cars don't need to be driverless to be electric. i'm in favor of public transport but as long as we're in the long process of building it out it's still a lot better to have electric cars than gas guzzlers, with drivers still included.

there is a doctrine here where you fuck up a less optimal but easier solution just to force the world to adopt the better one but it's a shitty thing to do. public transport and electric vehicles aren't exclusive. in fact, for lower density stuff we will need buses and those should be electrified too.

In cities, yeah. Outside cities, impossible

But I'd love to rent autonomous electric cars to move

It’s not remotely easier. Trains carriages are easy to build, but the infrastructure is not. You have to move and extend roads, demolish buildings, lay the rails, build bridges, if you go underground there will be lots of digging and engineering work to protect nearby buildings, and don’t forget about maintenance. It is only profitable when the population is high enough and people have the need to travel to set places en mass. Otherwise it is just fantasy. If you live your whole live around any city Center, I can understand that you are not going to drive . But plenty of people lived in a tiny town of population under 10000people .

Been seeing a big push for trains in Florida and California lately, hopefully things with Amtrak go well and we see more lines implemented in the future

Because as the wiseman said, somebody just wants to sell more cars.

We 100% need more trains. But in rural America, we need cars to do anything.

The worrying thing here is the assumption that we can choose...

The world has 2 billions individual cars. Lithium extraction rate may not be sufficient to make 2 billions cars by 2030... and that's assuming we don't need lithium for computers, smartphones, but also not for batteries for the grid (because no solar cell works at night and wind farms are not on demand erther), and... not for electric trucks! Then comes the question of the other metals: copper, nickel, cobalt, ...

Trains will not work everywhere for everyone, but not deploying them now and fast will be a severe issue for North America when resources will get scarce.

We need a smart mix of trains, buses, subways, tramways, shared vehicles, bikes, everything but one individual car per person. That era will come to an end because we're closer to the bottom of our planet's natural resources stock than the beginning.

There's not even a real option of keeping gas cars a little while more, as cheap oil is also coming to an end.

The difference between accepting this and "choosing" individual cars is how ready countries will be when resources will get scarce. It may get ugly...

Why is it that trains are always proposed as the alternative to cars? I, for one, really want PRT to succeed. It seems to be the best middle ground between efficiency and convinience.

Trains are electric. They use diesel generators to power the wheels.