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I know it's just a meme but they both solve different enough problems. A self-driving car can easily turn back into a non-self driving car, meaning you can self drive for long transit and switch to a normal one in the city or hectic areas. This basically solves the issue of self drive tech not being smart/reliable enough. Which, as you probably also agree, is still quite far from perfect.
Self driving cars will allways use far more energy and space per passenger than a train or light rail. And personally owned cars will spend more than 90% of their time just standing around, being useless and wasting space. If you propose self driving taxis, you're just another step closer to trains.
Take any tech bro take on transit, and if you try to perfect it, you'll almost always end up with a train.
The problem is "perfection" looks different to different people.
If you're optimizing for efficiency, then you're absolutely correct.
If you're optimizing for convenience then shit like personal taxi drones is probably gonna be better.
Trains are extremely convenient. You optimize them for convenience by adding more trains.
That's how you get to cars.
Add more trains.
The trains now need to seat fewer people so make them smaller. Maybe 2-7 people per train.
Most routes aren't needed at any given time, so you might as well only run the train when someone needs it.
Rather than keeping the unused trains in a central depot, keep them at the departure points
We can't staff all these trains, and if the departure points are peoples' homes, then let's have the people themselves drive it
The network of destinations requires a TON of rail switches, and coordinating that is a complicated. Better to use a technology that doesn't require switches, like wheels on pavement.
Boom, cars.
So it really depends on what you're optimizing for.
And walkability.
When I first moved to Boston many years ago, I had some enlightening experiences. I loved how walkable Boston is, I loved trains, but I did not expect the the feeling of freedom I got from leaving my door with only a T pass in my wallet and Having so much of the city so convenient.
It was revelatory just how much more convenient that was than using a car, when all my life I expected to use a car to go practically anywhere. The challenge is sharing this experience among others who have only known car life, making the advantages real, immediately beneficial.
And yet a coordinated approach with multiple strategies will most effectively cover every use case.
Yes it’s critical that we refocus much of our transportation effort to give more people better choices in more scenarios, but that will never rule out cars
The point I was trying to make was that tech bros are almost certainly trying to optimize for convenience, because they live in a bubble where thats what's important to them (or that's what has the highest margins).
Issue is, tech bros want "individual pods", with some futuristic look.
What about the moon? Surely not...
Well, ultimately space elevators are the most energy efficient way to escape Earth's gravity well. And once we have one of those, mind as well build a mass driver at the top so rockets don't have to carry so much of their own mass. Then we can build a laser-based photonic sail on the other end to decelerate the cars and make them even lighter/faster, and then build track at the bottom...
Train.
What about interstellar travel?
Well, ultimately wormholes are way more efficient than any subluminal travel once the infrastructure to build them is in place: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
So we control traffic on each side carefully. In fact, we could just suspend a really strong wire on either end...
Yep. Train.
And once we have one of those, mind as well build a mass driver at the top so rockets don’t have to carry so much of their own mass.
You wouldn't even need a mass driver. You have to build your space elevator so that it's center of mass is where you want it to orbit. Logically, this needs to be at geostationary orbit so that the end point on the ground stays in the same spot. That means you can extend the other end of the elevator to twice geostationary orbit. Lift a mass from the ground to the far end of the elevator and just let it go. It will be flung away out of earth orbit because it'll already be moving faster that orbital velocity at that height. You're limited in the direction you can fling it because it will be flung off by the Earth's rotation, but you don't necessarily need a mass driver.
I mean, currently both space elevators and wormholes (as transportation) seem physically impossible.
If we're not sticking to the realm of our current understanding of physics, then that opens the doors for techbros too, because we're in the realm of speculative fiction and things can be however we say they are.
They're physically possible, just massive engineering challenges. Read Orion's Arm's overview, it's largely based on current known physics.
For space elevators, to the best of my knowledge, there is no known material that can withstand the forces involved. Not even CFNTs.
For wormholes, we're getting so deep into speculation that the conversation doesn't even really matter.
What about those giant quadcopter type things they keep wanting to build to fly from building rooftops in cities for some reason?
Everyone thinks the sky is big, without considering just how unscalable flying cars are
Let’s stop worrying about new ways for the ultra-rich to avoid the frustrations the rest of us have to deal with, we’ll all be better off if they also have an incentive to design more effective cities and transportation for everyone
I wasn't, to be clear, advocating for them, just pointing out that they were one of those things tech bros keep suggesting over and over again. I don't suspect they're something to really worry about, because I don't really expect the economics of them to work out.
Within cities?
Look, aircraft are Hella noisy and if stuff goes bad, they'll smash into buildings. Using them for intra-urban transit is not safe. Besides, I don't know if multicopters can autorotate^[1]^, which only adds to the safety concerns.
So why not bring it slightly closer to the ground. Maybe put the transportation device on a bridge or viaduct. And while you could put some stairs up from the streets, you may even choose to link buildings into them directly. Most tall buildings have lifts, after all.
Next, giving each building its own link into the system would be excessive. You can achieve 90 percent of the utility if you have larger entry hubs for multiple buildings, and expect people to walk the last mile.
Anyway, back to the vehicle, since a vehicle for a handful of people is rather inefficient, why not build the vehicles for many dozens of people? Why not build it to connect multiple vehicles? If you run, like, four of these, every five minutes, most people will be able to walk up any time and just go.
And to make that movement more efficient, let's have our vehicles roll along a specifically designed path, optimised for minimal friction by using hard wheels on a hard surface.
There, I replaced the quadcopters with a train.
EDIT:
^[1]^: According to one answered question on a StackExchange page, the answer to this question is probably no. Autorotation requires some magnitude of control of the pitch of your rotors, something that most multicopters do not have.
It does make me intrigued to see what'd happen if you could or did fit a multicopter with swashplates and pitch-adjustable rotors.
If they really want rooftop travel, a gondola system could probably work.
How many times will techbros reinvent the train/tram until North America finally starts laying down rails?
Don't even need to lay down rails. The rails are already there. Built by Chinese slave labor 150 years ago. We need merely to seize them.
Or just cut a check to the freight companies.
Many cities paved over their tram lines. Sometimes they poke through during road work. We had trams in nearly every city 100 years ago yet today people tell me we can't afford it or our population is too small to support it. If we could do it 100 years ago we could certainly do it now.
Even the rural college town my grandma grew up in had tram lines running down the main streets in the 30's and to both colleges. If a city had more than 20,000 residents 100 years ago, they probably had a tram system that was pulled up at GM's behest.
I love this Adam Something classic where they keep optimizing the tech bro idea until it turns into Thomas the Engine
The US has so much tarmac they don’t even need rails just turn some of that tarmac into dedicated bus lanes. And put one of these long boys on them
Just lay rails in the lane. Turn it into, I dunno, a fuck you I'm a train lane
Bus lanes are too easy for the next politician to remove bus priority and allow cars back into the lane. At least with rails it's a lot more costly to remove the route. Busses also still contribute to microplastics and tire waste compared to railed trams. Trams are also easier to automate which can make employing drivers and adding trams to lines less difficult compared to buses. The rails are also more effecient as there is less friction.
I'd defintely take BRT over no transit but many cities are dense enough to justify electrified trams.
I want to be done with car shaped cars... I want a self driving room to show up...I want to say "send me a living room/bedroom/office/whatever," and have a room shaped vehicle show up to get me. I want that vehicle to drive me to the nearest train tracks and hop on the tracks itself and then zoom me to the nearest hyper loop and jump itself on that to zip me across the country in an hour... Join up with other "rooms" as you go to create a typical looking train
Ah hyperloop, the fictional transportation method meant to scam California voters
It would require a Manhattan Project sized effort, but I think it could be done
Having slept in a train bed that has a bathroom and was 3 doors down from a kitchen, it's wild that we looked at a car and went, "That's what I want."
Jetsons theme starts playing
I think what they want is trains with individual private cars that can automatically choose the tracks you want by selecting a destination. Which would be fucking awesome it's how I thought cars worked when I was 4, I swear all the steering wheel did was change lanes (my folks were good drivers I guess).
next up in the agenda: what if we make cars larger so more people can travel in them simultaneously
Can't we just do like, lines on the road that have specific meanings? We could put it all in a book of rules and standards? Make it a nation wide system?
I just keep thinking about the automated robots that have existed since I was a child that just followed a painted line on the ground. Those operate around people, other robots and vehicles in ways similar to traffic on a public road, and yet they have none of the issues autonomous cars have. They're far, far more simple.
If a line-following robot bumps into a 3 year old, it might knock them over. It's a different situation with high speed 2 ton death machines