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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

"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

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> 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?

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

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