Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.
For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile.
Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.
The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.
For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.
Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.
Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency.
> the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking
Partially. Those roads will have to exist even if we did not have personal cars.
We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.
Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.
Consider that the transportation system might not be the best fit if it requires designing the rest of the world differently and against preferences (large, detached, single-family homes with a yard).
We also have the issue that dense inner cities are subsidizing the infrastructure for the spread out suburbs. If people had to pay the full cost they again might choose differently.
The car is mostly not.
> But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity,
Haven't looked deeply into it, but looking at how the US plans and designs its public transport, I'm surprised anyone was using it at all.
I agree. The question remains - why do U.S. municipalities universally and repeatedly fail to successfully implement rapid transit at an efficient price point? Buses, trains, and subways in America have ever-growing budgets (both in absolute and per customer mile terms) with ever-declining quality of service. Just asking for more tax revenue again and again is not the solution.
Re-read your same response, but replace "mass transit" with "private automobiles". The economic case is equally weak/negative. For a moment, imagine there is a small RaspberryPi-like device in your car that records every mile driven within city limits, then sends you a monthly bill for the true cost to maintain and police those roads. The cost would shock most users. Without a doubt, private automobiles are massively subsidised by tax payers. However, it is a democracy, and the voters are OK with it, so it continues.
To go further, there are very few mass transit systems in the world that do not require large gov't subsidies to operate. (I guess less than ten.) In all such cases, the gov't funds nearly 100% of the construction cost of railways.
If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.
And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.
I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.
1. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf
2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.
($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)
All take Waymo shared taxi/minibus - it is better than current mass transit and almost as good as car during low traffic.
But self driving cars are not public transit. That's a grift that the people making the self driving cars are selling, so they can sell a bunch of self driving cars. The most prominent example is the hyperloop in vegas.
Self driving cars will not solve the traffic, safety, time, or cost concerns around cars. They will help a little bit, marginal gains. But they will not solve it because it's not a departure from the status quo, it's just a continuation of it.
I would be interested to see a study on that. I see many buses driving around with zero or one passengers on them. If a bus is full, the efficiency would be off the charts. But for a city like Portland, that only happens during commute times. The rest of the time, the buses are driving around empty.
Almost everyone drives so the government needs to pay for roads either way. Public transit on the other hand is easy to cut. What matters here is marginal costs of people using ride shares instead of public transit, not the full cost of driving that would need to be paid either way.
Perhaps it isn’t expensive once you consider the peak load and externalities. How many new roads would you have to build to do that?
It is like saying “that bus would be useless at the bottom of a lake”
well, yeah. The first step would be not driving it into a lake
Different population densities have different optimal vehicle sizes. It's the same reason a small city airport might have one or two regional jets per day serving it instead of 2 747s per week.
You can fit 40-50 people in your car?
(I am of course ignoring the scaling for fuel, maintenance, pollution, and traffic costs of personal vehicles; but my point is that most people severely underestimate just how awful the economic case for an underused full size bus is. Now, minibuses and microbuses are a different story; but US public transit systems don't use them.)
[1] https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
Why not both?
The absolute biggest problems with mass transit in the US are the "first mile" and the "last mile".
If I wanted to take mass transit, I had to show up before 7:00 AM in order to park my car. Every single train after 7:00AM became useless to commuters. That's idiotic.
And then I needed a car at the destination station to drive to my workplace. So, a bunch of us had completely idle cars parked at the commuter station that we used roughly 15 minutes per day but needed parking at both the station AND the workplace--just to use the train. Good lord that is stupid.
Waymo at the right price solves a whole bunch of these issues. Suddenly utilization of your train can go up because you've decoupled train utilization from train station parking. In addition, train utilization isn't so dependent upon close distance to the station. Now, you can build a transit station and allow it to organically fill in instead of getting killed because it's an expensive money sink for 10+ years until housing builds around it. etc.
Sure, you should be able to take a bicycle from the station; that's not how the US is laid out so you have to deal with what you are stuck with today. Sadly, this isn't the old days where everybody works at the mill and dropping a station right there gets you 80% of the population; you have to put that station in and wait a decade while things adjust.
Waymo gets you across the interim while the mass transit convenience transitions from poor to something useful over multiple decades.
Which is also why WA state has been charging an additional significant car registration fee on EVs (on top of the usual annual registration costs), since EVs don't contribute to this normally through gas/diesel taxes.
Tax revenue was $555mm
https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf
~122,300,000 rides (originating + boarding)
So about $4.53 per ride.
The Portland metro is ~2.5mm people, so about $222/resident/yr.
Portland metro area residents pay on average about sixty cents per day to subsidize TriMet.
Roughly 1/43rd the average cost of ownership for a new car in Oregon.
https://info.oregon.aaa.com/how-much-does-it-really-cost-to-...
When a company / government gets the cost per mile to run a fleet of autonomous EV's down to ~60cents/mile or so, which is a plausible enough number, then a lot of those transit rides are going to look real silly from a cost effectiveness POV.
This of course is in refutation to the various points made up the thread that self driving EVs are not cost competitive and glorified taxis -- not viable public transit for the masses.
Like you admit that Waymo can’t compete with transit unless you hobble transit.
Waymo raised $16 billon in February. If they really need $500mm to build a transit competitor in Portland, the only reason why they would reach into the taxpayer’s pocket instead of their own would be to undermine a genuinely more useful and capable system that they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of competing with.