Let's bring back trams and trollies
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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time is a straight line. the circle is only for the easing of the incomprehending mind
Time is no line. It just exists together with space. "Past" is a point of time we saved in memory, "future" what we imagine. Physically, there's only "present".
if time is no line then the universe has no structure
Everything already happened. The past, present and future exist simultaneously.
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What, why?
cause->effect
Still not getting what you mean. From what i understand, what i said doesn't exclude time being warped. Think of space time changing density with energy-level (mass, heat), to make sense of it.
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I think what they want is trains with individual private cars that can automatically choose the tracks you want by selecting a destination. Which would be fucking awesome it's how I thought cars worked when I was 4, I swear all the steering wheel did was change lanes (my folks were good drivers I guess).
I want to be done with car shaped cars... I want a self driving room to show up...I want to say "send me a living room/bedroom/office/whatever," and have a room shaped vehicle show up to get me. I want that vehicle to drive me to the nearest train tracks and hop on the tracks itself and then zoom me to the nearest hyper loop and jump itself on that to zip me across the country in an hour... Join up with other "rooms" as you go to create a typical looking train
go live in a tiny house first to get a feel. you can even get one on wheels and have it towed around for the full experience. be kinda pricy though
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It's not a hard problem to solve. It's not hard to see the reasoning behind a desire for self driving cars. Anyone who lives outside of a big city in the US knows this.
Roads are already present. Traffic control is already present.
Tie the goddamn roads to the goddamn traffic control and have it coordinate the cars. The cars input their destination, and have radar to stop the car to prevent accidental collision.
The problem is people don't like that they can't get to their destination faster, they don't have the freedom of choosing their exact route, and they can't just rev their engine whenever they want.
It's not mass transit, but it solves the final distance problem.
I remember reading something (unauthoritative?) about Microsoft (maybe it was a decade ago at least) working on self driving cars and deciding the only way to get it to work safely was to put rfid tags in the road and the other cars and the postboxes and the children and the everything.
next up in the agenda: what if we make cars larger so more people can travel in them simultaneously
Main selling point of cars is that you don't have to share them with strangers.
Take any tech bro take on transit, and if you try to perfect it, you'll almost always end up with a train.
What about the moon? Surely not...
Well, ultimately space elevators are the most energy efficient way to escape Earth's gravity well. And once we have one of those, mind as well build a mass driver at the top so rockets don't have to carry so much of their own mass. Then we can build a laser-based photonic sail on the other end to decelerate the cars and make them even lighter/faster, and then build track at the bottom...
Train.
What about interstellar travel?
Well, ultimately wormholes are way more efficient than any subluminal travel once the infrastructure to build them is in place: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
So we control traffic on each side carefully. In fact, we could just suspend a really strong wire on either end...
Yep. Train.
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What about those giant quadcopter type things they keep wanting to build to fly from building rooftops in cities for some reason?
Within cities?
Look, aircraft are Hella noisy and if stuff goes bad, they'll smash into buildings. Using them for intra-urban transit is not safe. Besides, I don't know if multicopters can autorotate^[1]^, which only adds to the safety concerns.
So why not bring it slightly closer to the ground. Maybe put the transportation device on a bridge or viaduct. And while you could put some stairs up from the streets, you may even choose to link buildings into them directly. Most tall buildings have lifts, after all.
Next, giving each building its own link into the system would be excessive. You can achieve 90 percent of the utility if you have larger entry hubs for multiple buildings, and expect people to walk the last mile.
Anyway, back to the vehicle, since a vehicle for a handful of people is rather inefficient, why not build the vehicles for many dozens of people? Why not build it to connect multiple vehicles? If you run, like, four of these, every five minutes, most people will be able to walk up any time and just go.
And to make that movement more efficient, let's have our vehicles roll along a specifically designed path, optimised for minimal friction by using hard wheels on a hard surface.
There, I replaced the quadcopters with a train.
EDIT:
^[1]^: According to one answered question on a StackExchange page, the answer to this question is probably no. Autorotation requires some magnitude of control of the pitch of your rotors, something that most multicopters do not have.
It does make me intrigued to see what'd happen if you could or did fit a multicopter with swashplates and pitch-adjustable rotors.
Oh I mean you can replace them, but when nothing of the original system remains you're not so much optimizing the idea as throwing it out to use trains instead
If they really want rooftop travel, a gondola system could probably work.
Works assuming the rooftops are roughly in line of sight. That is something I assumed not to be definitively true in the other comment..
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Building railway tracks to achieve universal coverage for the entire US without be a massive undertaking that would require a huge effort over multiple decades. Compared to that, building self driving cars is downright trivial. Let's not forget that they exist already, albeit in limited areas. People should not let their (justified) anger at Musk blind them to reality.
Building roadways to achieve the current coverage for the entire US was a massive undertaking that required a huge effort over multiple decades. Compared to that, building railways is downright trivial. Let's not forget that self driving trains already exist, but self driving cars don't. People should not let their status quo bias blind them to reality.
Yeah, but the roadways are here now. And this discussion is moot anyway. Trains aren't happening. Self driving cars are maybe happening.
That's what I mean by status quo bias. Just because there are roads now doesn't mean that those are the only option. We have spent a fuckton of money and a fuckton of effort over the last century building these roads. But the problem is that cars don't scale. Self driving or not. So as we continue to spend fucktons of money and effort on transportation, we should allow ourselves to consider all options. Rebuilding all roads to accommodate self driving cars (as the original tweet implies) is probably the worst option. There are options that are better for the economy, better for the environment, and better for people.
Also, I don't think any serious person is suggesting replacing ALL roads with rail. Obviously, roads are an important part of any transit network. It's just that we should not ONLY build roads, and not build ALL roads ONLY for cars.
OK, I'm with you there. High speed trains are great for long distance transport and subways, light trails etc. are great for cities but they'll never replace cars. Self driving cars (or buses) are great in theory if they ever work. There is no one solution that fits all use cases. The reasonable thing to do is to work out what works best in which situation and then do that. Oh and cycle paths. We need a whole lot more of those.
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You wouldn't need to maintain as many roads if you converted some percentage to rail (which is much cheaper to maintain) so it could be an investment
Why would people have fewer destinations that they are trying to reach? Or is this just "you don't have to maintain them as roads, now you have to maintain them as railroads lol" sophistry
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Musk's crap can't even operate autonomously. Waymo and Zoox are on the lead now.
That was my point.
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