Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | Hacker News Reader

> The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue.

Well, the main issue is that most of the cars on the road during the busiest hours have just 1 person in them.

I think when the dust finally settles, the main form of passenger transit in urban-ish areas will basically be something that looks like autonomous vans.

Unlike public transit today, they won't have predefined timetables, nor predefined startpoints and endpoints. They'll pick you up wherever you are, whenever you want, and drop you off wherever you want, but they might take a roundabout way to get there to pick up and drop off other passengers too.

If they usually have 2+ people in them at a time, we'll be able to use our existing infrastructure (roads) at a much higher throughout.

View on HN

How is this an improvement over trains, trams, and light rail?

I think reusing car-based infrastructure with busses is an important step in transitioning away from car dependency, but roads are not permanent. In many parts of America, trams and railways were torn down to be replaced by roads. The roads can be replaced too, if it is clear that alternatives are better.

Plus, roads are destroyed incredibly quickly by cars and busses, so they will need replacing eventually, whereas rail is much more resilient.

It seems to me that rail-based transport is much more effective in dense urban environments.

Point to point transit at the time when you need it.

If I want to get from A to B at 14:00 and can do that in 30 minutes by car, but the only bus that goes there requires me to change at C, and it takes 20 minutes to get from A to C, 20 minutes to get from C to B, a 10 minute wait time at C, and the connection happens every 30 minutes and isn't perfectly aligned with my schedule, I'm now facing the choice between 30 min by car or over one hour (including the wait time at my destination because I had to take an earlier connection) with public transit. Add a 5-10 minute walk at each end to account for the distance between the nearest stop and the start/destination, and public transit can take 3x as long.

If there is a van service that gets me there in 40 minutes at a time of my choice, that's a much more acceptable option.

This may also consist of a car first taking me to a tram/bus stop a few minutes away that gets me more directly to the destination.

The van service also solves the problem of those few-percent edge cases where regular public transit just doesn't work, which force people to get a car, which then gets used even for trips where public transit would otherwise be acceptable (but not great).

This is already possible today. You don't need driverless cars to do it. Uber can already do it, but it's not taking over. Unless you're suggesting we will have more cars just sitting around waiting for rides, because they're driverless. Then we get back to them being so convenient that nobody will want to ride with another person.

In other words, why does making the car driverless suddenly make everybody want to use it?

IIRC something like 70% of the cost of Ubers is driver compensation, meaning driverless Ubers have the potential to be ~3x cheaper.

So they if get rid of the drivers they contract who is buying and paying for the cars and maintenance? - are you suggesting Uber start carjacking their existing drivers?

Do you know what percentage of driver compensation effectively goes to car ownership and maintenance?

so basically a jitney?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com