The 'Self Drive' Act puts America on the road to reducing congestion

Re:The 'Self Drive' Act puts America on the road to reducing... by kelnos on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @02:58PM (#15186196)

Agreed! I would love to look up directions to a destination, and find that the driving and transit time are comparable. As it is now, it's laughable: I live in SF and my SO lives in Oakland; driving time is usually 18-25 minutes, but transit is 50-70 minutes, depending on when I leave.

Here there are two problems:

1) "Last mile": it's a 20 minute walk for me to get to the right transit line, and then 10 minute walk after I get off BART. The BART ride itself is only about 20 minutes; my "transit" use is mostly not actually on transit.

2) Timing: during most of the times of day when I'd make this trip, BART runs around every 20 minutes. If I'm one minute off, then I've spent 50 minutes walking or standing around for 20 minutes of actually being on transit.

We need more transit lines, going to more places, and more-frequent trains during the entire day.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The 'Self Drive' Act puts America on the road to reducing... by cr0sh on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @05:56PM (#15187449)

I sometimes wonder if Doug Malewicki will ever be able to get his "SkyTran" system accepted and running somewhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran

It seems like there's always a "we're going to try it here" phase, then it never goes further.

The upsides sound great - basically personalized mass-transit, using individual pods on an overhead track system. The pods and track are lightweight, and can likely be put into tighter routes and areas than a full-sized train can go, as well as not disrupting traffic or whatnot when it is installed.

It does have the whole "monorail" stigma to get around (which I don't really understand why or how "monorails" got the stigma - they have issues, certainly - but the whole meme seems to only have started since that Simpsons episode)...

[ Parent | on HN ]