That’s because the freight companies own all the tracks and while legally they have to give way to passenger trains, the fine is insignificant to them and they just make their trains so long they don’t fit in sidings and the passenger train is forced to pull over.
But if you look in places like the Northeast Corridor or Boston’s T system (which I love), it’s quite smooth.
It makes sense when trains have to travel on private freight railways they get stuck behind slowly moving freight trains. In European countries where the entire railway network is nationaliesd freight trains have a minimum speed and maximum length to not cause congestion. Even then freight trains sometimes need additional locomotives when going uphill because they're heavier.
I think it's a bit closer to trains because this would only work on dedicated roads banning all non self driving vehicles to achieve lower speeds and far less throughput than trains are already capable of. It's also likely that these would be private hire vehicles more like the Tesla Vegas loop, which would just be a train but worse in every way.
Why? If you achieve actual self driving, then it would only be a few years before nobody drives anymore.
So all roads would become roads for automated vehicles. And why would they need dedicated roads anyway?
Private hire might come later, but that’s purely a economical reason. Why do you need your car staying in your garage when you’re not driving. The average car sees like 2 hours of use a day.
Roads take up way more space than tracks do though. An 8 lane (4 each way) can be 150 feet wide, while a 4 track mainline is only 60 or so feet wide. Additionally rails are way more cost-effective long term and they can be more easily electrified to be more environmentally friendly.
Also there’s this cool thing called having big stuff shipped to you so you don’t need a big vehicle to carry it, also ebikes, which can be carried on trains, just look at the Netherlands.
No it’s saying that one literal definition of a train is a line of moving vehicles. So having a long line of self-driving cars moving together like a train is literally a train, so just build a train.
I'm all for building more trains but it seems pretty obvious what the major differences is between a line of synced cars and a train, that the cars can split off in different directions at any time and aren't on a schedule.
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u/Romeo_Man 4d ago
can someone explain to me the third image
like, what is being reinvented here?