We know a lot about how to improve road safety for pedestrians, but its just not valued in some places.
Replacing 100s of millions of cars with smart robot is not safety solution. Actually improving road safety with cheap well proven methods is the solution.
If you can't go down any street in any country and find people staring at their phones while driving, speeding through stop signs, and making routinely dangerous decisions then you are less aware of your surroundings than the people texting while driving. You are the person this technology is meant for. People who don't pay attention.
Same of stop signs, if stop signs aren't overused people respect them more. Stop signs are an anti-pattern that should only very rarely be used. You constantly see people running stop signs because stop signs are badly placed. Where I live, its very rare that people run stop signs because there are far fewer of them. It still happens, but usually not when traffic is high, because most people do value their live.
The US is well known for building roads that are great for driving fast on, then just slapping a bunch of stop signs down and a bunch of maximum speed limits (that are barely enforced) and then complain when people don't follow the law. People look at their phone because the roads are straight and wide and they think they can look at their phones.
People react to intensives and to enforcement. Give them the right intensives and most people will follow them. And best thing is, these changes even work on Waymos too.
My neighborhood is close to the city center. Even so, bus service is very sparse, recently reduced to just twice a day. In addition walking to bus stops is long and difficult, or even impossible, for many elderly or disabled residents.
I envision a Waymo-like car service transporting people to/from destinations or if it's more practical, a transit center. I concur car services wouldn't be the cheapest option but may well be the most effective.
To be honest, if you have a good path to this the $30 m won’t be hard to raise. If I had the skill to do this at 1/1000 cost I would not hesitate to start the company tomorrow.
I think autonomous buses would be terrific. But for a different reason: it removes labor as a cost centre and scheduling constraint, allowing demand responsiveness. Thought so last year too so it’s not like I’m arguing here https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-15/Fully_Autono...
Honestly I think this is the only real advantage of a self-driving bus. Driving a bus is hard work and it doesn't pay well. Getting drivers to cover all the routes every day is an ongoing challenge.
I would honestly be nervous to ride a self-driving bus much of the time. Drivers limit the level of shenanigans that can happen. The subway has emergency intercoms and staff at every single station, but a bus could take you miles away from the nearest transit cop.
I think self driving buses would be awesome. I can imagine having smaller ones that come more regularly too. Add some amenities like a tracker that tells you exactly when to leave to catch the bus, and exactly when you'll reach your destination, and it would probably be an awesome UX.
But I don't know if I agree that it'd be 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars. And the overhead of a car is huge, you need one driver for a maximum of 4 passengers and probably a mode of 1 passenger. The overhead of a bus is smaller, because one driver can carry 30 or 60 people. Arguably, you'd need less of them because busses carry more people, but for some reason the unit economics often doesn't work out like that IRL. It'd make more sense for a neighborhood to have just one xbox that everyone shares when they need it, rather than everyone having their own xbox that's idle 95% of the time, but that's not how it went. (Same for any other computing device.)
All that to say, we are far from the point where a self-driving bus is cheaper than buying a regular bus and paying a driver.
But when it’s non-car transit suddenly it’s too much money, not profitable, nimby, etc.
When cars enjoy fuel subsidies , (mostly) free roads and endless expansion.
Update: some car brains over the world decided that even bike lanes are an issue. When bike lanes have bigger throughput, costs don’t even make a dent compared to roads, maintenance is negligible, etc.
I wouldn't want to be a kid, elderly, sick, blind, disabled in USA.
> There’s no point spending money on something that only 15% of the population will even consider using
Induced demand.
Though seriously you had everything: trains, trams/streetcars, great towns - now say it's impossible (after 80-100 years of lobbying and crazy subsidies).
I bet if "right" startup popped up that by accident would be public transport adjacent - atitude would shift on a dime. I saw a bunch of articles about pedestrian accessibility improvements, due to delivery bots[0]. Apparently it may be easier to improve things for businesses instead of people.
[0] first article I've found: https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/could-delivery-robots-hel...
Generally societies that invest a lot of capex in high capacity transit do quite well.
Also roads have high capex along with operation cost, along with high private cost. Not even mention the additional cost for health and other hidden costs.
If you go by total lift-time cost by capacity then its a fantastic deal.
Cars are way more expensive if we're talking "full prices".
You are simply applying two different standards for road cost and rail costs. Roads are fully tax funded and all land use decisions are made to support them. And then there is insanely huge subsidy in how parking lots work, not to mention tons of other regulation that forces the creation of parking, zoning and so on.
Your statement only makes sense, because what your 'normal' is actually an insanely pro car, anti train normal.
I know it's not for everyone, but if you really do value being able to go out without driving, it's a great lifestyle.
Most people say they want the benefit without giving anything up. Tends to not work that well lol
We need to eliminate human drivers in the future. So the best solution should be both self driving cars and public transportation.
They can subpoena recordings and Waymo will call the cops on you if you commit a crime in one of their cars, but your statement implies Flock-like access which the police simply don't have.
> Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order.
Waymo is no more required to turn over data to the government than you are.
The point is that there's a process, it applies both to Waymo and to you as a rando. The police don't have special access to Waymo cameras.
Even when you've got your own camera on your own front porch making recordings on your own hard drive using your own isolated network: There is are long-established legal processes by which you can be ordered to hand over [a subset of] those recordings.
Neither Waymo nor you, yourself, are exceptional to these processes.
That is the opposite of reassuring, because here are the stats for those processes as a whole (just ‘requests for user information’, not broken down by data type or Google product). Currently at 84% accepance rate i.e. the ‘process’ is a formality lol: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...
This is not some newfangled shiny thing. If you hold records that are important to a court case you can be forced to give them up by court order. This is true regardless of who "you" happens to be. If police "have access" to a Waymo, it's only because they also "have access" to your phone, your medical records, your car rental history, etc., etc.
The linguistic ambiguity is always where the creepy extrajudicial shit seeps in.
See also: ‘We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers’ RE: Snowden/PRISM
Because they also comply with warrants and court orders, and it's easier to say "valid legal request" than that. Probably the vast majority of data requests are subpoenas.
I suppose that a FISA court could try to get footage from Waymo, but it would be difficult to do so because FISA requires a reasonable suspicion that the target is outside the United States. The (terrible) decision to allow dragnet surveillance with PRISM was allowed because the government claimed that it would be targeted mostly at people outside the borders of the US.
Needless to say, data from a Waymo operating entirely inside the United States is not covered by this. Secret courts are a bad idea in general IMO, but according to the rules this should not be allowed.
That process is fine, the best we have.
The problem is having roving surveillance vehicles driving around everywhere. I see a couple of them every day on my walk in a mostly residential area.
The addition of facial recognition is trivial if not already implemented. Can be done after the fact. The tradeoff is catching an occasional criminal while enabling all sorts of abuse from the powers that be.