Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I already aggregate the cost of maintenance across all my personal driving: there is no cost savings.

No, aggregated across all drivers, not just aggregated across your driving. As in, 1 million drivers insuring, licensing and maintaining 1 million cars costs far more than 1 million riders sharing 200,000 cars whose insurance, licensing and maintenance is aggregated by a riding sharing service like Uber, and those savings will show up in your final bill, ie. total cost of ownership of your own car will exceed using ride sharing services with self-driving cars for virtually all people.

> A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max

It can be as little as 0 minutes if you get there at the perfect time. That's irrelevant though. Worst case and average case wait times are what's important.

> If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership.

No, it's the lack of sufficient incentive and benefits to use transit. America is not Europe.

It won't be 1 million riders sharing 200,000 cars. It will be 1 million sharing 900,000 cars at best. There is a reason a single occupant car is by far the most common - for the individual it is the easiest, most convenient choice. No waiting for a shared car, leave when you want, keep your personal things in the car for latter.

The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.

That's all conjecture. Queueing theory can plan spare capacity for any level of utilization. The higher the utilization, the lower the cost to the individual rider, ie. the more sharing that's allowed or encouraged, the lower the cost. The sharing equilibrium is almost certainly not 10%.

> The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.

Sure, but the increased convenience of not needing a shared meetup/dropoff of transit is considerable. The biggest cause of traffic into and out of a city is the 1 driver commute from the outlying regions. If car ownership were more expensive than ride sharing, most of these people would use ride sharing because it has the convenience benefits of car ownership with the efficiency benefits of transit. The ride sharing equilibrium in this model would be upwards of 70% for rush hour, at least.

Non-rush hour times would have fewer cars on the road because the cars would park themselves when utilization falls. This is more efficient and more convenient than transit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com