Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design. They're still cars, so they still contribute to traffic and increased pavement wear, and I cannot imagine they'd be cheaper at scale than buses for storage/maintenance/cleaning.
I spent ten years in the trenches of American urban design policy. The best we could do was lose very slightly less quickly. It's not changing. Trains are great, we should build more, and we probably should replace a lot of bus routes by subsidizing rides on Waymo and its ilk. It'll be cheaper and provide better service.
Not like the US didn't try. California spent 15yrs trying to build a high speed train and failed. Canada has been talking about building trains forever too and it usually goes nowhere because the budgets explode like every major infrastructure project these days.
I wonder what's different between these English speaking countries you mention failing to build out rail transit, and places like Japan and China that have built fabulous rail networks.
Japan is a fairly unique case, and probably does not share much with China aside from being in the same region. Japan is geographically well suited to serving a large portion of the population with one long line with a few branches. That's a convenient advantage.
China just doesn't have to worry about environmentalists or anyone else locally trying to stand in the way, they just bulldoze them and build.
China also has much lower labor costs, and even Japan is a good bit cheaper (than the US, at the least)
Most of the rail has get around mountainous, uneven terrain subject to earthquakes, strong winds, and heavy rain. California should be able to build rail parallel to the I-5, a long, flat terrain without extreme weather or strong earthquakes. The problem seems to be a political one, not an engineering one. In fact, if the Interstate Highway System did not already exist, I doubt the U.S. today would be able to accept and complete it.
> one long line with a few branches
I currently live in Japan, and that does not really match what I've observed. There are three distinct railway companies in my area (JR, Tokyu, Yokohama Municipal Subway), each with their own dedicated rail, trains, power supply, etc.
The situation is more like "a disjoint union of graphs, where some of the graphs are connected".
LA proper seems to have a density of 3000/km^2 according to Wikipedia
A perhaps more interesting use case is the utsunomiya light rail. Utsunomiya has a density of around 1200/km^2.
What they ended up doing was building a new tram with exactly one line. The main thing they did was make sure the tram comes frequently, including off peak.
End result is people rely on the tram line and the tram is making good money, being operationally profitable (still gotta pay back construction costs of course).
Utsunomiya is obviously not exactly greater LA, but Utsunomiya has on average 2.25 cars per household[0]. It has traffic issues and people feel the need to own a car. And yet the tram line is finding success because transportation is a local issue, not a global one!
You can solve for transportation issues in crowded areas. Few reasonable people are lamenting that you don't have a train between madison, WI and Chicago every 15 minutes. Many are simply lamenting that even at a local level PT in many places is leaving a lot on the table despite there being chances of success!
Smaller focused PT has proven itself to work time and time again, and compounds on other PT projects in the area.
California high speed rail isn't running now but it is improving lots of things along the way. For example one of the most dangerous crossings in the state is now grade separated with the Rosecrans/Marquardt Grade Separation Project.
I wonder if California high speed rail will ever surpass quadcopter personal vehicles in passenger miles per year. I know which way I'd bet for the year 2040.
Ha, even using the UK as a counterpoint, they do pretty well. I enjoy taking the LNER, and appreciate that it is a 'slow' train that happens to run 50% faster than the top speed of Amtrak in all but a very limited set of tracks in the NEC. And maybe I've just had unusually good luck, but LNER has almost always been punctual.
OTOH, on my visits to Europe I am simultaneously impressed with the prevalence of passenger train options, but disheartened by the price. If Europe struggles to provide really affordable trains, there isn't much hope for the US. Aside from regional train options in the densest areas, we just have too much distance to cover. Infrastructure costs would kill the plan. At this point maybe we should just be trying harder to produce renewable fuels for planes.
As a tourist or outsider, the cost of trains in Europe is going to be much more expensive. In the Netherlands for example, the price of a train ticket without a subscription (such as for tourists) is very high; the price of a monthly subscription for free train rides outside rush hour is €130/month, which is way less than monthly cost of car use.
A huge amount, most self-proclaimed supporters of "public transportation" are primarily train enthusiasts (which is a fine hobby!). Any concern for safe, clean, effective transportation is incidental and is immediately abandoned if it ever means less trains.
Bus Rapid Transit is another option that could be amazing (while being much cheaper to implement), but it falls short for the same reason as trains: they require dedicated infrastructure that complicates driving, and complicating driving is political suicide.
One of the things I found when advocating for transit was that BRT cost savings in the US almost always come from reducing quality at stations, which loses public support faster than you save money. I found that voters are usually willing to spend far more on trains than on BRT, in excess of any savings.
BRT is mostly "you get what you pay for" - cheaper at a cost of lower capacity. Given relatively low density of US cities - that might be the right tool tho.
None. Why would you think that? My guess is you're an American living nowhere near an urban rail system but I thought most people here would at least be passing familiar with modern trains. Even some American cities have them.
Only that they are worthy of noting. If there is a modern system, but it happens to suck for some reason, you don't have to mention that one. So feel free to strike that "notable". Which American cities have modern train systems?
I've lived and travelled in a ton of places. Trains in low density cities are simply not working well enough. I now prefer to live in exurb and drive everywhere. It's so good.
Muse this - train is a tool, just like a car, bus, bike, plane, drone or rollerblades.
Repeating "trains" in every transport context is unproductive. Each mode of transport requires certain density. Most US cities just don't have it. It's that simple.
It's not at all that simple. One of the neat things about trains is their permanence - once you've built one, you can fight for allowing increased density repeatedly until you win. That's what we've been doing in Seattle!
Also just like... looking at a train and noticing it can carry a ton more people than a car, has no concept of traffic, and can theoretically go as fast as possible.
People generally don't want to use it because we design everything exclusively for cars, so cars are more convenient. At the cost of increased risk of death, increased travel time, increased land cost, etc.
What makes you say that? I'd only propose them in very high density corridors (or in corridors where building a train would be paired with allowing high density).
A lot of it probably has to do with train advocates seeming like audiophiles extoling the virtues of phonograph records and the like. It seems like they are nostalgic for an 1880s utopia. That's just the vibe I get. I wonder what people in this thread think about The Line.
I think there is also a couple of other factors at play with the online train / mass transit advocates on places like HN. It could just be my imagination, but I think there is trains-are-a-good-solution-for-other-people (but not necessarily for me) contingent. And there is a trains-are-good-for-you transportation method, that you have to put up with for the "greater good". A bitter pill to swallow, not something you actually want. Kind of the opposite for say, electric vehicles, where they currently are a much superior alternative to and internal combustion engine vehicle for almost ever use case (acceleration, $/mile, maintenance, general hassle). That's why I think EVs will inevitably win, even in the U.S.. Maybe someone could come up with a luxury light rail that people would actually want to use? I mentioned it up-thread in the context of California high speed rail, but now I'm going to broaden it. When will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S.? I'm could see it happening within my lifetime. Maybe this has some bearing on why I see trains as antiquated?
Also, reading through the whole thread make me think there should be a meme about this.
Normal Person: I heard about shellfish, but it turns out I don't like to eat it, because it tastes bad.
Seafood Advocate 1: You are wrong, shellfish is highly nutritious. And one of the most calorie dense foods.
Seafood Advocate 2: Everyone knows you need to eat shellfish between the hours of 11AM and 1PM. If you learn to eat at the proper time, you would like shellfish.
Seafood Advocate 3: People in Japan eat shellfish, so it is highly likely that you like shellfish as well.
Seafood Advocate 4: The only reason someone could say they dislike shellfish is because of the anti-seafood conspiracy.
Normal Person: I thought this was originally a thread about chicken pasta recipes?Continues to not eat shellfish.
And am I the only one who thinks the concept of a "transit advocate" is a bit odd? I mean, yes, there are people whose career is to make transportation work/better. And they should continue to do so. Were there non-Bell-Telephone-employees that were telephone advocates back in the 1940s? Airline advocates convincing people to fly? Car phone/cell phone brick/flip phone/smart phone advocates?
Were there man-on-the-street grass roots 1950s advocates that were instrumental for getting the interstate highway system built? Suburban expansion advocates? Do you really only need an advocate to convince people to like something that they otherwise currently dislike?
A well run public transit system should obviously be cheaper at scale than robotaxis, but the incentives for Waymo (or Uber, or Lyft, etc.) are very different than the city's incentives. It's very possible that in practice private companies can operate more cheaply at scale than buses because they have much higher incentives to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
“Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design.”
That might be an unintentionally excellent analogy, because like a Band-Aid, self self driving cars have the potential to heal the urban environment. The widespread adoption of self driving cars doesn’t take cars off the road, but it does reduce the reliance on destination parking. Entire city car parks could be replaced with medium density residential, substantially increasing density and paving the way to walkable cities.
It's not a bandaid because American urban design isn't going to change substantially. I don't see American cities changing their mind on how they build and where they build.
They won't be better for maintenance but unless Portland can build the state capacity to fund public transport properly this is better than nothing. Plenty of developing countries rely on buses, jitneys, and low footprint vehicles like mopeds for traffic flow because they don't have the state capacity to enforce an urban framework conducive to public transit. Honestly many US states are the same.
> the X chromosome has a mechanism to shut itself down (which makes sense; otherwise cells in women would have twice as many gene products from the X chromosome as cells from men).
You can see this visually because not the same X chromosome is deactivated in all cells: it's what gives calico cats their color (almost all of them are female).
Human women have stripey skin too, but you can't see it under normal light because unlike cats, skin tone in humans is not controlled by the X chromosome.
Can you link to a scientific article? I have severe doubts about that claim made on a random youtube video. In fact, I'd go as far as to claim that the content of the words here, are not correct. This is why I think a doi link to a research paper is necessary. I don't doubt that individual cells are, of course, chimeric, but I doubt the "stripey skin" claim. That one makes zero sense.
I just did a google search and this further confirms my suspicion. Thus I would like to ask for a link to a scientific article - until that happens I remain rather unconvinced.
> Human women have stripey skin too, but you can't see it under normal light because unlike cats, skin tone in humans is not controlled by the X chromosome.
Humans have 'stripey' skin because of somatic mutations, and it's not clear that there are X-chromsome-located skin color loci. Don't believe everything you see on Youtube.
For a more practical example, how does this work for the daughter of a colorblind person (the colorblindness gene is on the X chromosome)? Do they have four types of cones?
Yes, but it's not limited to that case - there's two common variants of the green cone that respond to different wavelengths and people with two X chromosomes can have both, improving colour identification.
I'm kind of late to this but for some context - bonzini knows me from a long time ago when I was still a genetics student and the joke here is that given where I am now in my career I still get to occasionally answer questions based on that background
How is all the tracking we have today not already sufficient for mass surveillance? What does age verification add if the goal is just more surveillance?
I hate to say it and it's not the future we all wanted, but as long as social media can be weaponized by foreign powers, the only solution is verifying internet users. It's inevitable.
I doubt it's the only option, just one with benefits to those with interest to censor and control others. I imagine some more tweaks in the algorithms could do quite a bit.
The US is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. You don't get to vote on specific federal policies, you vote on the people who vote for those policies.
Voting with your wallet doesn't exist. Try to boycott Amazon by blocking the AWS IP ranges and see how unusable the internet becomes for everyday tasks. Corporations continue to push the personal responsibility narrative so they can externalize costs of unethical business practices.
how are you making them lose money by blocking their ip ranges? Your are pretty much giving them money because now they dont need to pay for bandwidth.
The social media companies got so large because they optimized for engagement over all else. If they were any less addictive, they'd have way fewer users, and we wouldn't be talking about them now. This can probably only be addressed with regulation
Yes, you can be the guy at a social media company who says "perhaps earning a few extra billion in revenue this way is bad for children," but the executives are just going to replace you.
Using provided UI controls is consistent with how today's apps behave on mobile:
- For single-line text fields, pressing enter is an alias for submitting the form.
- For multi-line text fields, pressing enter inserts a new line. There is no shortcut for submitting the form.
In mobile chat apps, the enter key inserts a new line, so you have to press the non-keyboard submit button to send a message. In mobile browser address bars, since they are single-line text fields, the enter key becomes a submit button on the virtual keyboard.
> - For single-line text fields, pressing enter is an alias for submitting the form. - For multi-line text fields, pressing enter inserts a new line.
Web browsers have been like that by default for ages in text input (single line) vs textarea (multi line). Since way before smartphones even existed.
Regardless, many chat apps on the computer have what look like a multi line textarea but it will be anyone’s guess whether Enter will add a newline or submit in any particular one of them.
> For the same reason, plugging in an external keyboard is also a no-go since freshly updated iPhones are placed in what's known as a Before First Unlock state, which prevents wired accessories from working until the passcode is entered.
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