My Last Rant on Public Transit. Probably

I promise this is the last of my blogs on public transit. Well, at least for a while. I can’t promise I won’t ever blog about public transit again.

The biggest headache for me is the time sink. It eats up too much time. And the timing between the different parts is atrocious. If I didn’t lose between 5 to 15 minutes between each transfer the whole trip would only be about 15 minutes longer than driving myself. The best idea I ever heard for mass transit/public transit was generally referred to as something like bubble cars. The basic idea being that you would get into a “car” or a “bubble” or whatever they wanted to call the small vehicle. It would usually seat between 2 and 4 people. You would program your destination, and the vehicle would take off, traveling along rails or tubes or whatever. The tube or rail system would be dedicated to these little “cars,” no other traffic allowed. As a passenger you couldn’t control the speed (some authors imagined emergency brakes), the vehicle would be at least partially centrally controlled. It would travel along the rails/tubes with other cars all moving at the same speed, like a fast moving conga line. Vehicles exiting the line only to transfer to other lines or to exit at a station. Really advanced versions would actually take you right to the door of wherever you were going.

The nice thing about a system like that is that it would eliminate the transfer delays. Cutting down on the additional time eaten up. There’d still be some time lost (probably to congestion or other problems). And of course it would still be just as expensive, perhaps more so.

It’s not exactly self-driving cars. Personally I think bubble cars or rail cars are a better idea. Particularly with our current level of technology. Keep the computer controlled away from the human controlled. I’m not yet convinced they’re ever going to work well together. I’ve known too many people and used too many computer programs.