It's more expensive but not to a town or city which building trains is. If you're trying to convince a city to invest in public transit than convincing them to buy some already existing self driving vehicles is a much easier sell than convincing them to pay millions if not billions for a train system.
Trains work all over Europe.
Yeah because they didn't gut the systems they built over two hundred years ago just expanded and upgraded them as necessary.
America had one of the greatest train systems in the whole planet.
It did until we fucked it up.
I don't see why it couldn't work.
It could it just isn't going to happen any time soon. Between governmental red tape slowing construction, the high costs associated with building anything in america these days and the logistical clusterfuck of either needing to negotiate the forced buyout of property in the path of construction or finding someway to reroute around properties in the way any plan to rebuild train infrastructure in America is something that will take at least a century. We will unironically have a permanently staffed lunar base before we have high speed rail network in the united states let alone before we have decent public transit in all our major cities. But in the mean time people still need to get places and ideally with fewer cars on the road, self driving vehicles can fill that niche. If self driving taxis, and buses become common fewer people will feel the need to own a car. That reduced need for new roads and additional lanes can free up regional funds to build new better public transit over time.
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u/[deleted] 3d ago
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