handle 35 cars. Road capacity, parking capacity, car dealerships, gas stations, repair shops, insurance, car loans.

Believe it or not, in some cities that have near grid-lock rush-hour traffic - there's between 50-100%+ as many people traveling by bus as by car.

If all of those people switch to cars, you end up with it taking an hour to travel 1 mile by car.

It's almost as if they have busses for a reason.

First, these cities should be fixed by removing the traffic magnets. It's far past the point where we used the old obsolete ideology of trying to supply as much traffic capacity as possible.

But anyway, your statement is actually not true anywhere in the US except NYC. Even in Chicago, removing ALL the local transit and switching to 6-seater minivans will eliminate all the traffic issues.

> First, these cities should be fixed by removing the traffic magnets.

If you remove the jobs and housing, traffic does get a lot better. But it's not much of a city without jobs and housing.

Indeed. And people live better lives, with better job accessibility and variety. Once you remove dense office cores.

Car traffic magnets like highways inside urban cores? Or people traffic magnets like office buildings, colleges, sports stadiums, performing arts venues, shopping malls?

Office buildings. Everything else is just noise.

Large stadium arenas are a special case, but they don't create sustained traffic, and their usage periods typically do not overlap with the regular rush hour.

6-seater self-driving municipal minivans would be fantastic, too. (I would still call that a "bus", but I don't care what we call it.)

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