Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Okay, so you take an $80 billion yearly budget and dump an extra fraction of a billion on top. Is that going to do much?

I'd rather risk it on an attempt to make self-driving busses. Getting more development money for electric planes is a nice side effect too, but just in terms of improving transit, reducing the need for drivers would be massive.

View on HN

I wasn't aware that the lack of drivers is what was holding up public transit.

It's not. What would make Americans take the bus is frequency, reliability, cleanliness and free wifi. And fucking bus lanes.

But that's boring isn't it?

Americans don't take the bus because they don't want to sit next to the type of people who can't afford a car or get a driver's license.

What would make Americans take buses would also be if they just stopped openly hating homeless people as a matter of life.

And if you save a lot of money, you can improve all of those.

Presumably their wages is meant.

Labor, not just by drivers but also mechanics and other staff, is a substantial part of transit costs. Cutting fuel cost makes wages a bigger fraction. Reduced maintenance load of an electric fleet could be important.

But that is more the cost of other stuff. I bet the difference in costs between driver and self-driving vehicles that are as reliably and safe as bus drivers is not that much. Mechanics etc... would still need to exist for driverless vehicles just as much. I think creating electric busses is much needed, without dumping lots of money into making them autonomous at the start.

Well, electric busses have already been created. We need a lot of them, for sure, but an extra half percent on the budget isn't going to replace fleets. I'm happy for that money, all paid for by random investors, to go into further-flung research.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com