I'd rather have frequent, reliable and safe public transport than self-driving cars. Can we pour billions of dollars into that instead, please?
It's a false dichotomy.
Also good luck carrying your children on your bike.
EVehicle brings you to public transit. Problem solved OW known as Park&Ride
If there was a sci-fi hoverboard that could be used in rain/snow to easily connect to the nearest public transit node, and easily carried until disembarkation, then car use would decline.
On a different tangent, I am curious about societies where motorcycles are a significant fraction of private transportation. What's their outlook on self-driving cars?
The big problem here at this point is not individual innovation into new devices. We already have folding scooters, folding bikes, bike share, scooter share, etc. I already combine a folding scooter with public transport in Munich and it works fairly well for me for many trips.
The real problem is that in many cities, the infrastructure to support these things is extraordinarily terrible. For example, there are literally zero cities in the US with decent bike infrastructure -- and it's bike lanes/paths that fit the kind of devices you're talking about -- let alone good infrastructure. The city I'm in, Munich, hits the decent mark, but still has a ways to go before being 'good'. And it only works well for me because I'm a relatively healthy/fit adult, an elderly person or a child would have more problems.
"We" the people can already invest billions into public transport if we collectively decide to do so. What the car companies are investing in has nothing to do with that.
Your comment is disingenuous, because it implies that one is blocking the other, but it's obviously not.
Short of arguing for FULL COMMUNISM NOW, where society would also be democratically telling businesses exactly what to do, these two things are not meaningfully connected. If the people decided to take public transport more seriously, we could do so at any time.
This is a tangent, but there aren't two separate pots of currency labelled 'PRIVATE FUNDS' and 'PUBLIC FUNDS' in society. Nor does private industry have a monopoly on R&D. As you acknowledge, it's entirely feasible through political action to change society's declared priorities, and there's nothing 'full communism' about it: Private companies operate within the market defined and backed by the state and legal system.
Self-driving cars, even if ready to go tomorrow, present a worse value proposition than public transport unless we enter into the realms of a post-scarcity society. My opinion is that it's a shame that the current sociopolitical system has ended up offering better incentives by having half a dozen mega-corps pump endless amounts of money into their own proprietary research of something less useful to society than public transport, which provides similar functionality.
Is it a useful, actionable statement? No, of course not! We're wasting time on HN not debating in parliament ;-)
This is true, because in reality there's more like millions of different 'pots' of money that are allocated for different purposes and are controlled by different entities.
> Private companies operate within the market defined and backed by the state and legal system.
Sure, but short of banning or at least actively disincentivizing development of self-driving cars, car companies are going to pursue that. And why wouldn't we want them to? We're always going to have millions of cars around, even if tomorrow everyone's public transit was as good as Japan (which would take decades at a minimum for the US, and probably other countries too), that's still a ton of cars.
Not to mention that self-driving car tech will also be used by public transit for buses, and by trucking companies for freight, both of those being very good things.
> Self-driving cars, even if ready to go tomorrow, present a worse value proposition than public transport
This is a false dilemma, since we can have both, and they're not even completely separate things: self-driving buses would be great for public transportation. That would let you run buses more safely, more cheaply, and with more routes more frequently.
I don't even own a car right now and I'm for it. If nothing else, it would've stopped me from getting hit by cars a couple times while biking.
Why own a car when you can have a self-driving car pick you up from anywhere, bring you anywhere, and drive away to the next customer when it's done.
Sure some people would still want to own a car, or drive one themselves, but eventually I can imagine self-driving shared cars will become cheaper and are still a reliable way of transportation. For many people, owning a car will no longer be desirable since shared self-driving cars suit their needs.
That's called a taxi and I don't see them replacing personal cars en-masse[0]. Even once autonomous cars are ubiquitous I'd still like to own one, not share it with other people.
[0] Taking an uber to work and back every day would already be cheaper for me than what I'm paying for my car + petrol + insurance + servicing, and yet I prefer to have a vehicle and drive it myself.
The reality is that there are huge swaths of the US where you need personal transportation.
Yes, but 80% of the population lives in urban areas, so would be better served by improved public transit. That doesn't mean anyone is taking your personal car away if that's the best way to get around in a low population density area.