zlacker

> With my car, I don't have to wait at all and I can go straight home.

Manhattan, famous for its congestion-free streets :-)

Calling cars "decentralized" is funny, and more than a little ridiculous: American car culture is a result of centralized planning, both of highways and cities. It'd be more accurate to call them "individualized," with the misaligned incentives and commons failures that that implies.

>>woodru+(OP)
Its not funny. Its accurate. Roads are more decentralized than trains.

Your argument is anti-scientific in a way. We see in nature that decentralized systems are more robust yet you are arguing the opposite.

>>mwbajo+Dy1
My point was that they're "decentralized" in the least interesting way: they exist as a "decentralized" structure only by overwhelming centralized effort. Calling them decentralized is like calling suburbia decentralized: it's not even wrong.

Decentralization is not a virtue (or end) in itself when it comes to public infrastructure. Robustness is also not intrinsically tied to it, and there are a variety of senses in which the American road network is not particularly robust: congestion and unsustainable funding schemes are just the first two that come to mind.

>>woodru+4L1
" in the least interesting way"

Who cares about being interesting, I can go around outages in the network with a car where trains can't.

You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.

>>mwbajo+ja2
> Who cares about being interesting, I can go around outages in the network with a car where trains can't.

You, ostensibly[1]!

> You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.

I'd be more than happy to take both :-)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html