This is incredible news. In the next 10 years more and more transportation will shift to self driving and save thousands of lives and prevent many more injuries. Already in San Francisco waymo's are and feel much safer than human driven rideshare.
People don't use mass transit because it sucks, blaming other modes of public transit doesn't cut it. The design and implementation of it is what keeps people from using it.
The good news is automated vehicles will add flexible options for new types of public transport that are between single-trip taxies and mass transit and will lower costs to all kinds of public transit.
Older US cities (Boston, NY) have great public transit/walking options, though I agree deferred maintenance is taking its toll. But if you look at cities designed around the car, for many of them it's just prohibitively expensive to add things like light rail or subways now. Austin TX will be adding more light rail, but the price tag keeps exploding and the route keeps getting shorter.
I'd be curious if anyone could point to any city that was built around the car where they subsequently made substantial public transit improvements that carry more than, say, 10% of commuters.
The "more funding" is always allocated towards existing rent-seekers.
And my opinion with getting junk is that if I'm getting it, I want to be paying as little for it as possible.
As a quick test for what you feel, try this. You read a headline that says "This city school received the most government funding of any school in the US". Do you think that school is "great" / "mediocre" / "crap"? My personal immediate inclination is that the school is probably shit.
Is it? Doesn't "public transit" at least somewhat imply that it's a business that has to operate under the rules of some democratically elected institution?
Waymo will ban you, price you differently based on who/where/when you are, etc. I wouldn't expect any of that from "public transit".
public transit already does this
https://www.bart.gov/tickets/discounts
-Seniors 65 and over get 62.5% off -Youth 5-18 years old get 50% off
That's a different kind of price segmentation than the kind of price discrimination that these companies can do. Also even without discounts public transit is substantially cheaper than taxi services (like 1/10th the cost). Some arguments I've seen is that the city should just make public transit free as you can offset the hit by getting rid of fare enforcement / fare machines.
From the FTA. and for those who really want to dive into the law of it: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/subtitle-III/chap..., whose own definition is:
>(A) means regular, continuing shared-ride surface transportation services that are open to the general public or open to a segment of the general public defined by age, disability, or low income; and
in a legal sense, Waymo doesn't seem to meet even these high level definitions. So it's likely classified as private transportation unless I'm missing something.
To add to it mass transit is generally heavuly subsidized that means that less well off people can get to work/school at low costs. It reduces poverty and income inequality.
I live in Europe in a village of about 1500 people are there is no usable public transport (2 buses a day).
Relative to total area, mass transit is almost nowhere. That's also true for for total road kilometers.
I agree with your last sentence, but for those who live outside of cities or other places of high density, public transport is unusable or unavailable. Governments roundly ignore people who live in these places (due to expense and political irrelevance) so there is always a fairly decent percentage of the population that is "public transport poor".
and how would waymo fix this? Waymo is still a private business and needs to weigh the costs of deploying to a smaller town vs. simply not supporting that range. It's the same issue as government.
https://chikatoku.enjoytokyo.jp/en/spot/willer_ikebukuro.htm...
Driving has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. If you have a car anyway, using it for yet another trip is cheap. If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes. But why would you do that? Because once a city grows large enough and dense enough, public transit becomes cheaper than car infrastructure. Because it requires less subsidies than driving.
that doesn't make sense. You just described the issue: they can choose to drive. And many do in the US.
Government subsidizes transport to get more people into the city hubs, which bolsters the economy of business as more people can reach downtown, which gives the town/city more money in taxes. These business have fixed costs so it's not like a rich person is going to be proportionately better to business than a poor person buying the bare necessities.
It makes a lot more sense to target people who are taken out of the economy pool otherwise without such transportation. Especially if we're talking about a large city like LA.
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and while it's a cliche, it needs to be asked in this context: what even is "middle class" here?
>If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes.
I argue that such a "low enough bar" for a state like California will never outdo the convenience of a car. You're right in the long term that less cars => lower road maintenance => less road subsidies => more money to go around to other parts of the state. But we're not starting from scratch here.
If you don't use the service it doesn't matter if it's a hunk of junk or a limousine, it's your tax money for a service you don't care about and will cut it anyway. You may be more likely to cut a limousine if you don't personally use it.
>Because the poor are a minority, most people don't really care about services used by them.
I don't know about minority, especially in these times. But minority or not, welfare programs take up 20% or so of government spending. It's a large enough population being serviced that it can't be ignored.
Self driving cars have much less use for parking garages in the middle of the city, so I think it's a net-positive.
AVs more or less solve the last-mile problem with public transportation - if you don't live on a transit route, or the one you live near is infrequent, taking it can be infeasible.
But also, it directly helps one of the major pain points of transit logistics - you cannot effectively respond to demand by scaling up/down the size and quantity of busses when you have human drivers that expect to have regular routes and regular hours. In contrast, you can have a whole fleet of electric short/medium/large busses which spend most of their time idling at the charge stations (which reduces maintenance costs) and go in and out of service as the daily traffic demands it, even pre-emptively going to a destination hub during off-peak times to await peak one-way demand (e.g. busses going to loiter downtown at 3/4ish to wait for all the businesspeople going back to the suburbs)