Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lutger | Hacker News Reader

Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.

View on HN

I'll be blunt about this.

Most of this research is funded in the US and the hyper individualistic Americans as a group don't believe in public transport.

My commuter train be packed though.

Where? And is it filled with people coming from the local P&R?

That’s really not true. Americans love good public transportation where it’s available and works well. Most US cities have lots of buses, and many have light rail. But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.

American corporations perhaps aren’t as interested in public transportation, because there is no money to be made. And that is who is largely funding this self-driving vehicle research.

The built up areas of the US have almost the same population density as the EU ones.

Nobody cares about the Rockies or farm fields or Death Valley.

> But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.

This is oft-repeated, but it doesn't really survive a moment's scrutiny. You might as well say it's pointless to build a path from your back door to your shed, because the county is just too big.

> Americans love good public transportation […] Most US cities have lots of buses

So… Apparently not…

The USA is probably the worst place in the world for 1) high speed trains 2) buses. And the only place I know where the train _waits_ for cars to go through.

If only they could see by themselves how bad it is during their next trip to Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, London, Paris (even France in general) and many many other countries and cities that have a functional network of high speed trains, metro, tramway and regional lines…

I hope you’re not ready to die on that hill.

I said they love it, not that they have it. Big difference.

From everything I am learning about the US on Youtube by transport people, they universally despise bus service in North America cities.

Some have light rail but at a far smaller rate then cities in Europe.

There are tiny cities in Europe that have more light rail then cities 10x the size in North America.

My tiny town of less then 100k people literally has more extensive bus and train connection then most cities in the US that have million+ people.

> But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.

Compare for example Switzerland (lots of maintains, rivers, hills and so on), with a equally sized metro area like Torronto, Dalles and so on.

The reality is many of your metro areas are the literal exact opposite of spread out, they are just badly designed.

Zürich for example is a city that has only like 600k people, with maybe 1.5M in the larger metro area and Zürich has more trains and trams going then whole Texas city triangle.

So please stop with the excuse about how everything is so spread out in the US. Its not spread out, its just badly designed.

Self driving tech could and will be applied to public transportation too. With self-driving mini-buses we can serve more destination much more efficiently, fine-tuning commute supply to better fit the exact demand.

This is probably a good model for the future of public transit. We use large buses because of the high cost of drivers. For less popular routes and times it currently doesn’t make sense but self-driving mini-buses would.

At least in SF there has been little discussion due to the influence of the unlicensed transit unions. The idea of eliminating drivers can’t even be discussed.

If San Francisco repealed Prop 13 the city could afford to hire drivers for a fleet of small buses.

Then again if you want a reason to hate Feinstein she's the one that got rid of the gypsy cabs in San Francisco.

While this is somewhat true, in the overall problem of transit, this is a tiny problem dwarfed by far larger problems. For this argument to make sense, there are about 5000 ways to improve current US cities in terms of transport that don't require this amazing technology.

Its not technology that is limiting good transit, but will.

Yes, as a hyper individualistic American fuck public transport. I don’t want to travel with other people, I don’t want to live in dense cities and I don’t want to go to like the 10 places with public transport. I love national parks, camping, hiking, road-tripping etc.

Is this a parody?

No, I gave reasons for my preference.

You do understand that sprawl and suburbia (and car infrastructure) takes away from nature, not adds to it, right? We have paved over a huge portion of the country and that beautiful nature you so claim to enjoy.

You can have both. You can have fewer cars and excellent public transportation.

I rather have a full fledged car infrastructure and excellent public transport.

You can't have both like that. Cars will need to lose priority to make public transit usable.

Car infrastructure spreads everything out, puts parking lots everywhere, makes walking or cycling impossible or really unpleasant. You can't have working public transit if visiting two businesses requires walking 10 minutes along a loud boulevard.

America has tried cars-first infrastructure. It has failed. The spread is unsustainable, and it's bankrupting suburban areas.

Here is an idea. You can have a 'full fledged car infrastructure' with about 1/5 of the car infrastructure you ALREADY HAVE. In fact, there is already way to much car infrastructure, far more then anybody can maintain. Most town in the US and the highway system have maintenance backlogs that will literally never be cleared.

Here is an idea, build public transports so that less people use the car infrastructure, and just like that you get higher utility out of your existing car infrastructure.

Seriously, the amount of 8 way stroads in the US is a fucking joke. There is essentially never a need for an 8 way road anywhere at any time. And for sure not absurd 20 way highways.

I also like the benefits of invidualistic cultures, but there's a cost to it too.

The US got this way because it was super-charged between pre-WWII and the dotcom boom. Both economically and culturally. The post-WWII high wages allowed the rise of suburbia, the Cold War induced WW3 scare led to the highway system, and so on.

The low-efficiency of it is taking its toll. (Sitting in traffic for hours each day, pollution, etc.)

Traffic is usually only a problem in major cities and that’s about the only good usecase for public transport. I don’t want to lose the amazing infrastructure we have for cars everywhere that isn’t a major urban center.

Traffic is one thing. Low-density sprawl itself is more costly. (More roads to maintain, more poles along roadsides, more distance to drive, more pipes, more wiring, every SFH is a big box with a lot more surface where heat exchange happens (and then folks want to keep it warm/cool), every backyard is one more sad lifeless walled garden to water and mow. It adds up.)

And I'm not saying there are no benefits, nor am I saying that the alternatives are so perfect people just somehow don't see it. (I'm saying let's quantify the costs and let people choose. For example I'd spend a lot more on soundproofing and a lot less on backyards and frown lawns, but mostly there's no such option. [Hence the big push for more permissive zoning/permitting/etc.])

Then stay out of the cities, and live in the country. If this is how you want to live, then your opinion doesn't matter for how cities are run.

This is all private money. If these companies didn't spend the $100B developing autonomous vehicles, it wouldn't suddenly be available for building public transit.

Beyond that, $100B doesn't go as far toward building transit as you might expect. For example, San Diego recently spent $2.3 billion on a light rail extension that's projected to have 34,700 daily trips by 2030. If you assume most of these are round-trips, it's serving fewer than 18,000 people. Spending $100B at this rate would serve around 750,000 people (0.2% of the U.S. population).

The most cost-effective form of public transit in most places is busses because they can reuse existing road infrastructure, and in the U.S., labor accounts for around 70% of the cost of operating busses. As a result, autonomous driving technology should be helpful in scaling public transit systems as well.

Do you mean the La Jolla trolley line? It seems like a nice idea (I’ve lived next to several trolley stops) but the virtually nonexistent ticket validation tends to make the trolley a magnet for negativity, and keeps me in my car.

The budget for just the MTA in NYC is 18 billion / year and that’s really only for the ongoing costs. A 100 billion investment in public transportation over the entire US over 10 years once wouldn’t have done shit.

A fleet of self driving cars are realistically the only scalable public transportation because the costs increase with the number of people not the area to be served. Do people just forget how unbelievably spread out everything but the densest cities are? 24/7 bus service to within 0.5 miles of every house in my city is already impossible even if you allowed them to be on the every 4 hour. To replace cars people would realistically need them on the hour and want on the 20 minutes. Bet you my shirt at that point it would just be cheaper for the city to just run a free taxi service.

This pretty much. Building public infrastructure is insanely expensive and there are capacity limits that can't easily be solved. We need to add public transport to the mix that 1) doesn't require heavy additional investment in infrastructure and 2) solves convenience concerns that make buses unappealing and 3) can reliably replace privately owned vehicles.

You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it. Any bus-like thing would need far too many stops to be practical to be able to get people to a reasonable walking distance of where they want to go. That's why in basically every city where they've been added (distinct from being created due to organic demand), pretty much nobody who can afford any alternatives rides them, no matter how much money is dumped into them.

To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians. Which is pretty much a non-starter, and even if you wanted to try would cost many orders of magnitude more than all of the self-driving car projects.

> You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it.

Its not about 'snapping your finger'. Neither Netherlands or Switzerland built their systems from 1 day to the other.

You need to make decision to change and then consistently and incrementally work on it. Put it in your standards and invest ever $ you have for new roads to that instead.

You need to change your tax policy so that horrible inefficient land uses like parking lots cost a lot more. You need to enable mixed use development so these parking lots can be built on.

> To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians.

I'm sorry that is complete and utter nonsense. Like seriously, completely insane.

If you look into some urbanist and city planning literature you will see that lots of places where there used to be total car shitshows, are now beautiful. Often you would never have guessed that just 10-20 years earlier it was horrible road and a parking lot.

Again, small and incremental steps. Here are some really basic steps you can take:

- Remove parking requirements

- Slow speed of cars

- Don't allow turn right on red

- Make the lanes thinner

- Make the sidewalk broader, maybe add some trees

- Take one of the existing lanes and add painted bike lanes, later add protection for those lanes

- Rezone for mixed use (specially existing commercial zones)

- Change property tax policy to discourage sub-optimal land use

I could literally keep going on and on. Non of this, requires you to demolish anything.

Specifically for the US, there is whole movement about incrementally improving your city, see Strong Towns (https://www.strongtowns.org/). They have lots of podcasts and books. Specially: 'Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity'.

They also point out in detail with real data how these changes make your city safer and economically much better (They have some seriously amazing visualization of city finances that shows how such chances can improve cities).

And this is not some hippy organization, these are coming from a somewhat conservative small towns perspective.

Honestly your attitude of 'we are stuck with this' is horrible. I can understand frustration and bleak outlook, about the situation. But put your hope into incremental low cost change, not some techno futurism and you will be less disappointed.

What's wrong with "turn right on red"? It'd be a big problem in that exact form in Australia, but as a cyclist especially I'd rather we had the equivalent "turn left on red" law, and to be honest, cyclists can generally get away with it anyway. But I can't see why it would really be a huge issue if it was allowed for cars, unless they were persistently ignoring pedestrians/cyclists and turning into their path as they crossed in front of you.

The big one for me is traffic lights - cyclists/pedestrians should be able to trigger traffic/pedestrian lights to turn green instantly in most cases (with some reasonable lower limit on the amount of time they've been red for, although ideally all traffic lights in urban areas would be hooked up to sensors able to determine if there was any traffic approaching), and ideally approaching cyclists should be able to trigger them without even stopping to press a button - I gather they have something like this in Copenhagen. There's realistically no way to set up traffic light sequences so that they suit all modes of travel, but they're often especially bad for cyclists, and the act of having to stop and start all the time is far more onerous (and even dangerous, esp. if you're clipped in) for cyclists than it is for cars.

Turn right on red kills cyclists and pedestrians. It was always unsafe but the introduced it in the 1970 during the oil crisis with the idea that there would be less idling on red.

In most cases you shouldn't even need traffic lights at all but there is certainty a lot you can do with traffic lights if you optimize them, there are lots of videos on this from the Netherlnads. There they have separate sensors for different transport modes and also multiple levels so the intersection can respond smartly based on lots of info about what is coming from what direction. It can also let people cross half the road to the protect middle in a smart way. Forcing to press a button is horrible design!

But this is just one of many tools. Having flat bicycle and pedestrian ways where cars have to go over bumbs. There are many methods that are used.

The most import one is just slowing cars down cars.

Netherlands deliberately bans cars from some streets to kill certainty routes completely and forcing people to take different longer routes. That means also less cars on that route even in the parts that the car could have taken.

I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between - basically driverless, electric ueber.

As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.

Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.

This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues.

If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.

I guess it's just a question of capacity. If you can cram a lot of travelers into a subway train during rush hour, you could just as well imagine an uber pool type function where clever route finding combines riders into a single car during rush hour.

Carpooling failed because people prefer having everything under control in the face of how cheap car-based travel is already. Thinking self-driving cars will fix a luxury problem is a pipedream.

Whether it is self-driving with an incredibly optimized algorithm (good luck with that) or manual carpooling, the same problems are still going to bubble up. The solutions already exist. We, as a society, just don't want to deal with the consequences.

Driving individual cars isn't cheap. The overall for society are huge. Roads are massively subsidized. Car dependency hurts housing prices as well.

Carpooling failed because it doesn't make sense to use amateur drivers on the same overfilled road network to carry a couple more people. If the entrance to the city is backed up, car-pool lanes don't add much.

If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to delays.

This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-research individual self-driving we have today.

But really most people shouldn't be commuting anyway. WFH should be much more of a thing, even if it's not full-time.

Brilliant option, we could cut the front off one car and the back off another and weld them together, think of the room saved for more people! Talk about a dense network!

Yes, exactly. The whole premise of self-driving removing peak load rests on arguments which exist in theory, but are stupidly difficult to create in practice. The costs made today will pale in comparison to the costs required to get this off the ground.

Meanwhile, we have solutions which work today, several of which can be done today. WFH, incentivizing working outside peak hours, building more densely and closer to cities, investing in public transport, and more. We just don't want to do it.

We see this in The Netherlands. Public transport has gotten noticeably worse, car usage is going up as a result, and roads are expanding to compensate. In a country where housing is a massive problem, which means people will move to less desirable places (read: places further away from work hubs). Now we have a chicken-and-egg problem with regards to public transport, and increased car usage is pressuring space which could be used to create more homes and remove cars from the peak.

We simply don't need to wait another 10-15 years for self-driving to finally be a thing. What needs to be done, is accepting that things will suck for a bit to then get better eventually. Continuing on the same path with self-driving cars will only stall the problem instead of solve it, anyway.

This is true but the gains are surprisingly limited. From Algorithmic game theory there’s the concept of “the price of anarchy” it measures the gap between cooperation (a centrally designed or coordinated solution) and competition (where each participant is independently trying to maximize the outcome for themselves). Selfish routing basically what we have now has price of 4/3. This means the greedy status quo is only 33% worse than perfect coordination.

I’ll quote from one of my favorite books Algorithms to Live By:

“It’s true that self-driving cars should reduce the number of road accidents and may be able to drive more closely together, both of which would speed up traffic. But from a congestion standpoint, the fact that the price of anarchy is only 4/3 as congested as perfect coordination means that perfectly coordinated commutes will only be 3/4 as congested as they are now.”

> much closer together and increase road capacity

So you are assuming there are essentially no more humans driving?

Also, if you want to improve capacity, how about bicycles and buses?

> Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.

You know what's even less dangerous, like essentially no danger, train.

> This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving

So the most complex possible solution that is 100% unproven and even in the best cases is far worse then having a city optimized for walking, biking and trains?

Like I just don't understand. Why do you start with the most inefficient solution possible, and then try to apply (expensive) technology to try to make it better.

How about you start with the most efficient, cheapest technology and apply that in 60% of the cases. Then solve the next 35% of the problem with existing technologies that already solve these problems.

And then for the last 5% you can try to solve them with some amazing future tech.

Its quite simple, design cities to be walkable. Make that safe and a priority. Then extend that by the most energy efficient (and space efficient) mode of transport, bicycles. Then use trains to connect different walkable parts of the city with each other.

Then at the very last step, maybe have some fancy self driving cars for a few special cases.

We know this works. It has been done. And its not expensive, it in fact safes money.

I too rather like rainbows, unicorns, chocolate waterfalls and free happiness growing on trees as a solution to all problems.

I feel that this one is a rather realistic solution. It uses existing technology (cars), existing infrastructure (streets) and existing data infrastructure (cloud providers) to solve a massive problem. The "only" thing that's missing is the self driving part (the only being in very large quotes of course).

This means its much less of a stretch to get this scenario working than proposals like Hyperloop, Flying Taxis or other things that require a lot more innovation and infrastructure work before they become feasable.

The “only” thing missing, is to get the best engineers, and pay them double what they normally make.

Source: https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q

Here is an idea. Take 2 lanes of that already existing street. Block them off from cars and make dedicated bike lanes. Then take another 2 lane and make a dedicated bus or tram line.

> It uses existing technology (cars)

A technology that kills a huge number of people and destroys the environment.

> existing infrastructure (streets)

Infrastructure that when uses for cars is very expensive to maintain and a safety risk.

> existing data infrastructure (cloud providers)

This computation not fixed, if you want to use it you have to pay more then somebody else is willing to pay. Its note like an unused road at all. So sure it exists, but its not idle.

> As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.

Great so you have constantly cars driving form the city center to outside of the city, that for sure will cause no traffic at all.

Will be fun when people proposes new elevated highways out of the city so the self driving car can go outside of town to the coal power plant to charge.

The only thing worse then having vehicles driving around with 1-preson, is vehicles with 0-people. Its literally the most inefficient use of space ever.

It makes traffic worse, not better and it makes the city worse, not better.

How about this, a city optimized for walking and biking, where different parts of the city are connected threw buses, trams, subways or regional trains.

> Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.

Turns out that cities where people can, walk, bike and take trains they don't own cars. Shocking.

Well, why not then create bigger cars, or smaller buses? Between 5 people in a car or a 100 people in a bus, an optimal solution should be able to converge slowly, to 20 people in a vehicle. It would be different for every city, or region or country.

Most cars spend most of their time, being stationary in a parking lot or a garage, 93 percent of the time to be more specific, or 23 hours/day. Buses spend a lot less time being stationary. The trade off here is the speed of driving. Cars offer an unlimited amount of speed, while buses do not. An optimal economic solution should exist in which the economic actors, i.e. people will figure it out after a lot of trial n error.

A crucial factor in self driving cars no one mentioned, is the data the machine uses to drive should be incorruptible. A blockchain which supports billions of tps, offer a solution to that.

Additionally road variables change over time, and data should change as well. Economic actors, not just people should feed the machines with updated data every day. That means that a marketplace of information is required, in which the most efficient economic actors with the best accuracy and the best reputation are rewarded, and the worst economic actors, who's data aggregation cause a lot of crashes, fall off the market.

A marketplace of information, doesn't exist for the time being, so there is no chance for self driving cars to be safe and effective.

20 people minibuses already exist. Examples include Mercedes-Benz Sprinter.

I'm about as big of a fan of mass transit as you can get, but this is completely overblown.

That's $1Bn for the hundred largest cities in the world.

Assuming even 40% of that went to the US, that's $1Bn for the top 40 cities. That leaves out 22 entire states [0], and like 75% of the population...

Look to NYC, LA, and SF for what $1Bn gets you... It's about 1 mile of subway [1]. And it takes close to 15 years to build.

We wouldn't all be riding around on space elevators with materially better lives if this money was invested in subways or trains.

If you spent $40Bn on busses - you'd have to spend another $250Bn to pay people to ride them...

Self-driving cars will eventually change cities. I think there's evidence it's already starting to happen.

I don't think this money would've been better spent on trains, and definitely not busses.

What else are you thinking of?

I'd be interested in a better cost breakdown of bike lanes and how much it would cost to get a significant percentage of people in cities biking & scootering around - but I'm skeptical, and also, it's not mass transit!

NYC installed 29.5 miles of protected bike lanes last year [2]. I can't find the cost, but next year they're asking for $3.1Bn to build 500 miles of protected bike lanes, among many other things [3]. I know it costs less than $1M to pave a two-lane road one mile [4] - so a protected bike lane should be well under $1M - but then everything costs way more in the city...

If protected bike lanes cost substantially less than $5M per mile in the city (like $0.5M) - $40Bn could get you pretty far!

That's 80k miles of protected bike lanes! That's about 4x the amount of total bike lanes we have now.

Bike commute rates in NYC are decent (by US standards). I'd love to see a study on how much bike commute rates increased after these new lanes were completed.

Copenhagen has only 240 miles of bike lanes and 600 miles of paths for 70 square miles and 750k people [4]. That's enough to get 62% of people commuting by bike [5]!

For the top 40 cities, you'd be looking at like 80k miles of protected bike lanes for 4000 square miles and 81M people. That's better than Copenhagen!

That could potentially get you close to 62% of people biking instead of driving - just depends on if that many people live within 5 miles of work / school / going out. 5 miles being the average commute distance in Copenhagen [6].

62% of cars off the road in the top 40 US cities would DEFINITELY change my life for the better - but I'd be surprised if we could even get 15%. Still, it's something you could do in a couple of years - and for $40Bn - would definitely be worth it. But it's decidedly not mass transit.

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/vividmaps.com/map-of-largest-me...

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyre...

[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/cyclingintheci...

[3] https://www.6sqft.com/council-wants-additional-3-1b-to-build...

[4] https://homeguide.com/costs/asphalt-driveway-cost#:~:text=Co....

[5] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-07/copenh...

[6] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-07/copenh....)

How far has the $100bn spent on self-driving cars moved the needle?

I don't think you're refuting the parent post so much as lamenting the difficulty of doing anything "infrastructure" in today's America.

There are lots of places all over the world where $1B would make a big difference in many, many people's lives -- and where people eagerly ride the busses they actually have, which are often not that nice.

Do we need things to work in the USA for them to be worth doing?

It's not government money for the most part, these companies would not have put it into public transportation if they didn't work on self driving cars

But you could say that about a lot of things. Instead of going to Starbucks you could have fed a starving African for a week.

Instead of wasting research money on computer networking, you could spend it on stamps and envelopes.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But you don't know what's going to come out of that research before hand.

According to the UN, it's enough to save over 40million lives (for almost two years)

We have our priorities all twisted.

And what after those 2 years?

Same question applies to self-driving research.

The knowledge gained is forever. Once we learn something in science and engineering…

… it vanishes when the companies fold?

Unlikely. The knowledge is with the employees, filed patents, etc.

in fact, the information is probably constantly leaking out of the company. It’s hard to keep secrets.

Try taking 2-3 young children on crowded public transport. What works for you can be pretty exclusive.

It wasn't your money.

It's a non-trivial amount of our society's wealth, doesn't really matter who owns it in regards to talking about it's use. Just like we can talk about how spending a billion hours on reality TV is probably not an amazing use of time. It's not our time, do what you want, but you can still talk about it.

Having been the victim of public transport for the first 30 years of my life: nope. You just can’t polish a turd. (Maybe other countries can but here in Germany it’s a lost cause and you can’t make individual mobility expensive enough for me to ever take public transport again).

In Minneapolis, our billion dollar tram has become a rolling homeless shelter.

As a counter-anecdote, I’ve been using public transport exclusively for 35 years (since first grade) in Helsinki, London and New York, and never felt like I’m a “victim” of anything.

I only ever take a car for trips outside the city.

Indeed, and I think you’re quietly pointing at the nub of the problem: if you like in a major city or sufficiently close to one of its public transport ‘spokes’, and you want to travel to somewhere also covered in a similar manner (be that short- or long-distance) public transport is usually somewhere between great and acceptable. As soon as you fall outside that usability window, it often becomes close to unusable.

(One exception: local countryside bud services can sometimes be really valuable for local travel; but they often don’t link well with other public transport modalities, IME.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com