Comment by nuancebydefault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nuancebydefault | Hacker News Reader

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nuancebydefault

Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.

What will happen is:

Companies will buy fleets of self driving cars.

The best self driving cars will be too expensive for most people to buy.

People will just pay one of those companies for transportation services.

The transportation - serving companies who will use the cars in the most efficient way will survive. They will use AI to optimize the usage of the fleets.

Regulators (governments) will tax the companies per km / time interval / peak hours.

People will pay more if they want to travel alone or want to travel in a straight line. They will pay more if they want more exact timing.

Roads will be safer because they will communicate with the cars and the cars will communicate with other cars.

There will be manned vehicles that will help relieve any obstructions.

In other words, given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.

> Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.

This is not necessarily a given; after all, most Americans have other little-utilized equipment that nobody bothers to try to "rent out" to maximize usage. Think - washing machines, dish washers, lawn mowers, snow blowers, etc. In fact, there's an entire industry built around storing little-used equipment (storage units).

And we have high-usage vehicles transport already, they're called taxis and they're at use in most major cities; the AI cannot save MORE than the cost of the driver without some magical accounting.

Most of those things are dirt-cheap compared to a car. A better analogy would be a boat or an RV in a northern climate. Even those tend to be priced roughly in line with a higher end car (where you're more likely to find full self driving).

> Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.

I don't really follow the argument. I don't think of my car as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think of it as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly a necessary cost of living (commuting for work, shopping) and partly for leisure (visiting friends and family, going out on the town, road trips). It makes very little sense to me to "want to be on the road as much as possible," especially considering that most of the depreciation for when I eventually sell it or trade it in is likely going to be based on the odometer rather than the calendar.

> I don't really follow the argument. I don't think of my car as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think of it as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly a necessary cost of living (...)

This means you'll end up not owning a car at all. Like with housing, those who look at it as investment game outcompete and drive up prices for those who just want a place to live in and call their own.

Except there needs to be natural demand and short enough supply. You’re viewing them like its early 2020 where people were buying up cars and selling them used at a marked up price somehow. People really be trying to treat everything as a profit nowadays

> ...given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.

And if you mix together "modern American government" and "billions of dollars at stake for mega-corporations" - just how close to zero is the real-world probability of those "proper tax rules" being made and maintained?

Shortly after we get self-driving cars widely available, most municipalities will have trolly busses that run the grid so that the most you need to wait is like 2 minutes. At which point, a substantial amount of people aren't going to pay $20 to get from A to B when you can get there slightly slower for $2.

The wages of the driver are hardly the limiting factor of busses right now. We could easily have many more in operation, but we don't, because running an empty bus is very expensive.

Is this true?

That's a legitimate question I haven't done the research on this. It would seem though that usually it's a municipal employee, probably a union job, so probably paid pretty well (relative to say an uber driver). Also that cost for the driver would be double if you half the size of the bus and run them twice as much which would be a better experience for passengers. It would seem like the cost of drivers could be a real impact but this is me being handwavy I haven't crunched any numbers.

It's completely false. Bus wages and pensions are the majority of expenses and BY FAR the largest line item.

The average bus only drives less than miles in cities like NYC, Chicago, and LA per day.

They get >6 MPGe. Fuel is about $65 per day or less. The cost of the vehicle financed probably averages less than that - and should definitely be less than $85 per day. Maintenance and insurance are peanuts. Parking should be quite expensive, but they usually have pieces of land worth tons of money they already own and aren't going to sell. Practically, it's close to $0.

A driver for 12 hours per day costs >$360 without factoring in pensions. With a pension it's >$450.

The reality of the situation is bus fare is currently less than $2. If you get rid of the driver, it's gonna cost a lot less than $2. If you can make trollies ubiquitous, a huge potion of the population isn't going to take taxis anymore (or drive themselves).

According to the NYC MTA[1], there are close to 6k buses in the fleet with 1.2M riders per day. That's over 200 riders per bus per day. With each paying a $2.75 fare, you are making about enough to cover your estimated costs.

I think the problem is not the cost of the bus but the organisation of the city's infrastructure. The bus could be a viable option for a lot more people -- far more than 200 per bus per day -- they just don't structure the roadways to maximise bus use but rather to minimise it. If there isn't a dedicated lane for buses (physically separated since NYPD cannot or will not enforce painted separation) then buses will go at least as slow as traffic, along with regular stopping, making it a less attractive option to driving or cabbing. It's pointless to operate the system this way and very cheap to fix it, where fixing it would make everyone's lives so much better as explained in this video with the extreme example of the Bahamas [2]

[1] https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz6FeQLuHQ

> Shortly after we get self-driving cars widely available, most municipalities will have trolly busses that run the grid so that the most you need to wait is like 2 minutes.

On what are you basing this?

I grew up in NYC which had the most frequent buses I've seen anywhere in the US, and 10+ minutes on a route was common, far far more on off hours. Plus, that route would only get me so far, so I'd have to change buses.

My ~2 mile trip from my apartment to my elementary school required at least two buses, often three.

> a substantial amount of people aren't going to pay $20 to get from A to B when you can get there slightly slower for $2.

NYC MTA trip fare is $2.75. Atlanta is $2.50.

Are you Chuck Wollery? How are you doing 2 and 2?

As you pointed out - the bussing infrastructure even in NYC is not good - because busses are too expensive, because drivers are the biggest expense by far.

Comparing to a current system limited in service by the cost of the driver to a future system that won't have this meaningless.

And I've got news for you. Your $2.75 ticket wouldn't be $2.75 without a driver.

Additionally, the vast majority of transit rides are covered by a monthly pass, and the average trip price is less than $2.75.

IDT that's the future, and here's why: if you go to any modern skyscraper you'll find that elevators ask you which floor you're going to rather than just which direction. Applying this in 2 dimensions, it becomes obvious that the future is something like Zoox's 4 passenger car running point to point a la Uber pool.

That would be true if you could only have one car on the road per lane. But you can have more...

Even individual companies will drive it to the bottom. Humans out of picture they will drive price to few percentage of margins. Or if we get VC money involved beyond that.

Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t recognize that SDC technology can eventually be applied to busses or smaller transit vans. You can get fancy with dynamic routing (with my fleet of busses and customers asking me to take them from A to B, how do I route the busses to serve the most customers the fastest?) but even just running a SDBus on a fixed route could be pretty convenient. It would basically take us back to the “streetcar suburb” paradigm.

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