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Comment by salmonfamine | Hacker News Reader

That only raises more questions. People will buy them, of course. People buy cigarettes, heroin, and NFT's. Will they actually meet high enough safety standards in these places? Will they reduce commute times?

In other words, are they actually going to deliver the long-haul, end-all-be-all transit solution that many of its proponents imagine they will? Or is it just a nice-to-have feature that will make driving a little safer and a little easier for some people? And if so, is that value really worth the incredible amount of effort that's gone into making it a reality?

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I don't know that anyone believes that driverless cars are a long-haul transit solution.

Will they be the end-all-be-all? I mean, that's an easy question to answer: no. Universally. For anything you want to bring up. Nothing is perfect.

It seems to me that you're making very weak claims dressed up in very strong language.

Ok.

Let me put it a different way for you:

All of this conditional on self-driving cars really being actually solved, such that an autonomous car is, say, better than the 75% driver on the road.

I expect the overwhelming majority of long-haul (say, >200 miles) passenger transport to happen via planes and trains, just like today.

I do not expect that commute times will be substantially shorter -- indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if they were mildly longer.

I DO expect that people will be able to use their commute time productively (they could work during it and either increase their productivity or decrease their hours) and/or be able to spend less money on transit, because they're using shared vehicles.

I DO expect that short-haul public transportation would suffer a significant decline in ridership, as it would be outcompeted by driverless carss.

I do NOT expect that short-haul public transportation would be entirely killed, it will still have some advantages, especially in very dense areas.

I am agnostic about how wise the investment in autonomous vehicles will end up being -- it depends on how much additional investment is needed to get to this (hypothetical) mode of full self-driving, and to what extent many actors are able to reach full-self-driving at the same time and drive commoditization of self-driving cars. But who cares? It's not my money, this has overwhelmingly been paid for by private actors.

Do you disagree with any of that?

Mostly just this:

> I DO expect that short-haul public transportation would suffer a significant decline in ridership, as it would be outcompeted by driverless cars.

My contention here is “outcompeted.” Ultimately, this is a policy decision —- at least in the United States. In regions where there is both existing rail and highways, there might be good conditions for a competitive market to exist between the two. But, that competition will also rely on energy pricing and EV availability, as well as policy decisions. As you mentioned, density is a huge factor. However, there’s not sufficient evidence that self-driving cars can solve the congestion that comes with low-density.

In short, there’s far too many factors to make a big prediction about the fate of either at large.

In general, my contention is with those who tout self-driving as a transformative technology that will turn our congested highways into high-speed infra, and all with a higher degree of safety than existing cars. We don’t know any of that.

We do know that short-haul public transportation can work very well.

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