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Comment by wayne_h | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars?

The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.

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Meanwhile, JR East announced it intends to raise speeds on the Touhoku Shinkansen from 320km/h to 360km/h by 2020.

Tell me the chance of single passenger road vehicles routinely travelling at speeds like that within the foreseeable future, because I'd say zero.

And furthermore, these slow motion freeway "trains" will rely on networked, not merely autonomous, car technology, not included in the 2020 timeframe.

People fail to realize that the California bullet-train project is primarily an economic stimulus exercise.

No sale. Economic stimulus is completely nonfunctional when the lead time is in the "many years". The term "shovel-ready" was thrown around a couple of years ago for a reason.

Of course, I suppose you could just hope that you start planning for the project in this downturn, but it'll only start in the next one....

Work in the Central Valley, the part of California that was hit the hardest by the recent economic downturn, is expected to start this year.

[1] http://www.hsr.ca.gov/Programs/Statewide_Rail_Modernization/...

For the economic downturn that happened five years ago. The fact that we still need "stimulus" is itself a pretty powerful argument against its effectiveness. Our new economic innovation, making sure the economy stays down as long as our incredible sluggishness in "stimulus".

It costs so much money because the land is so expensive. The land is so expensive because 40 years ago many people like yourself said bullet trains won't work in America.

Is it really that hard to be convinced that traveling 220mph on a train between cities 200-500 miles apart is a good thing?

California isn't getting the ideal system now but if it builds the first one, lots of people will use it, and the next generation will have an easier time building the 300-350 mph maglev.

Cars cost something like $15+ per (calendar) day, and cause congestion when used in big cities. Making them autonomous won't help with either of those, but replacing them with usable mass transit does.

Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing who is doing what when. I am not a network engineer, but I cant imagine that people are driving the most efficiently to even attempt to maximize throughput.

especially when you think about the fact that a lot if not most traffic jams are ghost jams, where a slight overreaction ripples through the following cars causing them all to stop for no apparent reason.

Exactly the kind of stuff I am talking about!

Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing...

== No. You can't 'optimize' traffic away. LA is a case study.

I might have to look into this a bit more, and I would agree that adding more cars to the point of the system literally being unable to handle them cannot be optimized.

However, its clear to me that individual actors in the traffic system do not behave in a way that is beneficial to considerations above and beyond their own. I do believe that this would cause some decrease in overall traffic if it was "fixed" by an automated program. (If your car can drive 200 mph and not make a mistake, doesn't that imply that you can have more traffic throughput on the road?)

Either way, I am interested if you have specific examples besides the meme of traffic being terrible in LA. I assume they have done massive studies on the problem considering how problematic it is known to be.

specific examples besides the meme

Traffic in LA is a symptom of a social interaction, where demand exceeds supply of a scarce resource. Its not a "technical" problem in the naive sense. You proposed solution is like trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" through fertilizer. The problem of the commons is not that the quality of the commons is poor. The problem is that no matter how productive it is, it will be overgrazed. So, this is a social problem. Not a technical one in the engineering sense. The solution is ultimately solved with poltics, who keep the politically less powerful (ie, the poor) out of the commons.

Making cars autonomous would virtually eliminate traffic. Traffic only exists because of the inefficiency generated by cars driving at different speeds in a "pack" on the highway.

Aside from traffic caused by accidents or unavoidable roadwork, the vast majority of traffic - caused by raw inefficiency and poor reaction to the aforementioned two - can be regulated away.

While this is a good idea in theory, i'd say the autonomous highway isn't going to work well if you give grandma the option to tap on the brakes when she gets nervous.

The thing is that autonomous cars should just not allow it, like in the word autonomous.

Obviously the bullet train is going to be a disaster, but if there were a high speed train (as in Europe) from SF to LA, I would definitely leave my car home and use the train. I'm only to happy to free up I5 for you.

I take the train from Santa Barbara to San Francisco from time to time and would even put up with a train with decent internet connectivity. Even if the train is slow, I could at least be doing some work on the ride. Unfortunately the train is currently more expensive, less productive, and slower than driving.

The technology to build faster trains was invented before man landed on the moon. It has been 49 years since this technology went into production. It's older than most people reading this discussion.

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