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Comment by DiogenesKynikos | Hacker News Reader

If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.

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Private autonomous transportation will allow that public infrastructure to be tenfold more productive.

Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.

Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.

That's not true. For example, France is rapidly automating its metros. The US is quite unique in viewing public transport as a jobs program rather than a public service.

Of course it has the incentive. Even in this thread people are getting mad about it costing too much.

When someone says incentive in this context, they usually mean the individual incentives of each of the workers to make money for themselves, get promoted to get a share of profit, not the overall fuzzy public pressure.

And low density suburbs in America are never going to get torn up and re-platted so autonomous vehicles is the only way to improve safety.

On the contrary, our biggest cities started as little groups of houses. Letting places increase their density is a natural solution to a lot of this. The core problem is that we need to take away the power of local government to limit development.

The roads and houses are constructed with such separation and space that it is literally impossible without eminent domain of basically every lot. It’s simply not a possibility to turn the suburbs with huge stroads and subdivisions into mixed use high density living.

The separation and space tends to resolve itself slowly and naturally as density increases. You get the pressure from the new people who live there to make crossings shorter and safer. It's slow, but it is effective.

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