I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech, so I can drive it manually when I want/need (snowstorms, off-road), but I can also let it drive me across the country at night while I camp in the back. Would absolutely change the way we move across the US, especially if you have hobbies that involve a lot of gear and equipment.
At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.
I’m not saying cars shouldn’t ever exist. The ‘last mile problem’ is a thing, and proper self-driving cars could be good for part of that (especially after a train and bus if you have lots of stuff). But you want to sleep in a vehicle with lots of storage space while driving across the country? That’s called a train. Nothing new needed.
I looked at taking the train from my town to Glacier National Park along with my bike. The route goes from Portland and Seattle to Chicago, and has a stop at south glacier.
Step 1, get to the local train station in my town. There are 6 trains daily between me and Portland. Also, amtrak on the cross country trains requires the bikes to be in a box, in storage cars.
So I gotta get a large bike box, and get myself, my bike, the box, and some tools to break it down to our local amtrak station. Then partially dissasemble the bike, and box it. (of course, our train station has room in it for 5-10 people, and most sit outside, uncovered, which is fun in spring.)
Then, get to the main Portland Train station, with my bike box, and backpack with my stuff and tools. Wait up to 9 hours for the hawaitha train. (its often many hours late, and only leaves once per day).
Load Bike in cargo car, and then board train late at night.
Wake up around 5am, (or later, if train is behind schedule) and disembark at Glacier, re-assemble my bike. Figure out how to get it, and the box (i'll need it for the return trip) to a hotel or AirBnB.
For the return trip, its about the same, 1 daily westbound train, that is usually hours late, then hope you get to portland before the last train for the day leaves for my town, or else find a place to stay with a bike, backpack, and bike box in the sketchy area around the trainstation...
Or, hop in a car with a bike rack, and drive 10 hours. Which is easier, and MUCH cheaper if I split the cost of gas with someone else. So 2 extra travel days back for vacation, and much less stress.
Most of this is just that the US rail system is amazingly shitty by global standards.
This is an extremely simplistic view. For instance, the US moves more of its freight (by percentage) than all western European countries except Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
Passengers are not freight. And freight is one of the reasons US railways suck for passengers.
Moving people by train in the US makes about as much sense as delivering pizzas by barge.
Because the US is soooooo exceptional, right? And yet the moment you provide actual proper train connections the lines are successful and profitable (see e.g. Northeast Corridor.
Is that profitability calculated before or after billions in federal funding?
Have you calculated profitability of vehicles after government has funded all the infrastructure for them?
Freight is better. Passengers don’t belong on trains.
Tell it to Northeast Corridor. Or Japan.
The US is a very big, very spread out place. I'm not sure which country has trains that take you directly to your front door.
It is indeed a very big place.
But this fellah seemed to have that part figured out: Bike to the train station, and take the bike on the train. That part seems straight-forward. The train stations were near-enough to where they wanted to start, and near-enough to where they wanted to be.
The problems they lament seem to revolve chiefly around the specifics of taking the bike on a train, and the limited schedule of the train, and the lack of adhesion to that schedule.
Those problems wouldn't be improved if the vastness of the US were reduced, would they?
Near-enough is not strong competition with as-close-as-possible.
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Where I live in the Netherlands the train quite literally stops in front of my door, as in my building that is ~50 meters from the train station where I can take a train every 10 minutes (15 on weekends) to any other city in the country, and even outside the country to Germany or France.
I'm even planning a Eurotrip by train this summer with some mates, I'd say the distances here are comparable to get from NL to PL for example.
And besides, how is it that the US is "too wide" for trains to work, but apparently building an equivalent highway system is perfectly possible? China is also a massive country, yet they have incredible passenger train options to get cross country.
A self-driving car can stop 2 meters outside your house on an arbitrary schedule. That's going to be the competition with trains in the very near future.
Not sure what you mean by the last bit - the US already has that highway system, and the local roads serving the last mile, because that last mile infrastructure already has to exist to get from public transit to your house.
China doesn't have the exact same problem because so much of the country lives in dense wall-to-wall housing, which sucks no matter how you spin it if you like having any kind of space to yourself.
> A self-driving car can stop 2 meters outside your house on an arbitrary schedule.
No it can't, because cars aren't allowed on the streets around my house, with the exception of emergency vehicles and logistical vehicles like moving or delivery vans. The closest spot where a taxi could stop to drop me off is a lot further than where the bus or trains are. The closest parking space is actually a good 200-300m away from my door, reserved for residents so also always full, whereas I have a bus stop literally in front of my door and a train station 20 steps from it. I can also rent a bicycle 24/7 from the train station if all other modes of transport fail me (and I didn't have access to my bike for whatever reason).
Same in the center of the city, you cannot get to many places by car. A deliberate choice, for example when we dug out the hideous polluting highway and replaced it with a canal instead (which funnily enough was a canal in the first place before they made it into a highway). Utrecht is a perfect example of gov't realizing a mistake it made with car-centric design, doubling back and correcting it in a way that increases the QoL of every single resident of Utrecht.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...
This isn't even to say that the Netherlands is some kind of dystopia for drivers, if anything drivers here tend to be happier since they don't need to contend with a bunch of other people on the road, and more than half the country drives anyways.
> Not sure what you mean by the last bit - the US already has that highway system, and the local roads serving the last mile, because that last mile infrastructure already has to exist to get from public transit to your house.
My point was that building out the highway system was a deliberate policy choice made in lieu of a strong passenger rail/public transport network. Had they focused on making passenger rail more viable, then we'd be talking about the opposite world here, where building highly space-inefficient and expensive highways would be a ludicrous proposition.
> China doesn't have the exact same problem because so much of the country lives in dense wall-to-wall housing, which sucks no matter how you spin it if you like having any kind of space to yourself.
We're talking about cross-country lines here, if anything it's even more absurd that the Chinese can have such a strong rail network when the majority of the country has no use for the lines serving the far-west of the country where there aren't that many people. Whether the cities are shit to live in or not is a separate discussion altogether.
Recently, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395
There are lots of potential high-traffic corridors, and the US is still incapable of serving them.
Hard to find an unserved corridor where train makes more sense than plane or car.
US East Cost. The area is about the size of Japan with similar popilation. And there are only a few disjointed efforts.
On the East Coast they have trains that go to the front door of your house?
Didn't know that Japanese trains (or European trains) go to the door of your house
Exactly, why would the US want to copy that?
Northeast Corridor 2200 trains a day, 15 million passengers a year, 14% of intercity traffic, replacing most air travel between some of the cities.
The Brightline in Florida exists, as does the Acela on the East Coast. These things are entirely possible in the US, we just don't seem to want them enough.
Sorta, kinda.
Suppose in some hypothetical future, we can take the (expensive) train to our destination in Somewhere, USA, and it drops us off.
So there we are, at a train station in Somewhere, USA.
What happens next? A bus? Light rail? Uber/Lyft/taxi? A friend who has time to show up? Renting a car? What's our next move? (Lots of destinations don't have much for local public transport.)
For contrast: When I drive myself to Somewhere, I've still got my car to use after I get there. I can go anywhere I want to go, at any time I choose to do so, and I can bring as much stuff and as many people as suits me without much additional cost.
I don't have to wait around for a train. I don't have to deal with checking luggage, or retrieving luggage. I can just pop into town -- with my car -- and set forth to do whatever I want. The bags can ride along with me until I get to wherever it is that I'm crashing for the night and until then, they don't present any particular burden at all.
I might have been better-rested if I took the hypothetical train, but getting dropped off at a train station isn't a very complete solution.
> What happens next? A bus? Light rail? Uber/Lyft/taxi? A friend who has time to show up? Renting a car? What's our next move? (Lots of destinations don't have much for local public transport.)
You're saying all this as if this exact scenario isn't solved in plenty of places across the world? You take the bus or tram or metro or cycle or just walk if it's close enough. If the city is actually built with public transport in mind, not just a single bus line that runs every 2 hours bolted on as an afterthought, those options can be easier and faster than finding a parking spot, unless you feel entitled to park your vehicle anywhere you please to the detriment of everyone who isn't you.
Where I live in the Netherlands it's faster to bike most places than driving, because we don't solely cater to drivers and don't devote half the city to letting people store their cars. Even up North in the villages you can still get around by bike, since cycling lanes are dead cheap to build and maintain and can go down in the middle of a swamp if you needed to.
> When I drive myself to Somewhere, I've still got my car to use after I get there.
Sure, and when I cycle to Somewhere, I've still got my bike. Same logic, except I can lock it to a post and forget about it rather than needing to find a dedicated slab of real estate specifically reserved for my vehicle's existence. And if I took the train, I can rent a bike when I get there, which is a thing that exists in basically every city that actually invested in making it work.
> I can go anywhere I want to go, at any time I choose
That only holds true because decades of car-centric design have made it so. In the Netherlands you couldn't just go anywhere you wanted by car, because there are plenty of streets and whole areas where cars flat out aren't allowed, because we actually prioritize the people who have to live with those infrastructural choices over random passersby who don't want to be "inconvenienced" by having to walk 5 minutes or share the road with someone who isn't also in a car.
If the US bothered to build out the infrastructure, you could go anywhere you wanted to go via public transport as well.
What happens in your scenario if you can't find parking anywhere near your destination and the only option is lugging your bags along roads that weren't built for pedestrians? I know I've been in similar situations in the past where I had to drive around for fucking ages trying to find a single spot, I definitely would've preferred walking than that whole circus.
> I might have been better-rested if I took the hypothetical train, but getting dropped off at a train station isn't a very complete solution.
Right, in a country that gutted its public transit and zoned everything to be car-dependent, a train station by itself isn't a complete solution. That's a policy failure, not an argument against trains.
> If the US bothered to build out the infrastructure, you could go anywhere you wanted to go via public transport as well.
Public transit != mass transit. There's no reason that self-driving vehicle fleets can't be municipally subsidized and provide a dramatically better private experience than any mass transit anywhere in the world, and we already have the infrastructure for it.
How many private vehicles do you need to provide mass transit away from a mass event such as a stadium, or a concert?
Ah yes. The entirely hypothetical situation that doesn't exist anywhere in the world
Those places are comfortable with subpar transit conditions. There's nothing actually individually desirable about taking the train compared to having a private car take you directly between points A and B, people just seem to shy away from admitting that in favor of pro-social signaling in support of public transit.
I guess you've never ridden on the Shinkansen or anywhere in Switzerland. I'd much rather take those trains than do the equivalent drives, especially if I'm the one behind the wheel.
Ah yeah, the subpar conditions of ... not being dependent on the car for 100% of your life. The subpar conditions of ... not having to spend hours driving on the highway. The subpar conditions of ... having a choice.
I wonder if there are psychological studies on why Americans en masse cannot even perceive the idea of there being other transportation options than cars and (to a lesser extent) planes. Even though in the rare cases when someone manages to provide a well-planned alternative Americans do use it, see Northeast Corridor (2200 trains a day, 15 million passengers a year, 14% of intercity traffic, replacing most air travel between some of the cities).
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Note: it's both funny and sad reading about the state of anything in the US that keeps pretending it's not a third-world country.
For example, Empire Corridor, passenger rail corridor in New York State running between Penn Station in New York and Niagara Falls: "In the 1890s, the Empire State Express between New York City and Buffalo was about 1 hour faster than Amtrak's service in 2013." (Wikipedia)
It can exist. Just add trains.
The lack of other public transportation is already real in much of the US.
(If we're not adding trains, then there's really nothing here to talk about in this context -- is there?)
> At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.
As an American, it's far easier to imagine autonomous robot driven road trips than it is to imagine a government that is competent enough to build passenger rail networks.
Why? Isn't Amtrak that, but just geographically-scoped? Isn't Caltrain workable? Subways also function fine in NYC, DC, Boston, and even LA
(to be clear, I don't think the other poster is correct that having trains would satisfy the desire of the guy who wants a self-driving Rivian. I consider his want/need there to be fundamentally different)
It's comically (and extremely variably) priced. A trip from DC to NYC and back would be ~$25 in electric costs with a typical electric car versus Amtrak could easily be $300+ though possibly as cheap as $50 if you are flexible to awful hours like depart at 4:30am or something.
You should factor in the time/stress/wear costs but yes, I've found driving to be significantly cheaper than even the DC Metro most days.
the actual cost of a trip between times square and the national mall is about $200 all things considered based on the ~0.80 federal mileage reimbursement rate for 250 miles. that train corridor is overwhelmingly successful as well so the idea that amtrak isn't a good deal is at odds with reality.
That's assuming you don't already have a time-depreciating asset in your possession. Per mile cost is about halved if you drive significantly more than average.
People in and around the acela corridor drive significantly less than the national average.
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Amtrak (where it exists) is often deprioritized for freight travel, and other times is often limited to extremely low speeds, resulting in extremely slow travel. Your road trips are only possible if you have extremely relaxed time constraints and specific destinations in mind.
Fees are also very high for such a slow option.
As for the future, well... it is bleak. This administration is actively trying to block transit expansion, presumably due to their undying affection for the fossil fuel industry, going so far as to withhold funding from already awarded grants to regional rail.
So while the northeast can sort-of pull it off due to its relatively compact nature and history of more progressive policies, this leaves the vast majority of the country in a no-mans land.
Amtrak simply leases the lines in the West from freight providers rather than owning the track outright. The reason Amtrak can offer so much better service in the Northeast Corridor is because they own the track. Incidentally the NEC is the only part of Amtrak operating at a profit.
It's better if trains prioritize freight travel and car-focused roads prioritize passenger travel, than the other way around. Human beings have more pressing time constraints than nearly all shippable physical goods.
Amtrak started out as a holding company for private passenger rail companies that went bankrupt. It's never had a static amount of funding (until the Biden admin, Amtrak had to renegotiate its budget regularly) and many of its stations are just pet projects for rural Congress reps who want to give their district a way to leave their area, so Amtrak runs many trains at a loss.
Building new rail projects in the US is very hard because of capital costs and regulations like NEPA (and CEQA in California) which require environmental review for everything. Brightline in Florida was able to get around this by working in an existing highway ROW.
> Brightline in Florida was able to get around this buy working in an existing highway ROW.
And will probably go bankrupt this year: https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-01-23/brightline-business...
Oof their debt is now considered junk bonds huh. They missed some loan interest payments? Yeah not looking good...
I tried to ride it a few times, but could never find a way it made logistical or financial sense.
The remaining dregs of Amtrak are the result of the nationalization of the failing private passenger lines in the US.
We used to have passenger rail. Even the desolate nowhere of semi-rural Ohio was well-served. Street cars to get around town, inter-urbans to get between nearby towns, and proper passenger trains to get to points far-away.
It didn't work out. There's reasons why it didn't work, like the literal conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire that deliberately sought to destroy it.
Whatever those reasons were, they are are behind us. So it may seem superficially easy to just put it all back... but it isn't.
When the lines stopped being used, we tore them out. They're gone. And where the lines are gone, old stations are also mostly gone. Cities had once been built around (and because of) rail, but were subsequently built for cars as time marched forward and things continued to expand.
In some cases, whole communities have disappeared in the transition away from rail. In many other cases, we let our central stations decay and rot or demolished them to make space for things like convention centers.
So what's left is what we have: We have cars.
It's easy for me to see a future where I can buy a car and curl up in the back seat with a movie (and maybe a cocktail) while it ferries me from A to B.
That's a future I might actually live long enough to see, and it appears to be inevitable.
And I'd love to be freed of the chains of having to drive myself from A to B.
But I'll be dead and buried before we get passenger rail to be even 1/10th of what it once was.
So I choose to dream practical dreams. I can only play the hand I'm dealt.
I’m 99-100% a car user now after living in Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles. Here’s why - I gave up my car for a bike when I lived in Portland, however when people openly smoked fentanyl on the trains the train operators had to stop the train during my morning/afternoon commute for ~15 minutes (this happened often). Also the last straw for me was getting my place broken into and having my bike stolen. Therefore I moved to cars because I didn’t have to inhale secondhand fentanyl smoke or deal with unscheduled delays. As a man in Los Angeles I had to deal with a drunk man on a bus touching my thigh and hitting on me and people trying to sell me drugs/solicit me for money/phone calls/etc. As a regular hiker I’m also not sure public transit would service trailheads in the Cascades or the Sierra Nevadas. As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy, so I think this problem will likely go away. I welcome Waymo in Portland, I’m just concerned for the well being of the vehicles!
Look I don't fault you - Americans drive cars because every alternative is absolute dogshit, I don't disagree. But I can't e realistic about that and not this:
> As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment
That's like saying gunshots may sometimes be more dangerous than throwing rocks.
> but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy
Even if this was true (I don't think either change is happening nearly fast enough) car-dependency is directly upstream of numerous other environmental problems, most of which don't disappear even if you take parking out of the mix, such as grounds heat and flooding caused by paved roads, such as obsession with energy- and water-inefficient low-density residential zoning (sprawl), such as particulate pollution from tires, such as ecosystem damage from the need to dump literal tons of salt on icy roads for tires to drive on, such as the emissions of road paving itself... you get the idea.
These also don't disappear if you replace privately-owned cars with buses and trains. You need paved roads to put buses on and track to put trains on, and they emit particulate pollution as well unless they're also electrified which is a similar problem to electrifying cars.
Low-density residential sprawl is mostly water-inefficient because it allows people to have the ability to have a garden that they water, you don't inherently use more household-internal water if you live in a suburban house compared to an apartment. Most of the energy efficiency issues are also directly related to low-density residential zoning allowing for more physical space for a dwelling than an equivalently-expensive dwelling would cost in an expensive, dense urban area. In short, the things about low-density residential neighborhoods that are less energy efficiently mostly don't have to do with cars and mostly do have to do with goods that people actively want and can only afford outside of dense urban areas.
The problems do diminish significantly if you need fewer lanes by half or more, and have fewer vehicles per person.
Low-density sprawl in the American style is impossible without cars. Streetcar suburbs could exist but those are necessarily more concentrated and again need less road coverage.
Nor can you say the sprawl is what people "actively want" when it's illegal to build to any other pattern in the vast majority of the country.
>Low-density residential sprawl is mostly water-inefficient
Which is more or less a non-issue east of the Missouri river
Indeed, the root of many water problems is people wanting to live in the desert.
I am a huge proponent of increased public transit (I'm of the opinion that every city should have a massive congestion tax with large swaths only accessible on foot or by public transit), but trains and buses would be wildly inconvenient for what op is describing.
Trying to take something like a windsurf board on a train, and then having to navigate multiple train changes along with whatever other baggage you have makes it a non-starter.
The "last mile problem" you mention is unresolved when it comes to getting from the closest public transit stop to the actual destination (frequently in a park or even off road).
And finally, the final cost to the rider would be significantly higher, as sleeper trains are not cheap.
I think America could do quite well if it focused on public transit in and between densely populated areas. Fewer cars in cities could make for denser cities, which in turn could allow for even more public transit. But outside of population centers, America is much more spread out than Europe, meaning that trains are less economical, and often wouldn't get the ridership that would allow them to make sense.
I appreciate what you're saying and am a big fan of long distance train and bus journeys myself and have done a lot of both, sleeping and not.
But one huge factor that you have to contend with is the randomness of the tragedy of the commons problem on public transport / shared transport. A train journey can be blissful to sleep on right until a loud group gets on and sits across from you and there's no seats available to move.
I think this is something that can't be overlooked, especially if you're talking about something like a short trip where if you don't sleep well en route, quite a large proportion of the trip time is going to be affected. Having a private vehicle where you can guarantee control of your environment is a really huge plus.
It is a chicken and egg problem. As long as the majority of people who would maintain the social environment are avoiding the social environment, the healthy consensus/operating regime can never emerge.
In my experience the majority consensus is to maintain a quiet, generally polite environment on trains and buses.
But that's precisely the problem, it only takes a very tiny minority to change this. If one group, one person sometimes, in a carriage of 50 people decides to go against this, then that's that. It's not even particularly common, but it happens, it's random, and so it's just something that must be contended with.
I think that is the case if the majority has or exercises little to no effective social power to enforce the norm.
The majority consensus is to desire a peaceful environment but do nothing when it is violated.
Correct. But the golden question is, do what? The authorities don't care. Rules and laws are rarely enforced, and when they are enforced they're done so unevenly. If you decide to take matters into your own hands, it's much more likely that you will be punished by the law than the person you were correcting. So, what do you expect people to do?
My point is that in established cultures there are expectations around how these situations are handled, and what you expect people to do is specific to the culture. A single disapproving grandmother can put a stop to it.
That is why it breaks down — once it is discarded in a melting pot the cultural expectations are unclear and it seems you’re at least initially dependent on the state or mob dynamics.
>A single disapproving grandmother can put a stop to it.
I think you have to go further upstream socially - there are people that should not be free, but are. Public transit has not just loud talking or music on phones, but the mentally deranged, babbling, even actively drug using population walking a knife's edge between erratic and aggressive behavior. From my POV it's so far past a stern stare on the US west coast that the suggestion comes across comical.
Create vigalantee laws that legalize “taking matters into your own hands”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_drug_war
Extremely popular and objectively reduced crime and drug usage. In portlands case, you keep weed, steroids, psychedelics, and party drugs legal and come down like hell on the society destroying stuff like fenty
China needed to do similar drastic things to get out of the slump caused by the opium wars. They call that period the “century of humiliation “ for a reason.
It's not. Pass a law that continuing to be noisy or disruptive on a bus or train after a warning results in 10 years of prison time with no parole and consistently enforce it. The problem will solve itself without a chicken and egg problem. Problematic people can simply be removed from society to make for a good social environment. Adding more good people is not the only option and in fact only hides the problem instead of solving it.
This would involve incarcerating a lot of homeless people, which is expensive, and pro-homeless activists would see it as a human rights abuse and fight it.
Deeply unfortunate, but we're arguably in a lose-lose situation where suffering from the problem has abuses, and yet so does fighting those who profit or benefit from the situation.
There's immense social capital and NGO patronage at work surrounding 'homeless' - and I parse that as mentally ill now, as it's an insult (IMO) to the homeless who are perfectly capable of respecting others and participating in the social contract.
It would be expensive, but would have everyday visible tangible effects which you can't always say about other government spending. In regards to people thinking it's abusing people's rights they will just have to be ignored or taught to respect other people's right to a good experience with public transport.
I honestly find it horrifying that you think stripping a person of their freedom and dignity for ten years is a reasonable penalty for being “noisy” on a train.
I’d much rather be around the noisy-but-relatively-harmless person than someone with so little regard for their fellow man.
>for ten years
Or longer if they show they are unable to reform while in prison.
>penalty for being “noisy” on a train
That is ignoring the second order effects of the situation. This noise is holding back the flywheel of public transportation that could have economic benefits to millions of people. The penalty is for the enormous cost of holding the rest of society back. The person who has such little regard for their fellow man is the one who is letting the few ruin society for the many.
Cars are not the solution to that. Hooligans and irritating people are just a possibility in literally every social environment, they always have been, and they always will be. Answers to that problem are social - it's a bigger problem in America than Japan, for exmaplem.
Answers which involve removing oneself from society (by entering a private car) are not good answers. And when you factor in the externalities, you're just displacing "I'm upset, possibly even unwell due to sleep lost" onto "we replaced 90% of the local natural environment with pavement and paint it with crushed human beings every single day".
I agree with you, however in the US the “last mile” is often the “last 50 miles” when goal is outdoor recreation.
People just do not understand how big and spread out the US is compared to other countries. "Last mile" dramatically underestimates how much heavy lifting the personal transportation part would need to do. More like "last 50 miles".
The European mind does not comprehend how big and sparsely populated the American West is. You can't even pitch a tent in most places in the Alps, and why would you, when you just stop at a hut that has a staff and you can get fed and sleep in bunks with 20 other people? Meanwhile I can drive to numerous places where there isn't a structure or even another person in a 20km radius. No one is going to run a train to a place like that.
there are effectively no passenger trains in America and effectively no political will to expand them. Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both. Given these facts, it is not wild at all to prefer cars (self driving or not) vs alternate transportation methods
MARTA (Atlanta regional transit) heavy rail average daily ridership is 80,000 people [1].
1. https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2025-Q4-Ride...
> Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car.
Buses can be slower, but I don't even know of a 2x difference. For longer trips they can travel 24/7. And overall they are more efficient because you can do other things instead of driving.
> This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both
I don't have a problem on buses and trains. I have more problem with other drivers when I drive. Your comment is, ironically, antisocial.
> For longer trips they can travel 24/7
That sounds like hell. Bus seats are just as tight as coach class airline seats, and unlike trains there isn't even an option to pay exorbitant pricing for a sleeper compartment.
Napaway briefly offered ticketed intercity service on busses with 18 sleeper pods, but has (temporarily) discontinued it in favor of focusing on charter service.
I guess everything is hell, if you feel like writing that.
> Bus seats are just as tight as coach class airline seats
IME bus seats are first class in padding and support, a bit wider than coach, and with more leg room (though I'd need to measure to confirm). Much more comfortable than airplane coach - and without the air pressure, vibration / noise, and humidity problems.
> exorbitant pricing for a sleeper compartment
It just depends on the train, how far ahead you pay, etc.
You are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. I like trains but they can't and don't address the issue the OP is raising. Even if the US already had public trains it still isn't a "last mile" problem. Especially in the western US, it is a "last hundred miles" problem.
No public transport system that remotely makes any kind of economic sense, either in terms of infrastructure or operational cost, can replace the established network topology that exists for cars in the US. The connectivity is much more like a mesh than a hub-and-spoke model. Even though the US has a strong regional jet system that connects arbitrary nodes in that graph it still doesn't entirely avoid the "last hundred miles" problem.
A lot of American long-distance travel is not between two big cities. Even in Europe, similar kinds of routes have no train service and limited bus service.
You're right, but in the US a government providing any sort of public service is an immediate target for the right (and an unfortunately significant portion of the "left"). We insist on paying more for less rather than ever allowing a poor person to benefit in a way they don't "deserve". So public transit hardly exists or is woefully inadequate in most places.
Its the ultra independence mindset. I don't think trains work for the commenter you talked to.
I want to move on my schedule and convenience, I don't want to have to warp my day to day around someone else's departure schedule.
> Its the ultra independence mindset.
And there's nothing wrong with it! I take detours on road trips all the time following “Historic <thing> →” signs or just because I see something interesting in the distance and want to go check it out. On a train journey I'd just have to watch them pass by.
The scenario is a cross-country trip in an electric car. What actual, specific advantage does a train or bus offer in this scenario? What problem does it solve better?
It's an electric car, so carbon emissions are low.
Most of the route will be in rural areas in the middle of the night, so the impact on traffic will be minimal.
As for the cost to build and maintain the roads, they are already needed so rural areas are accessible. Wear and tear on roads and bridges isn't much of an issue since heavy vehicles like trucks cause massively disproportionate damage[1]. (A bus might actually be worse than the equivalent number of cars in this respect.)
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[1] See https://blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/trucks-cause-the-lions-share... . Some studies show that damage varies with the fourth power of axle weight.
I'd love for you to come along with me on a ski mountaineering trip to the eastern Sierra. It's a mountain range larger than Switzerland with basically one interstate highway to access and no roads that cross through in the winter. Very few year-round towns, and nearly zero services outside of those towns. This ain't the alps - there are no huts, no gondolas, no nothing. If you want to access it, you have to walk/ski your way there. That often means long drives (50-100+ miles), camping in your car, and bringing everything you need to survive with you.
I love the confidence with which you give your answer though! Europeans famously underestimate the American West, which is why they often get into serious trouble (or die[1]) at alarming rates out here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans
Connecting two Waymo geos with a train would be an interesting company idea. You could lease freight track the way Amtrak already does it in the American West but try to negotiate a contact more favorable than Amtrak's. You could try to work with Waymo to work on bundles.
Amtrak could do the same thing but because of how Amtrak is organized in not sure that it would be possible. Most of the current Waymo geos are not connected by Amtrak directly and require transfers.
In the US it's often not the last mile, but the last 10 or 100 miles. I'm saying this as someone enjoying fantastic public transport in Budapest.
> At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.
So, let's say you take public transport from SF to Yosemite/Los Angeles. Now, how do I cover the last mile (or even multiple points)? Take more public transport? Hitchhike?
The reason long-distance public transport works well in Europe is that there is good local public transport in both the source and the destination cities. When that does not exist, you are better off driving.
Unfortunately, until something big happens in the US, autonomous vehicles will be more accessible to working class americans than good and reliable mass transit, especially outside of major population centers.
Its a trojan horse on the way to make car ownership impossible to a large swath of Americans.
I can't take my dog on pretty much any public transit or most ride shares. More than 20% of Americans have dogs.
Public transit only works if you live in the densest of the dense part of a city. If you live out in Beaverton or Gresham these bus lines lose money hand over fist, not to mention farther-flung places.
It's a train or bus that is exclusively yours, goes exactly where you want it to go, when you want to go. Sounds objectively better than a train to me.
The sad truth is the USA spends ~$150B/year building and maintaining it's road network (to say nothing of the inflation-adjusted costs that went into its initial roll-out). Source: The US Fed tracks it directly - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS
That's a $41/month subscription every citizen's paying no matter what. When we're pulling cash on that volume from everyone's pockets to build lavish infrastructure literally up to people's doors (vastly more road square footage than housing+school square footage combined), of course folks are going to say "nothing compares" -- because nothing does compare. Which stinks (imagine if we'd focused a century of spending on rail at rates like that; damn), but it is what we have at the moment.
Seems like a bargain by comparison! Chicago is about to spend $1 billion/mile to extend an above-ground train line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_Extension
The USA is riding on 100 years of the benefits of scale and economic investment. If the USA was investing $150B a year into building passenger rail, we would not be paying $1B/mile for "new" and "trailblazing" rail projects. If we had to build much of the highway infra we built 75 years ago, but do it now, we'd be paying similar $1B/mile prices for the highways.
The best thing about rail in the US is we'll have a lot of premium land for bike paths and AV lanes when the rail gets decommissioned.
In my experience, night trains with private cabins are fan service for rail fans, environmentalists and/or masochists, not real transport options.
One of the famous sleeper trains in Europe (Nightjet Vienna-Amsterdam) is often booked out weeks (sometimes months) in advance, costs as much as a plane ticket + hotel room or more, and you have a decent chance of being told (as you show up in the evening) that unfortunately one car is missing tonight and you have the option of a full refund (screwing up your entire trip and having to book a last minute plane ticket), or you can take a 50% refund on your 255 EUR sleeping ticket and spend the night sitting in the shared seating part on a seat that would have regularly cost 35 EUR. This was something that on some routes was happening routinely for over a year [1].
The night train from Switzerland to Malmö was cancelled (after tickets had already been sold) because the Swiss government decided to not subsidize it.
Trains like this offer zero flexibility (you have to book a specific train weeks in advance), go where they go which is a very limited route network, and even in Europe with all the environmentalists, rail networks, shorter distances, and massive government subsidies, they don't seem to be able to run them very frequently or on many routes.
Calling them equivalent or a replacement for self-driving cars (which would take the passenger where they want, when they want) is disingenuous and isn't going to magically convince people.
[1] https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/espresso/f...
Public transit in America presents a much higher chance of encountering dangerous people than a private car. Until those people are permanently, irrevocably, and definitively locked up, it would not matter off public transit were free, or even paid users to use it, it will not be a serious option. Nobody in my family is allowed to use public transit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Debrina_Kawam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Iryna_Zarutska
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-men-pushed-subway-...
This is all FUD and extremely unlikely if not improbable to run into someone violent. If you’re that afraid of public transit and people in general, no amount of “rounding people up against their will” would change your mind.
FUD? Are you claiming these did not happen?
It would also be satisfied by magic flying carpets. Between flying carpets, functional public transport, and self-driving cars, only one of these three things is not utter fantasy in the near-ish future in the United States.
How do those carpets handle in the snow?
I fucking love trains.
Enough with this public transport bullshit. We live in very spread out suburbs where you need to drive to everything and everyone has big backyards because we like it that way. Most people here don’t want to live in a tiny coop sharing walls with neighbors on all sides and live the vast majority of our lives in a 15 min public transport bubble. Further, having a train line is borderline not feasible the way the vast majority of the US lives. There is no way having a train station with even a 30 minute walking distance is feasible or even desirable. I also don’t want to get into public transport with a whole bunch of other people no matter how nice it is. It’s not going to be able to compete with a self driving EV of my own that I charge with my solar panels for free.
That being said I’m in full support of metros for large cities and high speed rail between major cities but it’s hard to beat a domestic airline you can show up for an hour before it leaves at an airport and gets you there 10x faster for anything other than the shortest trips.
That would be something being asleep and waking up to a car crash
reminds me of an old joke:
"When I go I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and afraid like the passengers in his car"
The version I've heard a bunch of times had him as a bus driver..
The version I've heard: When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like Grandpa; not like Grandma, who died screaming "Look out for that car!"
Snowstorms are probably when I’d most want self driving. Back in February driving from Tahoe to SF, they closed the road, not because of conditions, but because too many impatient drivers spun out. I trust Waymo to go the recommended speed and not get impatient.
Its not always about speed, This winter I was on interstate 93 in a 4WD with winter tyres. I was doing 25-35mph because the roads weren't treated. I still spun out, like many others. The road was an ice rink.
Humans and Control System Models need feedback to operate, and worse still... when any input into the vehicle's controls produce zero results, you will spin out.
My concern with a model in these conditions is that it wouldn't recoginize the fact that other cars were in the ditch and that it should probably slow down
When it comes to controlling the wheels to prevent sliding and slipping, the AV control system is unbeatable. The ABS and traction control on a regular car has to cope with whatever control inputs the driver has made; on an AV, the computer models the grip limits of the wheel and plans a trajectory to not exceed them. It's not just for snow but also for changing pavement surfaces and the rain.
The main limitation is still sensors in the snow, but it seems to not be that big of a deal to build sensor packages that are better at seeing in the snow than a human is.
This is the "works in a textbook" take.
Being able to plot a series of inputs that can more efficiently use available traction than a human doesn't prevent you from blundering your way into a dumb situation where the laws of physics dictate that the only possible outcomes are various flavors of bad ones.
It's not clear how often the software will chose poorly and need to brute force its way out with traction/handling. The fact that they seem to be hedging against this by putting the hardware on particularly performant cars indicates it must happen enough to matter or be rare but bad enough to matter when it does happen.
Waymo will probably also rack up a ton of technically not at fault accidents by being obtuse in traffic since there's when there's snow there's a lot less margin for the "two people trying to pass each other in a hallway" type missteps that behavior tends to create.
I don’t buy it. Proof you had actual snow rated tires on and still spun out? Otherwise I claim lies are afoot
I drove up there in the AM Thursday, Feb 18th, during the snowstorm, about an hour before they closed the pass for the rest of the day.
You couldn't see anything. As soon as there wasn't a car 20 yards in front of you, it was a complete whiteout. Ice built up on the wiper as quickly as you could possibly reach out of your window and clear it. Radar would probably be nice, but I don't think it'd be enough to keep driving. The cameras and lidar would be an absolute wreck.
I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but that is really the final frontier for AI driving I think. Waymos aren't even allowed to drive in a snowstorm right now. I suspect that you'll be dealing with Caltrans closing the pass for the rest of your life.
Snowy/Ice-y driving? Check out all this Canadian work!
http://cadcd.uwaterloo.ca
Disclosure: My grad student advisor.
Fair point, and I know it was bad on Thu. I was traveling back on Monday and, other than avoiding the impatient drivers, conditions were fine.
The entire city shuts down and loses their mind with just a millimeter or two of snow here. Last time we got 0.25 of an inch there were ~9 accidents within a 2-mile span on the highway in the morning, and we just ended up shutting the highway down for the day.
I love Waymo in other cities, but it'd be especially helpful here during the 1 day every other year that we actually get any snow ... if we ever get snow here again.
After skiing in Utah, I wonder why the driving conditions around Tahoe get so bad. In comparison, for most places around Salt Lake/Park City, you never need chains or 4-wheel drive.
It simply snows a lot more in Tahoe from a SWE standpoint. Utah gets similar "inches" of snow, but fractions of the moisture, which if you've ever built a snowman you know the difference between the heavy thick stuff and the powder that doesn't clump. Utah gets the powder, Tahoe gets the sludge (and a ton of it).
Utah snow at its elevations and climate is more dry and fluffy. Tahoe snow or similar when the temperature is only marginally below freezing is more likely to be wet, slushy. Same thing as snow/ice buildup on the mountain passes over the Cascades in WA when the temperature is hovering just below zero C.
In a Canadian context, on a two lane highway, sometimes doing the absolutely safe/totally cautious speed in a moderate snowstorm will result in a very large collection of vehicles behind you, with angry drivers. In particular if the persons collecting behind you are some combination of not very risk averse, commute on the same road every day, and are very confident in themselves because they have dedicated winter purpose studded snow/ice tires on.
Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre".
Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.
Turnouts exist. Unfortunately, head-of-line-blockers are very commonly already overwhelmed by the task of keeping tab of their own vehicle; would be a far stretch to expect them to simultaneously stay aware of traffic situations, spot the turnouts ahead, and then take the turnout.
Yes. The longer-term possible second-order effects are going to be wild. Easier t o get to wilderness? Awesome!, but also crowding like you've never seen (but maybe also more small parks because there will be a glut of unused parking).
I don't see why one of those second-order effects wouldn't be the death of car ownership, with everyone using a rideshare service instead. Hell, that's the business model for Waymo and almost everyone other than Tesla in the autonomous-vehicle industry. It just doesn't make sense to own your own vehicle, use it for ~2 hours/day, and have to worry about parking/storing/fueling/maintaining it when you could have a service do all of that for you. Plus self-driving cars fix several issues with human rideshares, eg. you can drive it out to the boonies without worrying about how it's going to get back; you don't need to worry about getting assaulted by the robot driver; when they wait for you you only need to pay the opportunity cost of another ride rather than the opportunity cost of the driver's time. It's feasible to take a Waymo out to a state park, though you wouldn't usually do that with an Uber.
The second-order effects of that could be pretty wild. If people stopped owning their own cars, we wouldn't need houses with garages and driveways. It'd favor dense development with loading zones rather than parking spaces. It'd also be a big boon for EV adoption since the cars are all owned by one corporate owner and all go home to a centralized depot to charge at night rather than needing to retrofit EV chargers onto everyone's living situation. (Indeed, Waymo runs an all-electric fleet.). There'd be a premium on very reliable powertrains, since the cars might easily put 60-70K miles/year on them instead of the 10-15K that is typical of passenger vehicles. I dunno why Waymo went with Jaguar instead of Toyota, but perhaps "EV" is the explanation. Cars would wear out in 3-5 years instead of lasting for 15-20, and so you'd always have the latest hardware and technology on the car.
All the money we spend on traffic enforcement would become pointless, with audits of the software becoming a more effective use of dollars instead. But that blows a hole in many small local PD's budgets, many of which use speeding and parking tickets to raise revenue. Municipalities would likely find themselves powerless at regulating Big Self-Driving Rideshares.
The third-order effects are interesting as well. Once all cars on the road are self-driving, why not have them draft each other and physically link up to improve power efficiency and safety? You might even call such an arrangement a "train", blurring the line between road and rail transportation. But then, if you've got docking and linkage mechanisms, why not put the boundary between the electronics & powertrain and the passenger compartment, like the Rivian "skateboard" platform? You could return to private ownership of the passenger compartment - where, after all, some people like to store all their junk - and then have the rideshare own only the means of locomotion. Then you could extend this to other forms of locomotion like elevators, airplanes and ferries, so that your passenger compartment could just drop down an elevator shoot, onto a waiting self-driving car, which links up with others to become a train, takes you to the airport where you're loaded onto a plane without ever having to board, and then your pod deplanes and a self-driving car takes you straight to your hotel, where you now have transportation to wherever you want to go.
The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.
I think this fundamentally misunderstands what people want...
Currently I live in a city with an OK pt network; in the a high density apartment. I chose this because I can catch a train to work, go drinking locally, and I dislike driving.
If I could rely on a driverless car, i would happily live further out in the suburbs, as the driverless car removes the upsides of density more than anything else... And I think this is a common sentiment, driven mostly by housing costs.
And then you have the cost of a trip, of owning vs rideshare... If its my car I can choose the furnishing, pay for fuel or power however is most efficient for me (eg solar), not have to pay for cleaning, and store my stuff in the car.
> The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.
Love this concept.
As self-driving vehicles become a larger share of road use, roads can be more efficiently designed just for them: no speed limit, just 2 strips of pavement for the tires, no signage or striping, etc.
Perfect.
We'll just build the cars with parts that seldom fail. And we'll make them very strong, so that the only risk from hitting a deer or even a cow is a splash of gore.
That should help eliminate the need to turn. A loud horn and flashing lights will do pretty well for any errant humans that cross the path.
We can even reduce rolling resistance by using steel wheels instead of rubber, and we can make the road a surface of continuous steel for durability.
We can even hitch the cars together so they can't collide with eachother and they can collectively share the propulsion load. (Maybe even with automatic micro payments, so a car with low battery can pay the others to help it along.)
What would we call this thing?
I already made this joke up-thread:
> You might even call such an arrangement a "train"
Joking aside, though, the big issue with trains is last-mile. The road network covers a lot more land than the rail network does, and can reach places that trains can't. And this seems to be inherent to the physics of it, driven (hah) by cars ability to turn where trains cannot.
Mass transit enthusiasts love to gloss over the very real convenience issues that mass transit has, saying "Well everybody should just live next to the train station." The world doesn't work like that. Hence why I think a hybrid system of dockable autonomous vehicles that can be linked up into a train in high-throughput thoroughfares gives you the best of all worlds.
> "Well everybody should just live next to the train station." The world doesn't work like that.
The world as a whole, and particularly the US, maybe not, but it does actually work in urbanized dense cities.
This joke gets made on every story about Waymo. It’s so funny.
if you can also figure out how to have the cars automatically detach and park themselves in the owners' driveway, you're on to something.
I want this as well. Hopefully my Cybertruck will get unsupervised driving someday, but until then, it's the closest thing to the dream of electric off-roading, self-driving vehicle with huge cargo capacity. I've already stopped driving myself around 98% of the time, according to my FSD stats.
Why did you buy a Cybertruck?
Yea. With a huge 100 kWh battery and a removable range extender for those extra-long trips :) Plus that battery (and range extender) can also provide power and heating when parked.
> something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech
So a Tesla?
I bought a 2018 Model 3 that was later upgrade with HW3. I paid about $10K extra for the full auto-pilot. Elon back then said that eventually the car will come pick me up from the airport. That was a nice dream. Nearly 10 years later, my Tesla still cannot do that.
$10K for full autopilot on Tesla in 2018 was essentially a fraud. I have since then learned not to trust anything Elon says.
Off-roading aspirations and 3rd row legroom (S1) seem to be major differentiators from Rivian.
As for autonomy, Waymos have LIDARs which at least provides more redundancy.
I see these as different design tradeoffs so no judgment implied.
I, independently, made almost exactly the same comment before seeing yours lol. I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep, which is only possible because I'm not meaningfully fatigued driving. it's still technically supervised but I think that's beyond the point OP is making
> I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep
Always feels a little weird to read a comment that is plausibly going to end up being referenced in a future news article.
That's kind of a beautiful vision
> I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech
So a Tesla? I think your dream is pretty common, since they make the most popular vehicle in the world
It will be amazing if they get self-driving working. Currently, you can't even sit in the back seat.
It depends what you mean by self-driving. The car drives itself without any input; I would argue that fits the definition of self driving. Legally you must be supervising it, which is a valid criticism, but the car drives itself well enough that I can provide basically no input on 20+ hour cross-country trips, which allows me to do things like not stop to sleep.
Self driving means self driving. If I drive myself to work, my wife doesn’t need to keep her eyes on the road for me.
The supervised driving is great, I have used it with my Model Y, but let me know when the car can pickup and drop off my kids at their school and activities. Like Waymo can. Then, it will be self driving.
So you want a cyber truck but you have Elon Derangement syndrome?