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Comment by ertian | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention, if self-driving taxis were ubiquitous and cheap, people would be far less likely to take their own car downtown--or own a car at all. In retrospect, the idea that there's a car sitting idle in a parking spot right in the middle of downtown all day for nearly every person in the area will seem downright insane.

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Congratulations, you just reinvented public transit.

Not really. A lot of people simply don't want to commute in a space shared with others.

Cars are not going anywhere.

What is a street if not a space shared with others? Worse, everybody else on the street (pedestrians, cyclists, ...) who is sharing the street with your car is suffering from you using the car by taking up disproportionally much space, needing disproportionally much maintenance and causing disproportionally much noise.

Imagine an inner city without cars. Cities in which this is a reality are a bliss to be in. And people get in and out just fine.

Well, first, mrshadowgoose has a point: I know a lot of people who would love to take a self-driving car but wouldn't got near a bus.

But also, while I'd love (love!) to see much better, European-style public transit in US cities, it would take a fantastic level of political will, lobbying, and pitching to even begin to happen. For all sorts of reasons, public transit is wildly unpopular in the US, and construction is wildly expensive.

But a company like Tesla could (if they could figure out the FSD part) just roll out self-driving taxis after a few legal tweaks. It's achievable in a reasonable timeframe (once the tech is in place).

The total cost of driving around people individually in cars is substantially higher than the total cost for public transit with similar convenience and significantly higher throughput. (This is including upfront infrastructure investments and maintenance.)

Seems Americans are just too used to staring at a 2 ton steel can in front of them.

> Congratulations, you just reinvented public transit.

Reinvented, but much better. It's the difference between Circuit-Switched vs. Packet-Switched in networking. Trains are extremely inefficient use of resources. They require a dedicated and very expensive path, cannot re-route around problems (e.g. broken tracks or obstructed tracks), and frequently travel at a fraction of their capacity. Properly sized and routed electric vehicles are much more efficient in terms of cost per mile, travel time, and almost any other metric.

Trains are also much safer, more energy efficient and have lower TCO than a car fleet with similar capacity.

> frequently travel at a fraction of their capacity.

The average occupancy of a car with 5 seats is only marginally above 1. So, 20-25%? The average occupancy of a European streetcar is far above that.

> Properly sized and routed electric vehicles are much more efficient in terms of cost per mile, travel time, and almost any other metric.

Just as much as you can optimize those factors in electric cars can you optimize them in trains/trams/buses/...

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