Well, we're going to need something as the Boomers continue to age, eventually aging out of being able to drive themselves en masse but being... let's say disinclined to give up their car keys and rely on someone else to drive them around.
Meeting them halfway with self-driving cars is going to save a lot of lives, compared to having octogenarians with horrible reaction times and the idea that having their own car makes them an adult filling the roads.
We could do what every other country does and build a really good public transport infrastructure so they can take trains and buses everywhere. That will also greatly reduce drunk driving and help people who are very poor whose lives can literally fall apart if something on their car breaks and they can't afford to fix it right away (and then can't get to work, and then lose their job -- or they fix it and forego insurance, and then get in a wreck and then own more money and legal fees).
Cars should be an optional luxury, unless you intentionally chose to live in a suburban area.
Actually in the US, rural areas are served pretty well by AmTrak as a principal way of getting to big city airports (although more expensive than a drive, AmTrak is way cheaper than using a rural airport to connect to a flight).
But if you live in rural areas, you're choosing to require a vehicle. That's fine. But in cities, are transport is shit in the US.
Even with rural areas, Northern Indiana has the same population density of Scottland. It could easily utilize a decent intercity rail system. The US use to have more passenger track at one time than Western Europe has today!
We had rail once. It went away and we spread out, but if we rebuild it, people will start living closer to it and everyone can benefit.
I think once the US hits a really hard economic collapse (not that piddly one in 2008 the banks just used to buy other banks) is the only time when US politicians will be forced to fix infrastructure (because the poor literally won't be able to go to work, and politicians really only care about the poor once they're no longer generating taxable revenue they can feed to their supporters). Once that happens you will see things change very fast, but things do have to get considerably worse before politicians invest in people.
> Actually in the US, rural areas are served pretty well by AmTrak as a principal way of getting to big city airports
This alone tells me you've never lived in a rural area in the US or relied on Amtrak.
> But if you live in rural areas, you're choosing to require a vehicle. That's fine.
It proves my point, to the extent that people who live in rural areas (by choice or not) need individual vehicles, and that given that the number of people who are too old to drive will be increasing in the medium term, we'll need something to provide people who are too old to drive with individual vehicles.
> Even with rural areas, Northern Indiana has the same population density of Scottland.
I'm sure it does. Now shift your gaze westwards, to North Dakota, Wyoming, eastern Montana, and, really, most of the rest of what used to be called the Great American Desert and is now referred to as the high plains or, more simply, flyover country.
You're doing something I see software developers do for their programs: Take a hard problem, solve the easy part of it, and consider their job done because they don't/won't/flat-out refuse to see the really hard bits their "solution" leaves unsolved. It's like their vision... slides over the hard parts, their minds automatically move away, as if you were trying to make two bar magnets touch at the wrong ends.
> This alone tells me you've never lived in a rural area in the US or relied on Amtrak.
ad hominem
You know absolutely nothing about me. I have lived in rural areas. I've never relied on Amtrak, but I've used it quite a bit. Most of what I was saying comes from facts out of people like Wenover Productions:
This video doesn't go into the rural -> plane connection; can't find that one at the moment. But he has another video on it. But yes, people do use Amtrak for connecting to major airports from rural areas.
> I'm sure it does. Now shift your gaze westwards, to North Dakota, Wyoming, eastern Montana ....
I was not addressing any of those areas. At all. You built some argument I wasn't making. I never said trains would be good for those regions. I think if we did build good rails, those areas would get some service eventually.
Australia has a similar situation (a region I have lived in btw). They only over 30M ~ 40M people. I have taken trains intercity and they are very touristy and not meant for general transport. But each capital city: Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney ... they have train systems that would make any US capital be ashamed of itself. The only capitals without any rail are Hobart, ACT and Darwin.
Australia has the infrastructure to accommodate high-speed intercity if they ever got around to implementing it. The United States does not and it has a much higher population density and much larger cities.
American cities, CITIES (which I've been saying a lot) need real transportation. If we built that, the rest would start to naturally follow into place. We'd see rural rail as a byproduct. We use to have it in the US and it's gone now thanks to GM/Ford/big auto buying rail and bus lines and then killing them.
I'm looking back over my comment just to make sure I'm talking about cities. I really feel like your anti-rail stance goes to the hart of the problem. American hate rail and public transport for some fucked up nonsensical reason and it doesn't make any sense to me at all.
I lived without a car for five years in three different countries and I simply think American cities shouldn't require cars to be livable. I don't think that's unreasonable.
This is a non sequitur. There's no contradiction between "There will eventually be autonomous programs that are safer than human drivers" and "Tesla's current autonomous program is not safer than human drivers". There's no principle requiring Tesla's current program to be good enough, or even that it will ever be good enough– the future might come from someone else.
Meeting them halfway with self-driving cars is going to save a lot of lives, compared to having octogenarians with horrible reaction times and the idea that having their own car makes them an adult filling the roads.