A self driving shuttle that needs its own dedicated lane with special markers painted, therefore following a predetermined route.
Just use a fucking train.
Innovation under capitalism is just reinventing the same thing over and over again
It's hard to monetize effective solutions to transportation/infrastructure problems though.
Yeah, most real innovation costs money, and ends up even more difficult to extract money form people. Thats why most people who do innovation only really do apps.
One of the hosts from "well there's your problem" did a video on one of the reasons why trains are so expensive.
US law mandates that all US train cars be US made. But there are no US companies that make passenger train cars because the company that made all passenger train cars in the US, Budd co, went out of business because their train cars were too good and never went bad.
So if you want any sort of passenger train system, you must pony up for a foreign company to build an entire factory in your state, just to build the train cars you need (probably using Budd Co. licensed designs), and then close shop.
Edit: the youtube video, its long: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CEjozE--YrY
"Not linking a cool video you talk about. That....That is the 57th type of liberalism."
That train will travel at 7,000 km/s and will have a payload on the nose equal to 750 kgs of TNT. Whenever it is late it will posthumously declare the previous schedule an enemy combatant
US law mandates that all US train cars be US made.
Well, this clearly doesn't apply to subways or streetcars, because the MBTA is replacing their fleet with trains made in China.
Interesting. So assembly fulfills the requirement? Alright.
I do know that there's this paranoia on the part of the T, and they will not let any part of the electronics ever have contact with the internet for fear of...data concerns? IDK, seems like projection to me.
The worst part is that the US hasn't built good train cars in so long that they don't have the expertise anymore. So as soon as the factory closes shop (after building subpar train cars due to american inexperience), they have to send the cars back to south korea for repairs when the welding is inadequate. No one from the factory that made them is working there anymore, and they don't iterate on their existing designs to kinda cement that knowledge and improve the quality. So building trains in the us is expensive, slow, and bad.
Meanwhile, China and Spain are building all the trains.
Holy shit. In a single anecdote, I think you very nearly managed to sum up everything wrong with capitalism.
Loved the discussion on how nothing can even be marketed as a train, even when it is just a shittier train.
ITS A POD!!!
Yeah but you don't need an app to ride a train, have you ever thought of that?
My city actually has a light rail and its app is cool because you can buy a ticket to redeem later. So you can basically get on the train without buying a ticket and only redeem the one in the app if someone asks to see your ticket, which rarely happens.
Oh my god, literally, the first thing you see after they say "this could be the future of transportation" is a car going significantly faster than the bus in the background. Whats the fucking point, if its slower than cars? Also, look how short it is! Its like a half-bus.
Also, its worth noting, the California High Speed Rail project is going to get a major boost once Biden starts. Between him loving trains, the stimulus for COVID relief, and green infrastructure spending that everyone is hoping for, the project which started during Obama, and had its funding pulled out by Trump, is surely going to get back on track.
I think if biden intended to improve us infrastructure he would have appointed literally anyone other than Mayo Pete as sectrans.
Busses are a good transit solution, are cheap, and can more easily be modified than a train route can.
It would only work for new development. No town or city would be able to change right-of-way enough for a special auto-car lane. It would require tons of money to go survey the land, buy the extra land/access, then build the extra lane. Only to have your town complain you've built an extra lane and won't let them use it. So that means these special roads need to be planned which means new roads only. Not saying it would be more expensive than trains, just that this is a really bad solution. It's just a tech demo to get investors. And investors won't know enough about how urban planning works to see the issue. They do think that you can just get the DOT to throw down some extra lanes everywhere. It looks like the tech demo is just in a specific office park right around the company that runs it. It's much easier to get some extra lanes put around a business park that was probably designed with future bus access in mind than it is to do this in the wild.
And just to keep ranting about this hit further, god only knows what kind of unholy alliance would have to take place between big tech and DOT for this to happen everywhere. Basically the DOT would be saddled with doing all the work of building the roads and maintaining them while the company would likely own the newly built lanes. So they're definitely trying to do the libertarian paradise of roads being privately owned. The owners would be Uber, Lyft, This shit, etc. Then eventually those companies grow and merge and become a private DOT.
It only has its own lane because self driving tech isn't at a level where it is safe enough to drive with everyone else. That may not be the case in 10 years. I assume the dedicated lane is a temporary measure for this test
This is just a bus with a bus lane but it needs to be like this because people look down on buses because they have to share their space with poor people.
The fumes on busses do legitimately make me sick.
Maybe my city is just poor and better busses wouldn’t make me need to vom.
But I fuckin love trains.
Trolley busses are the best, cheap and easy to roll out and they can be reassigned to new routes with minimal maintenance/infrastructure. You can use them to service new developments and gauge where to put trolley stops without any delay in service too.
Has to be, that's the only way it can slowly run over a pedestrian it fails to detect
I am just sitting here surprised they aren't suggesting building a hyperl**p so you can travel 100km inside a tunnel just to buy some groceries and come back.
What the hell is the point of a self driving bus vs a regular bus? I doubt the cost of the thing's hardware, dedicated lane that probably needs special upkeep so the sensors don't get tripped up, and the subsequent lawsuits after it inevitably runs someone over would be less than just paying a bus driver.
If American traffic engineering has fought me anything its that running over pedestrians is a feature.
I imagine the dedicated lane is a temporary feature as self driving tech is still experimental. Or the lane is functioning the same as a normal bus lane but
looks like the road already existed and they closed off one lane to be used for this shuttle, basically a bus lane.
Trains don't use goodyear tires, ford parts, and chevron gasoline. That's why
