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Trains are crabs of transport.
they’re making an extra lane from Allentown to Philadelphia on the 476 highway when it would’ve been better to make a railroad.
Traffic will get better, then much worse. If you are unfamiliar it’s a concept call induced demand.
The funny thing is there is not a lot of traffic now. I think maybe it’s for truck traffic by having a third lane. The population in Allentown is increasing because everyone is moving from NYC and maybe they’re predicting more travel to Philly, but mass transit would’ve been better.
Pretty much the textbook definition of induced demand. The extra lane will speed it up and the road between will become an absolute traffic nightmare in a couple years. Really sad watching habit keep us making the same mistakes over and over again.
The YouTube Adam Something had similar comments. For example, the Hyperloop from Musk would be more efficient if you’d use pods on rails instead of Tesla’s, and make the pods longer like a train. It’s called a subway. Or other pod like ideas. What if you make them longer which would be more energy efficient, with one driving engine and carts behind it which you can fill with people or goods. It’s called a fucking train. Years and years of development into what we have now, then to have a stupid narcissistic scam artist wanting to reinvent something which works perfectly into some futuristic looking concept which would make a perfectly fine system broken and less efficient. “Please give me money, oh people on Kickstarter, as for I think I know better then years of evolution, research and development. Don’t do the math, trust me, I have a flashy computer animation to prove how cool my idea is. I did not finish school, my dad gave me a lot of money because he says I’m special.” Floating mega cities, pods, self driving cars, terraforming Mars, vacuum washing machines, vacuum tunnel systems, solar panel roads, etc etc etc. Next to Adam Something I can recommend ThunderF00t on YouTube. A scientist joking about Musk his stupidity and other tech kickstarter scammers, breaking their scams with science.
Ill be honest, when I first heard about the hyper loop, I thought the idea was to make trains cool again and kickstart national interest in public transit. In retrospect I was kind of an idiot.
The US is an idiot for not investing more in trains. The country literally was built with trains. People just stopped caring because air travel became popular and cheap. Just go invest in high speed trains, repair the tracks already out there, expand. Hoping someone would make trains sexy again isn’t stupid. Elon Musk is though. Falling for his scams is stupid too, but I’ve been there as well in the beginning. I was just not aware people could lie that much and get away with it. The to continue with even bigger scams. Guess I’m stupid too.
Most billionaires just want more money. They know how to sell something, so they try to get as much investors as possible for any stupid idea which they think they are able to sell. Same with kickstarter scammers. They become rich by doing the same trick. White collar scam artists.
Pretty sure freight is popular though.
Is it? Many trains are in disrepair, as well as tracks. There have been many accidents the past few years.
You weren’t an idiot. Musk was really good at marketing back then, and hadn’t yet revealed his true self to the world.
Everything becomes either a train or a commie block if you iterate enough on the idea.
Are trains the crabs of the transportation world?
Yes
Raise your hand, if you want to transform all roads into a bumpercar arena. 🙋 Imagine how fun commuting would be.
I would fuckin love shoving people going 5 mph under the speed limit out of the fast lane. There are many times that I’ve wished I had a Romulan disruptor mounted to the front of my car so I could disintegrate the car in front of me and go about my merry way.
I’m just imagining having a shitty morning, commuting to work, and some little 12 year old twerp keeps smashing into me from behind at full speed while laughing their ass off…ugh.
I was talking about this recently with a coworker but I remember a modern marvels episode on the History Channel many many years ago that was talking about California experiments with highways for self driving cars. S
o they were embedding magnets into the ground and the cars had sensors to follow those and them they would pack drive like 10 cars nose to tail. This is what I’ve always expected from self driving cars. It wild were going to direction we are with them but getting any local/state/federal government to pay to add shit to roads is probably a long shot.
I’d MUCH rather my tax dollars go to public transport for the masses, as opposed to embedding magnets in roads to help wealthy self-driving car owners
Balaji provides a great example of how not to think about developing systems that use AI. If you can build a system that is human-like in perception and cognition, then you don’t need anything more than what a human uses to navigate driving. His statement is like saying “I solved this problem because I didn’t actually attempt it”.
The problem stated is self driving cars, not use AI to self drive on roads unchanged from those used by human drivers.
How is it self driving if it’s on fucking tracks my guy?
Edit to say I get that “tracks” may not literally be required, but that’s besides the point
Edit2 note that self driving as a term has been agreed to convey autonomous driving. If you’re thinking of trams or trains as self driving than you need to use the fucking correct terminology of self propelled. You cannot redefine a term because you failed the problem or don’t want to attempt it
Oh no I’m shook
If a picture says more than enough words, doesn’t it say too much, rendering verbal description more efficient?
Always cut extra?
only if you scan images pixel by pixel for meaning
Try doing tight curves on a railroad. Try steep grades on a railroad. Try running a line to every neighborhood, with using eniment domain.
Somethings are just not practical
Try running a line to every neighborhood, with using eniment domain.
Aren’t you just describing how roads were built to every home in every community?
Nobody wants a train infront of every home. Thats what busses are for.
Rail is fundamentally superior to roads + cars at an engineering level.
All at the same time:
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Rail has a smaller footprint
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Rail moves multiple times more people or cargo per hour
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Rail has multiple times more fuel efficiency
The fact that USA’s policy has been designed to favor cars only makes them more ‘practical’ than rail if you consider political constraints more binding than physics constraints.
I’ll grant that trucks have tighter turning radii and maximum operating grade. If we truly only used them when those characteristics are needed THAT would be ‘practical’
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You dont need to have a line to every street and a stop in front of every house. Works pretty decently when paired with the willingness to walk a couple of minutes or cycle to a stop.
Yes, I am European. And glad I moved from the countryside to a city with loads of public transport options. I use the car way less now.
Id do trams
Have you heard of the tramway?
What about buses for those scenarios? I can’t imagine a situation outside some huge outlier or the middle of nowhere where rail and bus were both not practical to get to a destination but cars are.
Or try putting your hands on the fuckin wheel.
But muh edge cases!
The people who want these rail lines everywhere aren’t being reasonable. There are other reasons besides schedule and routes that people don’t use trains anymore.
Roads are going to need modifications to be made truly safe for self driving. I don’t think it’ll be particularly expensive, either. Some things that would likely help would be reflectors that only reflect a certain spectrum of light, ferrous materials, passive radio equipment, etc. These are all things a machine can slap onto/into asphalt and shoulders without much trouble. It can be done rapidly. It only has to be decided upon and done. On top of these, it’s not like roads are all that dynamic. Sure, there’s always construction, but for the most part, they don’t change rapidly. Any self driving car should have a very up to date model loaded of the roads in the contiguous land it can traverse.
If society really wanted self driving cars to be a safe reality, it would just require a little more focus. Trying to do it with computer vision without road augmentation is clearly problematic. My car has a travel assist feature similar to Tesla’s Autopilot. It is great on well marked roadways without tight curves, but can be dangerous if the driver isn’t paying attention as it will lose the road lines at times and go off on its own.
Who upvotes this shit?
