China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced Industries

Re:China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced... by worstspotgain on Monday September 16, 2024 @09:17PM (#41562994)

I don't think high-speed rail is what the future looks like. The platform to beat is the transit agency-owned robo-taxi. Calling it a taxi is a disservice, though. It's really a 1-, 2-, 5-person bus. If needed, it can scale to 10-, 15-, 20-person and so on.

Consider the following:

- Door to door is massively more convenient than door to hub to hub to door. What's usually overlooked is that it's often more efficient, too.

- In many cities, transit can't compete with cars unless it's in sub-15 minute wait range. But to provide that service level with buses/trains, you need to move around 20000lbs/350000lbs of steel whether there are 5 passengers or 50/500.

- Once a city offers municipal robo-taxi service, it can completely ban privately-owned cars. This means it can remove all non-commercial parking spaces and convert them to lanes. It also means robo-taxis can travel 1 or 2 feet apart and use optimized routing. This can multiply effective road capacity by 2 or more.

IMHO, the real question is whether we need any regional trains at all. Robo-taxis and planes might be enough.

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Re:China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced... by mcphage on Monday September 16, 2024 @09:43PM (#41563152)

> Once a city offers municipal robo-taxi service, it can completely ban privately-owned cars.

I’m sorry, you said they can what?

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Re:China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced... by worstspotgain on Monday September 16, 2024 @09:54PM (#41563217)

> you said they can what?

Something tells me you and I live in US cities with different attitudes towards this sort of thing. ;-)

In Europe, some downtowns are already doing this, even without the robo-taxis to make up for it.

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Re:China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced... by fnordpiglet on Monday September 16, 2024 @10:32PM (#41563449)

Yeah there’s no need to do that. Cooperative autonomous vehicles would make congestion near zero. In fact it would be like a self assembling train in all directions. The value of the train goes down dramatically when you factor commuting to and from the stations if you can eliminate human drivers. Vehicles would be high speed and capable of essentially congestion free transit by using basic graduate level control theory. I don’t think China built them something particularly useful in 10 years.

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Re:China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced... by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @09:36AM (#41567471)

I mostly agree, but there's no need to ban private cars. Just make it both cheaper and more convenient to not have one, and let people figure it out and act accordingly.

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Re:China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced... by DiogenesKynikos on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @05:53PM (#41573251)

Nothing can beat HSR for distances of a few hundred kilometers. Not cars. Not airplanes.

For reference, Chicago to NYC is about the distance at which a high-speed train and a plane would make equal sense.

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