Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.
40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents
We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000
it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now.
Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly…
In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win. Perhaps car ownership will drop.
Somehow, after a decade of hype, it doesn’t seem like driverless cars are the most direct path to solving that problem.
> Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly
I feel like that exists in a lot of places? Not sure what you mean.
If your city doesn’t host a large airport, then it probably doesn’t make sense to have a train system either. And I’m quite confident there’s a bus to the airport in just about any city that has one.
With less than 4 million miles of pure rider only data by relatively early Waymo rollouts in two cities it can be argued there's room for the claims per million miles to climb as the number of deployments rise.
No, human drivers drive on roads beyond selected neighborhoods of Phoenix and San Francisco.
It is unknown how generalizable the results of the study would be beyond the conditions experienced on the roads in the areas Waymo had been deployed in. We might see significantly improved safety or we might not. But given the messaging from Waymo, the presumption would seem to be that performance would be worse in other areas/conditions.
We are talking about relative performance of an automated system vs human drivers. The automated system has been specifically tuned to perform well on a certain set of roads. The point is that there is no reason to assume by default that the system would maintain good relative performance under a drastically different set of conditions.
More crucially, these are 4 million entry level service rollout miles .. a time when the company has highly paid engineers paying scrupulous detailed attention to the condition of the cars and the tuning of the automated responses, with jobs dedicated to the avoidance of PR incidents.
comte7092 has pointed out other factors - but these are not "typical miles" these are the miles before typical sets in - who can say if the stats will be maintained as sensors age and maintainence becomes an after tought in the manner typical of human driven cars.
I hope the figure holds up, I'm commenting here on the apples to oranges issues in the comparison at present.
But that wasn’t the point I was responding to. The point I was responding to was that we need to address 40,000 traffic deaths per year, to which I said it doesn’t seem to be the most direct route there.
Just because self driving cars are safer in some situations doesn’t mean that we will inevitably have that result within a reasonable timeframe and level of investment.
Besides the types of things that reduce human caused accidents would lead to benefits for self driving cars: slower speeds, fewer conflicts, etc.
Compared to the time-frame and investments on which alternatives? It might take 40 years for self driving cars to improve and have enough deployments to significantly reduce the number of accidents, but at least there is a path there and it will happen at some point.
Getting americans to use public transit, requires not only investment in public transit: it requires a cultural shift in how Americans view life. A cheaper solution that can never be delivered is not a good solution, it's just a dream.
There are a whole host of technologies that exist and have been invented to improve safety, that fall short of full self driving. From vehicle design, to improved road designs, and changes is laws (drunk driving being a major example).
Self driving advocates treat it like the messiah that must save us, but there is plenty that can be done to continue to make improvements.
> Getting americans to use public transit, requires not only investment in public transit: it requires a cultural shift in how Americans view life.
I can see why you would have that opinion, but it is an opinion, not a factual statement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/us/pedestrian-deaths-2022...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...
Now compare with the Netherlands: https://youtu.be/5aNtsWvNYKE?t=36
And waymo drives so conservatively to achieve that it drives most drivers around them crazy. No way it would work in Italy, South Korea, India, etc.
Still impressive engineering, but not very practical or economic unfortunately,
ETA: Replace all cars.
So as long as we will have cars, we might as well make them safer.
> getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win.
I will say that this is still far away and the goals are orthogonal. We have electric cars now, the technology is proven. But it will take a generation of cars to replace the existing ICE vehicles. If and when self-driving vehicles are available it will take a generation to replace existing ones.
Ew. This is so flawed.
What is china’s car ownership per capita? Trips taken per day?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
China has 2 cars for every 10 people (#99 in the world), while the United States has 9 cars for every 10 people.
While China buys a lot of cars (duh, they have a population of over a billion), they would buy even more if they had the dismal public transit of the US.
Of course public transit replaces cars.
Another fun fact: you would need 15 lanes of highway to handle the same amount of passenger load as a two-track subway tunnel. Manhattan as we know it would be physically impossible to exist if public transit “couldn’t replace cars.”
Certainly true for some cases. For the trains I'm familiar with, the parallel road carries many times more passengers in a single lane over the course of an hour.
Which train and road would that be? That's either a severely underused rail line (if the road is busy enough to be congested - and if not, it doesn't matter), or one that prioritises freight.
Yet they have almost the same number of cars as the US, with 4 times the population.
I’m a fan of bullet trains myself. I think it’s way smoother than flying and I wish the US could build some high speed rail. But the reality is, even in places with great public transit like Singapore, people still use cars.
What matters is that cars kill people and automated safety systems (up to and including self-driving) can make them safer.
This sounds like the Nirvana fallacy [1]. The dilemma is not about eliminating all cars. It is whether we should invest in public transit which would also reduce noise, pollution, energy usage, or in self driving cars, which won't fix any of those.
Eliminate, no -- but alleviate, definitely. Fewer cars on the roads means safer roads. By offering viable public transportation it does not really matter if everyone has or needs a car -- people will choose to use it less on average.
Finland has a comparable number of vehicles per capita to the US and is a sparsely populated country where large portions of the population need cars to get where they need to go. Yet Finland has 5 traffic-related deaths per 100,000 motor vehicles per year while USA has 16.5 -- over three times as many. I would wager this is both because of better road quality with safety built in (like pedestrian safety features and roundabouts, etc.) as well as less use of those vehicles thanks to functional public transport.
Admittedly I live in Canada, and in my city we have a fairly functional subway and bus system. But nowhere near as good as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan and etc. It’s such a bummer every time I visit those countries and see how they’re ran, and then travel somewhere like California or Washington to see the opposite when it comes to transit. I know not everything is the best, but I also don’t know how we can fix this problem when majority of people are against the fix.
Oh well, sorry for the rant.
India is a democracy, as is Japan where public transit is fantastic. Many European countries also have very good transit. The problem isn't the type of government, it's the people and culture political will. Americans just don't want public transit enough to build and live in cities where it would work well. Not driving everywhere in a car is unthinkable to most Americans.
Especially getting to Beijing South in the morning with luggage, a taxi or hiring a car via didi is the best way to go. To get to Beijing south, how many transfers do you need to drag your luggage through? So let's see, from where I used to live with the lines in place now: I would need to drag my luggage to Tuanjiehu on line 10, take the loop around to jiaomenxi, and then take the line 4 up to beijing south. Or I could pay 50 kuai for a taxi from my apartment complex gate to the front door of the train station.
Also, Beijing is a huge city. So what if the "subway network is top notch". It is still frequently 45 mins more travel time on slow subway for final destination.
Well, there isn't political will. If you feel like trying to develop that political will, have at it.
US also has almost 350 miles of high speed rail, not 0. The Northeast is where it’s all concentrated with Acela being the fastest.
If you live in a major city in the States it’s often way easier and faster to take rail. In Seattle for instance you can beat a driver to the airport every time during traffic. Hell even the LAX station in Los Angeles of all places will be available end of 2024 and that’s the most notorious car centric city in this country. The subway in LA keeps seeing ridership growth. I don’t even rent a car when I visit anymore. Everywhere I want to go is serviced.
Lastly NYC is one of the most serviced by transit areas in the world? Are you living in an alternate universe?
Mass transit is the solution. It’s vastly cheaper to build, moves more people, and far safer. I’ve got a highway interchange by my house that’s taken a decade to finish while they’ve ran rail and built four stations in that time. That’s a perfectly fine pace given our slow building system with environmental review and the like.
My 4 mile commute from Hoboken to midtown took anywhere from 45 minutes to 90, if there was a problem. Try getting to the East Side of Manhattan.
See people fighting congestion pricing for driving? If mass transit was good, few would drive into the island
And mass transit adoption keeps growing for the workforce. Because sitting in a car in traffic sucks that much. So we make self driving cars and all those people pile into personal vehicles? That only exacerbates the problem.
The reality of it all is extremely painful
However when I go into Manhattan for non work related activities, my wife and I (and nearly all my friends) always drive.
The NYC transit situation is decent and tolerable, but still very unpleasant. If I want to enjoy a night in the city, the last thing I want to do is deal with the transit system.
Dealing with mild to moderate traffic within the confines of my (admittedly pretty nice) car is not very painful at all.
We look at the traffic situation before going in. If it's terrible, we just cancel our plans in Manhattan and do something else.
I never bothered with taking the train to the Beijing airport either, even though it existed for much of time there. Taxi was still more convenient. If we are talking Tokyo or Paris, ok, no problem, but it doesn’t make sense in a lot of cities for a lot of connections to be made.
I spent most of my 45 years of age in public transport, I only had a car for a year and a half (and a total lemon, I don't miss that). Yet I say: beware of people who speak of THE solution.
For mass transit to work, population density matters. At least in the EU, there is a trend of people being priced out of capital cities to the surrounding countryside, where the population density drops to levels where providing extensive bus service becomes uneconomical. An important limitation is availability of bus drivers. People are loath to take lives of 40 strangers in their hands + rise out of their beds at 4am, and you can only pay them so much before exhausting the budget. And it is not just question of "more money". Prague, the capital of Czechia, spends about 33 per cent of its municipal budget on public transport and it still has a shortage of drivers.
Reliable self-driving, which was the original topic of this discussion, would be a huge boon to public transport. It would reduce hourly costs and address the driver shortage (which becomes especially acute in flu season etc., where too many people call in sick at the same time).
For mass transit to work better, we need to increase population density, and that means killing of the NIMBY phenomenon. Plenty of people, at least where I live, don't mind living in condos, as long as these are safe and clean. They are just priced out of cities by lack of development and the consequent soaring of prices.
Edit: interesting that this post attracted two downvotes, but no rebuttals. Is public transport such a sacred object for some?
From my personal point of view, it is a service like any other, and obviously cannot work efficiently everywhere.
Public transport would also be a huge boost to reliable self driving .. some years of only having to follow already established routes is a perfect middle step to self driving everywhere.
Vehicles can be tuned to the specific trouble spots of specific routes, there is a reduced need to deal with unfamiliar routes, in a number of cities public buses have established right of way | dedicated bus lanes, there's a pool drivers who can be migrated from driving a single bus to remote over watch of several buses, etc.
Self-driving vans, with all the fancy LIDAR, where people hop on and hop off, that only drives on specific paths that have been excruciatingly mapped and well-worn.
Basically a little bus without a driver that can adjust its route on the fly.
As a user, you'd be able to get picked up a little closer to your location rather than having to walk to "The Bus Stop", you wouldn't be at the mercy of a set schedule, and it would be much cheaper than a taxi/rideshare because IIRC 70% of their cost is the human labor, and the cost is not split among multiple individuals.
Crucially, they would also use our existing road infrastructure, so you don't have to lay down train tracks, streetcar lines, build dedicated bus lanes, etc.
And quiet. The biggest problem is noise pollution causing problems. I want to watch my TV or listen to music at an enjoyable level while also not disturbing my neighbors. The problem with the US is the incentives are not aligned to make sound proofing a requirement, making for bad living conditions and bad neighbors.
I think there's going to be greater awareness about noise pollution in the coming decade or so (it's hugely detrimental to human health), and it's worth paying attention to if you're looking to buy a place.
Yes public transport is one of the key talismans in the church of the utopian left.
Public transport in the US is in a terrible state and needs to be massively expanded and funded, yet it cannot solve all of the transportation requirements of our massive economy and geography.
Given the size of the US, 350 reads as very close to 0.
>Lastly NYC is one of the most serviced by transit areas in the world? Are you living in an alternate universe?
Perhaps the one where e.g. underground transit is an ill-maintained, dirty, and often dangerous experience.
A funny way to interpret this would be "a mile of high speed rail per every million people"!
The only downside is almost none of these systems are in operation 24/7, with the exceptions being NYC and Chicago. If you have a very early or late arrival / departure, you just can't use them at all without waiting several hours at the airport. I wish more cities could add reduced frequency night service, something like maybe 1 train every hour or hour and a half.
As a somewhat cherry-picked example, if someone in the southern part of my city wants to take a train into the city center, the last good route with only one transfer leaves at 10 pm. At 10:40pm Google maps suggests a route with 3 transfers that takes almost twice as long (and includes the commuter rail which is a separate, more expensive ticket). The last possible option is at 11:40 and takes 3 times as long as the normal route. If we want people to use trains and subways, the service hours have to be greatly improved.
Sea-Tac is 22 minutes from my house by car, during the worst traffic it is usually around 35 mins (I don't have to drive through downtown), and 1 hour 18 minutes by bus and lightrail. I live about 4 miles as the crow flies from the SODO light rail station.
> Mass transit is the solution.
This is only a solution for a large, dense urban environment, and really only a partial solution at that.
San Francisco is already connected via Bart and caltrain can take you to the Bart station before the airport, so you have to transfer. Just like at Oakland where you have to transfer to a tram that links the airport to Bart.
San Jose being connected by train is an egregious bending of the truth. The truth is there is no train to San Jose Airport. There is just a bus.
Acela is not "high speed rail". Maybe to Americans it is, but it really isn't. Let me know when the US can make a real high-speed rail where the train company actually owns and operates the track and can actually maintain a high speed, instead of just going fast on one short little stretch and then calling it "high speed".
I thought the US had legalised those now, so they'll happen as new systems come online.
> In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win.
Why? They're still going to take up as much road space (maybe even more, since they'll be moving around empty half the time). They'll still be spewing particulate pollution around our city centres - maybe more since they'll be heavier. They'll be consuming vast amounts of rare earths that could deliver much more benefit if used for electric bikes.
Self-driving electric cars will deliver at best a marginal safety improvement and a marginal reduction in whole-life emissions. There are much better ways to improve cities, transport, and lives: road-use pricing, bicycle priority at junctions, better parking laws, building more transit...
Excellent suggestions. Road-use pricing could easily be added as a rule to self-driving fleets. Self-driving cars could always yield to pedestrians and cyclists. There will be a glut of empty parking spaces when self-driving cars are common. Self-driving cars are transit.
They could, but they will be unpopular with users if so.
> There will be a glut of empty parking spaces when self-driving cars are common.
The self-driving cars still have to go somewhere. If they're not parked then they're going to be taking up space on the roads instead, which might be worse.
> Self-driving cars are transit.
Not really. In terms of space use they're still cars. https://www.cyclestreets.net/location/21715/cyclestreets2171...
And energy
Why should trains be the only alternative to driverless cars? What is difficult about buying a few buses and start taking people to the airport, today?
The only time I take a bus is when I need to take a transfer from the airport parking to the terminal, that part usually takes longer than my drive to the airport. I'd gladly pay another 10-20$ for a valet to park my car from the terminal to avoid those busses.
People want self driving cars so bad because driving everywhere sucks (and sitting on public transit sucks too). Routine travel is mundane and boring.
They're totally fine experiences.
Which can be much of the time, but isn’t always for sure.
NYC subway is also nice when the buskers aren’t blaring music at 140db right next to you and daring anyone to confront them.
Still usually better than driving, depending on where you’re going. Sometimes even faster?
Women and children might not agree though.
Dunno about the Tube but women and children routinely take the Paris Metro.
>grifters
This just means you look like a tourist.
Most women I knew in those cities preferred riding with friends or a boyfriend, some even took taxis to avoid the metros at night if they couldn’t. But that was also a crapshoot, because some taxi drivers are even worse and then you definitely won’t have anyone else around.
Most moved out of the cities entirely when they got kids for ‘safety issues’, among other things. Like the logistical nightmare that is navigating the systems with kids and all their stuff. A few stayed and got cars.
Very few systems the public seems to consider generally safe enough to send kids unattended - Zurich, Tokyo, Singapore are the only ones that occur to me.
Tokyo has a serious subway groping issue though, fwiw.
Grifters - truly, such a comforting thing to say that ensures everyone will feel the apparent warm fuzzies you seem to have?
Notably, they left me alone after some eye contact, but seemed to have no issue harassing female parisians indefinitely while the cops ignored them. None of the women seemed surprised. None of them seemed happy about it either. I didn’t see any unsolicited touching though, so that’s good!
C’est la vie?
I’m just calling bullshit on the public transit is perfect fairytale. Which is common here.
Both have pros and cons, and depending on who you are and what you’re doing, the balance will shift to different places.
How many people die when you do that? An AV stopping cause it encounters a weird situation is failing safe, and it is the correct thing for it to do. And yeah, they normally stop if you maliciously attack them. But human drivers also stop if you blow out their tires, or hit the driver with a well aimed rock. Car safety is not judged on malicious attacks, we are not talking about autonomous tanks.
Depending on how you do it and where, potentially everybody in the car.
I don't buy this. Specially in cities. You have roads, buy some buses and hire and train good bus drivers. Put some poles as bus stops. Lots of countries have done it in less than a decade.
More cars that suck at navigating weather is not the answer to traffic problems.
> 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents
If reducing traffic death would be a priority, we could reduce the speed limit (would also help with resource consumption and climate change). We could also have smart phones go into sleep when in motion. That's a trivial technical problem. A much bigger challenge would be to allow smart phone usage for passengers while in moving vehicles, but until that is solved, cry me a river. Using a smart phone in a moving vehicle isn't a god-given right.
More people living contributes to a greater labor pool, which reduces wages. It leaves a greater demand on housing, increasing costs and making so many peoples’ lives more difficult.
If you’re working class, an extra 40k deaths/year is making the world better for you.
IMO the main risk around self-driving cars is that it will perpetuate terrible city design. Hopefully the tide will turn towards sane urban policy soon.
"Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable benefits to moving the right atoms to the right places at the right time.
There are many form factors that moving atoms can take, only one of which looks like a car. The car is a good place to start for many reasons, including everyone needing transportation, existing infrastructure, existing culture, wasted time commuting, etc.
Now think about what comes after all "cars" are driverless. Their form factors change, roads change, infrastructure changes, proximity between people changes, life changes. Roads are like arteries that feed population centers, and if we can reconfigure them without worry about whether humans can keep up, we unlock whole new ways of living, almost like unlocking new organs with vastly different structures in the super-organism that is society.
The very story of life itself is evolving to move atoms around in new and more complex ways. This is one of the most fundamental and important techs we can invest in.
Please speculate on what some of these ‘whole new ways of living’ might be. I’m struggling to picture it.
I meant this to be sarcastic because we already have this with campers and RV's - but it does sound kind of cool on second thought. Pointless, but cool.
Lovely turn of phrase to describe a whole swath of "why shouldn't this make money" startup ideas. If your goal is revenue, maybe don't base your entire marketing strategy on people with disposable income and decent financial literacy, because once an economic lull hits you're going to be stranded with a whole lot of responsibilities and a huge drop in income.
I keep thinking back to Jupe[1], and how YC actually put their money behind it, as a synecdoche of the absurd and surreal decade we've had with all that money flying around. Some people got very rich on a wish and a promise -- maybe some think that's laudable, I think it's sociopathic.
We have divided ourselves into neat little nuclear family boxes and thrown ourselves together with a bunch of other randos in neat little boxes, with the unstated assumption that the family unit is the end all be all of human lived experience.
This has separated us from our physical (atom-based) communities, to many ill effects including our friends and extended family being further away. This makes having and raising families more difficult than it should be, as we work rando jobs in order to hire rando nannies to do the job that a community otherwise would.
A lot of this comes down to proximity, and available space for people to group up in spaces larger than apartments or single family homes. We've simply lost a part of our daily lived connection to our close community, and being connected to them via only bits is a poor substitute.
When atoms and bits are easy to move around, we have the best of both worlds, pushing the frontier out for having a community experience and having the positive aspects of what we have today.
Even in high density car-less environments with great transport, you've still got all the attention and friction entailed with being on public transport and last mile issues walking to/from it (effectively traveling through 'far community' to get to 'close community'). This means more need to be co-located to avoid these through 'far community' journeys, which limits ones options for finding their best life.
Meanwhile radically different automated transport infra could mean things like 'you walk into the elevator-like transport connected to your house and 5 minutes later you're at your friends house'. No crazy subway, no need for attention, just hop in the pod and do what you'd already be doing at home like reading or work.
This means you could go from ~20,000 people within 10 mins of you to ~100,000 (or insert your number). And ultimately this means more ways that we could optionally have larger social units, because there would be more 'space' for them to live within 10 mins of you.
E.g. if my friends wanted to all live right next to each other they'd need to find enough land that it'd be like 3 hours away and a huge inconvenience for anyone living in a city. So the only people who would do that are crazy committed to the commune life, and thus quite distant culturally too. If it was 30 mins away instead due to better transport, culturally we'd see a lot more mixing of different types of lifestyles.
I think all this represents a new way of living. It's not near future stuff I admit, but driverless tech is the next on the 'move atoms' tech tree that brings us toward these opportunities.
You need to explain why all the other times and ways we have tried what you propose did not work, and what will be different this time.
Start, perhaps, with "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".
Among other things, a means of allowing proximity to be less of a factor allows us to explore different sized dwellings due to a greater area of possible land within proximity to us, which allow for a broader range of different sized social units, which allows for some relief of those issues as people can choose to live in more ways according to their preference (e.g. community/kibbutz, loose structure of friends nearby, big family nearby, nuclear family, anonymous in city).
You can literally break it down to a tradeoff of cubic meters of space for a social unit vs time/effort it takes to get to things you want. If you want a commune of X families and a convenience store within Y mins, more efficient transport makes those numbers, on average, work better for people. Maybe it's 60 minutes out of town for 5 families to get together, but only 15 minutes for 3 families, based on ease of getting shared property at a reasonable cost. Do you see where I'm going with this?
If you wanted to go further you could say ease of moving atoms lets you even rethink aspects of dwellings (why we cache food in a fridge, instead of having what we need dropped off to us in a few minutes) and notions of community property (a 'tool/whatever share' program among an opt-in group), and ultimately how we pick what infrastructure serves whom. Lots and lots of implications to unpack when we move atoms around more cheaply, and many of these ideas unlock with small changes. See apps/services that only work economically in cities but not suburbs for a modern example.
Not sure how this relates to The Tyranny of Structurelessness, maybe you're assuming I meant something that I didn't?
The Tyranny of Structurelessness is directly relevant to communities of interest. Hippy communes. Co-housing projects. Cults both secular and religious. Idealistic people who don't understand what is actually necessary. We've been here before, many times. Read up on the 1960s and 70s. We don't live very differently now to then, and self-driving cars won't change that for at least a hundred years.
The argument I am making is that there is benefit to having social units of >1 families be easier to form in modern society, and better transport helps that by relaxing space constraints. In fact, better transport allows us to explore the frontier of connection to close community and the connection to the amenities and cultural richness of modern living. It's an unlock of scale from what was possible before, which means it is at least partly uncharted territory.
I never said 'and these social units should ignore governance', or define exactly how these social units should operate or how close their ties should be. Obviously they should be mindful of power and define explicit ways to work together, and arguing that this is simply an interest vs kinship category thing is limiting to the point of not saying much. And of course it doesn't happen tomorrow; my argument is this is the way it happens and thus it's worth going down this tech tree.
One thing to consider is that scale has a profound impact on possibility, both in cultural normalization and discovering the appropriate models of governance for a given situation, which are much more likely to emerge when operating at a larger scale. So in turn we a) don't get enough examples to have replicable models emerge, and b) we only get groups that are pretty out there that want to do the thing, and these people tend not to be great models of generalizability because they're culturally far different from the norm. The examples you give are the extreme cultural outliers, not regular people. A weird hippie commune isn't for me, but a place where my four best friends and I can raise kids with some shared outdoor space and nannies and kitchen all within 20 mins of the city? Sign me up yesterday - that's resource pooling at its best, and a way to live more efficiently and sustainably as a species.
A recent analog is the increased sophistication of funding structures for early stage startups, from clunky & predatory term sheets to convertible notes and SAFEs. This happened as a result of the normalization and scale of the early stage ecosystem. Before then early startups were weird and only attracted the types that were ok pushing against the grain or were too rich to feel the pain. Now it's been around long enough and at enough scale to be normal enough to provide an easy on-ramp for good people and good ideas to make waves in the world, not just a place for the elite and the weirdos.
Zach Klein's thread here is a good read on the on-the-ground constraints of proximity and amenities for larger social units: https://twitter.com/zachklein/status/1422293114480250880
And we can point to societies that were following a similar path, like the Netherlands, and then decided to stop and focus on a less car dependant society. It appears to be working over there.
Like it's not any one thing, but a self driving car really changes a lot of things about how cities and transport are designed. Interesting thing is that it's harder to have a self driving car now than it would be in 20 years, because as they get closer and closer, the roads are going to adapt to them.
Trains are enormous, costly, and extremely inflexible to changes in demand. Have you ever seen a train car small enough to only carry a single person? The existence of 4000lb cars and 200000lb trains is because we lacked the ability to quickly and safely move only the necessary atoms from A to B, so we had to bundle them up with a ton of other atoms until it became practical to implement. We can free ourselves from this constraint.
Self-driving cars are solving an unnecessary problem, if that makes sense. US made some truly terrible design decisions, and self-driving is sort-of doubling down on the disaster.
I think the question here is what is a practical roadmap to building better cities with the ones we've got?
An extreme distillation of my pov is: roads&rubber wheels > rails&metal wheels.
I believe roads&rubber are just far better for A-B transport by so many measures, but most importantly that it is an extremely flexible connective tissue because it can be incrementally and cheaply added to or changed.
We can make the big, slow, expensive changes to add rail, and that may (mostly) work (for some), but it is extremely unlikely to happen at scale because it essentially means upending how car-centric cities are designed using top-down process or fiat.
Meanwhile cities are living breathing things pulled in many directions by many forces. The question is whether those forces can be harnessed to bring cities toward what we want them to be. I think roads&rubber do that better, because they allow bottom-up, rapid incremental change that shares costs with citizens (by way of vehicles) and does not require anywhere near the level of commitment or consensus that rail does.
I think it's reasonable to assume that if self-driving tech starts showing up in 10 years, that in 30 years we'll begin to see several changes that push us towards our goals for cities:
* There will be cities that require only self-driving cars in city limits, which will begin the alteration of the rules of traffic flow, since rules can be reprogrammed instantly
* product (car ownership) will give way to utility as all tech does over time
* There will be roads that will be converted to mixed use (parklets, mini-parks, bike lanes, walking) and be limited to only smaller micromobility-like vehicles. An early version of this is SF's 'slow cities' streets in each neighborhood that have been cut off to (most) cars.
* Max size requirements & road size changes will start to be palatable, with roads being recaptured, property lines & zoning shifting, etc.
* longer commutes/travel would use (larger) vehicle types that specialize in long distance comfort whereas short commutes would use (smaller) vehicles that have higher throughput in high density areas.
And more. This is the kind of payoff we'd start getting by investing in self-driving tech today. And these are things that can be done in a lazy and politically simple way, making changes only as they make sense in the moment, not on long planning schedules and anticipations of ridership and population proximity in 25 years.
I doubt that in the same ~30 year span that you could get most cities to install more than a few light rail corridors, and they'd probably not have sufficient throughput and frequent enough stops. We'd have to get like 5-10x better/faster at big infrastructure projects including politically challenging things like eminent domain to get comparable results.
LA metro is a good example: remember the metro construction scene at the end of the movie Speed? That was 30 years ago, and in that time metro has eased maybe ~5% of total traffic and you still absolutely need a car to get around LA. How do we get the other 95%?
The ideal answer in my mind is neither cars nor rail, but a system that operates a lot like rail but flexibly sized and individualized, and using the basic roads&rubber approach of cars.
The technologically enabled cities of 100 years from now are not beautifully interconnected reorganized and optimized. They will be literal fortified pockets of safety - gated neighborhoods with autonomous access control. Those living here spend most days completely within the walls. These pockets are surrounded and vastly outnumbered by slums. Ones whose inhabitants have neither inter-generational wealth nor the means to accumulate even a fraction of what it would take to rise beyond their lot. The labor market has long ago dried up with the onset of more efficient and profitable automation. The inhabitants here are the first to bear the brunt of climate-induced emergencies. Hundreds of thousands regularly die at once as bouts of famine, disease, and natural disasters strike with increasing frequency.
These people subside exclusively on the regular allotment of their sovereign governance. And not all of the governments of the world are quite so motivated to maintain a standard of living. Much of Asia and Eastern Europe has largely unified under or become a puppet state to a single authoritarian state. The European Union has condensed westward and hardened, closing off borders in an attempt to maintain sovereignty amid influx of climate refugees. The United States is an aggressive corporate republic, under which the only legislation to pass in decades is related to military spending, border security, and population monitoring in the name of antiterrorism. Policy is now largely decided in the courts, which corporations have found is the shortest path to pushing their agenda, and also the most reliably fruitful, given enough lawyers and money.
Parts of the Middle East are permanently uninhabitable, and the bits of the Amazon that have not been clear cut are now beginning to succumb to changing climate forces. Sea level has risen considerably, and pacific island and Caribbean nations have been all but wiped out, as their governments realized it no longer made sense to rebuild year after year.
Those living in the slums have access to sophisticated VR/AR technology at affordable rates, even compare to their minimal dole and the informal barter/trade economy that has redeveloped. They create as much content as they consume, in an effort to find some foothold they can capitalize on and create wages.
We vastly underestimate the effectiveness of warfare. Highly mobile drones will be able of surgically eliminate threats in seconds. Direct conflict is rare and pointless. Nation states will focus their efforts on undermining infrastructure of their enemies, or isolating entirely. Information warfare will no longer exist to a meaningful degree because the nations themselves will have near unrestricted control over the information their populace consumes. The military and police will have blurred or fully merged in most governments. Revolts will be put down with ease and erased from public memory.
Education is perhaps perplexingly accessible, to a point. AI tutors work one on one with students, who now are considered anyone under the age of 25. The entrenched elite have access to private cutting edge versions of the same, and if you know the right people you may be able to send your children to a Luddite school, where children learn from physical books and corporeal teachers.
And if automation improves enough that there is no more labor market? I don't think anybody has a good idea what society would come after that. If you asked someone in medieval Europe what they would think would happen with the introduction of guns, they would probably say that the noble class (which was the martial class, that trained for war) would just use it to oppress the peasantry more. Nobody would guess that their introduction would lead to the complete end of the idea of a noble class.
What have drivers done anyway to deserve all this attention? Why try to automate something that involves killing people on-error? It seems any other occupation would be an easier more sensible more realistic target.
I doubt we will ever have effective public transit across the US. It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective. And the price of convenience would be high.
I used to be bullish about autonomous driving but no longer am. Ten years ago it felt like a much safer-than-human computer driver was within close reach. It no longer looks so rosy. I think Waymo’s approach will prove the most successful, and will end up with many of the same constraints as public transit. These companies have been going at it for a long time and have mostly demonstrated just how hard the problem really is. There is a decade of sunken cost for anyone leaving the market now. Would replacing human drivers be cost effective in any reality? I’m unsure.
- point to point in a private vehicle: x time, $y
- to the RT station: x * 1.2, y * 0.3
- to the bikeshare cluster: x * 1.6, y * 0.1
Governments have a role to play in creating the proper incentives here too, ensuring that congestion is properly paid for— every time any road is moving less than 80% of the speed limit that should be considered a failure of policy that it was too cheap to drive on it that day.
Being able to more or less promise a maximum wait time and being able to dynamically scale a bus service in smaller seat increments without the cost per seat going through the roof (I looked up UK coach hire costs breakdowns, and when hiring a 70 seat coach the cost of the driver still added up to about 40% of the title cost including amortisation of the vehicle itself; drop vehicle size and presumably that goes much higher and the per seat costs accordingly), combined with being able to flexibly feed passengers to transit hubs in smaller seat increments on routes where demand can't fill a full size bus all the time could make transit services vastly more convenient.
I hear this all the time and it still makes no sense at all. Population goes where transit allows population to go. Cars resulted in low population density. By getting rid of cars, you get rid of low population density.
As for cost, there is no world in which every person owning an automobile is cheaper than public transit. It's not remotely close. Average cost of private car ownership in the US exceeds 10k a year. That's about 3.4T of private spending, or 14% of GDP. This does not include the cost of roads. A single year of private automobile spending would build 20k miles of high speed rail, even assuming costs were CA HSR high.
I feel like the "low pop density & too big" argument is one of those things that only makes sense if you never consider second-order effects.
Where I live, to get across the city on public transport takes 40 minutes and a bus change. I can cycle it in 20. Replacing human-driven cars with driverless cars is going to make no difference to that.
When I think back to the covid lockdowns and how much nicer and more spacious the city felt with no cars on the roads, that’s what I think cities should be like.
And for rural areas, I understand in the US they have arrow-straight and wide roads pretty much everywhere, but where I live the rural roads even 10 minutes out of the city are very narrow and winding, I’m not sure how well a driverless car would be able to handle that.
Me too! Short of another global pandemic, the best thing to have on the ride beside "no cars" is self-driving vehicles.
It seems like making cars more convenient would induce demand (i.e. add more cars), opposite of what the parent comments desire.
There is a reason city drivers are aggressive, and it’s not just because they’re stressed out. It’s literally necessary to make any forward progress in many cases.
When the cows don’t behave, it’s because they aren’t spherical enough.
Good luck with that. It works, to some degree, when you can control all the variables.
Good luck with that approach when you’re dealing with NYC pedestrians, or Midwest winters, or cyclones/hurricanes, or auto rickshaws, etc. etc.
Having self-driving buses will obviously help in cities. And given the higher momentum, the margin for error is lower for self-driving buses and it's better to start with cars.
If we ignore the question about safety anyway
E-bikes are becoming really popular though, in some places. They're about the same speed as regular bicycles, but much easier and less tiring (/sweaty) to ride for most people, especially on hills. Here in Tokyo, every mother with small children has one now it seems.
• https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=895
• https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=305
• https://youtu.be/ZsrVP7p33Ng?t=605
• https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=807
• https://youtu.be/VWDFgzAjr1k?t=664s
• https://youtu.be/bMJaMy-0ChA?t=268
• https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54?t=448
Freiburg, Germany is nice as well: https://youtu.be/6Vil5KC7Bl0?t=827
We get it, an extremely vocal subset of reddit/HN who lives` in downtown cities likes public transit more than cars.
Anyway, the driverless car pilots are happening in our dense city downtowns. If it was all confined to Palo Alto and other techie suburbs then maybe we wouldn't care as much.
I think I'm an outlier because I like trains, bikes, and cars, but you have to pick the right tool for the job. In the US, new train lines are almost never the right tool.
Focusing on cars so much is to the detriment of all of humanity, hence the common pushback.
As far as I see, this isn't solving a problem as much as it is getting in at the ground floor on a technology that will take even more autonomy away from people.
But be patient. Let more pieces emerge. Let things evolve. Maybe driverless cars will evolve into passengerless engines. Then people own their own passenger cars that are engineless and just hop from one conga line to another to get to their destination.
Once you have driverless solved, you might increase traffic density immensely. Maybe safety goes way up and you can reduce the weight of these vehicles by 500kg. So fuel consumption drops dramatically, road wear drops dramatically, etc. Maybe it allows ambulances to fly down roadways because computers are way better at getting out of the way. Maybe it causes the auto industry to collapse because we go from 3 autos per home, to 0.8 cars per household because you can just summon one whenever you want. Maybe it doesn't do any of this.
The Pony Express was revolutionary, but only lasted 18 months before the telegraph sent it into the history books. Now we have pocket phones. So was the Pony Express a stupid innovation? Or does progress move in zigzag lines?
On average it takes close to twice as long to get from point A to B in SF using public transit than with Waymo. And for the walking portions you're likely dealing with either hills or sketchy areas.
the American Dream requires that each successful American owns a Car (and House, which is another reason American Cities can't be like other country's cities). they don't have to drive it, but since you have to own one, you might as well drive it, right?
places like the uk, germany, china, japan, etc all have working public transit, but they don't have the American Dream, so it's not a valid comparison.
the only people in America who will trade in their Car are the same people who might trade in their American Flag or Gun, which is to say the immigrants, poors, and other false-americans. no true American would ever give up their Car.
Much of NYC, SF, Boston, DC and Chicago are already on board with this. They have been for decades.
It's wannabe-suburbanites constantly driving through dense cities that's the problem, not Chuck from rural Maine driving to the town grocery store.
too many service interruptions, doesn't work late night, underfunded, homeless, getting robbed by youth
However, the level of service is not great; it takes too long between trains, it's really terrible later at night, and it just doesn't go that many places, so you need a car if your source or destination isn't close to the station or possibly a bus line.
I will give them credit though: they finally extended the Silver line all the way to Dulles, so you don't need to take a taxi or special bus there now.
it's possible to rely on it, but there are a lot services outages that will mess you up
For reasons that have nothing to do with cars, the US will never achieve the clean, safe, reliable systems like you see in Asia that are often heralded as the posterchild of ideal public transit.
Wave a magic wand materialize the Tokyo or Seoul subway system into an American metropolis, and within a short period of time, you'll see it devolve. We just cannot have nice things here.
Ironically, the contingent of people that are most aggressive/ambitious about promoting public transit are often the same that are most against taking the (admittedly, not always the most pleasant) steps needed to sell the idea to the masses.
> Ironically, the contingent of people that are most aggressive/ambitious about promoting public transit are often the same that are most against taking the (admittedly, not always the most pleasant) steps needed to sell the idea to the masses.
Like what?
When issues like that are brought up, common responses from the pro-transit crowd include:
"The psycho is completely harmless, just let him be. He has every right to be on the subway too."
"Cars kill people!. The psycho will never hurt anyone!"
"We have to pass Medicare-for-all and pass unconditional housing-first policies first. Until then, we can't/shouldn't do anything to the psycho!"
To be fair:
I am sympathetic with some of the above. However such statements will not help you sell improving/expanding public transit to the American public.
And I know not every pro-transit person is like this. But there seems to be a sizable overlap.
Also, anecdotal, but since the pro-bike and pro-transit crowd also do overlap - I've noticed a lot of people take up commuting or just traveling by bicycle in NYC the past few years. But the most common reason I hear is to specifically avoid taking the subway as much as possible due to dangers.
If the train is not what is driving people to these heinous conditions, then it seems like this imagined problem is some unrelated thing.
Should we not build any shopping malls or parks or roads until we can somehow be certain there won't be a "crazy drug addicted mass-murderer" who goes there? Should we halt the plan to build apartments on the chance a purple dragon might take up residence and burn the town down?
For whatever it's worth, I've personally ridden busses in the US for years, taken subways and trains in no less than half a dozen US cities, and I've been murdered zero times so far. I don't see any reasonable path to "building more trains" leading to my odds of getting murdered going up.
Rather, drugs and the perceived threat of violent crime, as well as general unpleasantness, is what turns off people from embracing public transit. Build a brand new shiny transit system in the USA, and you'll still face the same problems without changing the culture or enforcement. Both will face massive public backslash - again, from many of the same people who are most pro-transit.
You're falling victim to the same mentality I mentioned earlier of handwaving away the perceived concerns people have.
I ride transit nearly ever day. Obviously I haven't been murdered or fallen victim to violence. But I commonly encounter individuals who I make sure I keep away from either because of threatening behavior or simple unpleasantness.
Fortunately, it is within our power to both change the culture and enforce it.
Thought TBF the underlying reason is that America has a relatively abysmal safety net (healthcare being the most terrible of the lot), so you just have more people falling through the cracks onto the street.
So, you're cherry-picking the most extreme leftists to paint an exremely strawmanned version of the US pro-transit movement. You sound like you've either had some awful public transit experiences or perhaps watched a lot of scary news involving addicts on transit.
At least here in Boston, where I've ridden transit regularly for a decade, I feel safe around other riders. The things that make me feel UNSAFE on transit is the state of the physical infrastructure, which is not the result of lefty anti-police rhetoric but is the result of transit underfunding, cost disease with US public works projects, and historically poor management culture at the MBTA. These are hard problems but they are abstolutely all fixable. The new general manager is already showing that management culture can be improved.
Lastly, drug problems and povert in US cities can be clearly linked to the communities which were most devastated by highway expansion and transit defunding. There's a reason that the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to highways look hellish and depressing. So, it seems that you've declared that this problem which is at least in part caused by car culture cannot possibly be fixed by walking back car culture, because, obviously, most pro-transit people also want to disband the police, or so you say.
[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-left-has-never-stoo...
I've obviously never been murdered, nor have I been assaulted on the subway. However I very frequently do encounter people raging in a threatening manner, or otherwise behaving unpleasantly. Are they a real threat? Odds are they aren't unless provoked. Do people perceive them to be a threat? Yes, and valid or not.
You're again falling victim to asking for perfect but impractical solutions. Why can't we (as in, society) fix the issues with American transit in practical, incremental steps that will genuinely improve transit? As opposed to demanding we fix all societal ills - which while genuine, is going to prevent us from ever getting around to fixing transit? As I recall someone saying in another HN thread long ago, the NYC MTA should be running trains, not running a homeless shelter/mental asylum.
But I don't know why that means we can't have nice transit in the US, unless we're just throwing up our hands now and submitting to the most ardent anti-law-enforcement flank of the left.
Flexibility, comfort and convenience are car’s benefits, and people value that. Despite the disadvantages of higher cost or the burden of parking. The article highlights the older people group, which is only getting larger. I can list many other examples in countries with great public transportation.
Talking as someone who loves train and commutes by train, car will always be an important transport option, and any approach that helps improve safety, increase efficiency, lower emission, is a net gain.
[1] - https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/10/car-fleet-growing-fast...
All countries should be moving towards what the Netherlands is doing. Yeah, the 588 cars/1000 people [1] isn't ideal, but it sure beats the 908/1000 of the US.
Also, I think car ownership may not be the right metric to look at, most journeys are probably made by the young - commuting, etc. I wonder what the stats look like when adjusted for miles driven, considering car ownership in the NL for the 18-29 age bracket is low and slowly dropping.
Hmm: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/22/nearly-8-in-10-drivers...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
And yet, that issue hasn't been solved. Instead, rush hour remains a thing.
Taxis, driverless or otherwise, are "public transport".
If your define non-urban center as one far from mass transit to defend the need for cars, it becomes circular logic. It’s probably better to refer to more official definitions, which already reference population density.
Further, mixed use development like corner stores, restaurants, and grocery stores where people live will eliminate a large fraction of vehicle trips entirely.
Contradiction error. Does not parse.
Suburbs as they exist in the US do not exist because they are the best X for any X that exists; but because of top-down central planning. Remove those rules, and the apartments all but build themselves.
Most of the world is more urban than not: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/urban-vs-rural-majority
Think about it as last-mile public transit. Shared driverless taxies (or call them dynamically-scheduled self-driving mini-buses) that take groups of people from pick up points within a few min walk of their homes to transit hubs with trains or express busses.
The last-mile is always a massive weak point for public transit outside of high-density areas. Such a system could entirely replace the scheduled bus routes that slowly meander though low and medium density housing areas (or don't even exist), while also providing much better transit times.
If the system is reliable and priced correctly, it could drive public transit adoption in areas where it currently struggles, and encourage many people in those areas to get rid of their car.
The other advantage of driverless car technology for public transit is extending service to night-time hours. Because that's a common short fall of current system. You could even switch your fleet of self driving taxies from doing the last mile during peek hours to running ad-hoc long distance routes during the night, where they might be cheaper than running a full train.
Allow me to say first of all that I agree we should have denser cities/towns, better public transport to get around, and we should all use it more. But some stats (no citation, these are rattling around in my memory, feel free to fact check). 90% of cars are not utilised 90% of the time. That is insane wastage for energy intensively manufactured, expensive pieces of equipment. 1/3 of city centres are dedicated to parking (probably a US stat). Huge amount of valuable land unlocked.
Imagine unlocking that capital and land inefficiency. Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed. That could be a 2 x 2 x 2 improvement in commuting.
Don't get me wrong, even if we grant the pessimists on FSD that it won't be till 2100, that's a huge prize to be aiming at.
You understand that each car takes up a car-sized plot of (usually very valuable urban) land 100% of the time, right?
And now imagine one of those cars hitting a large pothole
Beyond this, how will there ever be 100% adoption to support that dream? There will always be a desire to have a steering wheel on some cars to go off road. It's really hard to see how that 2x2x2 dream could ever happen.
Or imagine the first time a self-driving car encounters a road-obstacle it flags it so that it can be repaired and all other cars avoid it automatically.
> There will always be a desire to have a steering wheel on some cars to go off road
Very true. People also own horses and burn candles, but these are not our primary means for transportation or lighting.
Doesn't help if you already have a multi-car pile up collision. OP said bumper to bumper at high speeds. Anything goes wrong and physics take over.
> Very true. People also own horses and burn candles, but these are not our primary means for transportation or lighting.
Horses very much still appear on roadways today. The idea that 100% of cars will be AI in the next 50 years I don't think is based in reality. Let's say we somehow get to a point where all cars have a switch to go from AI to not; so for example when on a highway where AI would shine, drivers could switch. What happens when a driver does not switch on the AI system? This is all to say the idea of that bumper-to-bumper driving at 100 mph with very small cars is snake-oil.
> but these are not our primary means for transportation or lighting
Not our primary means, but still a means and used. Again, this goes to the point, if you want that massive efficiency of AI cars, you need 100% adoption, not a single car in a convoy can be human operated. Alternatively, if the AI cars are smart enough to realize that another vehicle is human operated - do the AI cars slow down the entire convoy and then create adequate following distance? At that point, is that _any_ different from driving today?
> Or imagine the first time a self-driving car encounters a road-obstacle it flags
Perhaps the most common road obstacle is falling rocks. They shift around, there are many of them. They are 'repaired' by the bulldozer coming out and moving them all to the side, there is no guarantee that a human won't come out when it is quiet and move the obstacle. So, what is the use to even flag them?
How does an AI car know the difference between a small pothole and a larger one, and one that is even larger that needs to be avoided right now?
Back to the convoy example, let's say a tire blows; the whole convoy then crashes. It's just too easy to picture so many scenarios where a convoy of bumper-to-bumper cars turns into one part junkyard, one part graveyard.
I'm reminded of the promises from those 1950s propaganda videos for building more highways. That reality turned into the gridlock of LA freeways. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnrqUHF5bH8 - "1950s INTERSTATE HIGHWAY PROMO FILM BY AMERICAN ROAD BUILDINGS ASSOCIATION 78014 MD"
It's as simple as public transport + bicycles + dense mixed use zoning.
> Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed.
You're describing trains/trams.
And regardless of how America should have built up rail/bus infrastructure over the last century, the reality is that they didn't, and a lot of its cities are already setup to immediately benefit from large self-driving fleets of cars.
There's still a lot of opportunity to build up high-capacity rail where it makes sense, but that will take decades. Self-driving cars (and busses too!) can deliver utility on a far shorter timescale.
Meanwhile, you could sit down and work out a public transport infra plan using current tech with exact timelines today. Oh and it's proven to work too.
Having to pay those pesky gig workers I think.
Some quick searches, and I found pricing examples for coaches where even for a 70 person coach in the UK, the driver at near minimum wage added up to a fixed cost per bus in the fleet that made up near 40% of the cost per coach per day in hire.
Having the flexibility of picking vehicle size based on route utilisation without the drag of a fixed cost per vehicle that substantial that is independent of number of seats would make it viable to add bus routes in places where average utilisation would be way too low to make it possible to justify today.
In terms of transportation and city design, the US could learn a lot from Europe if it weren't so addicted to cars. It's better for the environment, mental well-being, and a sense of community.
The places where I go most often in Europe, people are nearly as car dependent as in North America. Get out of the big cities and you'll see how regular people live.
And rental cars can't be taken off road. It says so right on the rental contract.
It simply isn't economically feasible to have London or NY style underground networks in most cities.
I don't really get why public transport extremists are so against driverless cars. It would be a huge improvement to transport. Just think of them as small buses that aren't shit if you like.
Rental cars are a pain in the butt. Spend an hour getting one. You need someone to come with you to drive the vehicle you arrived in back or pay for expensive parking or an Uber. Repeat for when you drop it off. They kill all spontaneity.
That being said I would love to have a better train network in the US, just not at the expense of roads.
You don't need to lug groceries around - just get them delivered.
Not OP, but I enjoy and value having personal space when I travel. Being able to reliably sit down is also nice.
It's amusing to see that your immediate reaction to someone else having different values is to accuse them of having a mental illness, and then trying to force your personal preferences onto them.
I think this is a social trust thing - lots of people are just scared of strangers. This is particularly true for high-violence/high-tension societies like the US.
My city (in Australia) is very peaceful and I don't feel bothered or frightened at all by the general public - in fact I like being able to people-watch, feel a certain sense of vibrancy, etc.
Good luck winning people to your side with that.
Are you saying you'd use a car for non-work trips even when the train would be more convenient?
And pay markup + delivery fee + service fee + tip? No thanks
It's easy and convenient:
• https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=43
• https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=65
> I don’t want to walk to a station and then share the space with other people. I don’t want to lug grocery bags around.
Alright, use a bicycle then. I hear ebikes are pretty good these days. Or use a micro car if you must: https://youtu.be/B9ly7JjqEb0?t=101.
> I want to make pit stops.
A bicycle is better than a car for this.
> I want to go off road.
Bicycle again, but if you really wanna use a car the few times a year you may wanna go off road, go ahead.
> Want to live in the suburbs or semi rural areas so I can have a lot of land.
By all means, go ahead. Just as long as you pay in full for all the negative externalities you inflict on everyone else by doing so.
Entirely dependent on the infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8
> What are you going to carry on your bike? Five bags?
Seems like a lot of groceries to buy at a time, but if you really want to: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=379
> I don’t want to go 5 miles away, I want to go 200.
You cover 200 miles every day? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ&t=185s
Regardless, you can own a car for those longer journeys just fine and still make most trips by bicycle.
> With bikes and walking, your world is small.
Yeah, that's why public transport is important too. Cars as well, although deprioritized.
> Electric cars powered by renewable energy get rid of most of the negative externalities.
They get rid of some of the noise and almost all of the harmful exhaust. That's about it. They're still 2 ton+ massive steel cages that are incredibly dangerous to everyone else, take up a ridiculous amount of space, and require extremely expensive infrastructure.
As for the rest, sure, I'm not really criticising your particular choices, it sounds like you live in a rural area where a car is necessary anyway. However, there's no way for everybody to be able to live like you do. There are just too many people. We need to live with long-term sustainability in mind.
"Lack of good public transit" is code for "crazy, violent and antisocial people in American cities", which is not a problem USA is willing to solve.
The rest of the world doesn't care much about driverless cars.
Mass transit in batches has its own major disadvantages, and I’d prefer to obsolete it than have to settle for it.
It's likely that self-driving cars will eventually be better drivers than real people. Obviously, it's not like that at this point, but AI gets quite a bit better every year.
Think about the number of man-hours people spend behind the wheel. Taxi drivers are automated, and people who own cars and do something else while in their cars besides operate the car. It's a huge stress and efficiency boost for society.
Supposedly Google has spent $1.1bn between 2009 and 2015 [0], and Waymo has raised $5.5bn in outside funding, supposedly last valuing it at around $30bn. Cruise is apparently on track to burn ~$2bn/yr. Getting reliable figures on actual dollars invested to date on projects is much harder unfortunately. However, it seems like overall it's in the range of billions and likely less than $10bn for any individual project. [1]
As a few benchmarks, I was curious about the cost of the California HSR, Caltrain electrification, and the recent SFMTA Central Subway project.
The SFMTA Central Subway project was a 1.7 mile extension of an existing T line, and cost $1.95bn.
The California HSR's initial 171 mile segment is estimated to cost $35 billion with the final system estimated to be well north of $100bn.
The Caltrain electrification electrified 51 miles of the Caltrain network and introduces new EMU trains at the cost of $2.44bn.
From a bay area resident/layman perspective, the R&D cost for any self driving car project doesn't seem to be out of proportion compared to public transit. Even if we took the information's estimate of the whole industry burning $16bn so far, that'd only buy you half of the initial segment of the Cailfornia HSR, which doesn't make it seem like self-driving car research is that outlandish. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if full autonomous vehicles land before the HSR fulfills its full mission of LA <> SF in under 3 hours.
Bloated local projects like the central subway make self driving car investments a steal, with 1.7 miles of subway in SF costing the same ballpark as a semi-mature self driving car program.
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-has-spent-over-11-billion-o... [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/money-pit-self-drivi...
• Underground parking for 600 cars? 35 million euro - https://youtu.be/mXLqrMljdfU?t=690
• Rebuilding a highway? Half of the transportation budget gone - https://youtu.be/SfZYB-rnejk?t=479
• Adding just one more lane bro to a freeway? $2.2 billion - https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54?t=840
Take into account the money saved from scaling back car infrastructure:
• lower obvious direct building and maintenance costs
• reduced healthcare spending - increased activity levels [1], lower local pollution [2]
• lower stress thanks to reduced noise levels
• less of a need to spend money on counteracting the negative effects of climate change
• freeing up a significant chunk of the valuable ~30% of space in cities taken up by oversized roads and parking lots -> more housing, denser cities -> less travel needed -> lower costs
Sum all that up and then tell me self-driving is cheaper than rail.
[1]: "If every Londoner walked or cycled for 20 minutes a day we would prevent 1 in 6 early deaths and save the NHS 1.7bn pounds in treatment costs over the next 25 years." ( http://content.tfl.gov.uk/segregated-cycling-infrastructure-...)
[2]: "Each year air pollution causes thousands of Londoners to die prematurely and is associated with an increased risk of Londoners developing life-changing illnesses like cancer, lung disease, dementia and asthma. [...] So far, the ULEZ has contributed to over 1 million hospital admissions averted by 2050." (https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-...)
Not to mention the very fact that humans have to own cars anyways. That is a huge inconvenience.
A personal vehicle also provides you with a relatively robust protective exoskeleton, while with public transport you are much more vulnerable. Even worse, one encounters the the more frightening elements of society when riding public transportation at a much higher rate. When you combine this loss of autonomy with the increased dangers of riding public transport, it's to many Americans that private vehicles are a vastly superior mode of transportation.
[0]A 45 minute commute two ways + errands out of 16 waking hours. I for one would like that 10 percent of my life back.
The rich and the ultra-rich are thinking long term and they don't want to interact with their angry peasants in the neo-feodal post-climate change world we are joyfully heading to. /s
That, and its significantly easier to make every bus have a wheelchair space or two than to retrofit every car to be wheelchair accessible.
Less discussed, but probably even more important are driverless trucks. There's actually a shortage of truck drivers in the US, since it's a job with pretty bad work life balance and unpredictable hours. Self driving trucks could potentially be huge in terms of improving freight costs.
It's a shortage of pay and conditions.