Hacker News Reader

Comment by garbawarb | Hacker News Reader

But a good mass transit system, pedestrian/cycling infrastructure, and efficient urban design are already proven ways of doing that.

View on HN

FSD can make mass transit cheaper. Imagine not having to pay bus drivers' salaries. Being able to adjust vehicle sizes to the route's demand dynamically.

The biggest win is probably dynamic routing, just select your pickup-point and a destination and a bus will get automatically routed. You'd never be forced to waste time driving past a stop for which there's no customer demand on that particular trip.

Doesn't work (IMO). Very functional mass transit lives and dies on predictability. Having dynamic routing would be the antithesis to that. Maybe your trip will take 20 minutes, maybe it'll be 1 hour. It'd be impossible to tell which one it'll be because the route changes based on when you request and who else has requested.

If you wanted something like dynamic routing, then what you'd do is have it as a supplement to standard routing. Effectively taxi to the nearest bus stop.

For the same amount of trips, this system could reliably allow shorter and more frequent trips than previously possible. Given that the system would work better, it would need to scale up to meet increased demand.

There's absolutely no reason for dynamic routing to not reliably be faster than or as fast as static routes.

And FSD would just be one more thing to add to that list.

They come with fundamental compromises that Americans aren’t willing to live with, namely having to adhere to schedules, ride with other people, and not going directly to their destination.

Not just Americans, all the big European cities with good public transportation are usually full of cars.

Imagine how much worse it would be without the public transportation siphoning off so many riders.

For sure, but in many places it just couldn't realistically be much worse and the main consequences would probably be on the local economy rather than the amount of road use. Less people would be able to travel at all, inevitably leading to reduced need for travel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com