![[meme] Trains -- not driverless cars -- are the future of transportation](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f6468af5-8151-4b4c-b339-2fa0b0373c3a.webp){kind=link}
Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, “Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND.”
Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, “Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND.”
Driverless cars will very much have a future because you can’t build trains everywhere. They won’t be personally owned though, i.e. they’ll be robotaxis. Just imagine cities without parked cars.
I agree trains will just be more common for distance. I also agree driverless cars will be more common, but would add I think we’ll see more one person, two person, eight person cars in the city. No point in sending a four person car to take John to see his grandma.
We already have a system where you can request a car to come to your location, take you there and then it goes off and drives around doing the same thing for other people. I don’t know why it being autonomous means that people will ditch their private cars for it.
if japan can build trains, high speed ones at that then I think it’s safe to say you can build trains anywhere you fucking want.
You certainly can build trains wherever you want, but it comes at a cost that’s not necessarily worth paying everywhere, as it comes with both short term and maintenance costs. I say this as someone who works in rail and is passionate about it; in some locations there isn’t the demand to run the kind of high frequency service necessary to remove the need for car ownership. You can be better off with a demand responsive bus service, for example, to connect to your long-distance, high speed links.
counter argument, Switzerland.