Waymo Driver 3.5x better at avoiding injuries over 14.8M miles in SF and Phoenix
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We need actual mass transit that works for people, not a roving science experiment on wheels.
Why do you think the TCO is less for a bus than for a self driving car? Why would it be more efficient to have mass transit when you don't have extremely high density? Can you share some data?
That, and the business unit that actually operates the shuttle busses lives in the real world.
They ARE slowly replacing busses with ride share and will probably move to self driving once the city approves it.
It's gonna take some time. Regardless of the economics of it, they can't just magic up a fleet of Waymos. That production has been planned for and allocated and remember, they don't actually offer rides down the peninsula that the shuttle busses do yet. That said, I can't wait for Waymo technology to mature and be cheap enough for cities to use them on mini buses.
Do you have some data to share to show this is true in suburban environments? I live in a very wealthy area, budget is not a problem for the city, the busses are clean and well run. But they're often empty...
Bus lanes aren't going to do anything to help with the real bottleneck in city bus transport: having to stop every couple of blocks to let people on and off.
Even with a 100% safety rating, cars don’t scale to denser urban environments such as SF, NYC, Boston, Seattle, etc… For that we need buses, trams, and subways. My preference would be self-driving dedicated bus rapid transit lanes.
The biggest problem with mass transit is that it is slow, and while you can improve a system to make it faster, there are ultimate necessary limits because the passenger has to walk to a stop, wait for a vehicle, and then wait while the vehicle stops and passengers get on and off, and then walk to their destination. You cannot fix this, it’s inherent to the medium.
Uber and Lyft already have a similar (with a driver) service that they've rejiggered a few times. I used it a fair bit pre-covid to commute. The price wasn't much more than driving myself, and the speed was good -- usually it was only about 5 minutes slower on a 30-40 minute drive, and I could use the time to catch up on email, read, etc. The same ride on transit would have been about 1.5 hours, or 1 hour if I took a bike on the train instead of using busses or walking for part of the trip. Transit was also a bunch of broken up blocks of time either standing waiting, or sitting on a train or getting on and off/in/out of a station. With the shared ride vehicle, it was just wait a few minutes for pickup and then I had a solid block of time in a fairly comfortable environment.
I really think that this is the future of transit. If you have enough usage, you could probably push these vehicles up to 8-10 people and still get reasonable travel times (way better than transit) at transit-competitive costs. People who wanted better speed and more privacy could order smaller vehicles for a higher price. If these were popular it would massively reduce congestion because people would actually want to take them instead of driving themselves.
Where was your experience for mass transit? The US? I live in Boston, which has one of the best mass transit systems in the US, but still it sucks as a general means to get around, or even to and from work for many people. But the US has extraordinarily poor mass transit overall. Budapest, Paris, Tokyo, Vienna, etc… have efficient, multi-layered, redundant mass transit that serves the population well as a general means to get around. It’s faster than the auto frequently even in non rush hour times.
I don’t see (good) mass transit and AVs at odds with one another, but rather complimentary. Every auto off the road makes the remaining auto transit more efficient. Less autos on the road also frees up roads for bikes and pedestrian use, a big plus in denser urban environments in need of more green and public space.
Ultimately you just cannot get around the physics of it. If you have a 50 person vehicle, the average person is going to need to wait for 50 people to get on or off during their ride. In order to do that, they're going to have to make a bunch of stops. To do that, the vehicle has to slow down and speed up at a reasonable acceleration rate, so the average speed is necessarily much slower than the maximum speed.
With fixed routes, you also cannot get around having to walk to and from the station/stop, and you can't get around having to wait at least some time for the vehicle to arrive. For most trips you also can't avoid having to do a transfer with more walking/waiting.
The solution is less passengers per vehicle so there's less stopping, and dynamic routes so that there's less walking and less waiting. You can't really do door to door dynamic routes with lots of passengers, because you'd be going too far out of your way and it would be slow.
This wasn't possible before because you had to pay a driver, but if a driver is low cost, the game is completely different.
I can’t wait until this tech makes it to private vehicles.
You probably don't like single/low occupancy vehicles, and that's fine, I'm not here to convince you otherwise. But this particular argument is nonsense, it applies to every new technology ever.
At the very least you'll need to stick a human behind the wheel to take the blame when the technology fails like Tesla does. You can't remove humans from the corporation centered blame shifting society because you remove available scapegoats leaving the company without a blame shield. Perhaps they'll hire third world people for lower wages to remotely watch the AI car feed all day and auto-fire them in the event of a crash.
This is all still a worse deal than Uber hiring humans to do it all, they outsource all of the maintenance and liability onto some rando that they can ban from the app if they get uppity and then take a cut of the profit in exchange for running a data center and some ads.
I'm imaging a situation where an attacker can step in front of the vehicle, have it safely stop, before demanding you hand over your valuables, breaking a window to get in etc.
As a passenger you're trapped in an enclosed space and left without a way to escape, where as a human driver would be able to make the judgement call to do whatever is necessary to get out of danger.
Narrow streets packed with park cars, lots of bikes and pedestrians jaywalking, a homeless population that spills over into infrastructure, etc. It’s a good test case for most US cities that aren’t NYC.
A LIDAR is pretty much all you need to avoid a collision. It's a pretty forgiving environment.