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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

It's "boring" for the same reason people get "bored" in buses, subways and trains. That doesn't mean they don't use those because they are boring. If it gets 3x cheaper to travel by self-driving taxi vs driving your own car, people will choose them in droves.

In fact, look at self-driving taxis or cars as your personal and private "bus" or limo, if you will.

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I'd rather see self-driving buses and trains that run on clean renewable energy than self-driving cars. But Google won't do that because there's no individual trackability with mass transportation. And remember, Google is an advertising media company, and their business is individual surveillance of all human behavior. Hard to do in mass transportation. Easy to do, in fact, a bonanza, when done in individual vehicles. I fully expect Google to pursue this vigorously: target who's in these cars, where they're going, what their life history is, interests, aspirations, friends, etc, and then upsell the hell out of them while the car's moving -- hey, we're about to ride by your favorite store and we know you've been searching for prices on XYZ, well this store will offer you and you alone a special 20% off if we pull over now. In fact they'll run out to the car and hand an XYZ to you, you can go home with it today, and hey we'll take care of the credit card transaction, what do you say? Shall we swing by and get that XYZ you've been after for 1.6732 years? Tap here for yes, or here for no.....

> I'd rather see self-driving buses and trains that run on clean renewable energy than self-driving cars.

That's certainly where this is going, but the problem with mass transit is bootstrapping.

Currently, I take one of the Amtrak trains regularly, not terribly fast, but I'm not driving. However, I still need a car at either end of the train for the short hop to house/office.

If I could summon a self-driving car, I would take the train more often. In addition, if I could summon a self-driving car, I wouldn't worry about keeping a strict schedule at the office (very few places have trains/subways that run with enough frequency that you don't have to pay attention to schedule).

This sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. A much more plausible reason why this is being targeted at individual vehicle taxi-like behavior is that it's a lot more cost effective to use human drivers for public transportation because the ratio of passengers to drivers is much higher. I doubt it would be worth the cost of the research to do away with all the bus drivers in the country; the expensive part is maintenance.

It's a good thing they don't have a GPS in your pocket already, or they'd be wasting a lot of money on getting that data.

Why do you think it's harder to track mass transportation? Things like clipper cards, credit cards, etc will be able to log the data. If they also offered wifi it will help as well.

Don't know why they didn't do mass transportation, but my guess is legislation and unions. Getting rid of personal cars and human driving taxis is private industry. Mass transportation will have a large percentage be public sector workers and union workers.

If this is the path of least resistence and is proven to work, they will most likely go after mass transportation as well.

Google don't need to do trains because other companies have been progressing this since the 1960s — the Victoria Line on the London Underground opened with the first automatic train operation in 1968. There are now many similar systems.

Buses are more complicated than cars (city driving, people at stops etc), so doing cars first makes sense.

Agree on the buses vs trains. Infrastructure is already there for modern train systems to be automated.

>Buses are more complicated than cars (city driving, people at stops etc), so doing cars first makes sense.

I don't think this is a valid argument. I see self driving cars operating in Mountain View (a city, albeit not a crazy driving city like SF or Boston), these cars are aware of people as stated in the article, the condition of people at stops can start with stopping at... well stops ->recognizing people that are waiting there. Maybe prepayment to figure out how many people should have boarded.

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