Comment by jokteur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokteur | Hacker News Reader

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I live in Switzerland. Public transit goes _everywhere_, even remote villages and mountains. This is by design, such that one can only use public transit to go almost everywhere in the country.

Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we have a lot of money to spend. But many people, even if they own a car, will sometimes use public transit, because it is convenient, safe and comfortable.

There are places in Switzerland where if you need to take a taxi or an Uber, you will have to wait more than 30 minutes before one gets there. At this point, it is more convenient to take the regional bus that goes every 30 minutes. Even if the public transit frequency is every hour, I can plan my journey to arrive on the correct time (also, public transit is synchronised in the whole country to avoid waiting times).

I can see autonomous rideshares displacing taxi service and such. I think automonous rideshares still need density to be profitable. So if you need to subsidise rideshare to cover the whole country, why not properly invest in public transit?

Good for your country but also your country is quite small. I think a better analog is taking a trip from Zurich to Madrid. You could do it via train but it is probably going to be filled with lots of transfers and take 20 hours or you could take a 2 hour flight.

Fun fact: you can do Zürich Madrid with 3 transfers and 14 hours. The car will take 16 hours. Obviously, nobody is going to do that, and the plane is a better alternative. Your example does not get solved by autonomous cars, I am quite certain nobody is going to do this in a rideshare either.

Most people commute to the nearest city, move within a city, or go see friends in a neighboring city. Yes, US is much bigger, but I am quite certain that most people don't do more than 75km on a daily basis. The US still has plenty of medium and high density, where good public transit would make a lot of sense, but it is seriously lacking. It is a political decision, not a inevitable fact of life that the US has poor transit compared to other countries.

The correct question to answer would be: how do you move people efficiently in a 75km radius? Are there trips that could be solved with a good train, tram or bus? Do you provide streets with bike lanes such that people feel safe riding the bike? What about pedestrians? Are autonomous cars really solving the congestion problem? Most of these cars still need to be parked during the night when demand is lower, exactly like a railyard. However, the space taken by one person in one car is much higher than any other forms of transit.

My point here is: autonomous rideshares may displace taxi services and Uber. But most importantly, good street and city design, which is hard but not impossible, matters much more than solving the autonomous car problem.

I did a poor job with my example. My point is that your example is just a cherry picked anecdote from an extremely small country that has the luxury of a handful of dense cities and a large number of smaller towns that sit on the couple of major roads arteries.

I think you don’t have enough exposure. Yes yes road design great. Bike lanes great. Higher density great. It still does not solve the problem in American. My own cherry-picked example. The DFW metro area is half the land size of your country. A lot of it is already built up and it’s massively sprawling. On a normal commute from any given 5mile radius is going to be highly unpredictable, people are going in every direction. It’s extremely hot in the summer and it rains. Huge change management problem that you will not overcome. At the end of the day it’s hard to make a comparison from a country where a city by land is 2% the size of Dallas.

Last mile is an incredibly challenging problem in the US. It is typically not economically feasible even ignoring the culture change management. Short of rebuilding entire cities and forcing people into high density buildings most of this will not change. Now if you can make really amazing autonomous vehicles that can actually solve most of the last mile problem and introduces the ability for cities to create mass transit that is an interesting solution. Even if use for the full commute those have real potential to eliminate congestion as after all it’s usually some combination of accidents and poor driving. Parking those at night? That is no issue at all.

I am aware that the country is extremly small.

Here is the thing: the DFW metro area (from Wikipedia) has > 8.3M residents, Switzerland has 9.1M residents. The DFW metro density sits at 339.9/km2 (I took the conurbation number which has a lower number), and Switzerland sits at 207/km2.

So, in your example, Switzerland has less density than the metro area you mentionned, and yet it has much better public transit. Half of swiss population lives in tiny villages with no more than 5'000 residents. The last mile problem is also a problem for Switzerland. And yes, our summers are also hot, and winters even worse with lots of rain and snow. Not counting the mountainnous terrain, for example the city of Lausanne has difference in elevation of 400m, which is challenging to do by bike.

My point here is: you don't need a lot of density to create transit. It does not depend on the absolute size of the country. Yes, changing a city is hard (especially politically and culturally). But you need repave streets every 20 to 30 years anyways. You could make the city better by just changing how you decide to allocate the space every time you need to redesign a street.

These become such silly arguments. Why are you arguing against autonomous vehicles in America? Your examples on a base general case are not applicable and while I agree there are areas where things can be improved, for most American cities it does not make sense. Most all European examples including Switzerland are not applicable. Yes yes you have 5k population towns but they are all connected to very few arteries and in probably most cases it’s a single major road and commuter rail. Your summers are much more mild and winters (in the plains) around slightly warmer at the extremes. Doesn’t something like 60% of the Swiss population live in flats? You live in a small town probably in a flat and you take a train a few miles away to another larger city that is also relatively small and compact and you have much nicer weather if you walk around. These are such silly comparisons. What works in your geography because it’s small, highly concentrated in apartments, lack of sprawl, usually only one major road, more mild weather, makes it a lot easier to solve.

Let’s say you have redesigned a road in DFW, the question is so what? What does that accomplish? There are definitely pockets of improvement to be had but largely nobody is commuting via bicycle in DFW unless you have an extremely short commute. Those few miles of road won’t help a bus and again highlighting it’s a distribution last/first mile problem. The Swiss and most of Europe just by historical design, lower growth and cultural differences don’t have to solve for last and first mile (keep in mind a last mile could easily be 5 miles). There is no solution at scale short of rebuilding and designing an entire city. Autonomous vehicles are a nice solution here. They may support first and last mile allowing cities to implement concentrated transit options but they will also just get some number of cars off the road and create safer and better traffic.

I am happy Switzerland has a natural fit for commuter rail. It’s simply not happening in most of America so we should not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

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