Machoo Broooon
🚛 sam fox starshine 
Ray Gulick, he/him/wtf 🇺🇦 ❌👑All true. But also, apart from subways, trains don't generally deliver people within a short walking distance of their final destination. Trains need to be accompanied by better walkability, bikability, and other 'final destination' modes of transportation.
Shinydan@rgulick @starshine that's been invented too, it's called "trams".
Understood. But they aren't available everywhere there are trains. The whole system needs to be in place.
Enby Shark@rgulick @Shinydan @starshine lots of communities outside of North America have already achieved this
Yassie > moved to 0w0.is@starshine
In my opinion: The only time self-driving vehicles should exist is either a) at a museum of technological history, b) in isolated cases where low-speed ground transport is needed, like on enclosed sites, like quarries, transferring people around exhibition centres/airports, etc, or as search/rescue vehicles.
I feel the latter is a great use-case for autonomous vehicles because the operation of quarry vehicles is a tedious, monotonous role that requires vehicles to climb up and down. There's no other obstacles in the way. Ground rescue vehicles require you to send someone out there who may not come back - so removing that person removes that risk entirely, especially in a dangerous situation.
@freeplay
In my opinion: The only time self-driving vehicles should exist is either a) at a museum of technological history, b) in isolated cases where low-speed ground transport is needed, like on enclosed sites, like quarries, transferring people around exhibition centres/airports, etc, or as search/rescue vehicles.
I feel the latter is a great use-case for autonomous vehicles because the operation of quarry vehicles is a tedious, monotonous role that requires vehicles to climb up and down. There's no other obstacles in the way. Ground rescue vehicles require you to send someone out there who may not come back - so removing that person removes that risk entirely, especially in a dangerous situation.
@freeplay
Daniel Brotherston@starshine I mean, the easy answer is that self driving vehicles can also be buses.
The harder answer is to accept the fact that cars will continue to exist for a long time, even in the best scenarios where they are progressively removed from public spaces and restricted to the few places where they make sense (rural areas, service vehicles, taxis etc.) and in all those cases, a safer self driving vehicle is preferred over a drunk, dangerous, or distraught, or just distractable human.
LisPi@starshine #BuildMoreTrains, seriously.
Kevin Castro Riestra@starshine The point about helicopters being flying cars is really interesting. It highlights that want what people want isn't a certain technology but rather all the societal conditions that would make the flying technology as widespread and commonplace as cars are now.
Darren@starshine reminds me of all the stories of putting a bunch of technologists in a room and getting them to reimagine transit. They inevitably invent the bus but in a more complex way with an app to signal where you want to get off instead of a string you pull.
Oskar im Keller
Kevin Karhan 
Elon Musk's Loop is a Bizarrely Stupid Idea
James H-B@starshine because cars can take my shopping from the supermarket to just outside my house (oh okay, usually at least my road) and trains sadly can't?
like jam or bootlaces
Angela Miller@starshine
I'd like to add something about Sail as well. Free energy from the wind moving goods across the sea with maximum efficiency. We don’t need transport planes or fossil fuelled container ships, we have had clippers for centuries....
I'd like to add something about Sail as well. Free energy from the wind moving goods across the sea with maximum efficiency. We don’t need transport planes or fossil fuelled container ships, we have had clippers for centuries....
Mark Tomczak@starshine In the US, more track just means more freight trains clogging up the system because it'll always be more maringal-dollar valuable to keep people in one place and deliver goods to them than to facilitate mobility.
... and that's before we get into the sticky questions like "Who's neighborhood are we bulldozing to put this train line in?"
Greg Stolze@starshine But trains break the fundamental American hope that "I won't have to cope with people."
Claudius Link@starshine
There was a thread looking at signs for hype transportation solutions.
One signe was future technology solving already solved problems for rich people.
Another symptom was that the "solution" was using pods as a mean of transport.
Sadly i can't find the thread ☹️
(Maybe it was a YouTube video 😵💫)
There was a thread looking at signs for hype transportation solutions.
One signe was future technology solving already solved problems for rich people.
Another symptom was that the "solution" was using pods as a mean of transport.
Sadly i can't find the thread ☹️
(Maybe it was a YouTube video 😵💫)
Elon Musk Can't Fix Your Commute | NYT Opinion
union whore@starshine Let my train driver gf tell you for 90 minutes that there are "road" signs for thains and what they are and why they are important 
Nartagnan ⏚Technically, there is "road signs" for trains (track signs).
But there are few, and (at least in EU) we add a radio signal so the train's driver can be helped by the machine without the risks of a bad image recognition IA.
But yes, of course, trains !
Isaac Purrtail@starshine I wish trains were more viable in my country. Just too many dang mountains and fjords (which don't get me wrong are beautiful, but it's significantly more difficult to build train tracks everywhere). Shout out to buses though! Not as cool as trains, but still pretty good
Iαn has moved account@starshine It'll be useful to have autonomous cars feeding remote passengers in to the edges an integrated public transport system where it doesn't make sense to lay railway tracks or run regular timetabled transport. All owned by the public owned, transport network, naturally. And allowing shared journeys with pickups. Ensuring maximum use of the network. And not forcing everyone to move in to mega-cities.
Kaj of the Creek@starshine While I agree with this in spirit (and used the trains with glee while living in the UK), it’s difficult to imagine making trains accessible in America where there is so much more land and so much more rural living. The population density just doesn’t exist to make trains useful for a kid like me who lived 20 min by car from the nearest town (population 3,000) and 45 min to the nearest city with bus & train hubs. Not to say we shouldn’t use them more where possible
wb x64@SpeedOfHuman @starshine unless you live in the rural Midwest (and maybe even then) I encourage you to look at the history of trains, trolleys, and streetcars in your area. There was an electric railway from San Francisco to Sebastopol and back (two branches!) over a hundred years ago. People walked and got rides to stations. Horses existed. But the idea of lots of people commuting in individual vehicles along a path from home to work every day? Insanity.
@SpeedOfHuman @starshine the most likely scenario for the truly remote would be a bus stop of course, which rural Japan is full of (as one example of a highly transit oriented country.) And yeah if your job is to transport stuff around because you're an actual farmer then fine have a modern horseless carriage, but for average commuters individual car ownership has been one long planet-destroying mistake.
@wilbr @starshine I now live in Portland, OR; rich history of rail & other public transportation. It’s the most reliable public transport I’ve experienced in the US, & I lived here happily carless until the pandemic. When health issues stopped me from cycling to get my groceries, sadly I had to get a car again.
I DID grow up in rural IL, and while Chicago has great rail hist, it was 1.5 hr drive to the train station to the city (an X-mas family tradition).
@wilbr @starshine I rode a bus 1.5 hrs each way to school every day. A three hr commute barely got me to and from a smal town. This is exactly the type of scenario where public transport doesn’t work well here in the US. I agree w/ your sentiment tho re: cars for sure!
@SpeedOfHuman @starshine one has to wonder why you'd be living that far out in the boonies in the first place, like sure the kids of miners and loggers and farmers might be way out there but that's the long tail of transit, we can solve for 99% of the rest of the population before trying to get a train line out to Nowhere, Midwest