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Comment by boomzilla | Hacker News Reader

I share your sentiment. On the other hand, the upper bound of the number of car reduction is maybe 50% of the cars that would be there otherwise (assuming we can replace most single car trips by 2-3 people trips). It's a huge improvement, but the US really needs to work on public transport. Heck, why is Caltrain not more efficient?

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If sharing works out pretty well, people will start using minibuses for it. So we might see another reduction.

(In essence, that's like a municipal bus service, just with a much more flexible schedule.)

Eventually you'll be able to get a shared "bus" in five minutes to take you to most common destinations and at night you will be able to get a less-shared "taxi" that will cost more since there aren't people to share your trip with you.

We'll build the brave new tech world equivalent of a decent transportation system.

If that's the only way America is gonna get a decent transportation system, so be it.

when someone can buy a self-driving vehicle and hook it up to uber's network, buying a car could be a capital investment that gets you recurring revenue: you just hook your car up to uber's api, and take it to an automatic service station when the on-board diagnostics report that it needs work to be done.

What's wrong with Caltrian? Seems fine to me, except the difficulty of getting to/from stations.

Caltrain runs on diesel, is incredibly slow (much slower than driving), frequently breaks down, and doesn't travel across the bay. It was probably OK for the 70s.

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