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The New York Times has a story about what may be a more likely future of public transportation.
A small electric bus chugged along at a slow but steady seven miles per hour when a white van, entering the street from the side, cut in front of it. The bus slowed, as if its driver had hit the brakes, and got back up to speed after the van moved out of the way.
But this bus has no brake or accelerator pedal. It has no steering wheel, either. In fact, it doesn't have a driver — it operates using sensors and software, although for now, a person is stationed on board ready to hit a red "stop" button in an emergency.
At a time when self-driving cars are beginning to make progress — most notably with a trial program that the ride service Uber began in Pittsburgh this fall — the bus represents a different approach to technologically advanced transportation.
I say a more likely future because of the following:
A driverless car, after all, is still a car, carrying at best a few people. By transporting many passengers on what could be very flexible routes, driverless buses could help reduce the number of cars clogging city streets.
Few advantages accrue from driverless cars if the streets and highways are clogged with them. The passenger(s) can curse the vehicle up ahead instead of its idiot driver. My take: The idea has some promise, especially in places where people do not have long distances to travel.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday November 07 2016, @07:04PM
Light rail works, when cities have grown up around it and are relatively dense. If either of those is not true, light rail is a pipe dream.
I say this as someone living in Switzerland: We have "light rail" (we call them trams) in most of our larger cities. It works, it's great. But our cities meet both of the conditions above.
I've also lived in the US, and the cities there are far too sprawling. You would spend a fortune putting in enough tracks and enough stations to make any sense. Or you wind up with light rail only in the innermost city, meaning people have to drive their cars to "park-and-ride" stations, and then change - basically, the worst of both worlds.
On top of that, US cities did not grow up around the light rail lines. Here, the lines have existed for (in some cases) centuries. Guess where all the businesses are, that need to be near a line? In a city without trams, that will not be the case. You'll put the lines "somewhere", and then have to hope that the city adjusts over the course of years or decades. Or, you'll do like Edinburgh, put in too few lines (costing a fortune), in order to give clueless progressives crowing rights: "We have light rail! It's useless! We nearly bankrupted ourselves! Aren't we great!".
N.B. For those who don't know, Edinburgh installed a single line from the airport to Waverly [theguardian.com]. It parallels a long-standing bus line. The bus line still exists, runs more frequently, and is both cheaper and faster. Edinburgh is also about $1 billion poorer. This experience is utterly typical of cities that want to add light rail to their infrastructure. Phoenix, Arizona is another example. [coyoteblog.com]
tl;dr: Unless you are planning a new city, just stop with the light rail stuff. Buses are better: they are more flexible, and they are a hell of a lot cheaper.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 07 2016, @09:08PM
Except they get stuck in the same traffic that bedevils regular car travel. HOV lanes don't help.
I think a combination of what Chicago did with the 'L' and what Montreal did with its subway would work pretty well. The elevated part Chicago did avoids the very expensive excavation and right-of-way issues with subways and new light rail lines. The subway cars on tires part that Montreal did avoids the noise and wear and tear on rails that railcars incur. Personally, I favor maglevs because I love the smooth, silent ride, but then you get the wags singing out, "Monorail!" from that stupid Simpsons episode, as if that were an authority on that form of transportation...
That's for longer distances. Shorter distances are served pretty well by protected bike lanes. Extremely cheap to implement, and have so many benefits.
Many people assert that such options wouldn't work in American cities, but they worked before. The car companies worked hard to buy up the (then) private transit companies and shut them down so that people would have to buy cars; The Twin Cities are one famous case of that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @12:12AM
Thanks for the advice, Portland, OR will tear down it's very successful light rail program because the city isn't dense enough for europeans to think it would work.
Granted, the Phoneixes, Dallases, and Tampas of the country would have problems, but that's more due to car culture than anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @05:13PM
Light rail works, when cities have grown up around it and are relatively dense. If either of those is not true, light rail is a pipe dream.
It's a good thing that London is such a young city that could grow after the invention of subways. Imagine how bad the mass transit would be there if it had been founded thousands of years ago. And New York. And Tokyo. And...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:35PM
subway is underground light rail (and shitty sandwich).