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A comment on Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future. Parent comment

Re:Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future by patrickk on Thursday April 19, 2012 @12:56PM (#3863951)
Subways/trains don't collect you from the front door of your house and deliver you to the exact spot that you want to go to.

Conceptually, I think this is similar to the last-mile broadband problem[1] - it's not economical to lay fiber to the customer's home unless the customer lives in an urban/reasonably densely populated area. Similarly, if you want to go from transport hub to transport hub (bus/rail station, airport etc.) that's no problem, but getting from the transport hub to your home ranges from expensive and awkward to impossible, depending on how far you live from the transport hub.

Self-driving cars solve this problem. Who cares if you have a 100 mile commute, if you can snooze all the way? Just order the car for a set time every morning to allow enough time for the drive and go back to sleep on the way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile

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Re:Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future by eli_gottlieb on Thursday April 19, 2012 @10:00PM (#3866176)
More particularly, subways drive up real-estate values, thus pushing people out of areas served by subways -- unless you convince the government to spread subway access universally throughout the entire sufficiently-populated area.

Compare Europe and New York's Tri-State-Area to Boston or BART.

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