{"id":55309,"date":"2015-09-24T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T17:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55309"},"modified":"2015-09-23T07:58:24","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T12:58:24","slug":"autonomy-and-its-victims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55309","title":{"rendered":"Autonomy And Its Victims"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in the storied history of this blog, there was a liberal blogger<\/a> who fancied himself a transit advocate – indeed, was alleged to have taken money<\/a> from light rail interests to attack, using his various sock-puppet blogs, not only opponents\u00a0of light rail, but proponents of any competing type\u00a0of transit.<\/p>\n

Among some of his many howlers over the years, the leftyblogger claimed – repeatedly – that I was a supporter of “Personal Rail Transit”<\/a>, notwithstanding the fact that I repeatedly wrote I did not.<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0“His” “reasoning” was apparently that Michele Bachmann once parenthetically noted some interest in PRT, and Bachmann is a conservative, and I’m a conservative, so I must also support it. \u00a0To be fair, it wasn’t the least<\/em> logical the little fella ever got.<\/p>\n

But I always opposed PRT.<\/p>\n

Part of it is, and has always been, that I think PRT’s\u00a0supporters underestimate or underreport the technical challenges of having “just in time” personal rail service on a city-wide network of tracks. \u00a0 Also the costs.<\/p>\n

Part of it is that I don’t care; I’d rather have a steering wheel in my hand.<\/p>\n

But the biggest reason I’ve never supported PRT was that I believed that the private market will provide a way to power cars from hydrogen and guide them with software decades before the government can put tracks of any kind, ultralight and personal or heavy and East-Germanlike, from anywhere people are to anywhere they actually want to go.<\/p>\n

And, as usual, I’m right<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Not that I’ll ever buy one. \u00a0Trusting my safety and schedule to a bunch of programmers is only marginally better than trusting them to government transit employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the storied history of this blog, there was a liberal blogger who fancied himself a transit advocate – indeed, was alleged to have taken money from light rail interests to attack, using his various sock-puppet blogs, not only opponents\u00a0of light rail, but proponents of any competing type\u00a0of transit. Among some of his many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery","category-trains-and-automobiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55310,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55309\/revisions\/55310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}