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Comment by ArkVark | Hacker News Reader

Hub and spoke public transport is dead. It relies on huge infrastructure investment and open access.

The future is autonomous minibusses with algorithmically-derived live routes, served on a subscription basis by private companies to private individuals. This way people of similar socioeconomic status can rub shoulders with eachother and feel more comfortable, and receive a greater standard of service.

It might very well be necessary to modify roads and road rules to facilitate autonomous vehicles - that's the kind of public investment we should be making.

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The issue with private services is that they will handle most profitable routes and ignore less profitable ones.

You end up with a system where there is even more socioeconomic exclusion (poorer people living in areas where they need to use cars, but cars are more expensive and won’t get into the future cities).

Or - at worst - it won’t work at all, because you will need a car anyway for those 5-10% long tail destinations that private transport won’t cover.

I think this is the reason European countries have public transportation - which is forced to tackle less profitable routes, but can earn back money on the profitable ones. (Similarly post office)

Hope does that compare with the reality of jitneys both in India and the similar phaenoma around NYC providing timely transportation for the working class? (In NYC often persecuted by the government as well)

Autonomous driving is no where near the level of sophistication needed for that. You could probably finish a number of subways before you have a fleet of autonomous minibuses.

This ends up unreasonably expensive unless subsidised by loss-making VCs.

It ends up like an Uber, but cheaper since you have no driver and are sharing the vehicle with other passengers.

And Uber is endlessly subsidized by loss-making VCs. Uber has been losing billions of dollars every year.

Uber made money this year if you take uber eats out of the equation.

this year. Uber is 11 years old this year. It has been subsidized by endless VC money for the past ... 11.

Moreover, when they went public in 2019 they said that "Uber may never turn a profit". And yet here we are.

> This way people of similar socioeconomic status can rub shoulders with eachother and feel more comfortable, and receive a greater standard of service.

That's a lot of work just so you can avoid being near poor people.

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