• ian@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    We won’t get railways to every door. But the title says Public Transit. So various sized rail vehicles will connect with various sized road vehicles for the last mile. Everything electric and everything autonomous.
    Nobody will need to own a car in urban locations. Many places won’t allow access anyway.
    We’ll all pay less for ownership. Less per mile transit. Less for goods due to reduced transport costs.
    We’ll enjoy our streets as a place to socialise once the danger, noise and parked cars are gone. Multi lane highways will be replaced by parks and cycle routes.
    We’ll enjoy our time not wasted sitting in traffic jams.
    All this won’t stop the greed merchants peddling their lies and duping the gullible though.

  • David Scott Moyer@mas.to
    0·
    4 months ago

    @yogthos How about a city like NYC that bans human driven vehicles altogether and has a network of autonomous vehicles of varying sizes constantly available on the street for both cargo and passenger travel. You need to get from brooklyn to an address in midtown? You call up a ride on your phone. One immediately drops out of traffic, picks you up, and takes you where you need to go. No human behavior caused traffic jams or accidents. For less specific destinations, bus or van sized vehicles.

    • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      No. That only solves some of the issues, and creates brand new ones.

      You haven’t solved the inherent inefficiencies of having everyone sit in their own cars. The same bottlenecks will still exist and will still cause congestion, only with automation you can have slightly more capacity because it’s taking out the delays between one driver moving and the driver behind reacting and starting to move as well.

      All the issues with tires rubbing asphalt creating micro rubber particles will stay, as will the massively cost ineffective infrastructure needed to support mass car travel like freeway interchanges, as will the fact that you need orders of magnitude more materials to manufacture enough cars to do the job of just a few hundred trains.

      And having the cars autonomous will make them even more vulnerable to cyber attacks than modern cars already are.

      Also, trains are even easier to automate than cars. I live in Vancouver and we’ve had autonomous trains since 1986.