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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Waymo and other taxi services are inherently bad for cyclists compared to increasing transit utilization and providing more ways to walk and cycle that feel and are safe.

They’re even bad for drivers as they are more detrimental to traffic than personal car ownership. They take up space on the road even when they aren’t being used to transport anyone.

I think we should spend less time worrying about ride share policy and spend more time working on the root cause of the need to drive so often.

Achieving this goal is not something that necessitates giving up single family homes, or suburbs, or small towns, or the ability to own a personal car, or anything like that.

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Being around a Waymo makes me feel WAY safer than being around a human driver. If more cars were replaced, I would probably bike even more.

Seriously, Waymos follow at a respectful distance and overtake me safely. They stop at stop signs. Sometimes they even stop and wait for me to make a decision about which way I'm heading.

It's not "human driver versus waymo driver," it's "car versus no car" or "10 cars versus 2 cars" or "fast cars versus slow cars."

No, it's the human driver vs the Waymo. I'm not going to entertain fantasies where all the cars magically disappear from the road; there's no political will for that and no politician is dumb enough to try.

To be perfectly clear, the difference between an empty road and a Waymo is mostly academic if you're on a bike. The Waymo is just that good at respecting space.

I’m not talking about cars magically disappear from the road, I’m specifically talking about taxis and rideshares versus using another way to get around, which even includes personal car ownership.

Studies have shown repeatedly that rideshares lower transit usage and don’t reduce personal car ownership.

Improving transit and allowing Google to blow $100B on making cars drive themselves are not mutually exclusive.

In the US, in particular, last mile transportation is mostly done by car. Transit cannot economically serve low-density suburbs.

In a city? It depends on price versus convenience. As more and more cars drive themselves, the city can get away with taking back more and more space for transit and cyclists. People should choose mass transit because it's convenient, not because there's no way to call a car.

But the studies say that Google blowing $100B on self driving cars changes human behavior to take less transit which then costs taxpayers money because transit ridership and revenues decrease.

This idea that companies have to be allowed to do business however they want is not something we just have to do.

We can as citizens and governments say “no, you’re not allowed to run a robot taxi company because it’s overall bad for our city.”

Laissez Faire capitalism is an ideological cancer to American society.

> Waymo and other taxi services are inherently bad for cyclists compared to increasing transit utilization

Anecdote: I take transit way more in San Francisco with Waymo. Because booking is deterministic (it says 20 minutes, it will be there in 20 minutes, even if it’s a short ride), I can connect with the loose network of city and regional rail systems in a way that was tedious with human drivers.

(I lived in New York for 10 years, and eagerly take the subway there.)

Which, again, is a band-aid to bad regional transit connectivity.

> a band-aid to bad regional transit connectivity

Maybe. American suburbs are already spread out. It doesn’t make sense to run subways to every corner the way we do in urban centers. Doing last mile with shared transport—versus cars which park idle for most of the day around train stations—makes sense.

Did I say we should run subways to every corner?

Here’s a nice video about how small suburbs and even farms don’t need to involve deep car dependence:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

Meanwhile, Arlington, Texas has over 200,000 people with no bus system.

And before you say “oh it’s Europe it’s old” I will point out that the Netherlands had a huge car dependency problem in the mid-century and deliberately moved away from it during/after the oil crisis.

You can see multiple single family home developments that would be right at home in a US suburb in this video. The author even reaches a rural farm without a car.

What about if American transit authorities just did basic stuff like work together and perform actual regional planning rather than working in silos and having conflicts with each other?

For example, there’s zero reason why NJ transit should be a different agency than NYC’s transit authority. They should be the same agency that works toward a comprehensive regional transit system focused on the metropolitan area rather than arbitrary state borders.

Instead, they’re forced to do things like sell $100 World Cup train tickets because they haven’t been empowered to reap the rewards of the economic development they enable.

> For example, there’s zero reason why NJ transit should be a different agency than NYC’s transit authority. They should be the same agency that works toward a comprehensive regional transit system focused on the metropolitan area rather than arbitrary state borders.

This is something that I found pretty bizarre visiting the US. The transport is _so_ regionalised. San Francisco has a separate bus system to South San Francisco (which is as far as I can see just a suburb for practical purposes), for instance.

It doesn't generally make sense to split transport authorities strictly across administrative geographical lines, particularly where the administrative regions are small. For instance, London basically gets away with TFL occupying the same general geographic area as Greater London, but only because Greater London is _vast_. If you tried this with Dublin, it would never work, because the Dublin City administrative area is tiny (Dublin Bus operates in _seven_ local authorities, and its commuter rail lines all cross at least three).

> Here’s a nice video about how small suburbs and even farms don’t need to involve deep car dependence

I’ll watch in detail-thank you.

An important caveat, though, and it’s not about age but density. The Netherlands ex Amsterdam has just under 1,400 people per square mile. That’s still denser than every single U.S. state. (New Jersey and Rhode Island are the only two that break 1,000, and only the former if we exclude each state’s largest city.) The tenth-densest state, Pennsylvania, is still almost 5x less dense than the Netherlands, and again, I’m doing this for the Netherlands ex Amsterdam.

We can absolutely build more transit in our metropolitan centers. But the layout of America, in part driven by history, in part by our embrace of car culture, forces fundamentally different transport optima than almost anywhere in Western Europe.

> there’s zero reason why NJ transit should be a different agency than NYC’s transit authority

Same reason the Dutch and German authorities are separate.

> But the layout of America, in part driven by history, in part by our embrace of car culture, forces fundamentally different transport optima than almost anywhere in Western Europe.

It’s worth pointing out here that,

1. Again, this is an ongoing choice and not an inevitability.

2. A large amount of America was built during the railroad era and a lot of urban fabric was actually just removed/demolished and could be replaced. A lot of it sits empty waiting to be rehabilitated (and to many cities’ credit, a lot of it has been rehabilitated).

3. When you watch the video you’ll see it’s not all about density, it’s also about road and street design. It’s about making spaces that feel safe to exist in as a pedestrian or cyclist. Many suburban Americans don’t actually travel that far to get around, they just can’t get places without getting in a car (e.g., a typical big box store area is a dense shopping area just like a typical high street but traversing it on foot is hostile).

I'm not sure why you would compare states to cities?

And while The Netherlands as a country is dense, the cities are not, partially due to the massive amount of urban sprawl that The Netherlands has (compared to other European countries).

Amsterdam has a density of just under 5,000 people per square kilometer. That is way less than New York City, and less than any of the Burroughs except Staten Island. Manhattan comes in at 28,000, so over 5 times more. Amsterdam Metropole has only 950 people per square kilometer.

NYC, San Francisco and Boston are massively more dense than Amsterdam. Chicago, Philadelphia and Miami are about the same. Washington D.C. and LA are only slightly less dense.

> Same reason the Dutch and German authorities are separate.

Are there any major metropolitan areas that cross Dutch and German borders?

Is there a customs border between Hoboken and NYC?

Of course NJ Transit and NYC transit should combine in the NYC metropolitan area, they are serving the same people.

To add, The Netherlands in the 1970s was going full-on towards suburbanization and urban sprawl. Even today it has one of the lowest amounts of apartments in Europe and the most urban sprawl. So if they didn't go for bicycles, it would have been America 2.0. Just look at Ireland.

In other countries bicycles aren't really needed because you can just walk everywhere.

Yes! Thank you. People just assume because Netherlands = Europe that it’s all old world walkability.

In a lot of ways the cycling in the Netherlands is almost a band-aid in itself…but it’s a hell of a lot better than depending on the automobile.

We live in the real would and have to work with what actually exists. I'd love it if my city had Tokyo's rail system, but it doesn't, and won't.

We actually don’t have to work with what exists. We actively chose and continue to choose what exists. Every day new land is developed that perpetuates these choices. Every day we decide to keep things the same or implement change.

Here’s a nice video about how rural towns can be configured to not be car dependent:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

You’ll notice that this isn’t some ancient European pre-automobile city stuff, you’ll see many single family home tract houses in the suburbs and small towns of the Netherlands that would be at home in any American suburb. The Netherlands did struggle with post-war car-oriented development that it has successfully pushed back against.

If you live in Arlington, Texas, you live in a city of over 200,000 people that doesn’t even have bus service.

> Every day new land is developed that perpetuates these choices. Every day we decide to keep things the same or implement change

This is a great argument. Retrofitting America is one discussion. But building new developments such that they don't require a car–at least within themselves–should be doable.

I still think it’s worth observing the Netherlands as an example because they also had mid-century car-oriented development that they successfully retrofitted.

And of course, also, this doesn’t mean “nobody owns a car in the Netherlands.”

Do you have a good source on that retrofit?

one particular video focused on one specific neighborhood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARjrpb_FOcs

> We actually don’t have to work with what exists.

Sure we do, by definition.

We can work to change things, sure. But for many places in the US (especially established cities) this is a monumental effort. For example, I live in San Francisco. I wish we had more subways. Our bus system isn't bad, and they've converted/added many bus-only lanes over the past several years, but buses are still at the mercy of traffic (as well as traffic lights). Our light rail has large above-ground portions, some of which has to deal with traffic, some not (but all have to deal with stop signs and traffic lights).

I live a block away from 3rd Street, where the T line runs up and down the eastern side of the city. However, nearly all of it is above-ground. There's an express bus that runs between where I live and Market street, similar to the T's path. The bus is usually significantly faster than the train. If the train was entirely underground, I'd expect it to be as fast as the express bus (at the very least, it would be more consistent than the bus).

How would I, personally, go about changing this? You say "we" actively choose, but what is "we"? I don't have control or even influence over the collective consciousness. I feel entirely powerless to change the status quo. Even if I could get the ball rolling on this, it would likely be 15+ years before the project is completed. Will I even be living here then? I'm not sure.

From your comment, it sounds like your suggestion might be to move to a small town, and work to change things there, where it might be easier for individuals to make a difference. While that's not completely unreasonable... I don't want to live in a small town in a rural area. I grew up in suburbs and semi-rural areas, and while I had a perfectly fine childhood, I much prefer an urban environment. Yes, I'm restricting my options this way, and perhaps missing opportunities to live in a place where I can change things. But I have a finite amount of time left in my life, and I need to be selective in how I spend it.

The summary of your comment is basically "why put in any effort at all?"

Intro sentence: We can't change anything, by definition. (This is a strange definition because last I checked the highway system was built, it didn't just fall on the earth from the sky)

Paragraph 1: It's too hard! Weird, because hard stuff like putting a highway underground in Boston seemed to be "worth the price" rather than investing in transit solutions. (The Big Dig cost $2.8 billion, over $7 billion adjusted for inflation, which would have built out a heck of a commuter rail system in Boston. They could have just removed the highway entirely rather than burying it)

Paragraph 2 and 3: How do I change things? Who is "we?" Well, a lot of people ask this very question and join up together in advocacy groups, run for public office, etc.

Paragraph 4: assigning false conclusions to my comments. I am not suggesting you move to a small town, I'm not sure where you got that idea. I'm not sure why you keep saying you can't change things. Have you tried to change things? How much time do you spend per week advocating for what you want to see in the world? How much physical effort are you putting into it? Change doesn't just manifest.

More examples of citizen-induced change:

https://www.cnu.org/what-we-do/build-great-places/embarcader... (with the help of a major natural disaster making the right choice more obvious)

https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/55

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...

Personal cars also take up space on the road when they aren't being used. It would be much easier to build physically separated, safe biking lanes and drop off areas if we could use all the space we currently dedicate exclusively to personal vehicle parking on public streets.

Not usually, and not in the same way. They are usually parked in a parking spot or garage.

Taxis and Waymos stop in areas that are explicitly marked not to stop or park.

Taxis (and Uber etc) also take up space on the road when they only have their driver and no fare paying passenger on board, so I don't see that a Waymo is any worse than that.

Both human-driven and robo-driven taxis are financially incentivised to spend as much time as possible carrying fare paying passengers and as little as possible driving empty to pick someone up.

Anyway, I agree that walking, cycling, and public transit, are all IMHO preferable to any form of taxi.

>> Waymo and other taxi services are inherently bad for cyclists compared to increasing transit utilisation and providing more ways to walk and cycle that feel and are safe.

This is nonsense. Even in places with great public transport a lot of people own cars because taxi's and Uber's are unreliable or unavailable. Given Waymo should be available at any time of day and not pick + choose rides as randomly a lot of car owners should be able to give them up.

Studies have proven over and over that rideshare/taxi is bad for traffic, reduces transit utilization, and doesn't reduce personal car ownership.

Example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z#Sec8

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