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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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