7mo ago

Trump's infrastructure "fantasy": Ditch mass transit for self-driving cars, private highways

www.salon.com

14 comments

Elon Musk buys Trump's re-election. Trump drops safety regulation and crash reporting requirements for self driving cars and pushes for their mass adoption.
Guys, I'm starting to wonder if there might be any link between those things... But it couldn't possibly be blatant overt corruption. I mean, people wouldn't tolerate such a scandal regardless of political affiliation, right? Right?
Oh right, they became completely desensitized to it.
The math doesn't work. Physics doesn't work this way. Nothing scales like the proposed future of self driving cars. I know it was the vision of the 1950's to have a personal vehicle for everyone, but there's just no way to shoehorn the total volume of vehicles into a city based around people and people-scale areas. We've tried and all it does is make a dangerous, shitty, and unhealthy space with a single office building and miles of car storage around it.
This is just another money and power giveaway to Musk and the tech bros that bankrolled the campaign. The sheer scale of the damage it will cause to our cities is going to be generational, not to mention the damage to our planet's greenhouse gas budget.
- America still hasn't recovered from all the public transport being torn up nearly a century ago
- No no you don't understand: the cars will simply drive themselves around which means they can just endlessly circle the block instead of parking, creating more traffic and wasting more energy... Shit where was I going with this
  
  Nowhere because your Waymo car is stuck in a roundabout.
  https://jalopnik.com/empty-waymo-robotaxi-loops-roundabout-37-times-as-if-it-1851721933
- Physics doesn’t work this way.
  Nonsense! With a fleet of self-driving pods our valued customers can enjoy getting to work on time every time with our premium packages starting at $399.99 /mo!
  Not guaranteed
  Terms and conditions apply
  
  ** plus service fee
- I don't disagree that damage would/will be done, but how much is the question. Money has already been allocated and contracts signed for public transportation improvement in my area. Could this be retroactively cancelled? I guess we'll find out.
Sounds just like Musk's infrastructure fantasy. Surely a coincidence.
"Private highways"... built on public land.
- Sounds a lot like railroads to me.
https://bsky.app/profile/kalkaline.bsky.social/post/3ldobjgod6s23 damn, I thought no one was stupid enough to take the joke that far.
- Man, who are Fox/Musk proposing would pay for the bridge replacement? Do they think the shipping company that destroyed it would pay for the whole thing?

14 comments