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Re:Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your indu... by severus on Thursday April 20, 2017 @12:50PM (#14158374)
1. Public Transport.

2. Funding/Capacity.

3. More money.

Re:Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your indu... by nkoren on Thursday April 20, 2017 @01:57PM (#14159119)
Hi, I'm both a public transport planner and a tech founder (www.podaris.com). I disagree with your 2nd and 3rd points.

Funding and capacity limitations are indeed the cause of problems, but they're not root causes. They're symptomatic of broken political systems, broken business models, and a moribund industry that often delivers shockingly poor value for money.

Similarly, more money is a solution, but it's not necessarily a good solution, if the majority of that money will be lost due to graft, mistakes, and inefficiencies. (McKinsey estimates that around $1 Trillion dollars is wasted every year, across all classes of infrastructure.[1])

(Note: this assessment has a lot of regional variance. It is mostly true in most of America, mostly false in Singapore, and has various levels of applicability in between.)

Anyhow, before simply throwing more money at the problem, I'd recommend taking a look at how the politics, business models, and industry workflows can be shaken up a bit.

1: http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infr...

Re:Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your indu... by franciscop on Thursday April 20, 2017 @12:59PM (#14158481)
3. Automation? Depends on the transport it could be 5 years away (trains/similar) or 20-30 years away (buses/similar). Of course the trains/similar is more of a people issue than technical (;
Re:Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your indu... by dflock on Friday April 21, 2017 @12:55PM (#14167230)
For trains, automation already happened - in the 80's. London's DLR and Vancouver's skytrain are examples of mostly automated, completely driverless, metro systems - built in the 80's.

Afaik, the Vancouver skytrain still uses the original OS/2 software to run.

Re:Ask HN: What are the most important problems in your indu... by siscia on Thursday April 20, 2017 @02:38PM (#14159499)
New metro lines are usually completely automatic here in (I guess) Europe.