Waymo in Dallas

> I am trying to point out that a great bus service in a place like Dallas is not economically feasible.

I disagree. It is not politically feasible and so we won't get there, but the economics work out: a great transit network even in a place like Dallas could get enough riders to sustain itself. Problem is we need 50% of the families in Dallas Fort Worth to pay $200/month to pay for it, and nobody will stand for that - even though nearly every family in spending more than that per car.

>> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports.

> And you think I live in fantasy land.

Yes, you do.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/

> So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.

You must be a software guy. Moving atoms is very different from typing words into this textbox. Also, in the US, the 1950's to 1970's was a very, very different time. That was probably the peak of our industrialization phase. You had millions of men who came back from WW2 ready to work all kinds of jobs, an industrial based that had exploded due to WW2, massive entrepreneurial drive at every level and the ability to get shit done without the nonsense that kill even the most basic projects today.

Yes, a few decades can change things radically. In the decades since the period you use as the reference for this fantasy the US, Europe and other nations have deindustrialized to an alarming degree and China has become the world's factory. We make nothing here. To be able to to things you have to make things. On top of that, our political system has welcomed bat-shit-crazy ideologies, like the current push for down-right socialism/communism who's only recorded history is the destruction of nations.

So, yeah, yours is a fantasy. This is not the United States of the 1950's, 1960's or 1970's, not by a large margin.

To understand things at this level you need contact with reality. I've you've never tried to get a non-trivial project done in the real world, moving atoms, not bit, I can see how waving a magical wand and thinking we can do what was done five to seven decades ago might be possible. It is not. I've been in manufacturing my entire life. I assure you this is not the 1950's.

> This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments

Sure, but that's a different problem, isn't it? What we can change --over time-- is the relationship between where people work and where they live. If you take the greater Los Angeles area, the massive concentration of job centers in centralized "hubs" as I call them is tragically destructive. You have people driving into these hubs from every possible angle and you end-up with shit like the 405 freeway being a parking lot all day, every day.

This isn't about public transportation. It's about politicians being politicians (which I use to mean: incompetent) wasting decades of valuable intelligent planning. In the town I live in they absolutely refuse to grant permits for the kinds of job magnets that would have people from this town work here. As a result, if you are unfortunate enough to not have found work in this area, you are eating a one to two hour commute every day.

So, if you want to solve the housing and congestion problem, you need a long term intelligent planning policy that will incentivize businesses to build in areas that will reverse some of the flows.

To use a company I am very familiar with, SpaceX, just look at where they are in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the worst locations one could choose. And like that, probably hundreds of large employers in that area and a few miles north, south, east and west. A good policy would have looked at the concentration and created intelligent plans to incentivize companies to find locations that would balance flows and spawn new housing developments surrounding these centers of employment.

Instead of doing that, what you end-up with over time are companies leaving for other states where they have more favorable financial climates as well as the ability to, in some cases, build what they need and where they need it.

Moving atoms isn't easy. Some things we can do. Others we cannot. Public mass transportation is not likely to be some thing that will take over the US. Exceptions here and there, sure. I've completed non-trivial construction projects that don't even begin to approximate the zoning and political complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about, and every single one of them has been an expensive nightmare purely because our system has devolved into something that prevents progress rather than encouraging it.

Note that I am not at all opposed to the image you paint. I have travelled and worked in European and Latin American cities where public transport is wonderful and love it. I am just being realistic about who we are and we can actually accomplish in the US. We can't build a single new nuclear (or whatever) power plant while China is building a hundred. That should tell you something.

> Because 99% of Americans use cars.

I wouldn't want to be a kid, elderly, sick, blind, disabled in USA.

> There’s no point spending money on something that only 15% of the population will even consider using

Induced demand.

Though seriously you had everything: trains, trams/streetcars, great towns - now say it's impossible (after 80-100 years of lobbying and crazy subsidies).

I bet if "right" startup popped up that by accident would be public transport adjacent - atitude would shift on a dime. I saw a bunch of articles about pedestrian accessibility improvements, due to delivery bots[0]. Apparently it may be easier to improve things for businesses instead of people.

[0] first article I've found: https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/could-delivery-robots-hel...

I don't necessarily disagree with you. I think single person AV pods would be amazing and is likely one version of the future. However, this kind of change takes time, a lot of time. AV or not, if you have to share the road with monster trucks being driven by humans who are too busy looking at pictures on their phones, well, you are going to eventually want to be in something at a similar scale. That's why interesting options like Smart cars never made it here.

Whatever this will become, it will be a matter of decades and a real modernization of our traffic laws and other infrastructure. I will not pretend to know what form that will take, my crystal ball stopped working a few decades back.

There are so many questions. Just looking at a place like Los Angeles, I regularly drive right next to massive trucks moving containers and all kinds of cargo. Can we be more intelligent about this? An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway? Sure, as an idea and a fantasy. In the real world you'll have to contend with myriad issues spanning a range between our inability to build anything anymore in this country with how you are going to deal with millions of people losing their jobs if you automate cargo transport and clear large trucks from the highways. Etc.

It's nice to have these visions about the future. What will actually happen is a different matter. I am placing my bet on self driving cars as the first practical phase of a transition into something more sensible that will likely require three to five decades. The equation is very simple: Atomos are expensive and hard to move. Conventional cars and trucks manufactured and purchased today are going to stay on the roads for at least a decade. A mass transition to a different paradigm is measured in units of decades after the last conventional vehicle is manufactured and sold. Hence my five decade estimate for transportation utopia.

> Yeah, all the people who refuse to ride busses

It's not that people refuse to ride busses. In most places in the US this is either a non-existent or extremely impractical option. It's just reality.