No, self-driving cars are not a substitute for a functional rail system | Hacker News Reader

No, self-driving cars are not a substitute for a functional rail system

seattletimes.com

33 pointsjseliger19 comments

More than half the assertions in that article are predicated on the false premise that self-driving cars would be owned by the riders for personal use, rather than commissioned per-ride from a fleet (the way ride-"sharing" services like Uber and Lyft work today).

Once you take that part out of the equation, the arguments, one by one, become a lot weaker, if not collapsing entirely:

- Electric cars being impractical: when you're managing an automated fleet, taking them off the grid to be fueled electrically is actually more practical, since it's easier to deploy recharging nodes without manual intervention than it is to transfer liquid. Also, longer on-base recharging times (which aren't necessarily a given) can be combined with any routine maintenance which may need to be done (including scanning the cabin for lost items / cleaning it).

- Ownership costs: this one falls apart almost completely. There is the looming problem that this would give massive corporations even more leverage than they already have, but the solutions there are political in nature, calling for an approach similar to the existing approach to state-run mass transit (akin to how Seattle runs the Pronto bike service).

- No big increase in productivity: "One of the many benefits is smaller than claimed" is hardly an argument against autonomous vehicles - not to mention that that study only looks at the immediate behaviors of current self-driving-car passengers. It's quite likely that, after even just a few months of self-driving fleets being normalized, we'd see workflows start to adapt, with more voice-driven productivity adopted (to avoid motion sickness), possibly combined with translucent displays in the vehicles themselves.

- People like driving themselves: I'm not sure I buy this as a real obstacle for the majority of the population. People liked feeding horses, chatting with travel agents, and browsing bookstores, too- it wasn't enough to keep most people from abandoning them once a significantly more convenient alternative came along. (And if you're only making the decision per-ride, instead of for an up-front bulk purchase like a self-driven car, this decision becomes a lot easier.)

re: productivity - you forgot to point out that the same problems occur with buses and trains, except people have to wait 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour for them. Whereas with self-driving cars in the uber model, you wait 5 minutes, with zero warning time.

And the article fails to mention a key benefit of self-drivers: removal of human error, and lowering of accident rates because of it. This is still theoretical, but it almost certain to become reality. Imagine saving 33% of the lives lost annually in car crashes. That's 10,000 people.

Another key benefit not mentioned is the enablement of non-empowered people. Sight-impaired people, young people, older people, people who are unwell or otherwise physically limited - all of these people can benefit from door-to-door service offered by self-driving cars, and not offered by buses. Yes, today there are "Access" vans, but cmon. Those are not a viable large-scale solution. Self-drivers will set many people free.

Self-driving cars are going to happen, because they're convenient and offer privacy and utility that a bus or train cannot. Some people will be willing to pay extra for that. Some won't. As the author of the article said: We need the mix.

> People like driving themselves

I love to drive on a highway, but I hate to drive in the city. I'd easily give up on the former to get rid of the latter.

Eh, to the extent that they can be driver less or otherwise on demand, they complement public transit. I have been using the train a lot more after uber started to provide reliable taxi service. It gets me to the far away stop, and provides me a backup if I miss the train.

Uber is only really a car replacer for me because my ride is subsidized in a unsustainable way.

If self driving cars make taxis sustainable at uber pool with weekly discount rates, or even uber pool rates, that makes the sparse public transit we have way more practical

I see a lot of knee-jerk and reactionary positions towards autonomous vehicles from the Urban and transportation planning communities.

Skepticism is healthy, but what scares me is that a failure to thoughtfully ask 'What could go right?' Could lead to the marginalization of planners role in ensuring robotaxis are implemented responsibly, and they'll just get steamrolled by capitalists, and many of the same mistakes will be made as when the car companies aggressively campaigned to place the automobile at the centre of American life in the early to mid 20th century. A costly error that even half a century after we've come to acknowledge it, we've been unable to meaningfully alter the course.

Urban planners have been beating the same drum for over a generation now, and outside of a few small victories their efforts have been mostly fruitless. They're stuck on autopilot.

Are Self driving cars 'The Answer'? No.

Are they a potentially valuable tool for addressing longstanding pain points in urban transportation systems? Absolutely.

So, part of the issue is that, in Seattle, the question of "can self-driving cars replace mass transit infrastructure?" has political implications right now. The article didn't really mention it, but I think that's because it's the Seattle Times, so they would assume that readers are familiar with the background context.

To explain: after the usual [0] decade of planning, Seattle's regional transit authority has a $50 billion expansion plan (including more rail and bus service) finalized, and it is coming up for a vote shortly. One of the arguments that the opposition brings up a lot is, "we don't need ST3 because self-driving cars will take care of the transit problems."

A counter-argument made by supporters of the plan (including me), is that since Seattle is already snarled with traffic (average commute times have doubled since 2010, and it's only expected to get worse), the burden of proof is on these people to show that self-driving cars can replace mass transit, and so far they haven't done so. Without specifically accusing you (I don't know if you know anything about this situation), I will say that the suggestion of "we should wait and see" is very similar to the concern trolling that has been used by a lot of ST3 opponents to try and derail the project.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_process

Yeah, don't wait for self driving cars, it could be 30 years before they're fully realized. Autonomous vehicles can do wonderful things when it comes to addressing first and last mile problems, but as the backbone of a commuter transit system, rail's capacity to do the heavy lifting will be as viable as it ever was.

Some small number of urban planners have been "beating the drum" for a while, but the vast majority of urban planning during the 'Age of the Car' has been pro-automobile and anti-everything-else.

It wasn't private capitalists that demolished downtowns for expressways, or mandated minimum parking for nearly every kind of building, or prohibited high-density development, or required looping, unwalkable street networks, or used zoning to separate residences and shopping/jobs, or any of these things. Sure, car companies have campaigned for their advantage, like everyone. But the transformation of US transportation to a car-dominant model has in very large part been the product of urban planners and their rules. And it continues to be - for all the academic valorization of non-automobile transport, the old rules that advantage cars remain in place, almost everywhere.

A lot of people who drive cars do so because they don't like riding mass transit with the poor. Lots of people don't want to ride the train with people who are drunk and soaked in their own urine, or who are strung out on meth, or who are behaving aggressively, or are yelling at people, or... etc. Everyone who rides transit sees these things on a regular basis (Vancouver here) and I can completely understand others saying they don't want to give up their single occupancy vehicle.

I wouldn't see much of a niche for self-driving vehicles if authorities were free to enforce standards of dress and conduct on mass transit; but practically they can't (for so many political reasons in large cities) so they won't so there is such a niche available.

Sorry if this strikes you as being elitist, but I felt that it needs to be said. If we had functional mass transit that everyone felt safe using, I just wouldn't see much reason for self-driving cars.

For most people, driving themselves is faster and more convenient. The rest is just gravy.

I'm mostly with you on this one. I like mass transit. It's a fun opportunity to people-watch. What I don't like is riding with smelly and/or loud and/or violent people. I don't care how people dress, though, as long as it's not unhygienic.

I think that the reason why there is so little enforcement of any conduct rules might be more practical than political, though. To effectively enforce conduct rules would probably require there to be an extra government employee on each bus or train. The driver can't really be expected to do it, nor would it be a good idea to try to get them to split their attention in such a way.

Check out the Silver Line extension to the DC metro as a counter point [1]. Something like $7B to run rail 25 miles. And, who knows what the maintenance will be. For large sections of it, they had to run the tracks over the roads. So, now, there are these hulking, eternal masses of concrete that run through the sub-cities along the route.

Every day that I see its ongoing construction, I wish someone would just turn off the project are redirect the funds to improving infrastructure to support self-driving vehicles.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_(Washington_Metr...

It seems like it might be actually. A dedicated smart-lane without ped access, running road-trains of trucks seems a lot easier to maintain than a rail network.

Cars/trucks are way less efficient than trains in terms of fuel and vehicle overhead per passenger or ton of cargo. The article is a bit rambling, but the environmental argument seems the strongest to me - tiny little combustion engines are disastrously inefficient and polluting, and electric just isn't there yet for true long distance. An electrified rail network is the high-throughout, bulk-process solution.

I'm also willing to bet that trains are much easier to maintain in aggregate then the same amount of capacity in trucks, due to there being fewer individual engines/motors needed. Track maintenance is slightly harder than road maintenance, but probably not harder than roads plus whatever solution you'd need for an automated truck to make it across the country (charging stations, electrified roads, etc.).

EV's, and automated road-trains would hugely boost efficiency... hence the dedicated smart-lane.

The Seattle area already has decided bus lanes (with non - bus right turns). Basically, at-grade transportation that interacts with traffic fails during the peak periods of travel, particularly at turning points, because of other traffic. During the off peak it would work well, but then you've failed to solve the commute problem

If you operate dedicated routes that have limited interaction with traffic you found achieve higher efficienct, but now people are being dropped off at what is functionally a bus stop and have to walk to work. This could actually work really well, except choke points like highway ramps will wreak havoc.

Building an entire extra set of lanes everywhere is prohibitively expensive, and even then is only feasible in the outlying areas

It's a very challenging problem in terms of space utilization and management, even if the technology magically worked in the best possible way. AV only solves some of it

We're talking about an alternative to new railways, so the issues are already on the table in terms of space and money.

Those are very good arguments for long distance travel, what about in city distribution?

There's also the issue of self-driving car hype vs. the actual progress of the technology. Despite a growing number of successes in the field, I still can't really imagine that we are anywhere close to having self-driving cars that could be trusted to maneuver around public roads without human supervision.

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