Re:Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 in Two Locations: NY and VA
by jacques_chester on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @08:49PM
(#18396561)
> A properly-designed network of self-driving cars would be a train.
No, it wouldn't, for the reason I describe. Cars occupy too much space per person by a factor of about 11x times on the figures I gave further up. Self-driving cars will be part of the mix but they physically cannot replace the subway.
Re:Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 in Two Locations: NY and VA
by CamperBob2 on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @10:39PM
(#18396939)
But those 11x as many people are only there because that's where the train is.
Useful mental exercise: next time you're out of the house, imagine that every automobile parking spot, parking lot, and parking garage you see is actually a transit depot. That's what optimal engineering and regulation of self-driving cars would buy us. Of course, being Americans, I'm sure we'll try everything else first.
You do that by not going there in the first place.
A properly-designed network of self-driving cars would be a train. One that is always there when you need it, one that inherits the vast scale of existing infrastructure, and one that isn't vulnerable to paralysis through single points of failure.
But as the posts on here tend to emphasize over and over again, no one has the vision to make this happen. HN's love affair with fixed rail is nothing less than one of history's great irrational obsessions.
Public transportation is the one engineering discipline where solutions based on technology are "pedantic nonsense," while literally binding and constraining entire cities with hardware straight out of the Civil War era is considered the height of progress.