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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

To the degree that self-driving cars limit the adoption of public transportation, I am wholly against the technology.

In the countryside where I am there are 2 buses a day (only during the school year, for students, although they let non students ride it) and the nearest train station is 30 minutes away.

The real concern here is people driving when they shouldn't (drunk, tired, etc.) because they have no other option, putting lives at risk, so to the degree that self-driving cars will curb that I am wholly for the technology.

You should volunteer your countryside town to be the guinea pig place for them then.

Do you really think there will be more of these in the countryside, where people are more likely to have a car? There’s not much profitability there. They will be clogging up city streets, not driving drunk people in the middle of nowhere.

"Self driving cars" is better termed as "autonomous vehicles".

There will be many modalities of autonomous vehicles and one of them will be buses. Autonomous vehicles will hopefully be a large boon to public transport or just transport for people in general as it should drive down prices along with making it more accessible as it can run 24/7/365

The bus driver's salary is not the primary reason busses don't run 24/7

Yes, and in addition a drivers job isn't just to drive the vehicle, but to make the right call in a million different emergency situations, help people e.g. with a lack of mobility, etc.

One could argue the business-as-usual-driving is actually the easy part to automate.

I think it is true that systems with very frequent headings tend to be driverless though. However, the technology for a driverless train has been around for a long time.

Driver pay comprises about 60% of the cost of owning and operating a public transit bus.

Driver pay or labor? Because drivers are not the only labor

> There will be many modalities of autonomous vehicles and one of them will be buses.

I'd have a lot more faith in our society if we could prioritize automation of our highest density transit rather than catering to the fantasies of the wealthy.

I think we’re a long way from autonomous buses. There are lots of extra variables in how a bus operates. In fact, I doubt we would ever see a fully autonomous bus with no employee. How does it handle a disabled passenger? How does it handle security in the middle of the night? The wait is possibly long enough that these taxis have already killed transit agencies.

Maybe with cost savings from autonomous buses they could allocate resources to dedicated human driven buses for disabled persons?

If a car can drive itself, what's stopping that from becoming the public transportation of the next decade?

Or are you just ideologically against anything that doesn't pack people into tubes in order to "save the planet"?

Space efficiency.

As a species, (health-wise, resource-wise) we'd be better off with "walkable cities". Continuing to push cars as the mode of transportation makes walkable cities even less likely.

Curious, are you really making light of "saving the planet"?

Wouldn't it make public transportation better? You could have mini vans basically acting like public taxis that would try to maximize capacity and minimize path traveled

A mini van can hold a maximum of 7, maybe 8 passengers. That’s already worse than a bus because it means a lot more cars on the road. That’s also a best case scenario because you rarely have 7 or 8 people going from one exact location to another. Maybe your plan is instead to make multiple stops? That doesn’t sound like the best experience. Cramming 7 people into a smaller bus, sitting in traffic for an hour plus due to all the other “public taxis”.

Regardless, it means a lot more traffic and a generally worse experience for everyone. Cities should tax the hell out of these and put the money towards improving actual public transportation.

If the people who uber/taxi end up basically pooling in these vans then it's a win

Some places essentially attempted ride-hail as public transport and just like all car based services, they're far worse in terms of capacity and cost and so they essentially siphon money away from already proven modes like buses and trains. In Columbus Ohio, the attempt at this saw the consultant basically wind up shop and run away with millions of dollars in federal grants that should have just gone to cota. I expect AV as public transit to be similar.

With AI?

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