I grew up with public transit, it was a nuisance when a bus went through every 15 minutes rather than 10.
I want a time machine to go back and yell at myself to appreciate it more, because ever since I left my hometown, I missed it.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Fuck Cars
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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Stupid school holidays ... now the trams only come every 7 minutes instead of 3.5.
Move to Italy
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Dirt cheap cost of living
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Housing prices like it's 1999
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Main line HSR that runs from Venice to Lyons and Milan to Reggio Calibre
And boy does that HSR move. Used it to get from Rome to Naples a few years ago, and while being extremely comfortable it moved at around 320 km/h. I think it took like 1 hour to get to Napoli.
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To be fair that's how it is in a lot of countries.
Look at something like the podbike and imagine that as a self driving micro taxi that goes 50 kmh max. Little embedded energy, material and only needs small batteries and incredibly energy efficient because of aerodynamics (slimmer). Energy efficient even compared to trains or busses, especially in areas or times with lower utilization.
If you want to eliminate cars and make mass transit work as energy efficient as possible, you NEED self driving single seater cars (or double seaters with face to face).
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God damn I’d love that. My country has been trying to build a ferry free west coast. A road from southern Norway, along the coast and up to Trondheim. Back in 2012 they decided to green-light the project, but it’s still being argued about.
One of my issues with the whole project is how we’re not building any form of infrastructure based around trains. It’s cars. The geography is really harsh here, but adding train tracks by the road would be more future proof than just highways.
Wouldn't it be way easier to implement self driving on a rail system? The trains I take to work are frequently cancelled due to lack of operators.
Yes, there are plenty of driverless train networks around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_systems
Not really, because existing track would need to be retrofitted with all of the sensors and whatnot specific to automation. Then there would still need to be a large number of staff available to reroute trains when some run late or have issues, because trying to predict all of those situations is impossible.
Smaller rail systems are frequently automated, like light rail at airports and even some subway systems where minimal human oversight is enough to handle it when things don't work perfectly.
The shortage of operators has a lot more to do with intentionally trying to ruin rail by cutting funding and putting in barriers to working. There are a ton of people who would enjoy being operators if it paid well and was a reliable position.
We have a metro in Sydney that does this. It's usually pretty alright, but difficult to build and scale. The lines that actually go out of the city would never be able to achieve such things, the construction and setup alone is astronomical.
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Honestly, I want both. I live in Germany and my city has pretty decent public transit. But there are still way too many cars in the city, most streets have parking spaces on both sides, leaving only a small sidewalk. I want people to not be dependent on owning cars anymore. I want personal cars in the city to be replaced by self-driving cabs that you can just order when you need them. Imagine how cool that would be. There would be centralized (underground??) self-driving car storages and if you need a car, you just order one via an app and they just come to wherever you are autonomously and drive you wherever you want to go. You could basically get rid of all public parking spaces, it would be awesome.
The issue with the self-driving-cab concept, as a cure to car infrastructure, is it doesn't really fix the problem. Sure, maybe parking becomes less of an issue, but not roads. If anything they are worse. Not only is it still one person per car (usually), it also now has to drive around empty to pick up new passengers. At least a personal car never occupies or damages road infrastructure when it isn't in use.
Busses are a legitimate solution for shorter distance travel that reduce infrastructure requirements. You can fit potentially dozens of people in a single vehicle, and they can be made to get you almost anywhere you need, with only a short walk required.
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