Hacker News Reader

> If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city; well to be honest I find this premise a bit ridiculous. Call me a European, but I find the idea that moving 1-2 people in private vehicles on roads being superior than public transit -preferably on rail- simply absurd.

Much of the US like Huston and Miami is extremely lacking in public transit, and will likely never build the infrastructure.

> Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage.

~50% of your fare goes to the driver.

> Much of the US like Huston and Miami is extremely lacking in public transit, and will likely never build the infrastructure.

I am not trying to be a contrarian here, but I fail to see how that is an answer. I feel like what you say boils down to "since we are not solving the problem at hand in a good way, we decided to solve it in a worse way".

> ~50% of your fare goes to the driver.

Yet these ride-hailing companies who receive whatever is remaining after the meager pay of the rider and other costs only recently started to make actual profits. And even though it feels like the prices for customers increased a lot over the years, these companies are not exactly printing money.

> since we are not solving the problem at hand in a good way, we decided to solve it in a worse way

It's a different "we". Rephrased:

since Houston's government is not solving the problem at hand in a good way, Waymo decided to solve it in a worse way

Forget Houston. Half this country is suburban-to-rural with development patterns that are profoundly ill-suited to mass transit. Yet, all of those areas have a fantastic road system already fully built out. Provide cheap rideshares (by removing most of the labor cost, which are the vast majority of the per-ride costs) and you've solved the previously unsolvable problem of moving Americans from point A to point B without each person needing to own and pilot a car.

Huston is in fact building transit. They have a large spread out city which makes it a hard problem, but if you carefully choose where you look you will find people living there who don't have a car and just rely on transit and don't notice any loss of lifestyle.

Houston is adding bus routes, and even those are hotly contested in city hall. The city tried to expand the very limited light rail we have but the vote for that failed.

We live in a super walkable part of Houston and still need cars to go to many places outside of (and even within) the Inner Loop. A 10-min journey in a car takes 45+ mins by bus, and that's assuming peak schedules and buses that arrive on time.

I actually tried to do the no-car thing for a few weeks. It definitely impacted my lifestyle for the worst. The gym I go to is 10 mins away by car. It's a 45 minute journey by bus.

I needed to walk 15 minutes to the nearest bus stop (despite being next to two well-trafficked cross streets). When the bus finally arrived, I needed to pay with cash because METRO didn't have Apple Pay set up at the time (early 2024) and while you could use the Q Ticketing app, it doesn't have a Watch app and I didn't bring my phone.

The bus didn't show on two occasions. The next buses were 45 minutes away.

All of this is, again, in the most walkable, public transit covered part of Houston.

I also lived in NYC for a long time. There, getting anywhere was a 10 min walk to a train station, swiping you MetroCard (Apple Pay these days), taking the train and walking a bit to your destination. The only places that were inconvenient to get to by train alone were deep in Queens, Brooklyn or the Bronx; for those, you'd take the bus, which usually ran every 10 mins.

I didn't say many were no car. Jus that it isn't as bad as the reputation by a bit. Your experience proves that I think

*50% of your fare goes to the driver, as well as paying for fuel, vehicle maintenance and depreciation, insurance, etc.

Without a driver those other costs don’t go away.

It's ~75% going to the driver if you count the driver's expenses as money that goes to the driver: https://www.hyrecar.com/blog/how-much-does-uber-take-from-dr...

Not to mention tips. I feel an obligation to tip drivers, in part because I know the economics of their job is rough. I don't tip robots.

> Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage.

That's the problem. People want taxis. Taxi drivers are both underpaid and also expensive. Removing the driver is a very expensive research process, but once you've done it and rolled out the solution nationally, you're saving a lot of money.

And you're also creating a huge moat against competition. Say Google "finishes" self-driving cars, stops needing to spend nearly as much money on researching/developing the software, and mostly has figured out scaling. It's now far cheaper for Google to drive around than Uber. They can easily charge less than basically everyone who isn't willing to spend billions developing self-driving cars.

The grand vision is to erode the middle class entirely, have undocumented immigrants work in agriculture and automate the rest.

Who can afford a Waymo ride in that scenario is an open question, but perhaps the tech overlords dream of having a tiny "elite" and a robot army that subjugates the farm workers, in which case Waymo will no longer be required.

uber drivers deserve to be eroded entirely if their occupation literally costs lives compared to an autonomous vehicle

1. The global Taxi market is one that does a quarter trillion dollar revenue per year.

2. the biggest cost component is labour. The biggest safety component is labour. The biggest service component is related to labour.

3. if you cut down cost of labour, make it more safe than before, and provide a quiet and private ride allowing private calls, conversations, music, you can beat other market participants

So yes it's commercially interesting and that's all it needs to be.

As for efficient and sustainable transport, there are certainly criticisms to be had. But these must be addressed via regulation, in my view. You can't expect taxi companies to disappear. You can add a tax to fuel to encourage a transition to electric. You can put a tax on noisy cars to encourage silent ones. You can put a tax on size, to encourage 1-person taxi pods for 1 person which will be 80% of the self-driving taxi fleet, and encourage 100% utilisation of self-driving busses for a small portion of the fleet. But you can't expect companies to simply not do business in the taxi industry because cars are imperfect from a sustainability/transport point of view.

I'm not sure what's disgusting to you.

It also expands the market. Currently bus riders can’t afford to take Ubers but would prefer to. People that would rather take Ubers than walk or bike, and people who would rather give up their car and do uber full time.

This will all be possible with low cost autonomous transport

Here are some benefits:

- Lower costs in the long-term. In the future it should be cheaper than owning a car.

- Lot of space that is currently being used for parking will be freed up.

- Convenience. It's a better experience than Uber and it will be a better experience than a manually-driven car. One example is when I want to drive to place A, take a 3 hour hike to place B and then drive home.

Living in SF as a family of four with both adults working from home... Owning 1 car and using Waymo/uber/lyft/e-Bike is already significantly cheaper than owning 2 cars.

> I mean, what is the exact problem that's being solved here?

There are people that will pay you to give them a ride from point A to point B; Google has developed a cheaper and more scalable way to give people a ride from point A to point B.

> Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage.

And now Google made them way more productive, what leads to some combination of higher wages, lower prices, and higher profits. The government there has a moderate amount of control over the proportion, it's not clear to me what values it will pick.

> If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city

Nah, it's certainly not. But if you solve that one, Google will be forced to pivot into efficiently moving people into and out of a city, and they can add a lot of value there.

> moving 1-2 people in private vehicles

Eliminating the driver opens up so many options:

1. Vehicles designed expressly for 1 or 2 people, so they take up less space 2. Dynamic mini bus routes that can run all hours of the day 3. Dynamic car pooling

The grand vision, the problem being solved, is that humans suck at driving, especially when drunk and texting. If no human ever drove drunk again, it would literally save lives. You can be cynical about the profit motive, because there is one, but fundamentally, reducing traffic fatalities, which is over a million a year, was Sebastian Thrun, one of the original researcher's, stated goal. That it changes the rest of society and makes him a ton of money along the way is just a nice side benefit.

> Is the idea of living and moving around in a city full of autonomous vehicles actually appealing to anyone? I personally find the whole idea completely disgusting for a number of reasons.

Assuming they're safe and cheaper than current Ubers/taxis? Yeah I'd be fairly okay with it. I don't think it's necessarily ideal, but I definitely can't relate with "completely disgusting", personally.

Public transit is nice and all but walking to and then waiting around at bus stops (especially in bad weather), squeezing into a crowded bus or train, stopping at intermediate stops, making transfers... there's definitely downsides. I don't use Uber/Lyft/Waymo often but I have to admit walking outside and having a climate-controlled, comfortable ride right there, which takes you straight to where you're going, is pretty nice. If it cost less and was more eco-friendly I'd probably use it more; we'll see if they can tackle that.

As I see it, the biggest goal is safety - self-driving cars seem to reduce accidents per distance driven by at least one order of magnitude.

Citation needed. I've seen claims like that, but none of them from a source that stands up to scrutiny. Most such claims come from the people promoting self driving cars and so they have reason to "lie with statistics". Those who have unbiased data (ie governments) are not talking about it from what I can see.

I personally am significnatly safer than the average driver. This comes solely down to me not drinking alcohol and thus I never drive while drunk. The typical driver also isn't under the influence and thus is significantly better than the average. (I also try to follow other safety practices, but I'm not sure if I'm really better - I'm aware of and pay attention to one thing which makes me better - but what am I not aware of that others are doing?)

Most people are safer than average most of the time. Risk is a heavily bimodal. The issue is that people keep driving even when it's risky. Maybe they have to get to work even though they didn't sleep much, or they need to get home from the bar, or they're road raging, or they don't have someone with them to drive instead.

People driving home from bars is the biggest issue of the ones you mentioned. People drink alcohol at bars, which impairs their judgement, and they then use this impaired judgement to then decide that it's a good idea to get behind the wheel.

They're all big issues. We have an entire set of federal regulations specifically to address fatigued driving for commercial haulers called Hours of Service.

"I feel like at this point someone needs to take a step back and think about the general vision and overall goals of this whole fully automated ride-hailing service thing."

The goal is to make money for the owners and managers of those companies.

At least for me the goal is to have me seated, heated/cooled, separated from smelly hobos and showtimes, not breathing in crack smoke, not breathing in brake dust in subway tunnels, not breathing in other peoples diseases. Anyone who tells me my individual wants are disgusting will not get my vote.

For society, building rail infrastructure in the US is so eye watering expensive and time consuming that transporting everyone by electric AV might actually be an easier way to decarbonize transport.