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Comment by Sayrus | Hacker News Reader

Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware.

Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?

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Cars and personal computers have advantages over shared resources that often make them worth the cost. If you want your transport/compute in busy times you may find limitations. (ever got on the train and had to stand because there are no seats? Every had to wait for your compute job to start because they are all busy? Both of these have happened to me).

I ran the numbers, and for most non-braindead cities something like a fleet of 6-seater minivans will easily replace all of local transit.

And with just 6 people the overhead if an imperfect route and additional stops will be measured in minutes.

And of course, it's pretty easy to imagine an option to pay a bit more for a fully personal route.

This exists in a way -- I'd wager every city has a commercial service that will shuttle you to, say, the airport. They're not cheap, however.

Yep. And it's indeed a good model for this mode of transportation. And they ARE cheap.

For example, in Seattle I can get a shared airport shuttle for $40 with the pick-up/drop-off at my front door. And this is a fully private ADA-compliant commercial service, with a healthy profit margin, not a rideshare that offloads vehicle costs onto the driver. And a self-driving van can be even cheaper than that, since it doesn't need a driver.

Meanwhile, transit also costs around $40 per trip and takes at least 1 hour more. And before you tell me: "no way, the transit ticket is only $2.5", the TRUE cost of a transit ride in Seattle is more than $20. It's just that we're subsidizing most of it.

So you can see why transit unions are worrying about self-driving. It'll kill transit completely.

you made too many false assumptions if you came up with those routes. Experts have run real numbers including looking at what happens in the real world. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit - (as I write this you need to scroll to the second article to find the useful rebuttal of your idea)

Yeah, yeah: "Major US Public Transit Union Questions “Microtransit”" Read it. Go on. It's pure bullshit.

The _only_ issue with the old "microtransit" is the _driver_. Each van ends up needing on average MORE drivers than it moves passengers. It does solve the problem of throughput, though.

But once the driver is removed, this problem flips on its head. Each regular bus needs around 4 drivers for decent coverage. It's OK-ish only when the average bus load is at least 15-20 people. It's still much more expensive and polluting than cars, but not crazily so.

Scroll down to the other articles as I said in the first place.

self driving changes some things, but there are a lot of other points in the many article linked from there that don't change.

This article is just a bunch of propaganda. You can tell that by the picture with people in the shape of a bus next to the line of cars. Every time you see it, you can immediately blacklist the author and ignore whatever they are saying about cars.

Can you guess why?

Hint: think about the intervals between buses and how you should represent them to stay truthful. And that buses necessarily move slower than cars. And that passengers will waste some time due to non-optimal routes and transfers. And that passengers will waste some time because they need to walk to the station.

So back to my point, can you tell me EXACTLY what I should read in that article? Point out the paragraph, please.

> But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?

Even better — charge 10% less and corner the market! As long as nobody charges 10% less than you…

> Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?

Yeah, this would rely on robust competition.

Nah, I don't want to share my car with anyone. It's my own personal space where I can keep some of my stuff and set it up exactly the way I want.

That's how some people feel about airplanes. Presumably you're not one of them. For some people, the inconvenience of being responsible for a car would outweigh the benefit of setting up their stuff inside of one.

It's not even an inconvenience. I like my cars. Dealing with ride hailing services (autonomous or not) is certainly far more inconvenient than owning a car (unless maybe you're stuck living somewhere without convenient parking).

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