One advantage of clean, automated cars over trains: they are far more agile (in the buzzword sense), which is another point for why they're likely to be more sustainable.
To elaborate what I mean: regardless of how you evaluate the pros and cons of the California HSR project (I'm skeptical myself), some unfortunate realities of it is that it will be far more centralized, require far more planning, necessitate the build out of a complicated and new infrastructure, and not be cheaply scaled or repurposed. Automated cars are the complete opposite. They can easily be used on our existing infrastructure. If you need to go to a new place, you simply flatten and pave a long rectangle of area that's a couple meters wide. They merely need to be allowed instead of planned for (the problem is small enough and the incentives easily created enough that a corporation can realistically accomplish the necessary R&D and planning). And if they turn out to be a hit, it's relatively easy to just sell more of the automated cars.
And let's grant, for a moment, the rosiest projections of California HSR, and it's just a matter of doing it right. It's still a complicated, multidecade-long undertaking: all it takes is a random idiot in Sacramento or DC hellbent on sabotaging the project to change it from a convenient way to get from SF to LA to a one-way ticket from Fresno to Bakersfield. Needless to say, there are lots of random idiots in government ranging from incompetent to hellbent on sabotaging any potentially good government program: should we really be betting a costly attempt to ensure our ecological well-being on the hopes that neither type will come into power for the next 20 years? (This might be construed as giving into metaphorical terrorism, but thems the breaks.)
This also is not a matter of public versus private transit: it's trivially easy to imagine buses taking advantage of them to lower costs significantly, and not at all difficult to imagine totally new forms of public transit being made available.
I completely agree. I wanted to like the HSR project, but between bureaucracy and negotiation problems like holdouts by private actors, environmental litigation by private attorneys-general [1] and so forth, it just looks doomed. The fact that they don't anticipate electrifying the rail lines from San Francisco to San Jose until 2020 is just absurd. Last time I went down to Stanford (~35 miles from where I live) for a conference, the only way I could get there by 8am on Saturday morning by public transport required a $60 taxi journey for the last few miles, or taking a bus to San Jose and then going back north from there.
1. Dredging the port of Oakland to allow larger ships to dock (thereby boosting the Bay area economy) sounds like such a simple idea, and yet it took 25 years of litigation and a major rethink in the management of infrastructure projects to get it done: http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv/groups/public/@nyu_law_websit...
all it takes is a random idiot in Sacramento or DC hellbent on sabotaging the project to change it from a convenient way to get from SF to LA to a one-way ticket from Fresno to Bakersfield. Needless to say, there are lots of random idiots in government ranging from incompetent to hellbent on sabotaging any potentially good government program
I'm not all that familiar with local US politics... why would anyone in government be hell-bent on sabotaging a high-speed rail network that will help their state/county/etc?
The main reason is that what helps the state doesn't necessarily help every county equally. To have high speed rail, you have to have trains that don't stop everywhere. High-speed rail from SF to LA might be good for California, but politicians elected by Fresno and Bakersfield will want it to stop in Fresno and Bakersfield. Which makes it more useful for those people, but less useful as a whole.
You certainly get robots delivering items in factories/warehouses which e.g. stop if a worker steps in front of them, but that might be too limited and controlled compared with a public highway.
If anyone has ever lived in California, they will know that trains obviously aren't a practical option for most transportation needs. Due to extreme sprawl, cars are required almost everywhere in California, and only the poorest of the poor go without them.
However, with automated vehicles, trains or something like them could be very logical ways to connect relatively distant urban areas.
To elaborate what I mean: regardless of how you evaluate the pros and cons of the California HSR project (I'm skeptical myself), some unfortunate realities of it is that it will be far more centralized, require far more planning, necessitate the build out of a complicated and new infrastructure, and not be cheaply scaled or repurposed. Automated cars are the complete opposite. They can easily be used on our existing infrastructure. If you need to go to a new place, you simply flatten and pave a long rectangle of area that's a couple meters wide. They merely need to be allowed instead of planned for (the problem is small enough and the incentives easily created enough that a corporation can realistically accomplish the necessary R&D and planning). And if they turn out to be a hit, it's relatively easy to just sell more of the automated cars.
And let's grant, for a moment, the rosiest projections of California HSR, and it's just a matter of doing it right. It's still a complicated, multidecade-long undertaking: all it takes is a random idiot in Sacramento or DC hellbent on sabotaging the project to change it from a convenient way to get from SF to LA to a one-way ticket from Fresno to Bakersfield. Needless to say, there are lots of random idiots in government ranging from incompetent to hellbent on sabotaging any potentially good government program: should we really be betting a costly attempt to ensure our ecological well-being on the hopes that neither type will come into power for the next 20 years? (This might be construed as giving into metaphorical terrorism, but thems the breaks.)
This also is not a matter of public versus private transit: it's trivially easy to imagine buses taking advantage of them to lower costs significantly, and not at all difficult to imagine totally new forms of public transit being made available.