I don't think your sources support your claim -- but it's complicated. The first link: https://theicct.org/planes-trains-and-automobiles-counting-c... has a graph showing that bus achieves ~150 passenger miles / gallon gasoline equivalent, compared to amtrack, plane, and car all at ~50 +/- 10 miles / gallon gasoline equivalent. Bus is 3 times more efficient than the average car by that measure -- but it really depends what kind of bus loading they assumed. The second link: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-615.pd... is mostly arguing that trains should not be built _in the US_ for environmental/efficiency reasons. One strand of the argument is that building rail is less flexible and takes away ridership from the more efficient bus mode. I think this is the passage you were trying to quote:
> Two commuter-rail systems —New Jersey Transit and the Northern Indiana Commuter District—are the only transit systems that use less energy per passenger mile than a Toyota Prius. All other commuter-rail lines, except for the SEPTA system in Philadelphia, use less energy than the average passenger auto.
Quite the contradiction to "none are even close to being as efficient as driving a Prius".
There is a good DOT map showing average transit bus occupancy by US state that confirms your observation. The lowest average occupancy is in Wyoming at 3.9, the highest is in New Jersey at 15.6. It's a PDF so you need to scroll down page 12 to see the map:
So yeah, we can see why mass transit is overwhelminly less efficient than private car when on average a bus with 90 seats is only hauling around 7 people.
Early versions of Creative Commons (CC) license had a bug in which the license would terminate on breach of terms. The terms were easy to mess up, like requiring attribution and linking to source. There is now a new form of copyright troll that is basically fishing for CC violations.
Similar nit pick… Not sure if this is fixed in Monterey, but in Catalina the maps app is so close to being amazing. When you search, it shows suggestions but hitting tab defocuses the search and closes the suggestions!! It should select the next suggestion.
The accessibility guidelines we have, e.g. WCAG, usually say that tab is used to tab through separate interface elements. When you're still inside an element - for example if you have triggered a dropdown list in a text input field - you use the arrow keys to navigate within and enter/space to select elements.
Say tab was used for all (intra and inter) navigation tasks. In that case you risk suddenly having a thousand item list that keyboard users will then have to tab through to get to the next interface element. That is not good UI design.
Google Chrome, Firefox, and Slack select the next suggestion on tab from the url/search bar. That's a pretty big precedent. I like it... my arrow keys are far away from the home row but tab is not.
Anyway, we can disagree about proper tab behavior here. My intention is to support the article by highlighting sloppy behavior from Maps.app. A case in point, the arrow keys don't work either.
To see, type a few characters in "Search Maps" until suggestions appear, press down arrow key, ... no suggestion is select, instead the search box looses focus and the map moves?! While messing around with this... I noticed that pressing the right arrow before pressing down arrow (sometimes??) begins selecting suggestions. Seriously, go mess around with it... but it's super finicky.
This is the state of Apple UI polish and consistency today.
That sounds like a horrible situation to be in, but I can also understand the safety benefit. From high school, I remember a friend telling me about how they crashed. They glanced at the radio to switch channels (or change volume or something), which was just enough for the situation on the road to change and they hit the car in front of them. Clearly, that wasn't a good time to look away for even a split second, and a mature driver should know that. The empty highway has a lot more "safe" opportunities for glances away from the road, but I'm sure there's friction because the AI isn't lenient in this way. By the time the AI is aware of that, it's probably going to be doing the driving anyway!
I recently used lane keeping assistance and automatic cruise control for a long distance road trip, and it's SO liberating. You actually feel safe taking glances at the landscape. I never felt safe doing that in an old car. The new experience is simply not as exhausting as running the speed check, lane check, distance check loop required in old cars.
> I recently used lane keeping assistance and automatic cruise control for a long distance road trip, and it's SO liberating. You actually feel safe taking glances at the landscape.
And then you read about Teslas crashing into stationary vehicles because their drivers weren't attentive enough.
Current driver assist tech is dangerous because it is good enough to make you trust it to some extent, but not good enough to actually deal with unexpected situations when your attention isn't 100% on the road.
I don't think all driver assist tech is dangerous. Tesla FSD is dangerous because the name suggests no supervision is needed, and it's good enough that drivers fall asleep at the wheel. My driver assist experience is with a 2020 Honda Insight. The LASK/ACC features make the car a collaborator in the driving process. I can't fall asleep, it requires too much supervision/collaboration. But instead of running the exhausting speed/lane position/follow distance loop as fast as I can, I can do it at some variable fraction of that speed depending on road conditions. I have to monitor for the things I know or suspect cause issues for the automated system. For example, it generally wants to follow exits, so I have to put resistance on the wheel when passing exits to keep it on the highway. On the other hand, it is excellent (better than me) at making fine adjustments to stay between well marked lines on long straight stretches... that's where I feel comfortable stealing a glance out the side window or resting my foot on the floor instead of hovering over the pedals. It doesn't avoid debris sitting in the middle of the road, so I have to watch for that and wrestle LKAS to avoid if I see that coming.
I once heard someone suggest that creating mirror-prions out of mirror-proteins might one day be a safer way to study prion diseases, since an accidental leak wouldn't be able to trigger the misfolding cascade on the researcher's own proteins, since they're not mirrored.
No idea if this was meant seriously, but it simultaneously sounds reasonable and terrifying...
That's something that have to be tested - I would expect that mirror prions would misfold normal proteins too, but it's dependent on details of chemical process.
Supply chain chaos? I assume bike parts in the US come from overseas in shipping containers. One of my shifters broke in September and the local bike shop said they were out of parts and didn't expect to have any more until April 2022.
