In 20 years none of us will own cars. Cars will operate fully autonomously, which will much safer than the statistical human driver, and they will move at a much faster speed. You will take services like Uber everywhere because it will cost you hardly anything. That's the benefit of driver-less cars - no cost of human operators. You only pay for gas, depreciation, and profits. In 30 years we will have a competition between cars and hyper speed bullet train like machines that can transport you cross country in as little as an hour.
These are wonderful dreams. I assume you think this will happen in the US as well as other places. It could happen in Europe, Japan, etc. but it will take half a century minimum to happen in the US, and that is only for the Uber concept. The train system might never come to the US. Who do you think will own the cars? Uber? The government? The Uber business model is, more or less, to match passengers with drivers (for a fee), and to collect and process money for the drivers (and then keep 20%of it.) This is extremely low overhead and very high profit. It is very unlikely that Uber or similar companies would make the huge investment in fleets of automatic cars, and then charge very little per ride. Moreover, if very few people own cars, Uber could charge MUCH higher prices per ride, so it definitely would not "cost you hardly anything." Regarding the "hyper speed bullet train like machines that can transport you cross country in as little as an hour," I think you have misunderstood why so few places that do not already have train/subway systems are putting them in. Reality 1- Most US governmental bodies do not have the funds to maintain infrastructure, much less make advances in infrastructure. The US federal debt doubled in 8 years to $20 trillion that means that on the federal level, the US is probably the POOREST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. Most state and local governments are still struggling to catch up from the property tax losses from the recession, and another could easily hit before they catch up, simply because consumer borrowing behavior is still problematic (though somewhat improved). Worse yet, most governments are about to hit a financial wall made of baby boomers on state & local pensions, social security, and Medicare. There is no money for publicly funded transit systems, much less for high tech versions of them. There is not enough cheap land to be had for laying out train lines in the US. Just Acquiring land is prohibitively expensive in most populated areas for train lines to be feasible. The more densely populated the area is, the more houses and buildings must be purchased in order to tear them down and lay down track. Just the court costs for people fighting eminent domain are prohibitive to most public projects that require land acquisition. Reality 2- Most Professional Project Managers know that the processes for beginning relatively small infrastructure projects can take too long to achieve what you suggest. The process for a big rail project is almost certainly prohibitive. Even people who want the systems will fight it if it goes too close to property they own, or through where they live, or too far from where they live, or impacts some sort of native animal. It is common for the cycle of studies,planning, hearings, studies, plan revisions, hearings, etc. to take as long as 10 years for adding an onramp to a freeway. or a connection from a port to an interstate. Larger projects that cross county boundaries have to satisfy both counties, which often extends the time prior to ground breaking. Often, by the time there is agreement on the specific route, the Environmental Impact Studies have expired, and must be done again, under a new set of environmental requirements. This often requires routes to be changed, starting the whole process again. The delays in court by people fighting eminent domain can add half a decade to the project. Often by the time the groundwork is laid to finally put down the first piece of track, the funding has dried up, been reallocated, or is no longer enough to complete the project due to higher labor rates, materials costs, land prices, etc. Thirty years is enough time to develop the technology you are talking about. Thirty years is enough time to do the actual physical building of what you suggest. But thirty years is nowhere close to enough time to address all the issues related to red-tape and legal requirements. A mere 200 miles of track could easily take most of the thirty years before the actual clearing of land could begin.
If it doesn't exist today, and is based on science, then it is science fiction. For your statement to become reality, self-drive cars will have to be safer then they are today, and far more numerous then they are today. Until that happens, it is still nothing but good old science fiction.
To go coast to coast (let's say DC to San Francisco) is about 4,000 miles. There are no technologies that are envisioned that can go 4,000 miles per hour on the ground. The SR-71--one of the faster jets we've had--goes 2200 miles per hour. I don't doubt what you say about self-driving cars, but the bullet train stuff is just completely unrealistic bull(*)(*)(*)(*). - - - Updated - - - One hour coast to coast in a " hyper speed bullet train like machine" is science fiction.
You totally disregard human nature. Considering how few driverless cars there are - there are a lot of accidents and 1 death. People like to drive and I don't think they're going to stop. It's what every 15 yr old dreams about, the day he turns 16 and can get a license.
That's what they claimed about electric and hybrid cars, yet they occupy about .3 pct. of all cars. If it were popular, there'd be a lot more of them. And it's not trending. Most people don't want them. Build it and they may or may not come.
Nah. Nobody wants that. They just want to have sex in the backseat, which they can now do while driving. And you could totally still buy and drive a car... just not on the roads, where it will be illegal.
The question is why do they want to drive? Do they want to drive for the act of driving, or do they want to drive because it gives them access to doing so much more than they could otherwise? Also, these days not every 15 year old dreams about getting a license. I know a lot of 16 and even 17 and 18 year olds without licenses. The percentage of 16 year olds with driver's licenses in 1983 was about 46%. In 2014, that number was about 25%. The number of 19 year olds with a driver's license in 1983 was 87%. In 2014, that was 69%. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-decline-of-the-drivers-license/425169/
you do know that uber drivers use their own personal car right?..here in california the democrats are trying to build a bullet train from san francisco to Los Angeles..the trip with all the stops will take about six hours they expect..to drive a car now from those two points takes six hours and you have a car when you get there...so take the bullet train and stick it
Its a socialist utopian's dream. Less private ownership of modes of transportation that and move people around on a whim. Then, if all cars become driverless, that means they are more prone to confining their occupants when ever they are deems social deviants or "deplorable." And the rail system as explained earlier is never going to happen. FL and CA both have budgeted for a rail system. FL has been there since 2000 and CA with in the last 10 years. Neither is making head way and both are still spending money for something that isn't even being built yet. I think CA is $1bil in the hole already with zero construction.
I suggest that the main functions of driverless cars will be 1. Take people between home / work and mass transit stations. 2. Take you to places where mass transit stations cannot take you. Trains and busses are far cheaper than cars. In densely populated cities (which I think is the future of cities) a bus system that runs every few minutes can take more passengers than cars per lane. Then light rail can take even more passengers. So a driverless cars could pick several people up from their homes and take them to a mass transit station. Then the busses, light rail or train would run at high speed with infrequent stops to and from work. The driverless cars can then return and pick up even more people. This whole future assumes that the extra hardware and software required for driving costs far less than a taxi driver. The owners of the cars need not be one massive organisation, but can be many organisations that may own one or many cars. If this future comes about there would be a massive change in society. Houses would no longer require garages or drive ways. Work places would no longer require parking spaces. Car parks could be located in suburbs and used by the driverless cars during off peak hours and to recharge their batteries, as they would be electric powered.
According to Google Maps, it is actually about 2800 miles from DC to San Francisco. That does not change how unrealistic the one-hour time is. 2800 MPH is functionally as unrealistic as 4000 MPH. On the other hand, we could factor in a currently realistic speed of 600 MPH. Japan has a 600 MPH train < http://www.slashgear.com/japans-new-maglev-bullet-train-is-now-the-fastest-in-the-world-22380159/ > We are looking at a potential for less than 5 hours from coast to coast. That time is only good if there are no stops. In order to have a non-stop 600 MPH train, the train must be elevated above all cross-traffic, (including roads and other trains) or go under them in a tunnel. This adds enormously to the construction costs. The cost estimates I found ranged dramatically from $16 to $80 million/track/mile. That puts the cost at roughly $45 to 224 billion for construction costs alone, just to go to from DC to San Francisco. If you want more than one track, the price is greater, though not double. If we consider how many different people do not want to go to either DC or San Francisco, and we only add LA, Seattle, Chicago, Saint Louis, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston, with only 3 North-South and 3 East-West lines, the aggregate distance goes to roughly 12,000, at a total cost of between $192 and $960 billion, JUST FOR THE INFRASTRUCTURE. These costs do not include the trains, nor the operating costs. Currently, A non-stop flight is about five and a half hours from DC to San Francisco. More to the point, there are currently non-stop flights that go directly from most major US cities to most other major US cities. The infrastructure, primarily airports, are already built, as are the airplanes, so there is immediate capability to go to any US city at a similar rate to the state-of-the-art bullet train. Hundreds of planes can arrive near-simultaneously at a single destination, and even on the same runway, which is more difficult to do safely and reliably with trains, unless there are multiple parallel tracks. Moreover, because the infrastructure is piecemeal, it is possible for smaller organizations (cities, counties, even private companies) to affordably add to the infrastructure independently, and join the network immediately upon completion, or even before. Investors and taxpayers do not have the patience to wait for the cost advantages that come long term; and are not likely to continue support for a project that does not produce promised dividends within only a few years. I do not see how bullet trains have the potential to be competitive with airplanes for long distance travel, either in terms of short-term cost effectiveness, or capability to serve a country as large as this, with large population centers as widely spread out as we have, especially considering how mobile our population is.
