Note, too, that NASA didn't pay to develop the pen. Fisher did.
> If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat
Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)
I genuinely don't know. Do they use pencils still or switched to the space pen?
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/nasa-did-not-spen...
What about the places where people own cars not because it is the better choice, but the only choice?
Google Maps still thinks the speed limit on a nearby highway is 35 mph. We spent several months without lane markers on the highway. Any vehicle driving around here based on the current self-driving architecture, requiring central mapping/planning and good infrastructure, would be ridiculously unsafe.
Not to mention how lost they would be the moment they turned off the highway.
Why? My Subaru can practically drive itself on most Wyoming roads, including in whiteout conditions. It’s easier to drive with fewer cars around. It’s just not as profitable to field a fleet in suburban and rural America.
As an example of an urban legend/facile pop science take being treated as fact [1]?
> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure
Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and...
Japan has .67 vehicles per person, almost 80% America's .85 [1] and above many European countries. They travel about a fifth as many miles per capita as America [2]. But again, four fifths and a fifth. Nowhere close to zero.
There isn't a developed economy that wouldn't see a significant quality-of-life improvement from self-driving cars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...
Found only for 1997, but increases the discrepancy to 1:2.5 : https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm
Tokyo would have a tough time existing in a world without cars, trucks or roads. Its economy depends on that access.
There is no tradeoff between self-driving cars and a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure rebuild.
I will agree with that statement but mostly because you added trucks in when the original complaint was about car dependency.
> Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?
For the 127th time: car dependency is not the same as car usage.
$1mm at the time, $10mm today. They sold for the equivalent of $30 each in today's money and saved manned spaceflight from having to deal with graphite shards in the air and electrical.
> car dependency is not the same as car usage
"If the richest country in the world" got "rid of its car dependency," we'd still want safer cars.
With the technology controlled by a handful of corporations? At an development cost that will force them to create any and every opportunity to seek rent on your mobility?
The bad outweighs the good, plain and simple, and only those who are extremely naive or stand to gain from it refuse to acknowledge it.
You do not even need to restrict it to developed economies. Every city (even not very large ones) I have been to around the world, developed or not, has streets lots of cars: London, Manchester, Paris, Nairobi, Colombo, Madras, Bangalore, Sydney, Singapore..... and smaller towns and rural areas in those countries too. Those cover a pretty wide range of quality of public transport too.
We can look at international cities with longing and jealousy, but LA, Houston, Miami, and so on will never have useable public transit. You’d have to bulldoze the whole city and start again. So great for Paris and London and yes I would rather live there, but we are stuck finding solutions that work inside the mess we made.
LA was built around interurbans, the idea that I should drive my car all the way from San Bernardino (or frankly even from Pasadena) to Los Angeles would be foreign to the original planners and builders in Southern California. Consider that every major freeway in LA is basically in whole or in part paralleling a former PE line, and suddenly my assertion doesnt seem so odd.
https://www.pacificelectric.org/collections/pacific-electric...
LA is not the only place where the sprawled layout was created by interurbans, Arguably to a greater or lesser extent - Detroit, Dallas, Cleveland, Cincinatti, and there are others whose early development was deeply influenced by the interurban exist.
After that, there are lots of streets with a single lane of traffic - and buses go through them just fine. And there are lots of too narrow streets but they are isolated here and there - in between streets that are okay for buses. Equally there are lots of very wide avenues for several lanes of traffic and that's fine for pedestrians and transit even though it makes subway stations sometimes very wide. And there are lots of randomly angled streets. There are steep hills. There are rivers and canals and giant mining voids which make building subway tunnels interesting. There are lots of train track rights of way which sometimes block pedestrian traffic but are covered and crossed reasonably often (sometimes still not optimally so). There is snow, ice, floods, hot weather. You name it it's there.
Both of these are essential. "Decade after decade" is essential. Both density and building that infrastructure are impossible to build at the stroke of a pen. So an advantage of Paris compared to San Francisco is that it had decent inhabitant and workplace density from the infancy of public transit when it was private animal pulled carriages.
So what's missing in US cities: decade after decade of density followed by decade after decade of public intent. SF could do it - but for sure you wouldn't see the result tomorrow - but NIMBY so no, SF can't do it. Not before getting rid of NIMBY. LA is much more willing to build anything anywhere so it would have much more of a chance. But it's huge and people often live far from their place of work. Smaller areas with LA would have a better chance. Perhaps Glendale plus the entertainment industry north-south corridor? That might be manageable.
Yet still more "even then", ride Paris transit at rush hours in summer and you won't feel that it's all that good: it's sweaty, packed, and there are lots of timetable incidents. You will regret having chosen rush hour. You car would have been nicely air conditionned and comfortable (but depending on your trajectory would have been stuck in traffic for a while.)
Last mile is a nightmare with all public transit. With the low population density of the US we need a lot of small vehicles to feed transit hubs.
For trips shorter than 2 miles, I can bet you that it's faster for me to hop on my bike (or to find an electric scooter) and get to my destination than it is to drive. And let's not even talk about the time to find parking.
There’s a bus that serves that route but the stop is uncovered and service is unreliable because it’s immediately after a rest stop where the human drivers take care of their biological needs.
A robo-bus would be more predictable and enable more frequent service.
And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure? Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience" (at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure) when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?
It has occurred to me.
> Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience"
Not sure where you got this idea. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m still excited for self driving vehicles to compliment the existing system.
> at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure
Why would a self driving car need to park? The ability to always be in use is one of the advantages.
As I said there’s no requirement that the self driving vehicle be a car form factor. A self-driving bus could improve access and reliability.
> when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?
How?
I choose to live in a city with good (for America) transit. I vote for every transit measure available to me. I ride the bus. I commute by bike when I can. I don’t own a car.
What else should I do?
They are not going to be always in use. Unless you got a perfectly uniform distribution of demand over time, eventually most of these cars will have to be parked somewhere.
And whey they do, let's hope they don't keep doing this: https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/c2977546-lot-full-of-self-drivi...
How does bringing this up help anything? It's a bug, bugs happen, bugs get fixed. Quickly when they are software bugs. As opposed to NIMBY mind bugs.
Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance. Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.
The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist. People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.
> Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance
Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.
> Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.
Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.
Why would the existing infrastructure not continue to change? We are redeveloping parking lots today. Car and ride shares did reduce parking needs.
> People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.
Building codes for parking spaces are constantly changing here and consider transit availability and car ownership. If self-driving vehicles (including expanded public transit) are available that will further reduce the requirements.
Self-driving vehicles (even cars) put downward pressure on parking needs.
> Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.
Why are you so obsessed with the car form factor? I don’t see how a robotaxi needs any more parking than a taxi. A self-driving bus needs as much space as a conventional bus today.
> Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.
That’s not how busses, taxis or Ubers work. Ubers are not dispatched from a hub on every call. Demand is predicted and capacity is dispatched accordingly. As demand goes up dispatched capacity utilization goes up. More vehicles can be dispatched when demand approaches dispatched capacity.
This problem is the same no matter what form the driver takes. Taxis, ride shares, and busses already do capacity planning. Robot drivers just remove the human driver complexity from the equation.
Robotaxis (like busses and taxis) can use denser parking structures in their depots because they don’t have to deal with the limitations of the public, or even humans.
I would get a jacket and umbrella and walk this without giving it a second thought.
And I have to carry my groceries so I’m limited on how much I can buy.
If there was a robobus I would absolutely take that option.
Short trips made any way but walking have considerable overhead. Bad urban planning makes it worse. How many times do you have to stop a car on that route?
Not everyone has or wants to spend that kind of time. Especially when it’s not necessary and the weather is bad.
I’m hosting a party this evening so I need to run up there and get snacks and beer. The hour of time the e-bike saves lets me do that between work and guests arriving. I don’t have time to walk that distance and still eat dinner.
> Short trips made any way but walking have considerable overhead. Bad urban planning makes it worse. How many times do you have to stop a car on that route?
I don’t own a car. I ride my e-bike. There’s two lights and a stop sign on that route. It has a bike lane which is nice. Takes 10 minutes including time to put on my helmet and gloves and lock/unlock the bike.
If we both left my couch at the same time I’d be home on my bike before you even arrived at the store on foot.
In rural areas, sure. In urban and dense suburban areas, in most developed countries there's probably a bus stop within easy walking distance.
Tell that to Dublin Bus. Some routes are more or less unusable due to ridiculously high numbers of stops; there’s one in particular near me which has 37 stops over about 4km.
There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.
Sounds impractical.
> There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.
We have a solution to this. It’s called a taxi.
- There is nothing simple about it.
- There is nothing inevitable to this appearance of "not enough money". For example very little of self-driving cars development has been on public funds. For example, there is plenty of money in California govt. And plenty of money in US federal govt.
- One doesn't prevent the other. You can't seriously argue that better transit would remove all needs for automated driving.
EDIT: Small size then enables personalized routing: a multi-passenger taxi taking a set of people to similar destinations.
(Also, followup question: how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi service, now that Uber has stopped subsidizing most of their trips?)
It should! That’s the competition! Hell, I’ll pay a premium for a quieter, safer (and for now, due to novelty, more fun) ride.
And if Waymo maintain a monopoly that will stay the case. Otherwise, the normal thing will happen.
> how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi service
Cheaper if I wait. More expensive if I want immediacy. Either way, far more utilised than taxis in almost any city I visit.
Sort of. The cost of labor is the cost floor of the competition. So long as Waymo et al are smaller than the competition, i.e. so long as they don’t need to compete on price, they should tack under their direction. They aren’t setting the market price.
The moment they need to compete, they can tank the price or increase service quality. (They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition.)
Internet companies compete on price out the gate because we have low marginal costs. A company like Waymo has hardware costs that make competing on price out the gate prohibitive. So in a sense, their costs don’t have to do with labour. But that’s sort of true for any automation tech.
And believing that this is likely to happen is the problem I have with the whole proposition. I don't see any real player with capital, data and tech know-how to get into this in a way to turn it into a proper competition.
Way more money is being wasted on the grifts surrounding developing public transit infrastructure. LA County for example is 88 different municipalities and it will never get resolved.
Then have the dignitaries and environmental policymakers give their uparmored gas guzzling cars up first, leading by example.
No amount of public transport can accomodate the personal whims and demands of anyone let alone everyone. Even Japan, famous for its public transport infrastructure, still has a healthy population of drivers both in metro and rural areas.
I am not saying to get rid of cars altogether. I am saying that it would be better (and cheaper) for everyone if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first. Reduce the amount of yearly trips that are done by car. Provide alternatives.
The important thing about Japan or Europe is not "they don't have cars", but "people make 3-4x less trips by car compared with the alternative modes of transportation". If you want to have safer roads (in a way that doesn't give even more power to tech companies) the best way to do it is by simply reducing the amount of trips taken.
Waymo has raised about $11bn [1]. That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3].
These things aren't competing. To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency, it's not a good look for American public transit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/business/waymo-investment...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-24/cityla...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-21/high-spe...
What, you think Waymo will be able to weasel out of road tax or drive without roads?
Not relevant when we’re comparing project costs. OP argued we should devote self-driving resources to public transit. I’m arguing that’s nonsense.
> roads are still public infrastructure that has to be paid for and maintained
Sure. But that isn’t a new funding commitment. Cancelling Waymo won’t reduce our road costs.
Yes, because it would allow moving people more cost-effectively (among other things) - which is measured per person per unit distance traveled. (I'm not OP, but nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself.)
Add last-mile and model for the real American population distribution. Not an imagined America where everyone lives on Manhattan.
Not all miles travelled are equal. In value, urgency or desirability and thus price willing to be paid. Complaining about self driving cars is asinine. The scales are wrong. The problems are wrong. The places are wrong.
> nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself
I mean, exactly. We’re urbanising without commensurate increases in public transit. Deployment or use. Perhaps that hints at a change being in order.
Last I checked, Waymo also operates exclusively in urban areas.
There is no proximate future where public transit makes sense in Wyoming. There are multiple where self-driving cars do.
When I was in Germany 25 years ago, a district of about 25k people (less than 1k per square mile) had multiple bus routes (4 IIRC) connecting the main town to other settlements, running through farmland. It was not unduly expensive and the locals certainly seemed to think it made sense. Children would take it to school in lieu of a dedicated school-owned service.
There's a light rail system in Rennes, France (city population about 225k; metro about 750k - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennes) that's longer than the PATH system in the NYC area and almost as well used (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems).
Even Iceland has public buses, both local and inter-city (https://www.straeto.is/en).
> To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency
We can not. This logic is stupid. This logic will take you to the idea that the best thing to do is to get everyone a helicopter because helipads are cheap to build and it costs zero dollars to "build roads in the sky".
Yeah, you are right. These things are not competing. Yes, you are also right that proper infrastructure (re)development in North America will take a lot more money than what Big Tech has invested in self-driving cars.
The upsetting part is to see even supposedly smart people buying into the idea that American Exceptionalism is a real thing, and that you can keep holding on to the hope to find a shortcut away of your problems. Self-driving cars or not, the US is still going to be an expensive, inefficient country that can boast about its amazing economy, yet most people living there are at third-world country levels of development.
For fuck’s sake, the world’s largest rail system and navigable waterways say hello.
I’ve advocated for public transit. But it’s turning into zealotry when an $11bn project showing actual gains is turned into a soapbox for decrying a pet project.
Until then, the whole thing is nothing but a Trojan horse to let encroach themselves even more into another aspect of our lives.
Also:
> world’s largest rail system
The world's largest freight rail system.
You seem to just not like that this is done by Google. (Or by any private entity.) That is fine. I, like, hate this one restaurant in New York. But be honest about your motivations and check your biases.
This isn’t self-driving cars vs public transit debate because there isn’t one. If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.
> world's largest freight rail system
The world’s largest rail system, period. It’s also the largest freight rail system. But passenger and freight are types of rail systems.
> If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.
It depends on (a) why and (b) second-order effects.
Are they doing it, e.g, because they want to build a new campus in a lower-cost-of-living area, and they want to make the idea of living in Tuscaloosa, AL more palatable by having it connected to Atlanta, GA with train service that does not take 6(!!!!) hours as Amtrak currently does? Amazing, go Google!
Oh, they want to make it so that everyone can use it at reasonable prices, but Google employees can do it for free and get priority boarding? Fine, if that's what it takes to get private enterprises investing in infrastructure, I'm okay with it.
Oh, they want to do it because they are going to use it as a test-bed for some revolutionary transportation technology that they pinky-promise will eventually work as some Futurama-style tube network where anyone can go door-to-door as fast as possible? And they are offering the whole thing for free (or heavily subsidized) for everyone that enrolls in their beta program? Then please Google go fuck itself, because we all know how this is just bait.
I despise this way of arguing. Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever. Such a crude metric is entirely insufficient to back up an argument about how great American railways supposedly are.
What's the ticket cost for the passengers compared to other countries? Average train delay? Cancellation rate? Speed? Death rate? The argument is not looking so hot anymore, right? Then stop it with the irrelevant statistics of rail track length.
First by track and third by tonnage (after China and Russia).
It actually is. Japan's new maglev shinkansen line is stalling because they can't get land rights to lay rail through.[1]
An even more blasphemous example is California's high speed rail project which never accomplishes anything, but I'm pretty sure that also suffers from a severe case of legalized money laundering.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen#Shiz...
Bakersfield to Merced is 171 miles of intercity high-speed rail. It's unclear to me why Californians need to make such trips with any significant frequency, and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit".
22 years ago in Toronto, the Sheppard line (3.4 mi, underground) was built for less than $1b CAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_Sheppard). From what I can tell, costs in NYC are mainly a NYC problem.
https://www.transitchicago.com/ctas-36-billion-red-line-exte...
It may be an American problem but it’s certainly not just NYC. But of course most of Waymos market is American as well.
(The REM in Montreal - https://www.cdpqinfra.com/en/projects/rem - is doing much better than that, despite going over budget and being delayed quite a bit.)
You seem to be comparing an actual, private tech project to what you wished public transit looked like, not what it actually looks like.
Public transit is awesome, but construction costs in the anglophone world are bananas (https://transitcosts.com/).
Because they’re both between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
> and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit".
If not trains between cities what do you consider public transit?
This explains exactly nothing to me. There are many cities between Toronto and Montreal (the two largest CMAs in Canada, and about 88% of that driving distance) and I can't imagine why anyone would regularly travel between those two, either. Nor can I imagine why someone would make regular trips between Belleville and Ottawa (very close to the Bakersfield-Merced distance, and two of the larger cities in between).
>If not trains between cities what do you consider public transit?
Subways, light rail, streetcars and buses, all operating within a city. And, yes, trains operating within a CMA. (GO Transit trains from Toronto can get you as far as Kitchener, but as far as I know it's a vastly less popular route than the main Lakeshore lines. From Hamilton to Oshawa is definitely not solid built-up area, but it's pretty dense.)
I can't understand why this would be non-obvious. Maybe there's a cultural difference. Are Americans really so dedicated to urban sprawl that residents of a metropolis with an 7- or even 8-digit population might still require regular intercity travel to go about their lives?
Yes. Many Americans take it for granted that we have quick access to a variety of cities and landscapes. (Particularly on the coasts.)
Keep in mind that America is about a third richer, on a GDP per capita basis, than Canada. Even with stark income inequality, that produces a large disposable-income gap. Add to that the population gap and you have about the population of Canada travelling intercity many times a year.
NYC and London have had 'proper' public transit for over a century. It's handy but not that great. I was on a 52 year old Bakerloo line tube train the other day and they are much like modern tube trains, if grubbier. It's not going to suddenly turn wonderful and solve everything. (typed on a London bus)
Also while I'm not sure any technology is really needed, as in we could get by without it, there are about 1 million road deaths a year globally. A 90% reduction would save 900,000 lives which is a nice to have. And more meaningful than a space pen.