> To be clear, I think self-driving cars beat busses on quality of service.
Yeah if your metric is how much time you spend walking, or privacy I guess, then a car is better than a bus (a car with no driver even more so).
But in NYC many people don't have cars, and while "parking in the city is impossible" is one reason, there are other way more popular ones:
- mass transit is much, much safer
- it's more environmentally friendly
- it's faster (trains, not buses, although with bus lanes and lights that might be changing)
- car maintenance is expensive and tedious
- cars are expensive assets that depreciate incredibly fast
- you can do other things while on mass transit
> There simply isn’t a bus that exists that will take most people from where they are where they want to go.
You might be surprised. There's a bus around the corner from me that takes me directly to my subway station. My total walk time is maybe 2 minutes. It doesn't make any sense to me to figure out self-driving cars to save me 4 minutes of walking a day, in fact that's probably a bad idea and pattern in general.
> I’m describing why so few people are using them, and why self-driving cars have a better chance of success.
Again you might be surprised. In NYC, 2.25 million people ride the bus every weekday. I don't know what rideshare stats are, but I bet they're lower.
In places without expansive and deep mass transit systems, people don't ride buses for exactly the reason you said. But the answer isn't to figure out self-driving cars, the answer is more buses (and other vehicles like light rail), drivers, and routes.
> In fact, I think self-driving is a necessary ingredient for a public transit system that meets everyone’s needs in the US.
Well, it doesn't exist at all right now, so I think that's pushing it when it comes to "needs". Something else that would satisfy that is if we installed light rail and started switching wholesale to remote work, things we know how to do super well right now. It's also even safer than self-driving cars, easier on the environment, cheaper, etc.
Self-driving cars remind me a lot of blockchain: a solution looking for a problem. It's a little more vexing than blockchain though, because commuting really seems like a drive time problem, but the root problem there isn't that a working human has to drive, it's that a working human has to move 30 miles every workday. The smart, efficient solution here is better mass transit and more remote work.