Hacker News Reader

Comment by dabeeeenster | Hacker News Reader

“Meet Sustainability Goals: Waymo’s fully electric fleet helps organizations advance their sustainability targets”

Taking a private taxi to commute to work or school is easily the worst thing you can do environmentally in a city. Doesn’t really matter that you’re not burning dinosaur juice.

View on HN

Especially when I'm guessing a lot of these "urban tech worker" commutes are mostly on surface streets or congested highways barely moving any faster. In my experience cycling to work I am actually faster on the bike than when I take the car. This is mostly due to filtering to the front of the intersection effectively eliminating any and all effects of rush hour traffic. Another huge factor is I can also park the bike directly in front of the door to the building, no having to walk from a designated parking or drop off zone.

I would be 90% sweat if I biked to work. Would need a shower and change

While I agree that it’s kinda unpleasant to get all sweaty before work, many larger corporations have offices (usually with gyms) have locker rooms and showers to support bikers. While I’m able to take transit, many of my coworkers do bike+shower at the office for commuting.

Is all that showering better or worse for the environment than using more appropriate transport in the first place?

The bike is in fact the more appropriate transport for moving a 200lb person than a 5000lb vehicle. Literally 95% of the energy being consumed is just to move the damned vehicle around, not to do anything productive with it.

Your relative masses are obviously exaggerated.

Showering uses hot water and you also must change clothes, which also require cleaning. If you are doing this twice per day in addition to someone using some other means of transportation there is a non trivial energy cost involved.

If the car propulsion is non fossil fuel based then the car wins because you are using much less water.

Showering does use hot water, but, it's maybe 20-30 litres, and you're heating up by what 25-30 K ? That's just not very much energy, and since we want heat we can go via a heat pump to do less work, whereas that's not an option for the car.

I did some envelope guesses and I can't see how this can come out for the car.

I shower once a day regardless. I combine my bike commute on the way in with train or bus depending on the route I feel like. No sweat that way. The ride back I will do on a bike and take a shower after. Gets the cardio requirement done at the same time as the commute so it's a two birds one stone thing.

Is showering worse than congestion and vehicle emissions? …no. This is not a good faith argument

What I do is bike to and from the train station on the way in, saves me a 15 min walk on either end and no sweat at all biking at easy pace for a few mins especially when its so cool in the morning. On the way back I will bike the whole way for the fitness benefit and shower when I get home as usual after work. Once you are in shape though, which happens surprisingly quickly with regular riding, you won't really sweat from ~30 mins easy pace rides.

If you don't have a train or bus along the way, ebikes can also save you sweat. You don't even need to pedal at all.

> the worst thing you can do environmentally in a city

Worse than owning a large single family home that lowers density and pushes everyone further from their destinations?

That doesn't seem right. Taking your own car, which you park at both ends of the trip, is clearly worse from a vehicle utilization and land use standpoint. A Waymo that takes a dozen trips a day and never parks on the street seems obviously superior.

I think the point is it's green washing. True sustainability is public transit, or biking or walking. This is just a line item got a company to blast as sustainability in marketing. This will let Waymo absorb some money from green washing slush funds.

> True sustainability is public transit, or biking or walking.

Surely it's whatever is most sustainable, which Waymo (or equivalent) very well could be.

What? How could it possibly be more sustainable, the self driving parts are more energy hungry than a normal ebike.

But the energy can be renewable, so it isn't a problem.

It's better than the status quo, your standard for Scotsmen notwithstanding.

> True sustainability is public transit, or biking or walking

Free your mind. Cost per passenger mile is atrocious for most US transit systems. All that cost equals carbon: concrete, steel, fuel, salaries, etc.

The waymo carries no passengers when it's driving to pick up its next customer. So, its average occupancy (<1) is somehow even worse than that of a car used exclusively by one person.

This is incorrect, because you have used the wrong denominator. The average occupancy of a private car is approximately zero. Most of the time, it just sits there empty.

Who cares how many passengers it has while not moving? It's not using any energy then, and neither is it participating to traffic.

Again, this is not correct. Parked cars absolutely "participate in traffic" by making the other things in the city further apart and less convenient to reach without cars, and cars parked on the curb are taking up an entire lane of the street, which is half the street in many cases, or in some places like Manhattan the parking lanes are 2/3rds of the street.

the more people use it, the more likely there will be someone nearby to pick up next. and this issue is not exclusive to waymos, it applies to taxis in general.

Driving your own petrol car is surely worse? What are you talking about...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com