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Comment by prhn | Hacker News Reader

The future of (public) transportation absolutely is driverless cars.

Every time I'm stuck in traffic on an LA highway with 5+ lanes and I see the horrendously inefficient use of space this future becomes clearer.

Waymos are also really confidence inspiring. They drive more safely and cautiously than any Uber/Lyft driver I've ridden with.

If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.

So I'm happy to see more announcements like this. I hope the Waymo driverless tech becomes ubiquitous.

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This “if cars were synced all would be well” fantasy assumes that the limited gains from scrunching won’t be a rounding error compared to the nearly unlimited additional trips that robots with infinite patience could start making.

Currently it’s got to be worth sitting at the wheel or paying a delivery driver… but if my robot says “6 hours to drive 10 miles”, I’ll think, “wow traffic is bad, whatever, it’ll get there when it gets there, beep, off you go! siri, text mom that the paint chip is on its way”, oh hmm actually maybe teal is better… “hey siri, get me another toyotaymo”

If you're implying the marginal cost of a 6-hour AV errand is almost zero, I think you're describing a prosperous future.

This is also easily managed with congestion pricing.

If you want to get rid of the space taken up by 5 lane highways you need to convert roads into walkways for pedestrians, bike lanes, and bus lanes.

There can still exist space for cars but they need to be last in priority rather than the first, second, and third consideration cars have today when it comes to infrastructure.

I challenge anyone who seriously proposes this to first spend a month in a wheelchair. You quickly discover that your sense of scale and freedom of movement is largely a function of your physical capability and financial comfort.

I’m confused by this. Making public infrastructure people first, not car first, in your opinion would make things more difficult and expensive for handicap people?

The town I live in has many streets without sidewalks, and even the ones with sidewalks, many of those are entirely unsuitable for wheelchairs. Designing the streets to have pedestrian needs prioritized over cars would make the streets more handicap accessible not less.

> Making public infrastructure people first, not car first

What does this mean? People ride in cars.

People. As in people walking. My town is not designed in a way that is conducive towards walking. It isn’t safe, there is either no sidewalks, the sidewalks are in disrepair, are not wide enough for two people to pass each other, or set back far enough from the road to not feel like someone could run you over.

But the roads and dozens upon dozens of acres of parking lots? Perfectly fine. Millions spent every year maintaining them while sidewalks are neglected, there are no bike lanes or paths, and it could take twice as long to take a bus as it would be to just walk on the dangerous roads.

I just would think I should be able to walk to a restaurant or the library with my kid safely but I guess because I can do it in a car I should shut up and stop worrying about everybody getting excited about autonomous vehicles making infrastructure even more car centric.

> If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.

So like a train?

Like a train without the worst of the public, where any individual can choose their preferred spot for a station.

Trains don't have guaranteed personal space, nor do they proceed from one's origin directly to their destination.

You might not value that, but lots of other people do.

Yeah, but the train goes from my house to my destination. Not 10-20 minutes away from my house and 10-20 minutes away from my destination.

Fair enough. But keep in mind cars only solve this last mile problem when there's high throughput roads connecting all possible trip starts / destinations. In American we have this infrastructure (at a great cost in city design and tax payers dollars), but cities in many other countries don't have this and don't want it either.

The future of public transportation is buses and trains. Any other solution that involves wrapping individual humans in a steel bubble 10x the size is woefully inefficient and wasteful. No matter how well they self drive.

For every bus you can take ~50 cars off the road.

Unfortunately, at least in the US, that ship has sailed, and there is zero interest in creating walkable, public-transit friendly cities.

Doing things the right way requires civic-minded effort. The average American is just way too individualistic to make a dent in this problem.

You might be right. I saw a survey somewhere (can't find it now), where Americans were asked about working in factories.

Majority said that USA will be better if more people started working in factories, but a minority said USA will be better if /they/ worked in factories.

It's the whole "I got mine" mentality, where people are not willing to compromise on their own comfort for the greater good, yet they expect others to do so.

I don't think this is unique to the US, I think it's just very egregious there at the moment.

I love AVs, but It would do jack shit for traffic and the horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains. You still gotta have spaces for pedestrians, and cars still make cities ugly and unpleasant. Even electric autonomous ones. Tire friction still makes noise and pollutes the air with microplastics.

They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.

> They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.

Full agreement here. AVs are great for last-mile transit.

> horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains

This is where we disagree. The whole point of AV TaaS is that they can go where bus lanes and trains can't. Last mile transportation.

I also wouldn't say they do "jack shit" for traffic in the sense that they reduce the need for parking, and reduce accidents which are the source of a lot of unpredictable congestion.

Surely there are tradeoffs. They indirectly incentivize sprawl and taking more taxi rides overall. And I get the tire residue argument (especially since AV fleets are mostly electric with high torque generating more tire wear). But is tire noise really a fair complaint? They're just going where cars already go and tires are engineered pretty well to minimize noise...

Tire noise is still quite substantial - use the NIOSH noise meter app on your phone to compare the sound levels on a city block when an EV goes by compared to just bikes and people – and there’s a growing body of evidence that noise levels correlate with worse health and sleep for residents. EVs help, but it’s only partial.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11297122/

> Tire noise is still quite substantial

100% I live near a bus route and their tires and engines are a huge disturbance.

I guess my question is - will Waymo really cause that much more tire noise vs today? Wherever car tires are making noise, I doubt Waymo is going to generate that much _additional_ noise.

But I think the real challenge isn't just the tech: it's the messy middle. Human drivers aren't going away anytime soon, and mixed traffic (humans + AVs) is where a lot of that theoretical efficiency gets lost

> If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.

That's not going to happen, not in our lifetimes. It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it. Given the average age of cars, it'll take ~10-15 years from such tech being mandatory in new cars to think about doing this. Being mandatory is of course itself over 10 years from it being available. And it's not available yet.

We're now a decade out from people starting to say "stop investing in public transportation because driverless cars will obsolete it," and so far driverless cars have only managed to provide a limited taxi service in a couple of cities, a far cry from deprecating public transit.

(Actually, I personally hew to the belief that driverless cars will make traffic worse, since it will probably increase the number of empty cars running around because traffic tends to be dominated by unidirectional bursts of traffic.)

> It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it.

You could always give those cars their own section of the road like HOV lanes. EVs were granted access to HOV lanes in California as an incentive to increase EV adoption. A similar thing could happen with a dedicated autonomous lane that has a much higher speed limit.

How does it require a critical mass?

If the car ahead of you is sharing visibility and braking data, you can drive on their bumper and stop when they stop.

If the car next to you is receiving route data, they can open a spot for you to get to your exit.

The benefit is large and NOT REQUIRED for normal operation. It's the easiest coordination problem in the world, because it's all upside and practically atomic.

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