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eagleinparadise 3 days ago [-]
As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone.
Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliver anything you can live in.
So instead, Cities should lease Waymos (or other brands), and provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking.
Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing or you'll end up handing the keys back to the lender and bankrupt on the deal. Instead, if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units, that tenants have first priority to use for free (or an amount subsidized per month) up to reasonable limits, then you'd address the concern "where are people going to park and how to get to work?".
it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
What's it cost per year to lease? $30k? That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? The cars can be rented to the public on off hours to offset their operating cost.
It's a lot more cost efficient and can be done TODAY, not 5 years after complicated LIHTC financing with 4 layers of other public funding, 3 years of approvals, and 2 years of construction.
Grombobulous 3 days ago [-]
With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read.
> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!)
I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita.
I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus
As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people!
It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus.
I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.
missedthecue 3 days ago [-]
the simple fact of the matter is the Waymo is a better public transport solution for Dallas than the bus. The bus doesn't work very well in endless cul-de-sac suburbia, and that's what the Dallas/Fort Worth area (and indeed most of America) is. Like, you have to understand that most of Dallas isn't even commuting into downtown Dallas every day to work. They are just commuting to other suburbs and then back to their suburb. If your public transport solution is step 1. nuke the place and start over, it's not really a solution.
yreg 3 days ago [-]
Why is a bus not fit for endless culdesac suburbia where people are commuting between the suburbs instead of to the downtown?
I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.
missedthecue 3 days ago [-]
because you can't fill the buses!
1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow.
2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency.
3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable.
4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.
yreg 3 days ago [-]
1. I promise you that a bus can get through winding narrow loops just fine. All medieval old towns are like that.
2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet.
3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places.
4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop.
From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.
servo_sausage 3 days ago [-]
What happens, is your underserved bus has to increase stops per loop for viability.
You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.
Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.
And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).
So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?
But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.
Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.
So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.
JKCalhoun 3 days ago [-]
"You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot…"
Holy shit, you have to walk a mile from a cul-de-sac just to get to a street with an intersection?
Who the hell designed these streets? (I guess Big Auto?)
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Sadly yes. Normally it isn't a cul-de-sac. It is a neighborhood with several streets, but the streets are more like a maze so that residents can get in (they know the way), but anyone just passing through cannot find a path (without a map). Since everybody has a car it is only a couple minutes to a main road and so good enough - but that is still a long walk and so nobody walks to get places. (People do walk their dogs on the sidewalk, and generally there is a park inside that the kids will walk to)
It isn't big auto that designs these places. Big auto likes them, but the people like it because they don't know anything other than cars, and they know they hate living on a busy street with lots of cars. Those are the only two options they know about so don't bother replying with all the others you know about, they don't exist as options.
servo_sausage 3 days ago [-]
Chicken and egg problem. If you start with the assumption that you have a car, they are pretty great. Quiet, no through traffic and can become neighbourly, potentially large blocks. Somewhere to park your car...
Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.
birdman3131 3 days ago [-]
I can't say for a properly designed system but I can get anywhere in my city (~90k population / ~0.25m metro) in 15 minutes via car. (Some days traffic effects a bit.)
Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.
Can and implemented are often worlds apart.
A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
> I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats.
Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
Microvans exist. However they are not cost effective. Drivers are expensive and they don't get much better fuel economy than a bus that holds several times the number of passengers. Waymo changes the driver costs but not the other costs of running transit. Worse for the van, it holds few people so you dare not let it get popular because it can't handle a random surge of just two families trying to go somewhere at the same time. Your 4 person bus cannot handle my family of five, which is only slightly above average, there are bigger families in every neighborhood.
A larger bus is needed for useful transit.
yreg 3 days ago [-]
Sure, but the Dallas residents still don't have the autonomous on-demand bus while they could have had a normal bus decades ago.
And I doubt that 4 or 12 is the ideal bus size in that place.
ricardobayes 3 days ago [-]
It works in some countries with a low gini coefficient. In places like Germany or Spain people use public transport because everyone, broadly speaking, is in a very similar socioeconomic status. In some other countries, the wealth inequality is much higher, and people with a higher economic standing don't want to share space with crackheads or mentally ill (a direct consequence of not having access to cheap or free mental health). Some societies are set up in a way that public transport can work, and others don't, it's just the way it is.
alooPotato 3 days ago [-]
Just scale your small bus further down and you get a cybercab/waymo. It gets full easily but its routes are fully customizable and you never have to change lines and it runs at all hours with no wait. Ohh and its actually way cheaper to run per passenger mile. IMO shared, electric, autonomous AVs are the best solution for mass transit for 90% of the routes
galangalalgol 3 days ago [-]
Lots of single user "busses" cause dramatically lower road wear and microplastics than a many user bus. Those scale with axle weight to the third and fourth powers respectively.
rigrassm 2 days ago [-]
I've seen big yellow buses driving through every neighborhood I've ever lived in picking up and dropping people off on a fixed schedule... Seems like the concept works just fine when it's not being actively fought against and sabotaged.
mnahkies 3 days ago [-]
Why not both? Driver-less (or even just with drivers) mini buses, without fixed stops and dynamic routes/stops based on demand.
I guess you don't want to stop more times than needed, so maybe you'd want to cluster the demand somehow into "virtual stops", and you may lack some amenities like shelters.. so maybe the traditional bus route is good enough. Though it feels like it's ripe for optimisation (you know the classic no buses come for 30min then 3 arrive at once, or these buses are all full whilst others are roaming empty)
IG_Semmelweiss 1 days ago [-]
Buses were indeed the logical solution before Waymo/etc. Now, they are just a modern version of horse carriages. Dirty, slow, smelly and insecure.
The faster you get out of the bus, the faster you liberate grandma and kids from a fall, being mugged, or from freezing to death while waiting, and instead you promote an active lifestyle.
Waymo-like transport is incredibly liberating for low middle class parents, that cannot be trust their young kids to ride a bus alone and take time off blue collar work to take their kids to X practice.
Plus, they are much cheaper and safer to operate long term
Buses are a solution today, but only for upper class americans & soccer moms, who don't realize the issues that low income or limited fixed income seniors face in their everyday life.
hahla 3 days ago [-]
Your entire view point is framed incorrectly. The problem isn’t can a bus solve the problem, it’s the majority of people don’t want to endure the hassle of riding the bus.
ricardobayes 3 days ago [-]
Not saying to refute your point just flagging that in places like Germany the bus works flawlessly. People there are really proud that you can even go hiking with public transport, buses are clean, safe and cheap (cheaper than using your car).
DeathArrow 3 days ago [-]
In Germany they penalize using cars by taxing cars and fuels. They reward using public transport by subsidizing it. Car owners pay so public transit users get cheaper rides.
So people are using public transit in Germany not because they love to but because they are forced to.
And the system is far from perfect, Germans are complaining because public transportation is having a lot of delays. You can't reach every point you need, you have to wait and some times public transportation is dirty and filled with dirty, rude, violent people, drug addicts and drunks. Not a lovely way to travel.
sdthjbvuiiijbb 3 days ago [-]
The human geography of Germany is completely different from the US. The US has much more continuous sprawl vs Germany has more clearly defined borders between higher density areas (towns and cities) and lower density ones along with land use laws that maintain this. Also US zoning laws typically don't help either with clear divisions between commercial and residential instead of more mixed use zoning.
I am pretty pro transit and urbanism but it really annoys me in these discussions when people (not you specifically) just wave their hands and go "add more buses, ez, problem solved", completely disregarding the physical realities of how we have constructed our civilization.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. People don’t comprehend some areas of the world are simply different. If you could get a bus to pick up near my house and drop me off near work absolutely I would consider it but the reality is everyone in most US cities are going in many different directions. It’s not a problem a bus can even solve and like you said, folks don’t want to take a bus.
FromHoiPolloi 3 days ago [-]
ok... Why the majority of people don't want to endure the hassle of riding the bus?
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
Because most buses have terrible service and people are confusing the service with the vehicle. Where buses get good service they get used.
When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.
Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. If they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.
FromHoiPolloi 1 days ago [-]
Oh I fully agree. One thing that (I think) is being overlooked is that when some people switch from cars to public transit, the congestion eases. One doesn't have to make everyone switch to buses/light rails. Just enough for everyone to benefit.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
Why would you think it works? Let’s say you have a community of 100 people in Dallas. That neighborhood is going to be commuting in all sorts of directions, sure you might be able to transport some groups going the same direction but there is a complete lack of central offices so how does the last mile work? Lots of transfers would be required and that’s a nonstarter
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Your community should be more like 500 people. Each house will have more than two people (most people live with a romantic partner, and kids are still common enough) and there are more than 100 houses in the neighborhood.
infecto 2 days ago [-]
And now what? You now have 500 people going in every different direction still sure some overlap but in a metro like DFW you probably don’t see anything meaningful until the thousands and DFW does not have that kind of density.
JKCalhoun 3 days ago [-]
A bus isn't going to be able to pull into my driveway, obv.
toasty228 3 days ago [-]
They made it work in hong kong with buses/minibuses... it can work everywhere, as long as you try it a tiny bit. But no let's send billions to private company to add more 2500+ kg of metal that displace a single 70kg meatbag, such a waste of resources and energy
Is it not simply a density problem? HK is a very different beast or any other major dense urban area. Dallas is a sprawling with an urban communities and office buildings.
gilbetron 3 days ago [-]
Hong Kong is around 5x the density of Dallas.
toasty228 7 hours ago [-]
So what? One day the excuse is "it's too small", the next "it's too dense", the next "it's too large", meanwhile the 200 hab village next to mine in Poland has better bus coverage than the uni I attended in Los Angeles
fireflash38 3 days ago [-]
I find it a rather offensive that the suburbs don't have walking/bike path cut-throughs. They're cheap. They can cut down on non-car travel by a ton. They're just damn nice.
allturtles 3 days ago [-]
Some do. It all comes down to whether the local government cares/thinks about this when setting up ordinances and approving PUDs. I was also appalled when I moved from a place that did this to one that didn't. There were so many obvious opportunities to improve connectivity with a few hundred square feet of easement.
FromHoiPolloi 3 days ago [-]
No, it's not. It's a car for hire. Problems created by car-dependency will not be solved by adding more/cheaper cars.
FromHoiPolloi 2 days ago [-]
You don't have to nuke anything. Every street is fixed/rebuild from time to time (30-40 years). The steps to follow are:
1) Allow mixed use zones.
2) Update the specs how the roads/streets are supposed to look like.
After that, grab a pint and watch how your neighborhood transforms.
cucumber3732842 3 days ago [-]
> (and indeed most of America)
Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation.
Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.
irowe 3 days ago [-]
Can you explain how environmental regulations induce that housing style? I struggle to see the connection
cucumber3732842 3 days ago [-]
Basically every rule that tries to piecemeal outlaw the concrete jungle (muh setbacks, muh maximum impermeable area percentage, and so on) winds up introducing sprawl because you wind up wasting site plan space on whatever it is in your context.
staticman2 2 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure you are confusing your state's zoning laws with federal environmental regulations.
soco 3 days ago [-]
"If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." Henry Ford, about the resistance to a paradigm change.
jeltz 3 days ago [-]
So you are pro-bus? Because Waymo is the faster horse for someone in Dallas while a working public transit would be the paradigm shift.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
For the average person in Dallas the car they already own is faster than waymo: it is sitting in their driveway where they left it (or in the parking spot where they left it - while cars are stolen that is rare enough to ignore). They don't need to summon it and wait for it to show up - which saves a lot of time. Those who drive used cars (which is most people) the car is cheaper than waymo as well.
My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that.
Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.
Teever 3 days ago [-]
What if the public transport solution involved policies like taxing the existing suburbs in a way that ensures a break-even on infrastructure upkeep and operating costs so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society?
We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices?
The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them?
Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making.
Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.
missedthecue 3 days ago [-]
From a municipal finance perspective, most Dallas-Fort Worth suburban municipalities are far and away outperforming urban Dallas (the City of Dallas proper). That's not opinion, you can see the finances as they are all public. Ask the LLM of your choice to make research easy.
I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.
Yizahi 3 days ago [-]
I wouldn't dispute Dallas numbers and I may be wrong. But in general this feels wrong at a first approach. Denser low rise apartment blocks with more commercial square are per inhabitant and fewer expensive infrastructure per inhabitant (road area, length of water/sewers/electricity/data lines, amount of common things like lamp posts, signs, security (police/fire/medical etc.)) just logically should be better financially performing than single family home suburbs. In any part of the world at any age or local variation. And in fact in most countries that's true so far.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
When logic and the observation disagree that means your logic is missing something. Don't double down on flawed logic, figure out where the flaw is.
I don't know where your flaws in logic is coming from, but I have seen the numbers enough different places to know there is one someplace.
galangalalgol 3 days ago [-]
I know this isn't /. but a car analogy seems appropriate here. A city is like a modern cramped engine bay vs an old one where you can sit next to the motor to work on it. Anything you try to fix or upgrade in a dense city causes large problems.
Also, governance isn't like manufacturing, it doesn't get easier at scale, it gets so much harder.
Living in a perfectly planned super dense urban utopia where I can quickly walk wherever I want is extremely appealing to me. I would also like living in the wilds where once a week I drive to the general store and back as the full day's task. Suburban living is my least desired outcome. But everywhere there is room for it, it happens, even without a city to latch onto. There are good reasons for that.
Yizahi 3 days ago [-]
You are missing one thing. Logic can be faulty AND observation can be faulty just as well (it's just more rare usually). Especially in the financial reporting. I've seen enough to immediately doubt and try to find intentional tricks in any level of financial reporting or analysis. The tools are endless - simple faking, reclassifying specific inflows and outflows to the different time frames or divisions or even separate companies (both fake and real), confusing or obscure terminology is certainly widely deployed, metrics can be fudged from industry standards to some better looking custom ones, companies can "forget" some of their liabilities and debts or even rename them into something unrecognizable.
I'm prepared to be wrong though. The question is, are you?..
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
When you step back you can see that suburbs have existed since 1880 (street car suburbs), and most of them are still around. The roads have been replaced several times since then in most - they don't last for 140 years so they must have been. Likely the first ones didn't even have water/sewage pipes, but they all have that now so somehow they added them. We know how long pipes in the ground last (both average and maximum), so we know they must have replaced at least some of them at some point since they were added. We know that telephone and electric would have been built sometimes between 1920 and 1950 - and we know those wires don't last forever so they got replaced. We know that cable TV was added likely between 1970 and 2000, some of those much be wearing out and been replaced. We know that fiber is being added now.
I don't know how they managed to do the above. However we know that they have done it, and the costs must have not been excessive.
When you show me facts I'll change my mind. Until then the above facts are compelling.
Yizahi 2 days ago [-]
Sure. But you are assuming that somehow all those expenses come strictly from those same suburbs. Or if there is the is an external inflow (also known as debt) it is not larger than for the similar population low rise blocks. And I say that is far from fact, even without giving my own opinion.
Basically you are making correct observations but only for part of the picture. And if the discussion is about finances and economics, I would say that the part about where money comes from is pretty damn important, no? :)
Also, even from across the pond, I also saw historical photos of the old USA. Those suburbs from before WW2 were way closer to the Europe really. There were more small businesses everywhere, there were commerce blocks etc. And pre-WW2 infrastructure was much cheaper and less complex that contemporary one. So sure, old suburbs were probably much healthier economically.
As for the moderns suburbs (from 50s and up) you can view more knowledgeable people than me if you really wish to uncover facts and truth. I won't post spoilers, but you may guess them from the context easily.
cucumber3732842 3 days ago [-]
>I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities
Because from the 70s onward the former industrial northeast and miswest was actively de-urbanized and suburbanized with environmental and zoning law (don't blame this all on the locals, a lot of this rolls downhill from the states). This obviously coincided with de-industrialization. So basically all these former market and mill towns basically wound up underwater because they not only kicked out their economy but wound up in a situation where every stupid sidewalk repaving costs a bajillion bucks because pursuant to state law whatever it needs to be brought up to code which means some BS green space buffer, etc, etc.
Source: Live in one.
At the end of the day you're basically right it's a lie when it comes to some random Dallas suburb.
airza 3 days ago [-]
The finances of these metros rarely incorporate road costs; their accounting does not require them to incorporate the future liability for infrastructure maintenance and so everything looks good until they need to redo the roads.
1123581321 3 days ago [-]
What leads you to say that? Capex is typically budgeted.
irowe 3 days ago [-]
If it's anything like my municipality, all that stuff is balanced in the budget by issuing bonds. My accounting knowledge is weak, but as I understand it, even though a city's credit rating and the prospective interest on its bonds are a feedback mechanism to help moderate the spending, it's still tempting for a city to overbuild without a plan to fund the bonds plus the incurred cost ongoing maintenance without ending up with too much debt.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
The other thing people often get wrong is these things are funded by 20 year bonds, but they last for much longer. If you make the incorrect assumption that something must be replaced when the bond is paid off the suburb cannot support itself. However pipes last a lot more than 20 years in most cases. Even if the road surface only lasts 20 years (which is true in some extreme cases but not in general), the right of way is a one time expensive, and the ground work below the surface is generally one and done so the replacement costs are much less than the first time new road costs.
2 days ago [-]
Teever 3 days ago [-]
I think you're sort of missing my point.
After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance.
There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested.
The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.
galangalalgol 3 days ago [-]
The climate part is certainly an issue for dfw, but the superiority of dense urban areas from a financial or ecological standpoint isn't backed by data. Buses were better for fuel efficiency, but now the bus and robotaxi are both ev, the robotaxi has a smaller impact ecologically due to microplastics scaling with axle weight ^4 and financially because road wear scales with axle weight ^3. If buses and trash trucks didn't drive on streets they would last virtually forever the way they are built now. While the glorious excesses of the last 75yrs are definitely going away, the suburbs may very well not. Urban cores might instead rot in infrastructure until only the highways between them with low density adjacent settlements remain.
DeathArrow 3 days ago [-]
What about the problems negative externalities from unchecked crowding and bus culture? Like overcrowding, sky high prices for housing, very high prices for everything, broken infrastructure that is to expensive to fix and over capacity?
wj 3 days ago [-]
What is the timeline you expect for this?
FromHoiPolloi 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
DeathArrow 3 days ago [-]
>so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society
>The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas
So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?
bwhiting2356 3 days ago [-]
waymos don't remove lanes of traffic, they remove parked cars and parking infrastructure, which is still pretty huge. In many suburbs, parking is the real bottleneck not traffic.
Grombobulous 3 days ago [-]
Taxis and rideshares are actually proven to make traffic worse.
They still have to park somewhere... And the service (Waymo or a future competitor) that has it's cars closer will win more customers or can charge higher fees for faster service. The parking infrastructure might move a bit. But it won't disappear. I'd wager it'll even increase.
lesuorac 3 days ago [-]
> That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.
We did that though!
It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss.
If you have to say “with respect” don’t say it at all. You can share your ideas without calling names.
A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an entirely different location for dinner. I think it would be incredibly hard to get that problem right and you would still be fighting an uphill battle that people don’t like to take the public bus.
Grombobulous 3 days ago [-]
Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs?
Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling:
I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
Transit going to where. That’s the problem, you could build a new development that is transit oriented but where is it going? The average person in Texas does not want to transfer busses.
Your comparison to Netherlands is rough because you are talking about a country that has a fairly mild climate and older cities that generally have density and not much sprawl. I don’t comprehend these examples.
Also those cities are incredibly tiny with probably a concentration of employment. Keep in mind the Netherlands is about 115 miles wide and maybe 180 north/south diagonally. That’s roughly the size of the Dallas metro area.
Someone who lives in Arlington might commute to downtown Dallas, an office building in Plano or downtown Fort Worth. You multiply that by millions of people and it becomes a very hard problem that a typical city bus cannot handle.
Now I do think there is probably opportunity for a Waymo like solution with 10 seats that could do driverless ride sharing but I don’t see how a city can build a bus system that works, people don’t want to take a bus unless it has zero transfers. The last mile problem is incredibly hard and places like Texas are hot. I asking through a strip mall parking lot is further than most of the cities in the Netherlands in that video.
Grombobulous 3 days ago [-]
I guess I should have expected these talking points to come back after posting a comment like that and I should have headed them off at the pass.
If the Netherlands is the size of the Dallas metro area, then why isn't the Dallas metro area like the Netherlands? Dallas-Fort Worth has over 8 million people in it, it's not like it's a drastically smaller population than the Netherlands. This argument of "America has a bunch of empty space outside of metro areas" is irrelevant to the conditions inside of those metro areas.
Most Americans by population live in metropolitan areas. They don't live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, some people do, but 80%+ of Americans live in very much urban areas. So we can exclude the <20% of Americans from this "we should have decent public transit" debate if you would like, I am fine with that.
The Netherlands actually built out a lot of car-focused infrastructure in the mid-century just like the US. The difference is that they have since pushed that development mindset out.
This idea that America "can't go back" is a farce, because it makes an incorrect assumption that other countries never grew in population and therefore never built any new suburbs after the spread of the automobile.
The Netherlands grew from 11 million people in 1960 to 18 million people today. Do you think the Netherlands never built a new neighborhood in that time period?
This doesn't mean that people in the Netherlands or Japan don't own cars. Far from it. What it does mean is that driving a personally owned car in a one-person-per-car paradigm isn't necessary to survive and thrive in those places. Transit-oriented development means that they have other options.
You are concerned about how difficult the climate is, here is how Singapore stays walkable despite hot and rainy climate:
I will also inform you that buses are indeed air conditioned and have heaters, just like a car. You can think of a bus as a car but much larger and fits more people inside.
Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses? I transfer buses all the time in my city, or transfer from bus to train. That doesn't mean it takes me a long time go get around.
I will tell you why: because demand is induced. There isn't some innate human nature where we all automatically prefer cars and have decided by evolution that anything less than a car is less ideal. No, demand is instead induced: if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.
Induced demand is especially prevalent in the US because personal vehicles are heavily subsidized over other options. The US government engages in forever wars to secure low oil prices, subsidized by federal tax dollars. Gas taxes are underfunded and don't keep up with inflation to ensure driving is offered below the real cost. Society subsidizes traffic deaths as nobody, not even insurance companies, compensate society when a 19 year old dies in a drunk driving crash and all the economic activity they would have generated over their lifespan evaporates.
Personally owned cars at a ratio of one car per person are literally the most expensive way to get around on this planet until you get into stuff like private jets and helicopters. They're even more expensive than buying a plane ticket between many destinations. You say that people in Dallas don't want to take the bus, but if it was available, reliable, had a frequent schedule, and got them to everywhere they needed to be, they probably would be very excited to ditch the $5,000-10,000 annual total cost of vehicle ownership.
And, while public transit in Texas has a long way to go, Dallas Area Rapid Transit has ridership of 52,823,800 annually. If you are saying that people in Dallas don't want to transfer buses, I'd have to ask where those 52 million rides are coming from?
ExoticPearTree 13 hours ago [-]
> Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses? I transfer buses all the time in my city, or transfer from bus to train. That doesn't mean it takes me a long time go get around.
Because taking a bus there is much more inconvenient compared to driving. And not all people take a shower, someone undesirable sits next to you and so on.
The thing is that different countries have different cultures. I live in a country where big cities have public transport and relatively narrow roads. I wish we had bigger roads where everyone drove its own car. I can do whatever I want in my car as opposed to sitting in a crowded bus.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
I don’t think you touched any of the critical issues. You’re also incredibly rude for no reason.
- Dallas is much much hotter than the Netherlands.
- Overall Netherlands population density (including rural areas) is higher than DFW metro.
- For most of the cities in the YouTube video shared they are a few miles by a few miles. The length of a typical Dallas frontage road. It makes sense to walk and bike in those small hamlets.
Going back to density, you are right the Netherlands moved back from a car centric life but that did not change population density before or after. Most cities in the Netherlands are a multiple of DFW so you have this tough argument. What works in the Netherlands is not necessarily a solution for DFW. You would need to rebuild the city to be denser, have more businesses located together and then build out transit while ignoring that it’s too hot for a good portion of the year to ride a bike or walk around outside.
My back of napkin math ended up with 30k sq ft per person in DFW compared to 20k sq ft per person in all of the Netherlands.
I think Waymo is a great step in the right direction.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
> If the Netherlands is the size of the Dallas metro area, then why isn't the Dallas metro area like the Netherlands? Dallas-Fort Worth has over 8 million people in it, it's not like it's a drastically smaller population than the Netherlands.
EDIT: Your statement of "its not like its drastically smaller population" is also just not true. 8 is not about the same as 18. I ended up replying thinking they were closer without realizing this as well. So less than half the population on about the same area. Having half the average density before even thinking about how dense the clustering is really makes quite a difference!
Density of where people actually choose to live, which you've already alluded to with the things you're saying. Similar population, similar kind of area. But look at both on a satellite image. One actually has a lot of farmland for that area. Where people actually live its often a good bit denser.
Why is it like that? That's what people have voted for, that's what they've supported. Try actually talking to the people who live there and suggest to them they should live in a zero lot line home or a townhouse with shared walls.
> Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses?
I wouldn't mind transferring busses if there was good service. But instead transferring busses around here usually means sitting in the baking hot sun on a concrete bench in >100F heat for a half hour. If the next bus was in like 5 minutes, I probably wouldn't care.
It also often means you're probably taking a very suboptimal route instead of a direct route to the place. So not only do you have an additional wait to change busses, you then also have a much longer path to ride. And you're likely going to end up going a slower average speed, as you're having to stop to pickup/dropoff people along this longer route as opposed to just continuing on. For instance, it'll take me over an hour to go to where the new Dallas Stars arena will be in Plano as I need to make 4-5 bus changes. Its a 15 minute drive although it will probably be way more than that once 20k people try to leave at once.
Now, obviously, busses can change routes. They can get more busses and do more routes. They can get more busses and offer faster service. There's a lot of potential solutions to this. It doesn't have to be that way. But in the end getting people to put more funding into it is pretty challenging.
> if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.
Its often not very comfortable riding a bicycle in 110F heat index when you've got this air-conditioned box you could ride in sitting in your garage.
Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
> I wouldn't mind transferring busses if there was good service.
Literally what I'm advocating for is good service.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
> This is entirely because of the design of Haarlem and its pedestranized city-center
Practically all of those towns have had a focus of building walkable/bikeable spaces with dense mini-downtown areas for at least decades if not longer.
Its not impossible for this to eventually happen to these already built US suburbs, but a lot of these places were explicitly designed around everyone coming and going by car. A lot of these suburbs weren't even planned with the idea of pedestrians ever leaving the neighborhood. They'll have few actual entrances and exits, with those rarely connected to any kind of infrastructure outside other than busy roads.
> fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented
A lot of those fast-growing areas are in cities with zero transit and often don't even neighbor a city with any real transit. Look at places like Princeton, Celina, Melissa, Anna, etc. They border towns like Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, and more which also aren't connected to DART. All of these towns actively shun public transit. A lot of home buyers in these areas just don't care about transit access at all, with many actively opposed to transit. So what, maybe Princeton does decide to make some transit. Ok, where do I go with that? From one suburban house to another without a car? A bit easier time getting to Little Ceasars, Taco Bell, and Walmart? Its entirely disconnected from practically any other place the people there actually need to go, because its not like many people actually work in Princeton or Celina.
So it'll take a lot of additional development and rethinking of what these places are and how they ultimately function for transit to actually make sense there.
I'm not saying public transit and walkability/bikeability can't possibly happen in North Texas. I like biking around, I ride DART when it makes sense, and I do push for expansion of bike infrastructure and good DART access. But I also see the heat index for today is 105F, it'll be about 110F on Friday. I don't think I'll be riding a bike to get the groceries. I don't think the Netherlands often gets weeks where the heat index is >100F practically every day. And finally, it will take changing a lot of minds about public transit to get buy-in from a lot of the population to actually do it.
I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas. In 1960, 8 million fewer people lived in the Netherlands, and cars definitely existed and were mainstream back then. This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.
It's never too late to change course. It's not a black and white choice where we must suddenly give up our vehicles and never drive, it's more like a gradual increase in the number of trips that are feasible and enjoyable without a car.
I know people who lived in Cleveland who started using the bus to get to work when the HealthLine BRT line was completed. They still drive basically everywhere else, but that one bus line changed their daily habits dramatically.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
You keep drawing on this random anecdotes. Singapore is nothing like DFW. The best solution is progress that people will use. People are not going to walk around in the hot Texas sun across miles of frontage roads and nobody is going to rebuild the city to look like Singapore.
Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
While I accept what you're saying about rebuilding an entire city, I also think what you're saying is effectively "there's nothing we can do."
There's a huge gulf between doing absolutely nothing and accepting the status quo and refusing to change at all.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
If I lived in Singapore I'd absolutely ride and walk most places, as owning a car is extremely expensive. To own a Toyota Corolla, before even thinking about paying for the garage to park it just the taxes and fees, its like $130k. Then you're looking at a few hundred dollars in rent just to store the car.
This might be news to you, but it doesn't cost $130k to drive an old Toyota Camry around in DFW. Every home is pretty much guaranteed to have parking for 1+ cars.
If the average Singaporean could buy a car for $5k, the government mandated their apartment had a parking spot or two, and gas cost $0.79/L you think they'd all still want to be in the heat all the time?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying transit can't possibly work in hot places. But you're needing to convince people to leave a nice comfortable air-conditioned space to willingly go be outside in the heat. Singapore did that by making cars incredibly expensive to own. I can't imagine making a Toyota Corolla cost $130K to be a popular policy in the US.
> I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas.
I 100% agree with this. People are choosing to ride around in air-conditioned boxes instead of being in the heat. People choose to live in these sprawling suburban neighborhoods with zero walkability. People choose to prevent overturning parking minimums, people choose to expand highways and people choose to vote against bonds to build bike infrastructure. That is the choice tons of North Texans are making. I do think their decisions are rather short-sighted and often disagree with them, but those are the choices being made.
> This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.
I never said this. You're literally making a straw man here. In fact I'm saying the opposite of that. I agree its not impossible. Just a lot harder as people's mindsets are extremely different and the climate is very different.
If I had the weather of a lot of Germany or the Netherlands or UK or Norway I'd probably be outside a good bit more. I really don't mind riding a bike in the cold, exercise warms you up. If I was taxed like Singapore, I'd probably eschew the car.
infecto 2 days ago [-]
I know you are not saying this but in defense of what you are saying…I think if you could rebuild all of DFW that yes I bet you could get some portion of the population to live in denser apartment buildings with everything they need in a walkable area and have trains connecting these dense areas together. But people choose to buy a home in the suburb and choose to drive that suburban with AC. Folks who want density move to those places.
Waymo is a step in a direction of an interesting future. If you can take the current blueprint and make it more efficient that sounds like a win to me?
vel0city 2 days ago [-]
I think we're seeing that kind of happen with self-selection driving it.
While we're experiencing tons of growth in the far-flung suburbs with practically zero walkability, we're also seeing a good bit of redevelopment of places like Richardson, Garland, Carrolton, some parts of actual Dallas, and even some parts of Plano like the old downtown. A lot of these towns are trying to rebuild their downtown areas and more to be far more pedestrian, bike, and transit friendly.
Its entirely possible to live a car-free life in some places in DFW. There are definitely pockets where one can comfortably live without a car. I spent a bit of time without a car and got by with just a bicycle and motorcycle after my car was destroyed in a hailstorm. Because I had purposefully chosen bikeable places with decent transit to live near where I worked it really wasn't that big of a deal. But in the end you pretty much have to give up going to large parts on any kind of regular basis.
And yes, I do hope things like AVs can solve a bit of the current cost of operating bus lines. Nearly half of the cost to operate a line is the cost of the driver. We could run so much more capacity and really rethink a lot of the economics.
infecto 2 days ago [-]
Agree and it reminds me of my time in the Bay Area too. You could absolutely live car free but you give up a good part of going places (thinking of hikes and other activities).
I still think it’s really hard because even with that self selection, what happens when your work changes. Probably some of my Silicon Valley bias of swapping companies every few years but it can throw a wrench in your commute easily.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
I share all of your views. I think there is opportunity in some of the new developments to have some more amenities built in which I have seen some doing, community spaces, light retail, more schools baked in but I don’t see how you solve the density problem or how diverse work locations are.
I have never lived in Amsterdam but my obeservatiob is that these are older cities already baked in with density. So it’s much easier to switch back to bicycle and share infrastructure.
You can build a new city in Texas with transit in mind but people are still going to be commuting 30mins or more in every direction.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
> Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs?
To give a clear answer that others have beat around: it is the network. Transit works when you can get places. When you can get many places it doesn't work.
The real question is how can Dallas get there - which is a hard problem is you need a massive network investment before it becomes useful to many people and so there is a lot of upfront investment needed first.
The US has a poor history with getting a good return on investment for transit. In general even where the investment does get good ridership, the amount spent was way out of line from what anyone else in the world would have spent for that system.
infecto 2 days ago [-]
That trivializes the problem too much, part of the equation but you also have to have a population that actually wants it along with high enough density that it makes sense. For places like Dallas I struggle with all of the above. Sure some percentage would use it if it was flawless but I think far too few would.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Dallas has plenty of density as proven elsewhere. As for wanting it, people don't want what they don't know. How they would act if something existed is very different from what they say.
infecto 2 days ago [-]
Proven where? DFW is not as dense as you might think. Last mile is an incredibly hard problem to solve when it comes to transit and you add in unfavorable weather and it’s a not go.
Good luck though! Just sharing as a member of the DFW community has taken dart and bikes a lot. The metro is absolutely not dense.
joquarky 2 days ago [-]
Coppell (a suburb of Dallas) will not permit public transportation because the residents believe that it would bring in "undesirables".
They also have a highly regarded school system... Turns out that is only the case as long as you don't have any special needs.
servo_sausage 3 days ago [-]
Because a transit method that follows a fixed route, on a schedule, is inherently worse than an on demand one; unless you can separate the traffic.
trymas 3 days ago [-]
But I don't get the Waymo "solution" in this thread.
Genuinely and not trolling.
Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts.
My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens.
If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM.
Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car.
With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.
servo_sausage 3 days ago [-]
Because people are not nearly as rigid about a 9-5 as you are imagining in aggregate; enough people commute off hours to increase the number of round trips per car significantly.
Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...
trymas 3 days ago [-]
Fair and I concur.
Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)?
As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact.
I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
This is false. A fixed route is predictable. You know when it will be there and can plan for it. Non fixed routes mean you cannot be sure when your ride will arrive and thus cannot be sure you will arrive on time.
That makes the fixed route better than a flexible route. Sure the flexible route is faster in the best case. However it is unpredictable and people have deadlines of when they can arrive: a flexible route cannot meet those consistently enough.
Grombobulous 3 days ago [-]
Bus routes can be fixed in the sense that they can stay in place for decades. Even simple things like paint, signs, and shelters provide psychological permanence.
Things like WalkScore show up on real estate listings as a value add.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
You don't even need that. Just seeing the bus go by "all the time" provides permanence. Really it is better, I've seen plenty of paint/signs/shelters, but when I bothered to look the bus only came rarely. When I moved someplace where I saw buses all the time I realized I could use them even though there was no paint/sign/shelter close to where I got on.
alooPotato 3 days ago [-]
I think we should let autonomous, shared EVs use bus lanes (just like how some cities let taxis use them). They are just so good for society.
CalRobert 3 days ago [-]
I agree with you and hate car centric development, and yet, if this idea gets low or no parking housing built, it could be worth considering.
pid-1 3 days ago [-]
You can even buy some paint and build dedicated bus lanes. Some alien technology shit.
null3cksor 3 days ago [-]
This is a simple conversation involving ‘what abouts’ and divert your attention to delay public transit build.
In the end you waste long enough time to defend it to delay investments in affordable housing and public transit, both. You then funnel that money into road construction and fuel subsidies.
m_a_g 3 days ago [-]
God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport
ChadNauseam 3 days ago [-]
Sarcastic and self-satisfied comments like this are uninteresting IMO. The GP comment is talking about reducing parking requirements for new development, and parking requirements are probably some of the least efficient use of land imaginable. But he shouldn't talk about that because it'd be better if every city all across america suddenly had public transit tomorrow? It's like if a city in europe was talking about setting up a cooling station in a town square during a heat wave, and someone condescendingly commented "god, I love how europeans will do anything but install air conditioning." It's just not that easy and one doesn't preclude the other
hocuspocus 3 days ago [-]
Many European countries do install AC actually, poor ones at that, so it'd be a valid point because yes, it's that easy.
thundercleeze 3 days ago [-]
You're avoiding the point and wrong in assuming the analogy is incorrect. The US has around 1/5th the heat related deaths that Europe does despite being hotter, more often and mostly of European background. https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/how-europe-became-the-w...
stratom 3 days ago [-]
Nice graphs, but these numbers are not reflecting the reality. As both count heat deaths differently. Europe does calculate it based on excess mortality studies and US only counts them if it is listed as contributing cause on the death certificate. With similar statistics, US numbers are several times higher. And as Europe has an older population, rates are likely higher, but the real difference is much smaller.
latency-guy2 3 days ago [-]
> With similar statistics, US numbers are several times higher. And as Europe has an older population, rates are likely higher, but the real difference is much smaller.
Cool, so if you have the numbers or graphs, paste a link
I of course believe you're lying. Probably out of the standard xenophobia.
It wouldn't make sense considering average US household infrastructure vs average EU household infrastructure so I sincerely doubt you're able to prove it, or whoever you're going to cite as proof.
What do you think this link is proving actually? Its absolutely irrelevant to heat deaths, so nothing from either you or stratom lying.
orwin 1 days ago [-]
Gp said that the way heat deaths were reported in Europe (statistical analysis: additional mortality during heatwaves) and in the US (individual analysis: autopsy) makes the two incomparable.
I'm just making a note about life expectancy in the US and in Europe (which are both calculated the same way). I admit I was in teaching mode, and should have been explicit instead. If heat deaths had an oversized effect on Europeans, you should be able to see it in the graphs in summer 2023 and 2025, and not in the US (to a certain degree: US have to catch up like 5 years, so it's not an apple to apple comparison, but close enough)
hocuspocus 3 days ago [-]
You're just supporting my point.
xeromal 3 days ago [-]
Missing the forest for the trees
skipkey 3 days ago [-]
So the DFW metroplex is an example of why it's difficult to build decent public transportation - it has a population of about half that of Greater London, covering over 24k square kilometers. Very few people work in the downtown areas. Most people live in a suburb and work in a suburb.
I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble.
All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even.
Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
Bad operations is not the fault of transit it is the fault of operations. Making transit serve the poor is a political choice and the result is it didn't serve you. However there is every reason to think good operations with a good budget could serve you well.
HDThoreaun 3 days ago [-]
No there really is not. The problem is that static routes in low density areas do not work. The reason the transit system has a policy about poor areas is because they know people with cars will never take the bus unless the government makes driving onerous which will never happen.
rangestransform 2 days ago [-]
The idea of transit as welfare is a cancer to good transit in the US, even in places where it’s onerous to drive like NYC. This is how we end up with bus stops every block, buses from nowhere to nowhere instead of subway-like frequencies on well used routes, a lack of fare enforcement, running transit as a jobs program, etc.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Define low density....
In the typical suburb there is enough density for a good static network to work. Note that I said "good", and "network". A suburb cannot support a bus every hour, the service is too bad - but it can support a bus every 10 minutes or better because the service is acceptable. Also: network, not route - the important part is you need to be able to get to all the places you would normally go and that means the entire network matters and the ability to quickly/easially transfer to other routes is critical to success.
HDThoreaun 2 days ago [-]
I really think the issue here is just that you are blinded by your own preferences. Buses will never be faster than cars in Dallas. Literally impossible. So if they’re not faster, and they’re not more convenient, what are the upsides? Well they’re cheaper, but everyone in Dallas already owns a car so that doesn’t matter. They have lower externalities, but that’s not convincing anyone to switch, Dallas residents are republicans. I just really don’t think there’s any realistic way to convince non poor Dallas residents to use a bus no matter what you do, as long as the state is red. And if you only get poor people to use it there will never be enough riders for it to make sense to have enough bus routes/consistency.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Buses don't have to be faster. They need to be as good or better for the trips you take. If it is 15 minutes to drive to work and 25 minutes by bus that is good enough. If you can get all your other errands done on the bus then you can save a ton of money by selling a car. Note that I said sell a single car - nearly everybody in Dallas lives in a "family" situation with more than one car, so you still have a car for the exceptions while saving a ton of money (this only works if everybody is using the bus for almost everything and so there isn't a conflict when one person needs the car for something weird)!
Also we should not assume only the bus. A train is a useful part of any large transport network. There should be a train between Dallas and Fort Worth that makes the trip in 10 minutes - you can't do that in a car (a race car with a professional driver could beat that if we block all traffic, but no normal car or driver can even if traffic is blocked). Sure the current train takes an hour, but we can make is faster with existing technology.
HDThoreaun 2 days ago [-]
> If it is 15 minutes to drive to work and 25 minutes by bus that is good enough.
I really think this is completely wrong. You will convince approximately 0 people in Dallas to use a bus if this is what you are offering them.
hibikir 3 days ago [-]
Public transit is at its most useful and effective connecting dense, walkable locations. That's why it's so great in the world's best cities. The problem is a metro like DFW doesn't have the density to have said good public transit. If anything, many American cities have more bus lines and light rail lines than they would if you asked an European transit authority to decide where to build.
Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
Density is important, but overrated. There is plenty of density in the suburbs to support transit, but nobody gives transit the money needed for good service and so they don't get it. The money needed for his transit would be less than cars cost everyone.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
Just because it's not a train doesn't mean a self-driving car system isn't public transport. Free your mind.
stratom 3 days ago [-]
Definition of public transport:
Cambridge Dictionary (UK):
"A system of vehicles such as buses and trains that operate at regular times on fixed routes and are used by the public."
Collins Dictionary:
"A system of buses, trains, etc., running on fixed routes, on which the public may travel."
lkbm 3 days ago [-]
Quoting a dictionary won't get you very far with real people. Those are obviously wrong in that they're overly prescriptive and tied to what was common when they were written. The dictionary is trying to give you an idea of what most public transit looks like. It's not strictly reflective of reality or of actual usage.
Is the city and county provided point-to-point transit for disabled people[0] not "public transit"? Is Line 0[1] not public transit? Most people say yes; the dictionary should be updated to reflect actual usage, not the other way around.
I know in some places taxis are considered public transport. But I do not agree with that. It's still a car with one or two passengers. The only similarity with public transport is that you can use it while under influence.
jdale27 3 days ago [-]
Waymo is already working, on roads today, for less time and money than it took to build zero miles of high speed rail in California.
toddmorey 3 days ago [-]
You can’t do inter-city Waymo trips. These are different animals.
jdale27 3 days ago [-]
You can’t do intercity trips on California high speed rail either.
zzyxy 3 days ago [-]
The thesis needs some refinement. One can get a Waymo ride from San Francisco to San Jose, though one can also argue that Bay Area is one big suburb and thus the trip does not count as inter-city, even though both SF and SJ are most certainly different cities.
That said, Waymo is indeed not the right tool for the actual inter-city trips.
thundercleeze 3 days ago [-]
You also can't do inter-city train trips in most of the US either. Inter-city autonomous car trips will almost certainly happen before the trains arrive.
runarberg 3 days ago [-]
You think we will have Waymo between Bakersfield and Merced before 2033? That is a bit optimistic I would say.
getnormality 3 days ago [-]
One could say the same about the train.
trymas 3 days ago [-]
IMHO - you are not countering parent’s argument.
fishfasell 3 days ago [-]
Dallas needs public transit badly too. It's the least walkable city I've ever been too.
master-lincoln 3 days ago [-]
How do you get to and off stations if it's not walkable? Isn't walk-ability a requirement for successful public transport?
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
People will figure it out if there is good transit. Sidewalks are cheap, they will build them if there is a place to get to.
DiscourseFan 3 days ago [-]
A network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail. There is no way that traditional forms of public transit could outclass it. This is Waymo's big moneymaker: public contracts. The bus drivers and taxi drivers unions will fight it, but smaller towns looking to build denser housing and make their public spaces more walkable will happily adopt this as policy, and it will eventually spread to the bigger cities.
Cars are the very bottom, by very considerable margin. You need to prove otherwise.
DiscourseFan 2 days ago [-]
Yes, a traditional car. See my comment below about co-ordinated modular autonomous vehicles. Basically tiny cars that fit one person that can link up to share energy on longer routes, or even busses with detachable "pods" for last mile travel. But autonomous vehicles provide numerous possibilities that traditional modes of public transit do not.
pibaker 3 days ago [-]
> A network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail
[citation needed]
Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.
DiscourseFan 3 days ago [-]
Ok but an autonomous bus, or autonomous vehicles designed to fit different numbers of people, would not be better than a one size fits all bus?
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
The one size fits all bus would be better. A tiny car cannot share rides without adding big delays to the person already on it. That means you cannot count on getting there on time with a shared ride. The bus has defined delays so you can predict when you will get there and this arrive on time.
DiscourseFan 2 days ago [-]
If a root is only serving a smaller number of people, why have an entire bus? Busses make sense for thoroughfares, but I often board nearly empty express busses that are only running because of state/city appropriations. If we could modulate form to meet demand precisely, like Uber but for all transit, it would be far quicker and more efficient.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Even in the suburbs it is not hard to get a bus that is half full during off peak if the service is good. Most service in the US is not good so perhaps you are only looking at one of the many bad examples and incorrectly thinking it must be that way - it doesn't.
> . If we could modulate form to meet demand precisely, like Uber but for all transit, it would be far quicker and more efficient.
Efficiency is not the only or even the primary goal. The primary goals are to "Get people from where they are, to where they want to be, when they want to go, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable price.
Your modulate demand fails at that. A fixed route bus is predictable. I know in advance when it will be there to pick me up and where/when it will drop me off. That means I can plan my day. With Uber or any other demand/response system you don't get that and have to hope every time that it will get you there in time.
Quicker is much harder to quantify. A bus can connect to a faster rail (which potentially can go 300 km/h - only a race car can do that). A bus can be given signal priority while the uber needs to stop and wait more. However a bus will stop to pick up others on the way. (but if your "modulate to meet demand" does that it is worse than either a bus or uber because you can no longer predict when you will get there). A bus network done right is also likely to drive changes in your city such that most of the places you go are where the bus is going and that makes it just as fast.
DiscourseFan 2 days ago [-]
You must not live in a place suffuse with Waymos. At 3am anywhere in the coverage area you will get a car coming within 2 minutes, often for at least 20% less than an uber/lyft, and sometimes up to 50% cheaper. There is no way a bus can be that efficient, be that quick, or, in a large network, as coordinated. You could even set up basically a series of pods that merge to share energy and split up depending on where they need to go. Every person could have their own autonomous modular form of transport that is always ready at hand. How is that slower/better than traditional public transport? As I said, the only technology that supersedes it, and only because you cannot overcome friction, is maglev trains.
If only we could build a network of high speed, maglev trains covering the span of the entire planet, from the southern tip of Chile, through the Darien Gap, across the Bering Strait, all the way up to Paddington Station and down past the Suez Canal all the way to Johannesburg; that, plus airplanes and modular autonomous transit, should cover 90% of transit needs, and anything more than that will be served by older technologies, off-road vehicles, horseback/camel, and of course for the most treacherous environs, on foot is still best. But I cannot imagine a world where a traditional bus system would be superior to a highly coordinated system of autonomous modular transportation.
nunez 3 days ago [-]
I agree with you, but the car is embedded deep into the American DNA, mostly because it perfectly feeds into the dream of single family homeownership. I've come to the conclusion that the cities where public transit works got lucky and invested into it at the right time in history. I would love to be able to take a comfortable train to suburbs an hour away, but most people think that's freedom-limiting and won't vote to pay the taxes for it.
schainks 3 days ago [-]
THIS.
It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.
annzabelle 3 days ago [-]
In the countries that are closest to America's peers (Canada, Australia, NZ), the public transit is also lacking outside of a few dense cities.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Those cities are enough to prove that transit works. We can then look at other parts of the world and see the same in smaller cities.
yostrovs 3 days ago [-]
It's effectively xenophobic to comment such as you did about "Americans" without addressing the points by the author, which deal with real, structural issues.
Guestmodinfo 3 days ago [-]
One thing about private car ownership in the US is that it is a VERY BIG country and sparsely populated so who will pay for the public transport connecting every nook and corner because in the US it's so sparsely populated. Even in India I see metro train being very successful in places which are densely populated but in states like Rajasthan which are very big and sparsely populated there public transport is a failure because who will pay for the fuel when people are not enough.
Walking and public transport are good options in Europe because European countries are small and are more densely populated
pibaker 3 days ago [-]
The US is ten times more dense than Australia. And yet Australian cities tend to have comparable if not better transit than similarly sized American cities. The overall population density of a country is largely irrelevant in this discussion because 99% of day to day travels are contained within the same metro areas.
annzabelle 3 days ago [-]
> comparable if not better transit
Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.
jdxcode 3 days ago [-]
90% of australians live in 0.22% of the country's land
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
Whole the us has different numbers, but the same point applies. Most of the people in the US live in dense enough areas. The Mid west has similar size and population as France for example.
sebmellen 3 days ago [-]
Dude, Australia is like 95% sand and nothingness with Alice Springs in the middle. Where is your bullet train between Perth and Darwin and Melbourne? Boo!
I jest, but not completely. The US is more dense but more distributed too. You can’t realistically link someone in a rural West Virginia holler up to a regular bus schedule, nor can you build a train between Morgantown and Pittsburgh that gets ridership.
America doesn’t do badly at public transit in places like Florida where private companies can fill the gap and the communities are within a reasonable distance and the geography is flat and simple. See the Brightline trains for proof of concept. But it’s kind of ridiculous to imagine Australia and the US to be comparable in that way.
bobbylarrybobby 3 days ago [-]
1. We don't need to connect every nook and corner with public transit. Each city having its own would be sufficient. 2. The US is sparse _because_ of cars: the space allocated for parking pushes things apart.
hibikir 3 days ago [-]
It's not a matter of the size of the country, but the density of the metro areas: See Spain, a low density country with high density cities. The US' high suburb, low density metro design is the one thing ruining transit
3 days ago [-]
zero_k 3 days ago [-]
Build walkable cities instead. Stop car-brain-rot. Your cities could be beautiful, full of life and children running around and having fun. Walking, cycling, and taking public transport, brings life to a city. It allows random connections and makes you see "the other". It could significantly improve your quality of life. Open up your eyes, there's a whole beautiful world out there.
HDThoreaun 3 days ago [-]
People who live on Dallas clearly do not want this. Telling them their lifestyle is wrong and if they just open their eyes they will see the folly of their ways accomplishes nothing. If you work with their actual preferences instead of foisting your own into them you will see that there are still ways to make progress such as removing parking restrictions by utilizing self driving cars.
I lived in one of the most walkable neighborhoods in Chicago for 30 years before moving to suburbia with 0 walkability. It is completely untrue that walkability is secretly better than suburbia and those suburbanites don’t know what they’re missing.
danans 3 days ago [-]
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily?
A bus could serve 40-100 daily. The infrastructure already exists - the same as for cars. It's pretty low cost also - especially electric buses that have lower maintenance costs. The problem is that you have to ride with other people.
milkytron 3 days ago [-]
Riding with other people is _a_ problem, but I don't think it's the primary problem for why transit isn't used in the US.
Imo, the biggest problem is that of convenience. Convenience (time), cost, comfort, and (perceived) safety are the factors people use to make transportation mode choices.
If buses aren't prioritized in traffic above single occupant vehicles via dedicated bus lanes, signalling, etc. then they'll always be slower than a car because of the additional stops. Frequency is also a consideration that factors into timing, as well as transfers.
If any US city wants to get people onto transit, they need to prioritize transit above less efficient modes, amongst other things.
_fizz_buzz_ 3 days ago [-]
I am from Germany and public transit is hit and miss here also. Big cities like cologne are great. My commute to work is also fine with public transit (although I mostly bike, actually) But very often there are places I have to go where public transit is pretty inconvenient (adding a lot of time to a trip). I am all for public transit and it should be cheap (maybe even free) and widely available, but it simply doesn’t work for me all the time.
servo_sausage 3 days ago [-]
As infrastructure, busses don't make sense if you assume self driving EVs are going to be widespread.
Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.
master-lincoln 3 days ago [-]
Disagree because of the amount of space wasted for parking
servo_sausage 3 days ago [-]
What? Autonomous cars can park wherever...
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
Only by taking up more road space going to a parking lot. And more energy in those travels - that energy is at best 50% fossil fuels.
master-lincoln 3 days ago [-]
But they take up much more space than busses/trains per passenger.
servo_sausage 3 days ago [-]
So what? It's a genuinely irrelevant detail...
We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.
TiredOfLife 3 days ago [-]
And a 3km long train evem more
strulovich 3 days ago [-]
Aren’t Waymo prices above Uber’s? That’s what I’ve seen in SF.
That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.
jdm2212 3 days ago [-]
Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.
throwaway2037 3 days ago [-]
> Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints
To understand this better, is Waymo limited in each location by the number of cars they are allowed to drive? Or, is Waymo too slow to expand the number of cars on their side? As an outsider, if you have very good demand for your product, why not expand? I must be missing something obvious. (Again, I don't write this to doubt your explanation.)
jdm2212 2 days ago [-]
AIUI the issue is just scaling pain. No one has ever run a global network of first-party-owned taxis before, and they're learning by doing, at the same time as they're also solving problems in ML/robotics to make the robotaxis work more reliably in more contexts, and also figuring out how to manufacture reliable robotaxis at scale.
alooPotato 3 days ago [-]
There is a limit on how many they are allowed to operate.
LightBug1 3 days ago [-]
What's the product vs an Uber? Genuine question.
cflewis 3 days ago [-]
Drives better, isn't distracted, doesn't get lost, care are always clean, will always take you where you want to go day or night, and yeah, no human.
scoofy 3 days ago [-]
Yea, it not that most uber/lyft drivers are bad (most are good), it’s just that all Waymos provide a good experience.
It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.
throwaway2037 3 days ago [-]
> car[s] are always clean
This is a real surprise to me. I don't write that to doubt you. How do you think it works in practice? My point: If you have a human in the car, they can keep a closer eye on the car between rides and keep it clean. Without a driver, you lose that. How does Waymo know when a car needs to be cleaned?
jdm2212 3 days ago [-]
Waymo regularly brings the cars in to central service depots for cleaning and battery charging. Also, as a passenger you can report that a car is dirty and it will be pulled out of service for immediate cleaning (and you get a small credit towards your next ride).
acm9680 3 days ago [-]
"Doesn't get lost" is generous. they always cause so much caos in SF
hadlock 3 days ago [-]
I don't have to listen to the driver argue with his girlfriend across the entire span of the bay bridge, I don't have to worry the uber reeks of week (or worse, cigarette) smell on the way to an interview etc etc. Given the choice I will choose driverless every time.
throwaway2037 3 days ago [-]
Do you report these complaints using the Uber app? To be clear: I have no experience riding with Uber.
throwaway2037 3 days ago [-]
I have written about this before in similar discussions. I think men just cannot comprehend how much women are willing to pay to guarantee that they can avoid a scary situation in a car with a stranger driver. Ask any woman: Have you ever had a scary experince in a car with a stranger driver? Probably 100% will say yes. I would say Waymo's primary customer will be middle to high income women in urban environments.
jdm2212 3 days ago [-]
Also middle/high income parents. Shuttling kids to and from school and activities is the real killer use case for driverless cars. They're actively working on getting this legalized.
catchnear4321 3 days ago [-]
No human in the car?
mathisfun123 3 days ago [-]
This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product).
Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.
ChadNauseam 3 days ago [-]
They absolutely will. I'm a very social person but when I'm going home from a date with my girlfriend I always want a Waymo just because I don't want a 3rd person involved. And sometimes I'm having a bad day and don't want to have to make small talk. And it's nice that I can talk on the phone without disturbing someone.
vlovich123 3 days ago [-]
Safety is normally ok in an uber but in a Waymo it’s much higher. Whether I’m talking about driving safety or personal safety from the/for the driver, you pick. But generally you can charge more for a safer product.
hadlock 3 days ago [-]
This comes up in conversation at office events, every woman in our office always agrees they will choose waymo over uber every time, due to the lack of (presumably male) driver.
nunez 3 days ago [-]
My extremely social not-tech nerd wife that hardly uses FSD in her car got HOOKED on Waymo after the first ride. Same with my parents.
free652 3 days ago [-]
huh, definitely will pay more for not having a driver to be constantly on the phone.
catchnear4321 3 days ago [-]
yes yes you are the product.
pfooti 3 days ago [-]
Waymo is more until you factor in the tip for Uber. Ive also found that waymo is a lot more correct in estimating time to pickup in SF. Because Uber/lyft drivers can turn you down (presumably) I find that "your Uber can be here in 4 minutes" when I open the app turns into "but it will actually be 20"
jdm2212 3 days ago [-]
I think Uber just lies about estimated pickup times and Waymo doesn't. Partly because I've never had an Uber arrive faster than their estimated time, whereas Waymo arrives early pretty routinely. And also several times now I've had Waymo say "it'll be 20 minutes" so I book Uber because it claims a much shorter wait time, and then Uber winds up being about Waymo's estimate anyway.
satvikpendem 3 days ago [-]
Who tips on Uber? One price up front and paid, that is the deal. Anyone tipping on something like that is their own fault.
pfooti 3 days ago [-]
I dunno. Hard to say "I tip my Uber driver because I understand how little the drivers get paid" if I'm also moving to waymo instead. Hard to find ethical consumption under capitalism.
But since you asked in kind of a flippant way: who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.
SepiaSapient 3 days ago [-]
>who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.
Non-americans don't. To me, being socially expected to tip for a Taxi feels like a parody from a sketch comedy. ditto for tipping barbers or expecting tips over 10%. The only time I've tipped a Uber was when me and my friends were at risk of losing a train. The driver (unprompted) went pedal to the metal to make it on time, so afterwards I gave him a couple of bucks.
Tip culture is bad for rideshare drivers in aggregate anyways. The apps carefully manage the pay of drivers on each market so necessary supply is guaranteed at minimal cost. If a expectation of tipping exists, the platforms simply pay less. Now drivers also have maximize for tips instead of just driving the goddamn car.
pfooti 3 days ago [-]
Fair enough- outside of the US, workers may get paid fairly. In the US, many service workers are in a system where the employer has externalized the cost to pay those employees to the customers. The system is awful, but I'm also not going to not tip if I can afford it.
FWIW, the real problem isn't tip culture, it is the power imbalance between labor and the company that is using that labor (without employing drivers), but I dunno how much of an audience that kind of argument has on this particular site.
tpm 3 days ago [-]
> outside of the US, workers may get paid fairly
I don't think that's why there is little tip culture in eg east Asia. It's just... the price the business expects you to pay is mostly advertised upfront, it's known to everyone involved, why would you pay more if you got exactly the service you have ordered? It simply does not make sense.
SepiaSapient 3 days ago [-]
My country has stronger worker protections (for now) than the US, but employers would be happy (and do try!) to externalize pay to customers via tip. It doesn't work because people find it insane and refuse the US inspired nag tip screens.
The US will never fix the externalization of salaries until the public refuses to tip at ridiculous percentages and situations. You'll see a 40% tip expectation at restaurants, your local dentist will install a tip screen. Just tip 10% at sitdown places and refuse emotional blackmail. If you feel any guilt, just make the habit to tally the dollar amount of "normal" tips and make monthly donations to your local food bank.
EDIT: My point is that tipping culture is unrelated to worker rights. Many countries with large informal economies (i.e minimum wage isn't enforced for most people) have no expectation of tipping. The reason Norwegians don't tip drivers isn't because they have a wonderful safety net, it's because there's isn't a social pressure to do so.
Mixing charity and payment of services is stupid and a moral hazard. Servers have shit wages in the US by law because people tip and the same is true (via algorithm) with rideshare drivers.
jimjimjim 3 days ago [-]
I'm not a sociopath but I believe the concept of tipping to be terrible. Everything should be in the price. up front. what's advertised should be what leaves your account. If you get bad service, don't use them again or leave a bad review. Get good service then thank them and leave a good review. The rest of the world works this way and it is simpler and less stressful.
satvikpendem 3 days ago [-]
Not tipping being "sociopathic" as if you are even actually using that word correctly must be the most American thing I have ever read. Most of the world does not tip like this.
namdnay 3 days ago [-]
The problem with people is that they tend to all want to do the same thing at the same time. Drop kids off at school, go to work, come back from work, go out on Sunday etc. Using taxis isn’t really scalable, you’re going to end up needing a nearly 1:1 ratio
PsylentKnight 3 days ago [-]
As someone who knows anything about Texas cities, I assure you that parking space is not an issue in Dallas
eagleinparadise 3 days ago [-]
yes it is. it's still a cost.
but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
As someone who has lived in and around Dallas for a long time, parking is a constant source of tension, going in both directions of not having enough and having too much. It's a massive cost factor as well.
dinobones 3 days ago [-]
Here's another idea:
The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.
I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.
Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.
eagleinparadise 3 days ago [-]
Why should a tax payer in Dallas pay for your [affordable] transportation from the outskirts of Houston or OK to commute to Dallas?
tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on.
Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.
bitpush 3 days ago [-]
Perhaps I'm understanding things wrong, but isnt the idea of taxes for public good and some / all of it might never reach you?
I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.
SloppyDrive 3 days ago [-]
Ive never liked this framing; "the public good" is too nebulous an idea to justify how tax should be spent.
I, and people like me create wealth. Some of that wealth is pooled at an administrative level that makes sense across a town, state, or nation. Its still wealth I created; and I expect it to be used to benefit me, ideally proportionally to the tax taken.
Unemployment can be justified as crime prevention; Disability and healthcare systems limit individual worst-case outcomes (especially if due to chance). Super-commuter subsidies do what?
s1artibartfast 3 days ago [-]
That doesn't sound like a public good. It sounds like a private good.
I want a Ferrari. It would be good for me. Should taxes pay for it?
subygan 3 days ago [-]
these things will be evaluated based on the net benefit such a service would provide. more people having affordable commute to dallas would end up increasing the net benefit and value that dallas has.
cities grow in capabilities in direct proportion to the number of people who have access to it and their capabilities. it might be cheaper labour leading to better roads, plumbing etc
dinobones 2 days ago [-]
Why are you assuming there’s some taxpayer that will pay for my transportation?
I fully intend to pay my transportation costs myself.
It’s not about getting a free ride, it’s about being able to get to work while sleeping, saving money on housing, and pocketing the difference.
SoftTalker 3 days ago [-]
I'd go further and say that in most smaller cities that try to run a bus service but just don't have the ridership to support adequate service they would be better off just subsidizing Ubers or Waymos or whatever is available. Pare down the bus service to only the heavily used routes and run them way more often.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
100%. Most bus routes are terribly expensive to run, multiple drivers, benefits and then the physical equipment. It would be interesting if you could work out a subsidy program for low income riders.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
A route is expensive to run, but there is no reason you cannot automate a bus driver just like a car driver.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
Sure but most folks don’t want to take a bus in the US. Perhaps you build mini ride share busses that are driverless and I think this is where something like Waymo would actually go to.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
Nobody understands their why. They say they don't want to, but what they really mean is service sucks so they can't and assume that means they don't want to. It is regularly proved around the world that when you give good service people suddenly want to ride.
infecto 3 days ago [-]
I think that is a pretty broad generalization that lacks cultural differences and regional challenges. There are indeed many whys but one of the core issues in American is the rooted desire to be free by driving a car. It’s kind of similar to how folks argue small cars should be manufactured in the US when in reality most folks don’t want to buy them.
You could not efficiently run a bus service in most US cities at a level of “good service”. Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs but I don’t see that happening yet and Waymo is at least a nice step on the potential direction.
Even with great service it’s an uphill battle to get enough ridership.
Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car. That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
> You could not efficiently run a bus service in most US cities at a level of “good service”.
Only because you can never get the political supported needed to get there. If you somehow got the needed support people would start using it and it would turn the US city into a transit city. Note that political support needs to last for at least 5 years, in the real world there is an election every 2 years and so before you can get your bus system working for 5 someone will win an election on "lets stop wasting all that money on the bus system" platform and kill the whole thing.
> Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs
We we cannot. you cannot optimize a 10 set ride share that much. They would be even more expensive at that scale. Nobody likes busy ride shares - you have a deadline of when you need to be there and flexible routes mean that some days you are late because the rideshare decided to take a detour to pick up (or drop off) someone else.
> Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car
Because the bus nearly everywhere provides terrible service. Sure some people can take a few trips via bus, but then the car they need for the rest is just sitting around while you still make payments (including taxes and insurance).
> That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.
You don't need to get there. You just need to get "close enough". If you give people a situation where they can REASONABLE do nearly everything on transit most will give up the car. However if there is even one semi-regular trip that needs a car they may as well use the car for everything.
infecto 2 days ago [-]
Sorry no you are ignoring the most important fact. Unless you can get door to door service, people in a place like Dallas are not going to use a bus. You tell me it’s not feasible to do a rideshare small bus? Well then it’s definitely not feasible to run bus networks. I think the narrative is conflicting within itself.
- if you give someone the option of a bus with a transfer or taking a car they will almost always take a car (thinking of Dallas)
- if you can get me a bus that very nearly gets me door to door with low to no wait people will consider taking it over a car. Very nearly to me is 5-10 mins of walking at most. That’s like a single section of a frontage road in Dallas at best.
- I don’t see how you build that kind of service. Maybe you do live in DFW but it’s massive. Just walking from one intersection of a frontage road to the next would take me at least 10-15mins and thinking of job density there it’s pretty low and then thinking of those folks and how many are commuting from similar places is even lower.
You are arguing that if you could create a great bus service that people would take it and I am trying to point out that a great bus service in a place like Dallas is not economically feasible. It has nothing to do with politics at least from the upfront problem of it not being feasible.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
> I am trying to point out that a great bus service in a place like Dallas is not economically feasible.
I disagree. It is not politically feasible and so we won't get there, but the economics work out: a great transit network even in a place like Dallas could get enough riders to sustain itself. Problem is we need 50% of the families in Dallas Fort Worth to pay $200/month to pay for it, and nobody will stand for that - even though nearly every family in spending more than that per car.
infecto 2 days ago [-]
DFW is simply not dense enough. I don’t know why politics come into play. absolutely cities preference does but at the end of the day most US cities are not dense enough that buses and other forms of public transit work well.
runarberg 3 days ago [-]
This is already the case. A lot of transit agencies have a vanpools, rideshares, and ridehales for their low frequency areas. I used one recently in Tacoma because my ferry was late and the bus from the ferry arrives only ones an hour.
I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.
So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.
SoftTalker 3 days ago [-]
Last I checked, buses, related infrastructure, and fuel are all made by private companies
TranquilMarmot 3 days ago [-]
If they were taking the bus in Tacoma, it would be owned and operated by King County Metro which is publicly owned and uses roads that are publicly owned. A great deal of the buses are electric or zero emissions, using electricity from Seattle City Light which is publicly owned.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
Most share cities could get adequate ridership just by expanding service. That is more service would be more riders than they are getting. However they need a lot more service to reach this topping point to where people will choose to give up their car, and you can't get support for those costs until you already have had that level of service for five years.
And get to your destination in two hours instead of 20 mins
fzeroracer 3 days ago [-]
Waymo cannot ever be fully sustainable because cars are subject to variable and constantly increasing size. As more individuals own cars the throughput of a transit network relying on ride-sharing or autonomous cars gets less and less efficient.
It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.
torginus 3 days ago [-]
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily
The problem is rush hour. You still will need some kind of minibus that can serve 4-8 people efficiently, and take up way less space. An added benefit is that if you cut peak traffic volume by 3/4th, you can eliminate congestion.
oblio 3 days ago [-]
America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.
robomartin 3 days ago [-]
> America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.
This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc.
In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more.
The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains.
The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design).
So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
The California highspeed rail project is 33(!) years old.
robomartin 3 days ago [-]
Even better. I didn't remember. It's a suppressed memory!
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
You say it can't be done, but it's literally happened several times before. The most recent being when we built all these urban highways.
It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
Busses. I rode on a public bus once while visiting Columbus Ohio.
I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there.
Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow.
The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful.
I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses.
I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated?
(Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
Your experience isn't uncommon. Lots of cities in the US have pretty limited transit, and a lot of the people in those cities don't use it. It's usually seen as a last resort kind of thing for those who can't get private transportation, as opposed to just yet another option.
turdprincess 3 days ago [-]
Boulder Colorado has a public airport bus route that is pretty widely used - it takes one hour and is well liked by the general public.
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
It seems that Columbus has one today, but they didn't back when I needed it in 2021 or so.
(Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)
robomartin 3 days ago [-]
> The most recent being when we built all these urban highways.
What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category.
You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries.
> to run bus routes
That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing.
Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero.
The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work.
In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.
Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports.
And you think I live in fantasy land.
> if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country.
So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.
It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen.
> Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.
This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc.
I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.
robomartin 2 days ago [-]
>> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports.
> So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.
You must be a software guy. Moving atoms is very different from typing words into this textbox. Also, in the US, the 1950's to 1970's was a very, very different time. That was probably the peak of our industrialization phase. You had millions of men who came back from WW2 ready to work all kinds of jobs, an industrial based that had exploded due to WW2, massive entrepreneurial drive at every level and the ability to get shit done without the nonsense that kill even the most basic projects today.
Yes, a few decades can change things radically. In the decades since the period you use as the reference for this fantasy the US, Europe and other nations have deindustrialized to an alarming degree and China has become the world's factory. We make nothing here. To be able to to things you have to make things. On top of that, our political system has welcomed bat-shit-crazy ideologies, like the current push for down-right socialism/communism who's only recorded history is the destruction of nations.
So, yeah, yours is a fantasy. This is not the United States of the 1950's, 1960's or 1970's, not by a large margin.
To understand things at this level you need contact with reality. I've you've never tried to get a non-trivial project done in the real world, moving atoms, not bit, I can see how waving a magical wand and thinking we can do what was done five to seven decades ago might be possible. It is not. I've been in manufacturing my entire life. I assure you this is not the 1950's.
> This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments
Sure, but that's a different problem, isn't it? What we can change --over time-- is the relationship between where people work and where they live. If you take the greater Los Angeles area, the massive concentration of job centers in centralized "hubs" as I call them is tragically destructive. You have people driving into these hubs from every possible angle and you end-up with shit like the 405 freeway being a parking lot all day, every day.
This isn't about public transportation. It's about politicians being politicians (which I use to mean: incompetent) wasting decades of valuable intelligent planning. In the town I live in they absolutely refuse to grant permits for the kinds of job magnets that would have people from this town work here. As a result, if you are unfortunate enough to not have found work in this area, you are eating a one to two hour commute every day.
So, if you want to solve the housing and congestion problem, you need a long term intelligent planning policy that will incentivize businesses to build in areas that will reverse some of the flows.
To use a company I am very familiar with, SpaceX, just look at where they are in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the worst locations one could choose. And like that, probably hundreds of large employers in that area and a few miles north, south, east and west. A good policy would have looked at the concentration and created intelligent plans to incentivize companies to find locations that would balance flows and spawn new housing developments surrounding these centers of employment.
Instead of doing that, what you end-up with over time are companies leaving for other states where they have more favorable financial climates as well as the ability to, in some cases, build what they need and where they need it.
Moving atoms isn't easy. Some things we can do. Others we cannot. Public mass transportation is not likely to be some thing that will take over the US. Exceptions here and there, sure. I've completed non-trivial construction projects that don't even begin to approximate the zoning and political complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about, and every single one of them has been an expensive nightmare purely because our system has devolved into something that prevents progress rather than encouraging it.
Note that I am not at all opposed to the image you paint. I have travelled and worked in European and Latin American cities where public transport is wonderful and love it. I am just being realistic about who we are and we can actually accomplish in the US. We can't build a single new nuclear (or whatever) power plant while China is building a hundred. That should tell you something.
vel0city 2 days ago [-]
This is a lot of words to ultimately agree with my core point. If we have the political will to do so, we can. It pretty much all boils down to that. If we don't have it, we can't do it.
I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will. I agree, building things and changing minds often takes time.
But instead we've elected people who put people into power who thinks bike lanes are woke and need to be destroyed. So I guess it'll take a bit longer before we start making real progress on these issues.
You flying on that Joby tomorrow? I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing. I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.
robomartin 7 hours ago [-]
> I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will.
This isn't about political will. Politicians are whores, it doesn't matter what side, they respond to money and votes. This is worse than that, this is about people not being intelligent enough to vote with a view towards future benefits --decades away. Politicians buy votes by promising crap that the masses eat-up and never get. This nonsense is as old as time. This is precisely the kind of thing that destroyed nearly every nation in Latin America. And now idiot voters are pushing the US in the same direction with these bat-shit-crazy socialist/communist politicians gaining ground in various places. Americans will eventually learn, however, and sadly, this might require a few decades.
In that context, the whole mass transit conversation is so utterly insignificant it isn't even worth the bits we have wasted in this chat.
> bike lanes are woke
No, they are not woke, they are stupid...in certain cities. Some of the things I have seen are truly horrific. One of my own kids, who decided commuting to work on a bike was a good idea, nearly got killed twice. A year later he bought a car.
Once again, there's reality and fantasy. They are not the same.
>You flying on that Joby tomorrow?
If I could, absolutely. I've talked to people who would never get in a Waymo. I have, many times, also through Uber. Great experience. Progress.
> I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing.
If you've never been involved in product development, manufacturing, testing and certification within a regulatory environment you don't have a real sense of just how hard and detailed these processes can be. Could it go faster? Sure. The point is, we probably don't really want them to in a case where safety is the top consideration. It will take as long as it will take.
> I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.
Sure, but it will happen and affordability is relative. For example, it costs me $120 each way for an Uber to the airport that could take one to two hours to get there. If I drive my own car, I still get to eat two hours on the road and spend about $300 parking it at the airport. So, if I can buy a 30 minute Joby ride for $300 to $500 round trip, with Uber car pickup and drop-off included, sign me up!
Also, people use helicopters today and they are not at all cheap to fly. So this isn't like comparably-priced options are not out there. In fact, a Joby solution integrated into Uber is far more likely to democratize short-range air transport than anything else.
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
It's important to understand the history, wherein:
There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost.
Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time.
And now, it is stuck this way.
jakintosh 3 days ago [-]
> And now, it is stuck this way.
Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
Let's talk about trains.
We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed.
We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.
In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions.
Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them.
So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got.
And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button.
At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
> We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.
A lot of old train right of ways still pretty much exist. For many areas it often isn't too outlandish for those lines to be brought back, if there was a will to do so.
rangestransform 2 days ago [-]
See how politically difficult it is to build queenslink in NYC, a transit project using ab existing right of way in the most transit-oriented city in the US. Even there, the unholy alliance of NIMBYs and the degrowth/rent-control left have managed to shut it down for now.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
They exist but not as a continuous empty space. Every few miles something else is in the way and blocks the whole route not just that few meters, the entire route). If not that means it is a bike trail and the bikers won't give it up.
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
Man, I wish I could say that this seemed true for me.
I don't feel like pinning down my location in public, but it is sufficient to say that I'm very familiar with a place in Ohio that was once a booming with every kind of rail.
I can walk around and see where things used to be, and sometimes it's very clear.
But mostly, it seems like it has been transformed. Whereas people used to build around the paths of the rails, they've now built atop of where they used to be. It was once a straight shot with an occasional (and very deliberate) bend, but now there's a house and a factory and a substation in the path.
Or, Columbus Ohio again. :) That place used to have a very diverse passenger rail network, with a somewhat grand Union Station right in the middle where it counts. Rail was such a thriving and important thing that at one point they raised the level of the main drag, High Street, to help reduce conflicts between trains, pedestrians, and the various horsemobiles. For some of the old buildings that still remain, what was once the first floor is now the basement.
And in what seems like something that real libertarians would dream about, these railways were built privately and were self-sustaining.
Things changed.
In ~1979, they finally tore down the old Union Station just weeks before it was likely to be ruled a protected historic site and then put a very immobile convention center in its place instead.
Columbus has been expanding pretty rapidly (by Ohio norms) for a couple of decades now. The old rail paths are hard to find at all while walking around or in aerial shots, never existed in newer neighborhoods, and whatever was there has been further decimated by the batshit highway network that is in a continuous process of changing.
It's possible that it could all come back again, but the cost would be intense beyond imagination.
And even if it did come back again, who would ride the things, anyway? They've already got busses that they hate. Folks would still have cars, and they'd still drive them. I guess people might eventually be able to adjust to using trains to get places, if that became practical for them, but I'd also guess that this transition would take multiple generations to really take effect.
financetechbro 3 days ago [-]
Cars clearly won… or did the car industry use its monopolistic powers to acquire and shut down our train networks while also relentlessly lobbying for more (and permanent) car infrastructure?
Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for
i know multiple developers with public dollars to build housing $800k-$1.2M per unit. so i don't know, maybe come up with a better solution I'd be happy to hear your idea that is realistic and will deliver more units at a lower cost.
theappsecguy 3 days ago [-]
Have you tried "building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods"?
s1artibartfast 3 days ago [-]
Buyers aren't willing to pay for it. Its not really up to the developers anyways.
[Edit] I am serious.
Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.
eagleinparadise 3 days ago [-]
I can't tell if this person is joking or actual serious. It's sad, because this is exactly the kind of ridiculousness developers experience day to day by the general public.
No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park.
Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.
nixass 3 days ago [-]
You seem braggy too much
Barbing 3 days ago [-]
Eh, the more details they’re willing to reveal the better. It’s probably their reality.
3 days ago [-]
3 days ago [-]
xnx 3 days ago [-]
Self driving cars are public transportation and make areas much more walkable and bikeable.
oblio 3 days ago [-]
> Self driving cars are public transportation
Waymo is literally a private company.
> make areas much more walkable and bikeable.
How so? Autonomous car companies have every incentive to continue lobbying for car only infrastructure? Why would they want infrastructure that increases competition?
TranquilMarmot 3 days ago [-]
If they are owned and operated by mega-corporations like Alphabet, they are not public
Analemma_ 3 days ago [-]
I get what you're saying, but in this particular case we're talking about Texas. The people down there think that bike lanes and walkable neighborhoods are a plot to send in UN soldiers who will forcibly vaccinate them with 5G nanobots. I'm only slightly exaggerating.
xyst 3 days ago [-]
Quite possibly the worst of both worlds.
trymas 3 days ago [-]
I hope it's sarcasm?
How about if autonomous cars would be bigger, so from same apartment block people could ride-share to same office downtown?
What if those cars would be on rails - imagine how simpler the autonomous part would be? Lower friction and fuel costs savings will be a bonus.
/s on my part obviously.
panick21_ 3 days ago [-]
> Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing
... in the US
> Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing
Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world.
> if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units
Or some kind of vehicle that comes by every 15min and connects to a network of other transports that are time interval based.
Or have car share vehicles attached to the property. Something that is routinely done in Europe for decades.
> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
Except it doesn't last that long and is not that expensive unless you are incompetent and live in a broken society.
Cities in China added 100s of miles of metro since 2010. Making bad excuses and doubling down on car dependency are a big part on why its not happening.
And btw. the US has so many fucking roads already (btw they are also very expensive, but I guess that money doesn't count), if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system. But of course taking a lane away from cars wouldn't be acceptable, better give money to waymo so people can sit in traffic in a Waymo vehicle.
It is not about cost, its about political will and the societal believe that public transit is for the unwashed poor and racially inferiors, spending money on it is charity, not transportation policy, and that any upstanding citizen in a car needs to have unlimited freedom to drive everywhere and never get into trouble.
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily?
This has been done for many decades with carsharing already, its standard practice in many developments. What exactly does Waymo or self driving change here from an investor perspective? Ok maybe if its really close buy the Waymo can go back when you don't need it anymore. So maybe you need half as many. But of course the Waymo vehicle is also much more expensive and has capacity you don't need.
But of course, even with that carsharing concept, the far better solution that almost everybody in the developed world does, outside the US, is to simply have good public transport, you build it first, and then build the new housing around those transport links. Car sharing is only for very niche situations and that's a good thing, because more cars in cities are bad.
s1artibartfast 3 days ago [-]
People don't car share in the US, and don't want to.
Building arrangements that would rely on them are mostly illegal anyways.
Allowing driverless cars to serve buildings without parking would be a huge step forward for those reasons alone.
For what it's worth, it's mostly illegal to build a housing that's the only served by buses too.
Last, the US has passed the point where it has the cheap labor and government competency for mass transit. Faster to do something now than wait for a new government or robotics that can replace all the construction workers and designers
rangestransform 2 days ago [-]
The unions will always get in the way of cheap transit construction, see the second ave subway in NYC
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Unions are part of the problem, but there are lots of other parts that all work together.
eagleinparadise 3 days ago [-]
I can't change, nor can a group of politicians change how broken the US land use and transportation policies are. But what can be done is leasing a car that can drive itself with minimal labor for $100k over 5 years that unlocked more housing to get built.
You're hilariously wrong on most of your points because just spend 5 minutes researching how CA fails to build rail. Not even worth responding to further.
panick21_ 3 days ago [-]
If all you know about public transit is CA building HIGH SPEED rail then you are not worth talking about.
ChadNauseam 3 days ago [-]
> if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system
Competent is the key here. $346 million would get 10-15 miles of underground subway if they were competent.
paulddraper 3 days ago [-]
> ... in the US
Dallas in the United States.
rangestransform 2 days ago [-]
The transit-as-welfare idea that pervades the US precludes keeping trains free of antisocial behaviour forcibly as is done in Asia
Yizahi 3 days ago [-]
This is like building your business on the FAANG monster corpo's API and then getting shut down a few years down the line, but with your life and housing instead of the business. After Waymo will shut down or "do strategy shift and pivot" or just raises prices beyond your affordability, a homeowner in such a place will "suddenly" discover that he or she is completely stranded now and there are neither cars nor public transport available. Yay for our benevolent corporate overlords, I guess...
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
> provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking
Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.
s1artibartfast 3 days ago [-]
Solves one of the big problems with public transportation.
If waymo is willing to ban people for shitting or smoking meth in their shared cars, that's purely an advantage over government run transportation
filoleg 3 days ago [-]
> Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.
Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then?
I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
The point is that some people have other options. Personally I will always choose to go where I want, when I want, in the privacy of my own vehicle. Even if Waymo were completely free I'd still choose those things, and I am thankful I have the option to choose.
filoleg 3 days ago [-]
Good for you, and I fully respect other people making choices like that. I don't believe that you should be forced into a situation that makes you use waymo despite your wishes, and I believe that you should be able to opt out (in case you want to).
Back to the topic, why should I not be allowed a choice of having a subsidized/free waymo that prioritizes me and my neighbors (given I would be participating in this fully out of my own volition)?
If I am allowed to make that choice, do you believe that poors should have access to the same service and be allowed to make the same choices as non-poors in that regard? If no, then why not?
s1artibartfast 3 days ago [-]
Would you rather have that or be living on the street? Maybe let people without housing have that choice
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
Yes those are definitely the only two possibilities.
eagleinparadise 3 days ago [-]
"huge corpos" - obviously you don't know what you're talking about. Most affordable housing is owned and operated by non-profit organizations or entities, most of which are very small.
plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
> "huge corpos" - obviously you don't know what you're talking about.
Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity: $595281000000.
How big to they have to be before they count as ‘big’ to you? In your ideal world, getting your Google account banned not only means losing all your photos, documents, contacts, conversations, and access to all your other accounts (GMail) but now also means you can't go anywhere besides what you can reach on foot, via whatever anemic local transit exists, or via similarly-expensive Uber/etc. Super cool; sign me up.
cyberax 3 days ago [-]
Self-driving cars will kill off your kind of real estate developers once and for all. Because there is no such thing as "affordable housing".
All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing.
Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run.
Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.
ajmurmann 3 days ago [-]
How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas
robomartin 3 days ago [-]
> How do self-driving cars reduce congestion?
At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly.
The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe.
So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do.
That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
The average passenger capacity per mile of a Waymo is <1. The average for a regular passenger car is >1.
Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
eagleinparadise 3 days ago [-]
You're not factoring in the unused capacity of a regular car parked on the street or in a garage versus being in service of delivering transportation value..
The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher.
Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality.
I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization.
But yes, traffic is indeed an impact.
The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
An unused car parked isn't causing traffic jams on the highway. It's irrelevant to my comment that AVs increase traffic, not decrease traffic. I agree reducing parking needs is a benefit to AVs, but arguing it will reduce congestion is ignoring extremely basic traffic concepts.
You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??
hibikir 3 days ago [-]
The actual savings are minimal at best, as demand for cars is all about peak, and how the peak travels typically in similar directions. You see this in trains. In downtown SF, you will find trains parked near the stadium all day, because there is no,practical use for them 9p% of the day. Most of the fleet is idle most of the day, and it would not be any better if it's a self driving car. You'd have a much better chance if trips were random, but they absolutely aren't.
The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.
robomartin 3 days ago [-]
> Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
The overwhelming majority --overwhelming-- of cars, SUV's and trucks on the road have exactly one passenger, including the guy commuting to his office job in an F-250.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
You're right, but that still puts the minimum at 1. Even with the many, many vehicles with single passengers as 1, the average is still always higher than 1.
An autonomous vehicle doing a deadhead drive has a passenger count of 0.
0 < 1. You start tossing in a lot of miles with 0 in there on top of the vast majority of your trips being 1, and suddenly now you're less than the cars you're theoretically replacing.
A lot of these AVs at the moment at least are still roughly minivan/midsize SUV. On top of that, with safe distances adding another foot of the car to a highway scenario really doesn't increase the percentage of the total space that much. You need a lot of follow space ahead/behind the vehicle.
Maybe if they were like single person pods that teleported to their pickups and managed to group tightly together in packs on the road, but until then they're just another SUV on the road driving around sometimes with zero people in the car.
robomartin 2 days ago [-]
I don't necessarily disagree with you. I think single person AV pods would be amazing and is likely one version of the future. However, this kind of change takes time, a lot of time. AV or not, if you have to share the road with monster trucks being driven by humans who are too busy looking at pictures on their phones, well, you are going to eventually want to be in something at a similar scale. That's why interesting options like Smart cars never made it here.
Whatever this will become, it will be a matter of decades and a real modernization of our traffic laws and other infrastructure. I will not pretend to know what form that will take, my crystal ball stopped working a few decades back.
There are so many questions. Just looking at a place like Los Angeles, I regularly drive right next to massive trucks moving containers and all kinds of cargo. Can we be more intelligent about this? An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway? Sure, as an idea and a fantasy. In the real world you'll have to contend with myriad issues spanning a range between our inability to build anything anymore in this country with how you are going to deal with millions of people losing their jobs if you automate cargo transport and clear large trucks from the highways. Etc.
It's nice to have these visions about the future. What will actually happen is a different matter. I am placing my bet on self driving cars as the first practical phase of a transition into something more sensible that will likely require three to five decades. The equation is very simple: Atomos are expensive and hard to move. Conventional cars and trucks manufactured and purchased today are going to stay on the roads for at least a decade. A mass transition to a different paradigm is measured in units of decades after the last conventional vehicle is manufactured and sold. Hence my five decade estimate for transportation utopia.
vel0city 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder what the logistics and costs look like having to maintain a fleet of single-seaters along with multi-seater vehicles. I realize a high percentage of rides are solo rides, but there's still like 20-30% of rides with >1 passenger. Is it really easier for the transit companies to manage multiple fleets of vehicles with various seating sizes? Is it actually a better experience for riders?
> An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway?
There's already cargo freight rail practically all across the country. Loads on trucks are on trucks because of the desired flexibility and point to point response time as opposed to having to load/unload rail.
Also, unless you're talking some really long distances, having rail in the middle of a highway doesn't always make much sense. You're not going to have the depots or stations in the middle of the highway after all. The train then needs to weave back and fourth across the highway to get to the places its routed to. Far better to just figure out its own right of way rather than stick it in the middle of a complicated place.
cyberax 3 days ago [-]
Waymo is not doing any carpooling optimizations. They're right now a luxury service that is priced above the normal Uber ride prices.
This will obviously change in future, once they start a truly mass rollout.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
Yeah, all the people who refuse to ride busses to the point they're willing to spend many many thousands of dollars on their own cars are just yearning to carpool in a much more compact vehicle than a bus.
lkbm 3 days ago [-]
I know it's not popular in some circles to say it, but people (not just evil, rich racists) dislike riding the bus because of homeless people and other people who have little reason (or ability) to conform to social norms. I only saw one a couple altercations on the bus in my years riding it in Austin, but that's enough to get a lot of people to decide it's not worth it, especially women or people with kids.
We're not willing to enforce basic safety on buses, let alone other norms. If Waymo is willing to do that, that will make it available to many more people. Even just not having to wait at the bus stop before sunrise can be a game changer.
robomartin 2 days ago [-]
> Yeah, all the people who refuse to ride busses
It's not that people refuse to ride busses. In most places in the US this is either a non-existent or extremely impractical option. It's just reality.
cyberax 3 days ago [-]
We don't need to move _all_ the people to carpooling to fix the congestion.
And remember, the alternative is even worse: buses.
rangestransform 2 days ago [-]
I actually really liked uber pool in the Bay Area, talked to some interesting people
ajmurmann 3 days ago [-]
> Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappenit's odd, you'd think they'd all try to be ahead at the apex
robomartin 2 days ago [-]
I drive track days with some frequency. When I am on the road I have to turn my brain down to slow and just let it happen. To be fair, you can't expect grandma to drive at a high level. What most people talking about congestion and traffic don't stop to think about is that the traffic you get is a function of the lowest common denominator. All you need is one small rock in a stream to disrupt it.
cyberax 3 days ago [-]
Right now the average car occupancy during the rush hour is ~1.5 persons per car. By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity. This will completely resolve the congestion in the majority of metro areas, even with induced traffic.
No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's a logistics nightmare that removes most advantages of owning a car.
ajmurmann 3 days ago [-]
I'm not buying that a significant number of people would switch from their individual car to a self-driving car pool. One of the main advantages of a Waymo over a Lyft to me is that there is no driver. If we now fill the car with random people I'd rather drive my own car.
It's also not clear to me why routing self-driving cars would be more efficient than what Lyft Line did which ended up super slow. The slowness want just the additional route but also other passengers getting in and out and in some cases waiting for them.
hibikir 3 days ago [-]
There's significant trouble with routing, delays, and reliability: A self driving car does nothing naturally different that a cheaper Taxi, and you can see the lack of popularity of the carpooling offerings Lyft and Uber had.
Ultimately the argument against lower congestion is even easier. Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion. Now Timmy can go to his activities by himself, so mom goes elsewhere. Again, when we make something cheaper, we increase demand.
cyberax 3 days ago [-]
Uber Pool in SF was awesome when it was truly 50% of the cost. But they started hiking up the price (because they could) until it was maybe ~20% less than the full ride. And then COVID happened.
> Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion.
That's fine. I did some modeling for that :)
Most of the optional commutes happen outside the rush hour, and the US roads have more than enough capacity for that. The true problem is the congestion due to low occupancy during the rush hour.
And if we want to speculate a bit more, self-driving cars offer an option of more flexible mass transit for truly bottlenecked cities. They can the make transfer from a larger bus into 2-seater local vehicles completely seamless. This is a more distant possibility, as it will require new infrastructure.
jakintosh 3 days ago [-]
> By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity
Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all.
Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same.
So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.
seanmcdirmid 3 days ago [-]
Cars give you point to point access. In Seattle I have to decide today whether to spend $100+ on an Uber that will take 25 minutes to get from SeaTac to Ballard, or spend $3.25 to use light rail plus bus that will take at least one hour and 30 minutes. And to think that Seattle is just one of the better transit cities in the USA.
The sharing the bus with murder hobos argument is only relevant for daily commuters with relevantly decent transit routes that aren’t 3X longer than a car would be. Most people don’t get that far in the argument against transit.
cyberax 3 days ago [-]
> Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to?
Partially. Shitty people with zero manners usually end up in low-paying jobs (or in finance), so they tend to concentrate in transit that provides subsidized commutes to them. But the majority of people in transit are normal.
The real reason for not using transit is its slowness. Drop two points on a map of a large city randomly and plot the route between them using cars and transit. Transit will end up on average requiring 3-4x the time by car, even during the rush hour. Of course, people tend to optimize their commutes by choosing the workplace accordingly (this results in a toxic density-misery spiral), so on average transit is not _that_ terrible.
But it totally breaks down when you add more constraints. Like having several kids. Try to plot a route using transit between your workplace, a grocery store, a daycare, and a school. You'll find that it's impossible unless you package everything non-work-related into one spot.
> Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
Transit is WILDLY inefficient. It's amazing how inefficient and polluting it is.
javascriptfan69 3 days ago [-]
>Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run.
The only reason sprawling suburbs can exist is because they are subsidized by inner cities.
Building and maintaining miles of roads and utilities is not cheap and the number of people in these areas makes it impossible for them to cover these costs unless they're astronomically wealthy.
randomblock1 3 days ago [-]
By your definition a Lamborghini is affordable, because someone can afford it. I don't think that holds up.
cyberax 3 days ago [-]
Yes, it is. That's why "affordable" is a bad term.
There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing.
To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.
eagleinparadise 3 days ago [-]
I actually hate the term affordable housing because you're right, its not affordable. The wood, concrete, roof, and mechanical system costs about the same all things considered whether you're renting for $5k/mo or $500/mo. I make the same point it should be called subsidized housing too.
arjie 3 days ago [-]
Surprisingly low hype for a company running perhaps the most advanced consumer-interactive robots. I’m quite fond of these machines and will periodically rescue them when someone has misused them (door not closed, most commonly). Hope they do well. Very good road participants.
padolsey 3 days ago [-]
People seem so used to it now. I love them, I think they're probably one of the most exciting tech I've used in the last ten years. They're also like magical little rescue pods when socially overwhelmed in a busy city.
121789 3 days ago [-]
the easiest way to understand their value is to be a pedestrian. it is insane how quickly you realize how safe and careful they are vs. humans. the "bugs" with getting stuck in intersections and stuff like that means very little to me if I can bike or cross a crosswalk with confidence
panick21_ 3 days ago [-]
Easiest to understand their value as a pedestrian in a place that doesn't care about pedestrian and looks at their deaths as irrelevant.
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.
121789 2 days ago [-]
I feel like you have an overall rant about transportation you want to make so just make it instead of adding tangential comments to everything
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.
panick21_ 2 days ago [-]
You prevent speeding by structuring the road environment so to make speeding less. Comfortable, you narrow roads, you impact the visual field, you have speed bumps, raised cross walks, automatic cameras that hand out tickets when you speed, you change the road surface to create noise, you curve streets make it so cars can't go straight.
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.
dtdynasty 2 days ago [-]
I agree if the money was given to organizations which would actually effectively use the money to make road safety changes. But with this form of claim I always come back to the idea this was originally funded by corporations. I don't think the opportunity cost of corporate funding is public infrastructure unless it's profit motivated. So if it makes safety improvements at low safety per $ I still support it because its opportunity cost is more likely ads or other corporate investments.
Zambyte 3 days ago [-]
I want trains.
forgot-my-pw 9 hours ago [-]
Why not both!
We need to eliminate human drivers in the future. So the best solution should be both self driving cars and public transportation.
weird-eye-issue 3 days ago [-]
Will you use a Waymo to get to the closest train station and then from the train station to your final destination?
Zambyte 3 days ago [-]
I do that with my bike or scooter right now. Actually, throw a ferry in there as well and I'm doing an inter-state trip next weekend doing exactly that. So no, quite unlikely.
tim333 3 days ago [-]
I'm about to do an ebike train ebike journey (UK) and have to say it works rather well as a form of transport. You can work on the train and the ebike is fun, easy and has no parking problems.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Why would I do that when I already have a car which I need to use for every other trip. Once I'm there maybe, last time I did this I rented a car - which given the prices I've heard is likely the only affordable option. (my final destination was several hundred miles from the nearest train station)
xnx 3 days ago [-]
I think you'd want them a lot less if you had to pay the full price in fare (often $30+/ride)
Zambyte 3 days ago [-]
Do you think roads are free? Maintaining them? Parking lots? Gasoline / electricity? Required emergency services due to regular catastrophic failures?
Cars are way more expensive if we're talking "full prices".
panick21_ 3 days ago [-]
I live in Switzerland and it actually saves money for your society. Its universally considered a fantastic investment for the country and many people are happy to pay it, both in taxes and in ticket cost.
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.
paulcole 3 days ago [-]
What are you willing to give up to get them?
Zambyte 3 days ago [-]
A lot. Can you be more specific?
paulcole 2 days ago [-]
Move to Tokyo or somewhere that has trains of the number and quality you want.
Zambyte 1 days ago [-]
Or we could improve the United States for people who can't move across the world.
paulcole 1 days ago [-]
Not willing to give up as much as you thought?
amazingamazing 3 days ago [-]
Too much capex
jrflo 3 days ago [-]
Realistically it's "too much 'environmental' review", aka NIMBYs killing any project that will actually implement good public transit because it will ruin the view from their kitchen
trymas 3 days ago [-]
Capex for car infrastructure seemingly is uncapped (and I don’t talk only about USA either).
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.
HDThoreaun 2 days ago [-]
Because 99% of Americans use cars. There’s no point spending money on something that only 15% of the population will even consider using, you’ll still have to spend just as much on roads.
trymas 2 days ago [-]
> Because 99% of Americans use cars.
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.
Capex for countries isn't really that big of a problem. You can raise lots of capital for long term, a proper investment should increase land values (or property values).
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.
oblio 3 days ago [-]
Ok, self driving buses on fixed routes. Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.
ChadNauseam 3 days ago [-]
> Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.
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.)
arjie 3 days ago [-]
Google only spent $1.1B for the first six years of Waymo. At 1/1000 the price you’re spending about $1.1M over that period or about $200k/year. That’s cheap enough that you should just do it.
oblio 3 days ago [-]
LOL. Why would you only count the first 6 years? Be intellectually honest and count the total funding so far, about $30bn.
arjie 3 days ago [-]
I’m not “only counting the first 6 years”. I’m saying you can get to 6 years on $1.2 m if you can do it at a thousandth the cost. I’m sure if you have some success by then, the $30 m over the next decade won’t be too hard.
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...
jrapdx3 3 days ago [-]
You're probably right about comparative costs. But the problem of getting to an autonomous bus will remain a significant barrier to public transportation use.
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.
amazingamazing 3 days ago [-]
Nope. Fixed routes have chaos. You would have the same problem, converging on fsd. It’s the same reason Waymo isn’t deployed everywhere now. Not to mention buses are a couple orders of magnitude more expensive than a car and would be slower for any given median occupant compared to a car.
unfitted2545 2 days ago [-]
If it was popular, it would remove cars from the road. Would that not decrease congestion for everyone?
cyanregiment 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
They're also covered in cameras the police have access to, which have been used to track down legal protestors in the past. That's why there was a spate of people setting them on fire a few months ago. Basically, every Waymo car is a Flock camera.
nxc18 3 days ago [-]
They also have access to the cameras on buses and trains, typically. Public spaces are public spaces.
SR2Z 3 days ago [-]
Stop spreading FUD. The police do not in any meaningful way "have access" to Waymo cameras.
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.
3 days ago [-]
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
Irrelevant. They turn it over.
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
What percentage of “valid” legal requests are granted versus denied?
SR2Z 3 days ago [-]
Presumably Waymo complies with their legal obligations...
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.
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
> The point is that there's a process
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=...
SR2Z 3 days ago [-]
I don't know what to tell you. The subpoena system has been around for a VERY long time before Google even existed. You seem to be unfamiliar with it so I'd encourage you to read up before you call it a "formality."
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.
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
Why are you conflating “valid legal request” with subpoena? If they meant ”in response to subpoena” then they would say subpoena lol
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
SR2Z 2 days ago [-]
> Why are you conflating “valid legal request” with subpoena? If they meant ”in response to subpoena” then they would say subpoena lol
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.
digisign 3 days ago [-]
So they do have access after all—just have to ask nicely.
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.
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
So if I sent an email to Waymo I could get camera footage of a crime?
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
More like: When an entity (including a corp like Waymo and you as a random person alike) has information (such as camera footage), then that information can be subpoenaed.
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.
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
Who said anything about subpoenas? Waymo says "valid legal request". When other companies say "valid legal request" it means "a police department emailed us"
More broadly, do you believe that Google is not, in some way, adding Waymo data to the surveillance or intelligence product catalog the US government already purchases from them?
cortesoft 3 days ago [-]
I live very close to LAX, and we have hundreds of Waymos in our area. At first i was a little weary, and kinda weirded out by all of them.
They have become completely normal, and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers. They are very predictable, and will always let you pull in front of them when changing lanes (unlike a lot of other LA drivers).
I have seen a few incidents where they seem 'stuck', and it was a bit annoying and kind of funny, but again, it does not happen nearly as often as for human drivers.
I also like taking them. It is nice to just get in and relax and not have to talk to anyone or worry about who is going to pick you up. You can control the temperature and music from your phone, you can drop the pin exactly where you want to be dropped off and picked up, and the ride is smooth and comfortable.
We can debate all the knock on effects of Waymos, but the user experience is pretty great.
WarmWash 3 days ago [-]
>and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers.
Ironically the best way to verify this is that when they do cause traffic issues, it becomes national news.
Imagine breaking down and blocking an intersection in Edgewood Georgia, and then getting a call that night from your Uncle in Oregon saying he saw your breakdown on the news...
slg 3 days ago [-]
Would we apply this same logic to Tesla Autopilot?
As a disclaimer, this is neither an anti-Waymo comment or a pro-Tesla comment, I just find in interesting how these small sample size incidents are both covered and perceived in the absence of actual verifiable safety statistics.
SR2Z 3 days ago [-]
I'm sure we could, but since vehicles using Tesla FSD require human supervision almost everywhere and Tesla is aggressive about getting drivers in autopilot-related crashes to sign NDAs the comparison is kind of moot.
jackp96 3 days ago [-]
I'm under the impression (worth a check) that we do have verifiable safety statistics and that Waymos are significantly safer than Teslas at this point?
That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.
Fogest 3 days ago [-]
Not really a fair comparison between Tesla's autopilot and Waymo though. You'd have to compare Tesla's Robotaxi but I believe they have been running for a far shorter period and I'm not sure how much data is out yet or how reliable it would be at this stage. The Robotaxi runs I believe a different version of autopilot meant to not have a human driver and has a lot more work that goes into making sure it's highly tested in the area it is being deployed. Whereas the Tesla Autopilot I believe can work in pretty much any area, so it may have more potential issues that come up.
Also a common thing I see happening with the Tesla Autopilot for an accident is that it's often not the fault of the autopilot. It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second. Naturally the driver will lie or not even realize they were the problem as they may have had auto pilot active 1 second before the crash. I think it's that natural human instinct when you see something happening to crap the wheel or hit the pedal in that "oh shit" kind of reflex. And that sometimes causes the driver to make a mistake.
I actually was in a crash with a person driving a Tesla vehicle where I think this was the cause. 3 lane highway, they were in the center lane, I was in the left lane, transport truck in the right lane. The transport truck slightly drift towards the edge of their lane and the Tesla driver freaked out and over corrected their steering wheel to the left and came swerving into my lane and was losing control of their car between both lanes until they suddenly slammed on their brakes in front of me. I gotta say, the Tesla brakes combined with the regenerative braking have some impressive stopping power. Unfortunately that also meant they stopped way faster and so suddenly that I hit their rear a bit. I got very lucky that insurance ruled in my favour and had them 100% at fault.
Apologies for the tangent, just trying to illustrate a point via a personal story of how even when the system is working well and keeping the driver safe, they can still make a human-like overreaction which overrides the autopilot and leads to a crash.
I get pretty annoyed when I see news articles with the headlines "Tesla crashed while auto pilot activated", but then there has yet to be an investigation and we actually don't know whether autopilot was in fact active or not yet. It's a clickbait style headline that I think makes people more hesitant about the progress of Waymo and Robotaxi vehicles.
Barbing 3 days ago [-]
> It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second.
Per The Guardian:
“Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. […]”
“The real surprise came after [Mark Rober’s] experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.”
I kinda feel like "It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second" means it is still Autopilot's fault. It either needed to alert and hand-off control to the user well before the situation got bad- or stick with control. Getting into a bad situation and just handing off control is the worst possible way to do things. The human needs time to update their situational awareness, the Tesla needs to explain what is causing its concern to the human, etc. If it can't do that effectively- and quickly enough in the pre-accident moments- then it needs to not be used at all because it is more dangerous than just a human driving on their own. 20 years ago I did robot-human driving collaboration experiments for the US Army and I can tell you based on our experiments this is a really hard problem, but those experiments are why Tesla's entire approach has seemed suspect to me from the beginning.
It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.
Fogest 2 days ago [-]
So what I am referring to is more when they look at the data and they see there was human intervention that took place. Whether it be they pressed a pedal or jerked the wheel or whatever. I'm sure the system could handle the situation better on it's own, but the human reaction, especially when you've been driving yourself for many years is to take control and take action when shit hits the fan.
I think overall though as self-driving becomes more mainstream the system will only get safer. Not only will the computer systems themselves have better software and hardware to make them smarter, but there will be less and less human drivers doing stupid things that they have to account for. The roadways will have more predictable and sane self-driving vehicles on it.
I think the problem we have right now is that you almost do need these half-assed systems that still rely on human interventions to get over the initial hurdles of having people accept this technology. People want to feel like they still are in control while using something they may not fully trust. And regulators in many areas often also have this same desire. While I don't think we currently are at the ideal situation for self-driving, I think we are definitely getting there. I think Tesla's self-driving features really opened up the minds of people that human-less self-driving is a viable option that we can explore and that it can also be done safely.
I'm sure a time will come where we can switch to selling fully automated cars that people can buy for themselves with no human intervention needed, but I think we still aren't at that phase yet. People are starting to accept things like Waymo, but I still think many people would not accept having no control of their own personal vehicle when navigating around, even though I think it would be safer that way.
3 days ago [-]
alex1138 3 days ago [-]
There was a story here about it hitting a child (I think) but it was determined to be much less serious than if a human driver was involved
"As the Waymo approached the double-parked SUV, a child ran out from behind the SUV and into the roadway, directly in front of the Waymo."
Waymo cannae change the laws of physics. Braking distances exist for AI-driven vehicles just as much as human-driven ones.
waterhouse 3 days ago [-]
And if anything, I'd expect machines to have faster reflexes than humans. The Medium article is walled off, but I found another source[1]:
"The child reported minor injuries and did not require transportation to a hospital. ... Waymo said at the time that the child ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV and that the vehicle braked hard before contact, reducing speed significantly before impact."
Edit: Waymo's blog[2] says it "reduc[ed] speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made", and that "our peer-reviewed model[3] shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph".
> Braking distances exist for AI-driven vehicles just as much as human-driven ones.
Reaction times differ, though, and abilities to blend deceleration and turning and awareness of what else is around.
(Waymo's tendency to be a good defensive driver and bleed a few miles per hour at anything odd help too... though it is worth noting that if Waymo was 1MPH slower, that 6MPH collision wouldn't have happened at all).
I love when HN mentions my state or city, but that's the road and neighborhood one block down from me. I feel seen.
To add something more substantive to this thread, apparently Google's deal with Uber for distribution has become incredibly adversarial in our state. Uber won't explicitly let you book a Waymo or let you know if you're in the Waymo range.
zymhan 3 days ago [-]
Definitely never seen it written as "Edgewood Georgia" before but I there really is only one.
Okay two, Avenue and the shopping center.
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
Thank you so much for revealing your location. This data point has been added to your shadow profile. Kind regards, Palantir.
echelon 3 days ago [-]
I've been on this site for 15 years. The damage is already done.
zymhan 3 days ago [-]
Buddy, be real.
austinl 3 days ago [-]
In SF, there's a crosswalk on a street near me where cars regularly go 35 mph, so they rarely stop for pedestrians. A few days ago, I was waiting on the sidewalk to cross, and a Waymo stopped. I was so surprised, at first I thought it was letting someone out. It took a few seconds to realize that no, it was stopping for me to cross the street.
epolanski 3 days ago [-]
It's very interesting, because on one side we have clear data showing that autonomous cars at the Waymo level are safer than humans.
On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Which means that self-driving cars need to be a magnitude of order safer than humans.
And even though a self-driving car will never road rage or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets, we'll still tolerate humans driving more than one odd 1-in-a-billion ai-error caused incident.
overgard 3 days ago [-]
I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make. IE, humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations. I think the "fail to respond to novel situations" is probably the biggest blocker for people to trust them enough for widespread deployment. I'd love to see one of these things drive on a poorly mapped dirt road up in the mountains, for instance (I'm not saying it can't -- I just mean I would personally love to see how it can adapt to that kind of situation)
whack 3 days ago [-]
> I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make
Would you rather have a X% chance of a loved one dying from a human-category mistake? Or a 0.5X% chance of a loved one dying from a ML-category mistake? I would take the latter in a heartbeat. Why waste time optimizing for "categories" when you can optimize for your loved ones not dying
cortesoft 3 days ago [-]
While I agree with you, not everyone does.
You and I are thinking with a purely logical thought process, but most people don’t reason that way.
A lot of people want to be able to hold someone accountable, and that is more important than the pure probabilities.
They want to be able to blame a person for making a mistake.
johngalt 3 days ago [-]
That is not the way human beings typically evaluate risks. 'Acceptable risks' are more about psychology and not a statistical calculation. A self driving car that is twice as safe as the human average would be considered an unacceptable risk.
Add something that is new/unknown + lack of control, and you will have to clear a very high threshold to be considered 'acceptably safe'. My guess is a minimum of a 0.1x.
SR2Z 3 days ago [-]
I don't think that human beings factor the rate of injury or death in at all, because human beings are notoriously bad with expected values from extreme conditions.
Once people get used to taking robotaxis, they won't care. The bar is "safe enough for very few people to have a bad experience." If you take 10 robotaxi rides in a row and they all go flawlessly your subjective interpretation of the risk will be that there isn't any.
I feel confident saying this because if you die in the US to anything other than old age, it was almost certainly a car crash. Despite this, most people don't think twice before getting in a car.
overgard 2 days ago [-]
"Trust" isn't just about "% of a chance I die". It's like "can this system actually function well in the environment I'm in". For instance, I live in the midwest. Our roads are AWFUL compared to most coastal areas, the weather can get really extreme (-20 in the winters), there are things like invisible black ice which is a huge hazard, people drive giant brodozers, etc. If I'm in a taxi or an uber or something, I trust that the driver can adapt to these conditions. I do not trust that a Waymo can. I'm not saying that's a "never" thing, but it is a big deal.
JumpCrisscross 3 days ago [-]
> humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations
Humans fail chaotically. AVs, at least Waymos, fail safely. In urban environments, there is a case to be made within a few years for banning (or making it massively cumbersome) to manually pilot a private vehicle.
overgard 2 days ago [-]
Personally, I would fight hard against that kind of outcome. While I don't mind self driving cars on the road if they drive safely, being able to own and operate a vehicle is a huge deal for personal freedom. Part of why I refuse to own a Tesla is because I don't want a vehicle that's subordinate to big tech above my own wishes. (I even still drive a stick shift and my car is essentially air gapped)
stefan_ 3 days ago [-]
That's an odd claim. Human failures are uncorrelated, but the Waymos all running the same software must be expected to fail in the same way, in the situations in which they fail. Which is why they often make the news; one Waymo stuck soon sees many of its brethren join it.
ericmay 3 days ago [-]
Don't humans fail in the same way too, broadly speaking? Wouldn't it depend on how you categorize failure?
If a Waymo failed because it missed a stop sign, and then another Waymo failed because it was confused about some strange markings on the road, is that not failing "the same way" in the same sense that a person failing to yield or driving drunk?
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
I think they're saying if one waymo misses a stop sign every waymo will miss the same stop sign
cucumber3732842 3 days ago [-]
Failing in ways that confuse the crap out of all the humans around (including pedestrians and cyclists) and demand their time and attention and thereby detract from the safety of the overall system is not "failing safely".
Nobody would make excuses for a rookie driver coming to a stop in a busy interchange. Only someone with the moral character of a career politician would attempt to construe that as anything other than detracting from overall safety. But a computer does it and it's fine?
4fr2 3 days ago [-]
[dead]
signatoremo 3 days ago [-]
Statistics is still the most reliable indicator, because you can’t really tell if a situation is “novel”. How novel is novel? I doubt even Waymo knows for sure.
People will trust them by familiarity, not by any objective measures. Their trust grow as they see them more often, without bad accidents.
JLO64 3 days ago [-]
My understanding is that they only operate in areas they’ve had approved and pre-mapped out for them though. Practically I don’t think the scenario you’ve described would ever happen, but I too would like to see it (I suspect they wouldn’t handle it well).
I live East of DTLA and twice I’ve seen people driving them around, presumably to map those areas out. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t use them for my late night commutes yet, but I’m eagerly looking forward to when I can!
madaxe_again 3 days ago [-]
IDK, I've been in the car with someone when they just up and up drove off the road because they failed to notice that there was a corner - and that's a sober human. Another time, someone else, they rounded a corner, saw a tractor in the other lane, and were so surprised that they hit a tree. My mother has totalled six cars - she insists it was someone else's fault every time, but the statistics are somewhat damning. My wife's driving has given me haemmorhoids, I clench so fucking hard. Blind corners at twice the speed limit, looks over her shoulder to talk to passengers, and I constantly find myself buying wing mirrors, fenders, headlights, body panels, hubcaps, and anything else she can break off on traffic, rocks, or street furniture. Well, I did until someone finally took her license away from her for a year.
So... not so sure. Every AV I've ever been in has driven incredibly cautiously compared to a human driver.
munk-a 3 days ago [-]
> or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets
On the contrary, autonomous vehicles (especially if something like automated package delivery becomes an offered service) allow car bombs without the suicide bomber inside. Instead you just place an explosive in the device and send it to the intended destination - as an organization the primary concern then becomes whether the ride is traceable back to you which might be do-able given how "frictionless" rideapps are as long as you get a burner phone, prepaid credit card and are very careful about making sure the device is clean and can't be tied to your person.
Right now the tech is limited to places where carbombings aren't commonplace, but I think driverless cars open a huge potential issue in other markets. I absolutely agree they're safer than drivers are, but let's not be hyperbolic.
JumpCrisscross 3 days ago [-]
> autonomous vehicles (especially if something like automated package delivery becomes an offered service) allow car bombs without the suicide bomber inside
Every city has courier services, including Uber.
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
An Uber driver was recently incarcerated for driving a package of drugs 7 hours.
jazzyjackson 3 days ago [-]
> a self-driving car will never … use the car as a weapon
You are lacking in creativity and vision. With networked autonomous vehicles, all cars can be used as a weapon simultaneously.
hvb2 3 days ago [-]
> meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Any company that builds self driving cars or operates them should show how reliable they think they are. Not by showing pr material or stats, that's all 'free'.
Make yourself, as the company, legally liable. If you think it's good, put your name on it and own the risk.
When that happens, I'll trust whoever says it's safe.
bryan_w 3 days ago [-]
Why don't you think waymo is liable? Who else would be responsible for an accident in one of their cars?
hvb2 3 days ago [-]
It's more in general, with self/autonomous driving. In the waymo case the company owns the cars and all, which makes it more clear.
dylan604 3 days ago [-]
When a human driver messes up, there's a person to hold responsible. When a robot car messes up, who is held responsible? If the human messes up to the point they are no longer allowed to drive, that person is no longer on the streets to cause more mistakes. When a robot car messes up, are all of the other cars pulled off the streets as well until the glitch is fixed? Every robot car is essentially the same driver.
cortesoft 3 days ago [-]
While we hold humans financially responsible for all accidents, we don’t hold them personally responsible in every case. Most accidents end with no arrests or even tickets. If your hand slips on the steering wheel, you don’t go to jail.
Robot cars would be the same. Insurance is financially responsible, and if the accident is deemed caused by a flaw, it would be the company that made them that is held responsible for fixing it.
Fogest 3 days ago [-]
Don't we have automated systems all around the world with the same element at play? Elevators? Trains/Subways that are autonomous, robotic lawn mowers, self-driving little delivery vehicles on sidewalks, all kinds of automated machines in factories that kill people, etc...
I feel like you could come up with long lists of cases where there is no direct human to blame. Someone may be at fault down the chain, but nobody who was directly controlling the machine. Just like if a mechanic screws up my brakes and I end up crashing, it wasn't directly me who caused the crash, even though I was sitting in the seat.
phoghed 3 days ago [-]
Why would it work any differently than any other category of product or service? If you’re rich you can sue them, if not you’re fucked.
Unless there’s a very bad and widespread issue. Then you join a class action and get $24 on a visa giftcard you can’t figure out how to redeem and then forget about.
elliottkember 3 days ago [-]
Mistakes aren’t glitches when the environment is so dynamic. I imagine they are making errors constantly, and constantly learning from them.
When a robot car makes a mistake, all robot cars learn from the experience. When a human messes up, only that human learns from it.
epolanski 3 days ago [-]
> When a robot car messes up, who is held responsible?
The company owning and operating the robot?
sudokatsu 3 days ago [-]
Ah yes, can’t wait to sue Google on equal monetary and political footing. It will be very easy, and very fair. /s
Synthetic7346 3 days ago [-]
Also how does one arrest a company? Put the c suite behind bars?
navigate8310 2 days ago [-]
You can't easily and legally lift the corporate veil
We don’t tolerate machine incidents because who is liable if an accident occurs? A company with a $4.6 trillion market cap? They’re not a legal opponent any of us really want to take on.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
Lawyers are salivating at the possibility of suing Waymo if they ever make a mistake. Much better to be hit by a Waymo (or a Tesla Robotaxi) than the typical uninsured, "judgement proof", human driver.
sgustard 3 days ago [-]
Exactly, imagine the huge sums of liability insurance Google is carrying to make payouts when the worst-case scenario happens. That financial burden is a prime driver of their operational safety record.
sudokatsu 3 days ago [-]
Any stats to back up that the _typical_ driver is uninsured?
Good point because massive insurance companies can't afford lawyers and no one ever sues large companies.
JumpCrisscross 3 days ago [-]
> we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans
This was the hypothesis. But based on e.g. FSD, it doesn’t seem borne out in reality.
decimalenough 3 days ago [-]
We have a much higher level of tolerance for things that benefit us while posing a risk to others ("should my own car have FSD") than we do for things that benefit others while posing a risk to us ("should Waymos be allowed in my neighborhood").
shakna 3 days ago [-]
If a human makes a mistake, we give them the liability to own up to their mistakes, and carry the costs.
Most self-driving enterprises are trying very hard to ensure their non-driver continues to carry this liability instead of their company.
This helps a them v. us attitude. The company needs to be trusted widescale by the public, and do seem to undercut their own PR efforts on that, repeatedly.
brunoborges 3 days ago [-]
> On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
It comes down to accountability, IMO. We tend to be forgiven to humans because we are humans too and we know we, humans, make mistakes, and these can have serious consequences.
When a human makes a mistake, they are immediately accountable, and therefore judged and forgiven (or not). When technology makes a mistake, who's to blame? The CEO? The software developer who wrote the code? The tester? The architect?
Yes, we want technology to be an order of magnitude safer than humans for this reason, because we know that, given the current way our judicial system works, when technology makes a mistake, no one is held accountable.
panick21_ 3 days ago [-]
The solution is that we should give humans and waymo way less tolerance.
andrewmutz 3 days ago [-]
> On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
I completely disagree with this. I don't "give a pass" to humans killing other humans with a car.
Every year that skeptics delay adoption of autonomous driving is another year where tens of thousands of deaths could be prevented.
munk-a 3 days ago [-]
Tesla, in particular, has given those skeptics so much ammunition to be mad at. The delay isn't purely due to luddites but also somewhat driven by prior obvious bad actions by self-driving car companies.
It's also likely that if a switchover is aggressively pursued it'll cause a massive social backlash and likely evolve into a culture war issue.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
I'm still waiting to see independent analysis of the data. Autonomous driving has the potential to be better, but without data I have no idea if it is really better, or even worse.
I've seen lots of people talking, but when I dig in I quickly discover they either don't have access to the full data; or they have reason to be biased and so cannot be trusted. There are many ways to "lie with statistics". You don't even have to be that smart to make some educated guesses. (for starters all drivers include drunk drivers who are a tiny minority and yet make up for an outsized share of issues. As someone who doesn't drink at all their statistics should not compare to me personally)
phinnaeus 3 days ago [-]
> a magnitude of order
unless I'm missing something, you meant "order of magnitude"
lokar 3 days ago [-]
I took one to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. Chaotic traffic environment: lots of cars, cones, people directing traffic, pedestrians everywhere. It did great.
asdff 3 days ago [-]
YMMV. I tried to order one from a bar. It got confused when it got there, did a 3 point turn in front of me then left without me.
deepsun 3 days ago [-]
In chaotic environment it was probably human driving, or rather directing the car remotely.
runarberg 3 days ago [-]
Whenever I visit San Francisco I get the sense that these robo-taxis are nothing but public transit for those who are willing and able to spend extra money.
I would not compare the user experience to drivers, or the safety record to private cars. I would compare the user experience and the safety record to human driven taxis, buses, light rail, and metro. I am curious if the rider experience is actually any better then taking the M train from the Castro to SF state or the 49 bus between the Mission and Geary. The latter is certainly cheaper, and orders of magnitude more efficient.
SR2Z 3 days ago [-]
If the train goes exactly where you want to go, I would always say take the train. It's spacious and clean.
But if where you're going is only served by bus or requires some walking... it really depends on how you feel. Waymo is pretty expensive, but I have had some truly miserable bus rides in SF.
runarberg 3 days ago [-]
There is a reason I picked the 49 as my example. When I lived there 15 years ago, the busses were lacking to say the least. Extremely slow, got stuck in traffic, crowded, etc.
Since the BRT lane on Van Ness, taking the 49 is more like taking a more shaky Muni train honestly. Frequent enough that it doesn’t get crowded, and it doesn’t get stuck in traffic, meaning much faster ride. As San Francisco builds more of these bus lanes, the case for the robo-taxis is only going to get weaker.
sebzim4500 3 days ago [-]
>You can control the temperature and music from your phone
That's really cool but makes sense. Can't wait for them to be available in London. I'd use them instead of Uber even if they cost much more.
vjvjvjvjghv 3 days ago [-]
I used one last time I was in Silicon Valley and I was super impressed with its driving. Very confident and felt super safe.
I can’t wait for broader adoption of self driving cars.
panick21_ 3 days ago [-]
If you live in car sewer then slightly better shit is considered acceptable.
I prefer not to live like that.
coldpie 3 days ago [-]
As a public transit using American who does not live in NYC, I do live in a car sewer, so I will happily accept this significantly better shit while still also advocating for increased density, traffic calming measures, and better public transit. I'd much rather see a Waymo coming down the street while I'm crossing to catch the bus than a human driver.
YKutsev 3 days ago [-]
Been in a Waymo in SF — impressive tech. But I keep wondering: does the math actually work? Car + all the sensors + maintenance + mapping. Can a single vehicle ever turn a profit?
dmitriy_ko 3 days ago [-]
Uber rides are around $1.5 per mile on average. Assume Waymo car drives 200K miles over it's lifetime, 3mi/kWh EV efficiently and $0.20/kWh electricity cost. It will generate $300K over it's lifetime and use $13K worth of electricity. Right now it costs $150K to manufacture Waymo car because they are custom built and Lidars are still expensive. Even at $150K unit economics should be OK. But the cost of self driving cars will go down as they are manufactured at larger scale and will eventually approach cost of regular mid-range car. In a few years they will be under $50K per car. Mapping is a one-time cost and the need for mapping will eventually disappear. This will be a massively profitable business for self-driving fleet operators.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
Good calculation approach. Waymos will drive a lot more than 200K miles in their lifetime. Taxis often do a million miles. There are already photos out there of Waymo odometers over 100K.
overfeed 3 days ago [-]
> Can a single vehicle ever turn a profit?
That depends on how low they can get the costs. Waymo took delivery of the last Jaguar i-Pace, and are scaling up production of the Zeekr-based EVs, which I assume are significantly cheaper.
I think the math works, using car rental companies as an anchor point: they are (mostly) profitable*; they have relatively lower Cost of Revenue, but Waymo will have much fatter margins.
* There was a blip when Hertz had to write-down its bold bet on EVs didn't quite work out.
Philpax 3 days ago [-]
Are you running your replies through a LLM, or is the LLM producing them entirely?
jfoster 3 days ago [-]
If he/she was an LLM I don't think it would've forgotten insurance among the costs.
YKutsev 3 days ago [-]
[dead]
fragmede 3 days ago [-]
Back of the envelope, three car costs $200k, charge $20/ride, say that ride costs $5 to operate, $200k/$15 gets you 14,000 rides (rounded). Say 10 rides a day... shy of 4 years to break even.
Substitute in whatever numbers you think are reasonable.
otterley 3 days ago [-]
These companies are taking a very long view (and are funded accordingly). The future vision is one in which cars with drivers just aren't a thing in cities anymore. Nobody owns a car to use in day-to-day intra-city journeys; instead, you just take a drive in an autonomous vehicle on demand.
twosdai 3 days ago [-]
I thought about this as well. The dsytopian world I think will exist in the future where the Waymo is priced higher and people will want to take it more, over a cheaper Uber. Precisely because the human driver is removed from the equation.
So yes, I think they will be able to turn a profit by charging more for the experience. Which is a humanless car.
jerlam 3 days ago [-]
At least in my area, Waymos are always more expensive than Ubers.
fragmede 3 days ago [-]
So, uh, you don't really tip your Uber drivers much then do you?
Right now, Tuesday 3pm, Waymo will cost me 13.76 cross town. UberX 10.95, Lyft 11.95. If I don't tip Lyft/Uber they'll be cheaper but I definitely don't tip the Waymo.
jerlam 3 days ago [-]
The pricing was 30% more the last few times I used them.
cortesoft 3 days ago [-]
Just checked where I am (which, admittedly, is late at night), but for a random ride to a restaurant 2 miles away, Waymo was $9.34 and Uber was $8.91.
This does match my earlier observations, where the prices were pretty damn close.
nunez 3 days ago [-]
I'm happy that Waymo's finally lighting up Dallas, but they need to expand its service area quickly for it to be useful there, IMO.
Austin, Houston and San Antonio are hub and spoke cities. They are designed with their downtowns as loci for their metros with suburbs sprawling around them concentricly. Waymo gets you to a lot of places within these cities for that reason.
Dallas is built around and between Dallas and Fort Worth, kind of like LA, but more sparse. Fort Worth is still very attached to their downtown (Sundance Square and University); Dallas is very much not. When I think of Dallas, I think of Addison, Plano, Grapevine/Irving/Las Colinas, Carrollton, Richardson, and the HEB (Hurst/Euless/Bedford) none of whom are represented in this service area.
This will be useful for hanging out in Bishop Arts and Deep Ellum, and the rich SMU grads up in old money Dallas, but I hope they're doing this to train up on highway driving.
(My critique of Waymo's service area also applies to DART, their public transit network. They have trains built around downtown in a way that's meaningless for most folks that want to use it for daily commutes. With most of their non-downtown bus routes running on hourly schedules, it's no surprise that DART posts anemic ridership numbers every year.)
conductr 3 days ago [-]
I live just north of the service area in Dallas and cross into it daily, it’s been pretty great to see the traction it seems to be getting here. The service area is a great way to launch. It’s the fashionable part of town, covers most night life for young people, it’s created a buzz and a lot of people will jump onto it just as soon as they widen the service area. I’m sure it’s all a phased thing, Waymo overall has been super patient and slow to launch their services. The opposite of the Tesla/Uber/and any other startups with the break stuff mindset. I find it very attractive for a transportation company to actually care that much. I also want them to succeed and I know if they were cruising all over DFW, there’d be a lot of deadhead going on (miles without cargo). They need/want critical mass of demand more than they want to show a full coverage area. I see how that strategy makes a lot of sense. I don’t see how targeting people’s long commutes as a launch strategy makes much sense. A critical mass of demand tying up the limited available assets twice a day, seems like it would just create frustration. Better to grow into that I would think.
But also I support the critique. Especially of DART, which I don’t see how the rail service ever works in a city designed like this. With residents who hop all over the metroplex on a somewhat random and sporadic basis, covering great distances. I think Waymo/robot is the best path for mass transit until we use it so much we stop buying cars. Then, the city can build rails and hopefully robots can be more efficient with less lanes of road. The Waymo solution gives A to B where a rail requires ABCD, in a metro where first and last mile may be 10+ miles each, that just doesn’t work. Also, rail has a chicken and egg problem. It really needs critical mass to run more frequently and justify the expense but it can’t get much usage at all because of this first and last mile problem. So it is kind of like a zombie of solution, we invest in it to seem modern and whatnot, but in reality it’s mostly a transportation subsidy for lower income people that can’t drive, it supplements the bus system which many car owners would never use and don’t consider an option for their first/last miles (it’s a class thing in Texas, just is, most people will never use a public bus). A small percentage of the population use it more than twice a year.
Idk, just thoughts.
nunez 1 days ago [-]
The service area is definitely fashionable! Nonetheless, I do wish that Waymo added Plano to their service area. Between Legacy West, Frisco/Stonebriar, Old Town Plano, Garland and Richardson, this, selfishly, would have been much more accessible for work commutes and, in my opinion, would have seen more ridership from travelers on business. Oh well; maybe soon!
(Somehow we lived in the DFW for five years and hardly spent time there (and not for a lack of trying!), and we went out A LOT. Then again, we were more brewery kind of people, and outside of the Fashion District, most of the breweries in town were (and are) all over the place. While we did live in the HEB, we were happy to drive wherever for a good time. We frequented Deep Ellum sometimes and Bishop Arts less frequently than that, but Dallas wasn't really a draw for us. This is very much unlike Houston, where pretty much everything is in the Inner Loop, and we found ourselves driving there every weekend when we lived in the deep suburbs during our first few years here.)
I definitely agree with your second paragraph. It's a real shame that Dallas has the most robust rail network in the South...and it serves basically no-one at the moment because of its bus network being the Achilles' Heel it is. Like, it's a real shame that the TRE (Trinity Railway Express; proper heavy commuter rail that runs on dedicated track) only services 5900 passengers/day and doesn't run on Sundays. (For contrast, the Long Island Rail Road in NYC services almost 330k riders/day.) Waymo will be a SUPER DUPER useful microtransit option to close the gap.
conductr 9 hours ago [-]
I'm originally from Houston, but have settled in Dallas for my career/mid-life. It's hard to compare the two cities they are so different. The vibrant urban core inner loop of Houston has no comparison here. I miss it the most, and try to recreate it by trying to keep within the 635 "loop". Plano and HEB areas I know well, but avoid. I tried Colleyville and didn't like the distance. I try to keep 90% within 15 minute radius. In Houston, even in the loop, you it could take you an hour to get from say the Heights to West U. [It's the food I miss the most, DFW is bland midwestern to my Houstonian tastebuds.]
It's my take, that it's largely due to traffic, and although people in DFW complain - traffic here has no comparison to Houston traffic. People "easily" commute 40-50 or more miles one way. It's part of the Plano problem, if you lived in Plano an commuted to Legacy West, you are likely in the minority. Most Plano workforce, likely does not work in Plano at all. It's why 75 and DNT get traffic. Most of Plano jobs, likely held by non-Plano residents. The same story plays out everywhere here. In Houston, when I lived there, if you lived in Katy you pretty much stayed in Katy. Maybe you'd jump over to the Woodlands, or Sugarland, or go towards inner Houston on a weekend. The people that commuted downtown for work, the often woke up and drove at 4-5AM to avoid the traffic (they've added new roads since I lived there, toll roads that make this easier). But still, if you're on the West or North side or even in the Loop - dipping down to Galveston can be a significant road trip even though it's just ~50 miles from downtown. We simply don't have that kind of traffic in DFW. The commutes are long because traffic is light enough that people choose to live/work great distances away - then they complain about their commute/traffic. This is also why any type of fixed public transit won't work here, I think it has to do a lot with how the roadways are laid out differently - whole other rabbit hole I could go on about that, but DFW actually does do traffic a bit better than Houston which effectively unlocks the entire DFW area for people to use just like how you explained in your brewery patron example. I can't imagine a brewery in Pearland gets many visitors from the Kingwood or Woodlands or even Katy.
The urban core of Dallas is a failed experiment in my opinion. It's referred to as the Central Business District. And so, almost by definition, it's just office spaces. Covid hit it hard and it's slowly turning/gaining residential which will eventually bring back some life there. The nightlife in Uptown is very personality driven, if you're a preppy/posh type person you probably love it. It sounds like that's just not your cup of tea.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
Hopefully the positive buzz will spread to other cities where Uber and train-transit special interests are blocking it and everyday citizens will demand the cool service the experienced in another city.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
Definitely. Waymo is aiming for 1 million rides/week by the end of the year, and their last publicly shared number was 500,000/week. They're consistently expanding on all fronts: more cities, more territory, more vehicles, more riders, more road types.
ultimoo 3 days ago [-]
I was talking with someone visiting from Florida the other day and they were talking about how Waymo is slurping money that would have otherwise stayed in the local economy. E.g. you pay an uber driver, the uber driver pays the grocery store, etc.
This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean the cars? How are others thinking about this?
weatherlite 3 days ago [-]
For sure , this is gonna kill driver jobs and/or lower their wages due to the increased competition.
The upside is cheaper mobility for everyone - in general tech like this should have a deflationary effect (We're still not seeing this enough). Think robots building an entire city in months/couple of years instead of a decade, that would cheapen housing dramatically. We're obviously not there yet.
Zigurd 3 days ago [-]
There are a couple of other important factors: one is safety. Waymos observe traffic laws and safety rules. With enough Waymo on the road, everyone else will be forced to obey speed limits. As a cyclist, I welcomed the day when Waymo waits to pass me rather than a human driver who will get impatient and do a close pass.
The reason I say Waymo specifically is that I don't think it's well appreciated the tech advantage Waymo has by using Google's unequalled geospatial data. Elon keeps claiming that Teslas will do the same thing much cheaper and everywhere, but there's no actual evidence that that is possible. Grinding out larger and larger service areas in more cities is likely to be the way automated rides expand for the next several years.
ragazzina 3 days ago [-]
>The upside is cheaper mobility for everyone
Why should Google leave money on the table? They will raise the price until it's just below what people are already paying.
weatherlite 3 days ago [-]
Not an expert but in general that's usually not how tech works. It generally gets commodified and cheaper : TVs, mobile phones, computers etc etc. They're either becoming cheaper or you get a way better product for the same price (think of today's TVs that make the 80s tvs look like something from the middle ages).
Yes Google in the initial decade will possibly have a big head start but in the end Tesla and a bunch of Chinese names will also run robo taxis in the U.S.
So my take: efficiency and competition should bring prices down in a non broken economy.
ragazzina 3 days ago [-]
>not how tech works. It generally gets commodified and cheaper: TVs
Hardware gets commodified and cheaper, not services usually. Do you pay less for cable tv now compared to 20 years ago?
weatherlite 3 days ago [-]
Its complex. Cell phone plans became way cheaper in my country than 20 years ago, they used to be shockingly expensive. People old enough will remember SMS weren't cheap and a single minute of call was shockingly expensive.
I'd same similar thing happened with the internet, you can now get a basic plan for cheaper than 20 years ago. Is it as cheap as it should be? Probably not.
It's interesting this hasn't happened with cable I somewhat agree with you there. However you have alternatives that are just as good like Netflix and cost 20 bucks or less if you can live with ads.
buu700 2 days ago [-]
Agreed, I think it's a mistake to treat "cable" as the entire product category here. It's a (dying) subset of the product category, not the whole category. Like internet and cellular service, SOTA television content as a whole hasn't ever really been cheaper than it is today.
jillesvangurp 3 days ago [-]
Because they aren't going to be alone doing this for very long. Competitors will just undercut each other until just above the cost threshold. And people will simply pick the one that gets them from A to B fast and cheap. I've never cared about who drives my Uber/Taxi, what car shows up, etc. It's just a service that I buy without knowing any of that. It's only a problem if they don't show up.
The cost threshold should be pretty low. No fuel (only electricity), and no drivers. Those are two of the larger cost factors here.
Aboutplants 3 days ago [-]
If robot driven cars are more expensive than human driven cars then the solution presents itself.
weatherlite 3 days ago [-]
You are right, the clear solution is to eliminate all human drivers.
- ChatGPT
Laurel1234 3 days ago [-]
That's only until they destroy driver's livelihoods, once they get rid of the competition they can name their price.
sashank_1509 3 days ago [-]
There is some need for local labor, but it’s an order of magnitude lower than the number of Uber drivers that get paid.
I never thought of this, but I think this is a valid concern. Uber drivers will end up spending in their locality while money that goes to Waymo will be used for further investment that’s probably concentrated in the Bay Area. I will say this though, Uber it self somehow takes > 50% of the cut a driver and makes and once again spends it on engineers in California, so Uber is guilty of this same issue, but Waymo is probably worse at this than Uber.
In general AI is guilty of destroying the demand for normal human labour and accumulating money into companies with highly paid engineers.
tuesdaynight 2 days ago [-]
Someday some politician will propose a law to require companies to maintain most part of their revenue in the city where it was acquired. I know that it will not necessarily be a good thing, but it doesn't matter
xnx 2 days ago [-]
This is a clever talking point from Uber that doesn't get the same attention for any other nationwide company. Restrict Walmart, Home Depot, McDonald's, Verizon, Apple because they're taking money away from mom and pop: grocery, hardware, restaurants, mobile networks, and phone manufacturers.
rurp 2 days ago [-]
Are you saying that Waymo spends a similar percentage of revenue on local salaries as a labor intensive business like Home Depot or Uber? That would be surprising to me.
I've seen Walmart and similar companies criticized countless times for driving local shops out of business. It has been a common attack for decades, IME.
This doesn't mean the big corporate option is always inherently bad, but it's weird to me that their defenders often attack the very notion that there could be tradeoffs and downsides.
3 days ago [-]
darkwizard42 3 days ago [-]
The Uber driver likely gets a different job, probably something a little less stressful and low paying (and frankly dangerous) than Uber.
superfrank 3 days ago [-]
Usually if you're working a stressful, low paying, dangerous job it's because you don't have many other options. I'm pretty sure "just get another job" is easier said than done for most Uber drivers
I doubt the geofence exclusion is because of the demographics of those areas and not the demand for autonomous vehicles in those areas, although I don't doubt the latter is a result of the former.
smt88 3 days ago [-]
I doubt this is correct. “It’s expensive to be poor” — a lot of people who can’t afford cars (or have bad credit) end up Ubering to/from work every day
epolanski 3 days ago [-]
How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
powersurge360 3 days ago [-]
If you are curious about this, I recommend There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. It covers how some folks, with no credit, are forced to live in extended stay hotels (where they take cash up front and don’t run credit) which can cost multiple times what rent can cost.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
fragmede 3 days ago [-]
The most evil thing I heard was companies like Doordash and Uber buying up data on who has credit card debt, so they know which driver is more desperate for cash, so they can low-ball them and give them a worse offer because they're more likely to take it because they're desperate for it.
bryan_w 3 days ago [-]
You fell for some kid's story and should feel bad for repeating it unsubstantiated.
2 days ago [-]
frenchtoast8 3 days ago [-]
Where is the proof of any of this? There are too many conspiracy theories about gig work. There was a similar post on HN a few months back[1] based on some anonymous vagueposter on Reddit, again without evidence. Would I be surprised if this is true? Of course not. Should we just start believing random things without any critical thinking? No.
>How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
reaperducer 3 days ago [-]
How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
epolanski 3 days ago [-]
Aren't you going 20 times per month, twice, that's 40 rides.
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
reaperducer 3 days ago [-]
Aren't you going 20 times per week, twice, that's 40 rides.
Work 5 days a week = 10 rides. Plus four rides on the weekend, or not. That's why I used 14.
Where do you get 40 rides per week?
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Even if someone did 40 rides per week at your posited average of $25/ride, that's $4,000, not $1,000. Are you letting an LLM do math for you?
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
They showed their work and named their units. Their math is fine.
If work happens 5 days per week, each workday requires two rides, and there are 4 weeks in a month, then there are 40 rides per month. If each of those rides costs $25, then:
5 × 2 × 4 × $25 = $1,000, per month
reaperducer 3 days ago [-]
But he didn't state per month. He stated per week, then went back and changed his comment after I replied.
Guess you didn't notice that I quoted him.
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
You're so right! That's such a great load-bearing detail!
I especially liked the part where you quoted "1'000$/month" and got yourself all confused about the intended conclusion anyway!
Good chat, my friend!
surajrmal 3 days ago [-]
40 rides a month, not week. I'm not sure you're in a position to accuse folks of not doing math when you don't seem to read very well.
reaperducer 3 days ago [-]
Read what I quoted. He edited his comment after I replied.
3 days ago [-]
epolanski 3 days ago [-]
You knew very well there was a typo in the first sentence, and decided to look foolish none the less.
This is somewhat similar to the situation here in LA where they service and very often drive through Westlake/MacArthur-Park which undoubtedly low income. I think it’s for practical reasons though, as they’re not allowed to use the freeways here yet. So for people going from rich areas (Bel-Air/Beverly Hills) to DTLA they need to cross/drive through there anyways.
Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…
fragmede 3 days ago [-]
Ish. The problem with Waymos is there's no human driver, so they'll adjust pick up and drop off in a way that could be dangerous for the passenger. A human driver isn't going let a passenger off into a dangerous situation. They'll block traffic to drop the passenger off at their destination instead of a few blocks away in a dangerous neighborhood.
Waymo's got the legal go ahead to use freeways, but they're working on some of the subtleties of self-driving on the freeway vs city streets before enabling it for everybody. (Specifically, California car culture is you merge left early instead of staying in the right lane until you have to. Apparently the Waymo driver was staying in the right lane.)
holycrapwhodat 3 days ago [-]
> The problem with Waymos is there's no human driver, so they'll adjust pick up and drop off in a way that could be dangerous for the passenger. A human driver isn't going let a passenger off into a dangerous situation.
In this situation, you absolutely can (and are encouraged to) press the support button in the car to talk to a human agent. They have the ability to tell the car to go somewhere it normally wouldn't go for any situation that humans can reason about.
elictronic 3 days ago [-]
Tesla has fewer miles than I have driven in my lifetime. It’s currently still a half baked product. This might be a story in a few years but today you’re comparing an F150 to a Delorean.
fragmede 3 days ago [-]
How many miles is that?
pm90 3 days ago [-]
DFW is amongst the top 5 metroplexes in the US and is extremely low density, high sprawl with few public transit options and a car heavy culture. This is a a welcome change.
quxbar 3 days ago [-]
Here in Austin, I'm stuck calling an uber and hoping I get a Waymo. When does that deal expire?
That's also when the partnership with Rivian really takes off. Uber clearly wants its own fleet of robotaxis; they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago. Looks like they're content letting other companies take the risk while helping fund them.
overfeed 3 days ago [-]
Uber also partners with Zoox and Lucid on self-driving, missing this wave may be an existential risk, so they aren't putting eggs in one basket. Nevermind a level of duress due to the Uber/Waymo partnership being (almost certainly) part of a settlement agreement regarding alleged IP theft from Google by way of Anthony Levandowki.
> ...they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago
It was for the best; the Kalanick-era company culture wasn't (/isn't?) compatible with the levels of public trust required for successful self driving.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
It's hard to see how Uber is in any way relevant to the future of self-driving.
baggachipz 3 days ago [-]
Yeah well I'm sure they would like to prevent that.
It is so so so so so so bad to have to risk an uber every time I want to hire a Waymo.
flatline 3 days ago [-]
I have still not gotten a Waymo even once. I am in the service area. I don't use the service frequently, just enough to be disappointed.
pyaamb 3 days ago [-]
Elon may have been technically correct about 'if humans can do it with vision only then theres no reason why vision-only cannot work' but turned out to be the wrong strategy for learning how to get there. lidar gives you a constant stream of data to check your vision yourself against and interatively learn. Once trained you turn it off. whereas teslas strategy ended up having to rely on human drivers for error feedback which made the learning loop way longer.
adleyjulian 3 days ago [-]
The other issue is that lidar costs came down 99% in the last decade and self-driving took longer than he had said.
At $200, you might as well add lidar. At $50,000 vision only made more sense.
A trained marksman may be able to hit a clay pigeon with a 22, but it's easier with a shotgun.
So saying a human can do something doesn't mean it's the easiest way.
Sivart13 3 days ago [-]
Why would we want to have robot cars that only drive as good as humans can?
jfoster 3 days ago [-]
You seem to be baking-in the assumption that extreme precision is what can make the difference when driving a car, but I put to you that the vast, vast majority of human-at-fault accidents are not due to the precision being slightly off.
It will be logic and driving behavior that makes the difference between Waymo/Tesla/others rather than whether the perception accuracy is micron level or not.
heaney-555 3 days ago [-]
It's far far too early to say whether it turned out to be wrong.
Tesla also has a robotaxi service in Dallas, FWIW, in testing.
weatherlite 3 days ago [-]
In testing. Waymo though is serving millions of rides for years now. Not saying Tesla won't close this gap but there's a real gap.
heaney-555 2 days ago [-]
Waymo does 4 million rides per month.
Uber does 1 billion, for reference.
There's still a long, long way to go. Waymo has proven it can operate a high-priced service in a handful of cities in good weather, it hasn't yet demonstrated true scale and affordability.
pnt12 2 days ago [-]
"Humans can do x, therefore non humans can do it too", says the guy with a degree in philosophy! Surely not formal philosophy:)
Jokes aside I always thought this was a crap argument. If you can get more useful signals into a system, it's likely to perform better. Duh!
But never argue with a CEO: their interest is profit, not honest conversations.
Rover222 3 days ago [-]
we'll see how it plays out. Tesla FSD is incredible. Robotaxis are coming, slowly for now, but then in a wave.
alex1138 3 days ago [-]
Elon annoys me. Waymo has AFAICT simply a better safety record than Tesla. And he runs SpaceX...?
hmokiguess 3 days ago [-]
Missed opportunity to say "Open to Y'all"
BugsJustFindMe 3 days ago [-]
"Open to All Y'all"
raddan 3 days ago [-]
Isn't there supposed to be a liaison in there? "Open to Alls Y'all"
proteal 3 days ago [-]
Here’s my understanding as a native Texan with examples (don’t take this too seriously):
Y’all -> group of people (howdy yall)
All y’all -> everyone (all yall need to listen up!)
All’s yall -> only thing (alls yall need is another beer)
All y’all’s -> singular possessive of everyone’s stuff (put all y’all’s shit away)
All’s y’all’s -> plural possessive of everyone’s stuff (alls y’all’s cars are blocking me in). This one is a bit awkward and most people just use all y’all’s instead
Not all liaisons are French, but all the dangerous ones are.
dylan604 3 days ago [-]
I'd imagine a total of one Waymo car could service all of Paris, Texas and still be sitting idle for the majority of time.
semiquaver 3 days ago [-]
> Dallasites
Is that seriously the demonym? Terrible. Try harder, Dallasites.
dgunay 3 days ago [-]
It sounds too much like "parasite" for me to be comfortable using it. I'm assuming some random person made it up. It's okay to just say "people of/from <place>", guys.
raddan 3 days ago [-]
But then you lose extra important information from words like "masshole."
ndm000 3 days ago [-]
Having grown up in Dallas, I usually just say "Texan" and call it a day.
adrianmonk 3 days ago [-]
What's your better suggestion? Dallasonian? Dallaser? Dallasan?
Also, do you have the same issue with the demonyms Manhattanite or Seattleite?
rawgabbit 3 days ago [-]
If I had my wish, the original French hippie colony would have been successful and we would be calling ourselves Reunionais or something like that.
Texas -> Texan
Kansas - Kansan
Honduras -> Honduran
It should be Dallan?
gumby271 3 days ago [-]
Dallmatians
bijowo1676 3 days ago [-]
I like North Texans
mchusma 3 days ago [-]
I thought it was a typo, or strange url at first.
nosrepa 3 days ago [-]
I vote for dilly dallasers.
rawgabbit 3 days ago [-]
We go by North Texans.
behnamoh 3 days ago [-]
I'm with you on this and this is something I brought up on Dallas subreddits before moving here and got downvoted to oblivion.
"Dallasite" sounds like "parasite". Dallasian/etc. would be better.
chasd00 3 days ago [-]
better than "cityofhate" which is what we're called most of the time.
behnamoh 3 days ago [-]
In all fairness, I've noticed people here in Dallas/TX are indeed more racist than the East and West coast cities, esp. towards brown people.
triceratops 3 days ago [-]
Understandable, I'd also hate to live in Dallas /s
culi 3 days ago [-]
This urbanist youtuber did a really in-depth video on what the future could look like (both good and ugly effects) if self-driving cars become enough of a success to affect the way we build infrastructure
I watched a bit of it and it's mostly stating their own conjectures as facts. There's nothing objective about it, it's just pushing their own personal agenda.
culi 3 days ago [-]
Urbanist youtubers inevitably come to mix in some advocacy in their videos. You'd be hard-pressed to find one that isn't critical of car-centric design. That being said, NJB is a well-respected educational youtuber and all their videos are built on a lot of research
Even if you don't agree with the advocacy part of it, I think it's still valuable to watch to get the "urban planning professional" perspective on it
preommr 3 days ago [-]
Of course it's Not Just Bikes.
I used to be frustrated at their poorly thought-out arguments until I realized none of it matters. The videos are made for a certain demographic to jerk off about their special interests. The real world is going to move on and stuff is going to get implemented. These people and their opinions have no real world impact and don't matter outside of their niche little social groups.
Self driving cars will happen, and not because "billionaires and big companies with lots of money", but because it'll provide increased automation. It'll make it easier for people to get from point A to point B, even if it's not using buses that people like NJB and his ilk are for some reason obsessed with.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
Agree. Like many movements, "urbanism" stopped being about safe, convenient, affordable transportation and became primarily about catering to anti-car absolutists and self-promotion.
culi 2 days ago [-]
Urban studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that examines the history, culture, politics, and economy of cities and urban spaces
Yes, studying a specific thing can commonly produce particular perspectives but that doesn't inherently discredit the discipline.
vb-8448 3 days ago [-]
I'm just curious how it works on the legal side: if a human run the red light he gets a fine, who gets fined with a waymo car?
If the car I'm in cause a big damage or kill someone? I guess the damage will be paid by the insurance but whom insurance? Mine or waymos? And what about criminal implications? Insurance doesn't cover thoose for sure.
skybrian 3 days ago [-]
It should be the same as for any public transport: it's the service operator's responsibility to run the system. The rider doesn't need insurance.
I imagine Google has enough money that they can self-insure. Particularly since it's a very low accident rate.
vb-8448 3 days ago [-]
What about criminal implications?
PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.
SR2Z 3 days ago [-]
I would imagine that criminal liability for hacking a Waymo falls on the hacker, and on Waymo only if they are negligent.
surajrmal 3 days ago [-]
If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to run a red light, who is liable? Humans can get persuaded to do illegal things by criminals just as well.
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
Criminal implications of... what, exactly?
Please state your concerns.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
Similar legal profile to an elevator when they stopped being operated by people.
Fogest 3 days ago [-]
I used to give out speed camera tickets. How do you think this worked? We didn't know who was the driver. It didn't matter. We ticketed the vehicle owner. Not sure how this is different? There are workplace injuries all the time in places like factories due to automated machines. Elevators/Escalators have caused fatalities or injuries and don't have a direct operator. I mean there are tons of things in life with no direct human to blame immediately on scene.
elianaive 3 days ago [-]
Keeps on being rolled out in red states while being delayed in blue states, quite unfortunate.
runako 3 days ago [-]
Divide this differently:
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for > 3 months
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for < 1 month
Inclement weather is likely the differentiator. Blue state California gets Waymo in its biggest cities, which handily do not get much snow. The other Waymo cities are all below the Mason-Dixon Line.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
Blocked even from testing in NYC. Blocked from DC and Boston. Unfortunately this does have more to do with bad government than bad weather.
runako 3 days ago [-]
Boston, according to Waymo[1], is dependent on the legislature making autonomous vehicles legal. Apparently NY state laws also require a human driver at the wheel.
The only surprising thing about this is that other states did not require changes in law. It's Good, Actually, that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us.
In any case, there are more than 2-3 "blue" states. We can note that it's also not running in cold "red" states either. The climate angle fits the data best and aligns with what Waymo says, which aligns with what we have known about the tech for at least a decade.
(That note also suggests they are still testing their cold-weather kit and are not quite ready.)
> Apparently NY state laws also require a human driver at the wheel.
Earlier this year, Waymo had a permit to test 8 autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in NYC. The permit was not renewed [1]. Waymo can no longer drive autonomously (even with a safety driver) in NYC.
What changed between when the testing permit was issued and when a renewal of permit was declined? NYC had a political shift in leadership.
> that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us
Not if they’re stupid laws!
lokar 3 days ago [-]
Even then. There is value in uniform rule of law.
JumpCrisscross 3 days ago [-]
> There is value in uniform rule of law
Sure. OP's point is these products and investments are accruing disproportionately to red cities and states. Sinking together isn't a great pitch.
lokar 3 days ago [-]
I think elected state leaders should move to understand theses issues, hear from experts and the public, and craft good laws for these services.
My state (CA) is doing well this. If your state is not, and this is important to you, I suggest you get involved in the process.
Having companies ignore the law is not an alternative to the democratic process.
JumpCrisscross 3 days ago [-]
> My state (CA) is doing well this
Yup. And I invest there. I’m pulling back from New York, which is a shame, because I love it and still have interests there.
> Having companies ignore the law is not an alternative to the democratic process
Straw man. Nobody said this. The point is the current system of incumbent worship is not working. If it takes flipping parties to prove that, I guess yeah, but that won’t result in more rule of law.
runako 3 days ago [-]
> these products and investments are accruing disproportionately to red cities and states
Is this true at the city level?
> Sinking together isn't a great pitch.
Surely it's a worse pitch to suggest that companies can ignore laws they don't like, and operate above the law?
JumpCrisscross 3 days ago [-]
> it's a worse pitch to suggest that companies can ignore laws they don't like, and operate above the law?
It’s also worse to murder kittens. That isn’t the choice at hand.
The difference is between states adapting with a regulatory framework and those sticking with economic incumbents.
(Also, when the taxi medallion industry was at its peak, lenders did run roughshod over the law.)
runako 3 days ago [-]
In context, your comment reads as a defense of companies ignoring laws:
>> that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us
> Not if they’re stupid laws!
States won't adapt to new technologies at the same time, this is embedded in the design of federalism.
JumpCrisscross 3 days ago [-]
> States won't adapt to new technologies at the same time, this is embedded in the design of federalism
…how are you missing this.
I’m saying the states failing to adapt need to do so or have their governments replaced. That all of these states are also facing multi-party insurgencies doesn’t strike me as a coïncidence. Pretending the corruption in e.g. New York around this is fine is just such a weird take.
runako 2 days ago [-]
>…how are you missing this.
Yeah, you added that in a later comment because your original comment did read as "ignore stupid laws."
Yes, I agree state governments should be responsive to the citizens. Corruption is bad. Ignoring "stupid" laws also goes hand in hand with corruption, and is antithetical to responsive government.
> multi-party insurgencies
This is interesting in that we kind of expect a healthy representative government to have vigorous competition among multiple groups. I'm not sure this is bad...
But a key point of federalism is that each state will adapt in different ways due to having different priorities. Mississippi adapts to the realities of 2026 in very different ways than California. I suspect the same will be true in 2056 and 2096.
lokar 2 days ago [-]
The desire to slow down and consider the fate of cab drivers (very hard working, low income people) is not automatically corruption.
Zambyte 3 days ago [-]
Getting around Boston is very easy. Flooding the streets with more cars won't make it easier.
A government that listens to the people it governs is a good government.
I personally saw a Waymo in NYC on June 26th at 14th St and 8th Avenue, so they’ve done some recent testing at least.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
It's still legal for Waymo to manually drive them around for mapping.
senkora 1 days ago [-]
That could definitely be it. I didn’t get a clear view of the driver’s seat, so I don’t know whether or not the driver was manually controlling it.
cyberax 3 days ago [-]
NYC's government is focused on maximizing the pain and inconvenience for its citizens. So this tracks.
runako 3 days ago [-]
State law requires a human driver to operate vehicles at all times. This is not coming from NYC.
bhelkey 2 days ago [-]
At the start of this year, Waymo had a permit to test eight autonomous vehicles with a safety driver behind the wheel in NYC. The permit expired March 31st [1]. Waymo may no longer test autonomous driving (even with a safety driver) in NYC.
Waymo is not currently testing in NYC for political reasons.
Seattle was announced as a Waymo upcoming city nearly 2 months before Houston, gets a foot less of rain than Houston each year, and usually has only 2 or 3 snow days a year. That's at least one counter example to your theory.
WarmWash 3 days ago [-]
NYC has Mamdani, who is a very progressive populist mayor, and a longtime (active) supporter of the taxi drivers union.
There is close to zero chance it gets approval in NYC before 2030. I'd be totally floored if he goes against the union, but the optics are absolutely terrible for cabs.
overfeed 3 days ago [-]
Waymo can't launch anywhere in NY state due to state law, but by all means, trot out your favorite whipping boy.
cortesoft 3 days ago [-]
They have been fully open here in Los Angeles for almost two years now.
bhelkey 2 days ago [-]
Waymo has logged 67M miles in the SF Bay Area and 50M miles in LA of autonomous miles driven with a passenger [1]. It looks like the rollout is going quite well in California.
the metro areas where it gets rolled out are all blue regardless of state
staplor 3 days ago [-]
It is unfortunate, but we're still in the early days of AV's. I think that more cities and states will be amenable to them once they have proven themselves as indispensable.
Zigurd 3 days ago [-]
It's easier to roll out in places where it seldom snows.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
Definitely true, but snow affecting driving conditions is becoming pretty rare in cities like Chicago.
tptacek 3 days ago [-]
Seems about as common as it ever was? (I'm very bullish on Waymos here).
xnx 3 days ago [-]
You're right. I remembered some headlines about road salt usage and took them at face value, but the long-term trends are not clear.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
Road salt means I can drive as if it was summer a few hours after the snow stops falling. While the snow is falling I still have to be careful. Ideally I would never drive when the snow is falling, but I live where that happens often enough that we cannot shutdown life for a little snow/ice so we try to make it work - as a result people go in the ditch a lot.
skeeter2020 3 days ago [-]
maybe weather events that disrupt travel, but impact things like visibility, lane definition, etc? That's still super-common in Chicago and a lot of the US.
dmitrygr 3 days ago [-]
"Maybe it's something you've got that they haven't got." - Owen Kellogg
mrtesthah 3 days ago [-]
Is it unfortunate, though?
km3r 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
wwalexander 3 days ago [-]
What “anti-science slopulism” are you referring to? And what does corporate rollout strategy have to do with science?
xnx 3 days ago [-]
History of being anti-nuclear. Now against "AI" and self driving cars because they like trains.
wwalexander 3 days ago [-]
Self driving cars and AI aren’t science. Not sure what being pro or anti nuclear or AI has to do with corporate rollout strategy.
km3r 3 days ago [-]
The science shows self driving cars are already safer. The same was (and is) true of nuclear compared to oil/gas.
km3r 3 days ago [-]
Anti nuclear, anti AI, pro-rent control, anti-self driving tech, anti-automation
wwalexander 3 days ago [-]
What does rent control have to do with corporate rollout strategy?
yieldcrv 3 days ago [-]
Waymo sells itself
People hate human drivers more than they hate the idea of AI drivers
It’s an extremely consistent experience, and you can sit in the front seat (something I like personally). With Uber and taxi services, you never know what kind of driver or ride you’re going to get.
ooopsss 3 days ago [-]
Uber is at least 1000x better than traditionally taxi, without any rating system.
sbuttgereit 3 days ago [-]
They use to be (along with Lyft). But it's been a very long time since that was clearly true.
In reality I think you can get better experiences than a taxi with a rideshare service (which they really haven't been for a very long time), but it's very hit or miss.
So less consistently bad as a taxi service... but far from consistently good.
giancarlostoro 3 days ago [-]
The real test is, can these self-driving cars drive I-4 without getting into any sort of wreck?
Sorry, can you point out the section of that document that justifies the “found to be more hazardous” claim?
elicash 3 days ago [-]
Interesting, I went to the link they gave and to the safety section and it says:
> As of July 23, 2026, we have temporarily removed our safety analysis from this report, as well as relevant references to the analysis throughout the report (denoted in-text by a reference to this section). We were made aware of data discrepancies between City agency data for New York City for-hire vehicle crashes with serious injuries or deaths, as well as City agency data definitions related to such crashes. We are working to resolve these discrepancies and ensure our findings properly represent the data and the driving records of New York City for-hire vehicle drivers and Waymo vehicles. Other than this section, the remainder of our report remains unchanged.
My guess is jdlyga read this report before it was modified.
twoodfin 3 days ago [-]
I think it’s not surprising that a report written by a forthrightly anti-car public interest group managed to screw that up:
I had never heard of them. But anybody can make a mistake and it shows integrity to immediately remove a section with a disclaimer when prevented with contrary evidence. Not enough folks do this.
You can have strong anti- "car-culture" views and still be committed to the truth.
twoodfin 3 days ago [-]
Per the excellent Reddit thread linked below, if their analysis had been more thoughtful and careful, they likely would have concluded that Waymos are as safe or moreso than NYC yellow cabs.
Would they have published that result with the same fanfare?
I am really wondering, how they tackle the long trail problem of unknown situations. Sure they are monitor them constantly but I am asking precisely, how to handle situations that occur ridiculously infrequently: do they sample them 1000x in sim? Or do they use a different model and track uncertainty in the model constantly?
How to get another 0 between the dot and the percent sign in situations where the model makes the wrong choice with a significant probability?
jdlshore 3 days ago [-]
There was an article a while back that talked about their simulated world model. It has the ability to do things like floods, elephants on the road, etc.
How do the cars do when breaking a rule is necessary? For instance, a car is broken down in the one forward lane of a two-lane road, requiring the waymo to cross the double-yellow line to get around it. Or, a signal is red for so long that obviously its car detector isn’t working.
varenc 3 days ago [-]
It handles these circumstances. Definitely seen it cross to the other side with oncoming traffic to get around a truck blocking a lane. For the signal light, never experienced that, but I imagine after awhile it'd figure it out. Possibly with the assistance of a remote human telling it.
lokar 3 days ago [-]
I was in one stopped as the first car at a red light. The next section of road was full of cars waiting on another red light.
Our light changed to green and the Waymo waited until the next red turned green and then proceeded into the intersection in anticipation of the cars ahead moving.
acedTrex 3 days ago [-]
Ive really been enjoying waymo, ill pay a premium over anything else for them.
Sheeny96 3 days ago [-]
Why are the cars so big? Wouldn't it make sense to have a bunch of much smaller, single person vehicles?
porphyra 3 days ago [-]
Tesla Cybercab has about three or four times the efficiency and like a fifth of the price by having smaller, two person vehicles. Indeed, the vast majority of trips are taken by single people and it's ridiculous to have a giant machine for them. It would also be okay to have a handful of larger, Model Y-sized vehicles for the multi-person trips.
To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:
* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute
* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles
* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch
* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent
The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.
That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.
klaff 3 days ago [-]
I have one of the most inefficient EVs and it's only 2.4x hungrier than the cybercab. It can comfortably carry 6 adults. I've been in Tesla 3s as Ubers before. They only need 31% more energy than the cybercab.
If the cybercab was 1/5 the price it would be $14k. It won't be $14k.
porphyra 3 days ago [-]
The Waymo I-Pace is much less efficient than the regular roadgoing I-Pace. One X user posted a pic of the dashboard of a Waymo with 111,000 miles on the odometer, and it averaged 1.0 kWh per mile [1][2]. This is about 2.5x worse than the EPA rating of a normal Jaguar I-Pace. Probably the difference is because the Waymo has tons of compute and the sensors have a surprisingly large impact on aerodynamic efficiency. I was being generous to the Waymo in my original comment. If we compare the actual rating of the Cybercab at 165 Wh per mile, it would be 6x as efficient.
Also, whereas the stock Jaguar I-Pace was $70k, the Waymo one with all its sensors and compute have estimates ranging from $150k to $200k. In a comment made in late 2024, Waymo CEO Dmitri Dolgov mentions that the sensors and compute themselves cost $100k [3].
> The equipment on Waymo’s fifth-generation robot taxis — electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles — costs as much as $100,000, Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s co-chief executive, said on a podcast in February.
That is the same generation as the current I-Pace fleet that makes up the majority of Waymos.
Referring to the example from the Twitter post you cited, wouldn't the KWh per mile simply be a lot higher because these vehicles are engaging in much less efficient travel overall? City driving itself is often pretty inefficient because of all the stopping and going, and these vehicles likely are driving in a lot of the rush hour traffic and high density areas everyday. Not to mention they probably idle around a lot more than a normal persons car would in a day.
So wouldn't that be the reason the figures would look 2.5x worse than the regular Jaguar? I'm sure there are other factors of course since running the computer systems, lidar and all the other features will also consume more power, so I'm sure from a baseline it will be less efficient anyway, I just think because of the kind of driving it engages in, this will make it also look far less efficient.
klaff 2 days ago [-]
Depending on conditions, heat or AC can consume up to 5 or 6 kW in extreme weather and a small fraction of that in milder conditions. The most efficient speed of an EV is hard to pin down. If all fixed loads could be turned off, it would be most efficient at the slowest possible speed but with HVAC and compute loads present, the most efficient speed is around where the aerodynamic load is equal to the fixed load. That's still likely to be rather slow but the idealized math that gives this optimum is for steady-state operation. There is a round-trip loss for regen, so there is still an advantage to steady operation even if it is not as big as with ICE cars where no kinetic energy is recovered.
My guess for the poor reported number is excessive idle time w/ HVAC and compute stuff on within the trip interval.
porphyra 1 days ago [-]
Weather can be arbitrarily extreme, but:
1. My whole house AC only consumes 3 kW when the outside is really hot, like 36 degrees C, and I seriously doubt that car AC can consume 5 or 6 kW
2. With hotter weather, the density of air also decreases and air resistance is reduced. This partially offsets the need for extra cooling (of both the occupants and the battery), so range is only perhaps impacted by 5-10%.
porphyra 3 days ago [-]
Possible, but EVs tend to be more efficient in city driving than highway driving, thanks to regenerative braking and the fact that the dominant form of energy loss, air resistance, scales quadratically with speed.
klaff 2 days ago [-]
Regarding the dashboard pic - that's a trip computer display (see the "A:" and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAdzIuAB3-g) which can display a large range of values depending on the history since the trip was last reset. That fact is recognized in the article you posted but buried in the middle. Using the power estimates in the article won't get you to the inefficiency shown in the trip computer either and aerodynamic changes only make sense if the vehicle is making mostly highway trips, which maybe? My EV, less efficient than the i-Pace (because it's big tall van), in it's first 10k miles averaged 2.5 mi/kWh or 0.4 kWh/mile at an average speed of 36 mph. That works out to around 14.4 kW average load. Adding 3 kW to that for compute (upper end of estimate of one source in the article you linked) pushes that number to 17.4 kW, which would change my efficiency number to 2.1 miles/kWh - still double the i-Pace trip computer. So I don't trust that number as a foundation for any conclusions.
And if the cybercab is cheaper because it doesn't include the sensors needed to actually see the world around it, that's not great either.
redox99 3 days ago [-]
The cybercab would be almost perfect if it weren't for it's low height. It's easier for the elder to get into and out of taller vehicles.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
The Waymo Ojai is great for this: large entry, low floor, high ceiling, high seats
redox99 2 days ago [-]
Yeah it's definitely better in that regard, but it has the other disadvantages: oversized for single passengers, and also personally it feels like public transport, it's the opposite of luxurious.
senko 3 days ago [-]
> Tesla Cybercab has about three or four times the efficiency and like a fifth of the price by having smaller, two person vehicles
I read this as Tesla Cybertruck and was mightily confused for a minute.
Looking it up in Wikipedia I see it has no driver support (steering, pedals, etc). Is that even road-legal?
cortesoft 3 days ago [-]
Why would it make more sense? It isn't like a car half the size would cost half as much, but it would severely limit the capacity. Now, you can get a waymo for 1-4 people, but if some (or all) were single occupant, you would be limited.
Being smaller does not help that much much in cost per mile, but has a big cost for functionality.
smt88 3 days ago [-]
SFC costs don’t scale linearly with volume or number of seats.
The cameras, LIDAR, and sensors are all fixed costs. You need them on even a single-person car. And they’re extremely costly.
solatic 3 days ago [-]
The smallest single-person motorized vehicle is a motorcycle. Leaving stability aside for a minute - one of the issues with electric motorcycles is that the batteries are too small to have range that most riders consider sufficient.
If you have a large enough battery to deliver sufficient range for an electric taxi (driving around most of the day, hopefully, if it is well-utilized), with 4 wheels for stability... I doubt that you could really get significantly smaller where the smaller size would make a big difference.
Zambyte 3 days ago [-]
It would make more sense to make them even bigger, and to have one vehicle service many people. Maybe they could even be linked together for efficiency, and put on rails so the self driving is super reliable.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
And make those rails go to any destination, on any schedule.
Zambyte 1 days ago [-]
Yes! Let's build dense, walkable destinations around transit stops with regular service.
jwpapi 3 days ago [-]
I’m thinking that since 2015. Like BMW C1 just with doors on the side and a bit more security. This would approx allow 3-4x as many travellers on a given route compared to traditional cars.
grim_io 3 days ago [-]
A C1 with more security, meaning more material and air between you and a potential high-speed obstacle, is called a car and is sized like one.
jwpapi 20 hours ago [-]
Fair point.
I still think you could build single person cars that are more secure than traditional cars and use less space and energy
arccy 3 days ago [-]
Americans are fat, they don't fit.
3 days ago [-]
cft 3 days ago [-]
Good case for shorting Uber longer term. The Persian taxi driver may be a good exec but he lost the race
alexjray 3 days ago [-]
Can't wait for this in my town. I also can't wait to see people freak out over them.
thelastgallon 3 days ago [-]
I wonder when Waymo will roll out to Indian cities.
xnx 2 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, probably not for 5 years. Economics probably don't make sense. England and Japan are next.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
There are other considerations though. What are the laws in England or Japan (I do not know, but this is critical). Also India has a lot of engineers, they may hire a bunch and then open the system locally just because everybody can go outside and see how they work.
If profit is the primary motive than India makes no sense, but that isn't the only motive.
InfiniteRand 3 days ago [-]
I wonder how they would handle a freak snowstorm
bitsoda 1 days ago [-]
Probably the same way they handle our summer monsoons in Miami: they shut down the service until conditions clear.
breckenedge 3 days ago [-]
Service area is still miniscule.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
Gotta start somewhere. Still bigger than any competitor.
mridulmalpani 3 days ago [-]
I love waymo, but it's very costly compared to Uber.
3 days ago [-]
Geezus_42 3 days ago [-]
Dallas drivers are bad enough already...
airstrike 3 days ago [-]
I love Waymo. The only problem I have with it is that it further siphons wages from local economies into Silicon Valley, beyond what Uber/Lyft already did.
boc 3 days ago [-]
You could argue that cheaper/safer local rideshare would boost traffic to local bars and restaurants in denser areas though. If you want to keep the $ local, just add an AV tax that goes to the city.
TripolitianFish 3 days ago [-]
You certainly could argue that! As you could argue any number of contrived political inferences which are more fun to think about than be of any real use.
CatalystPz 3 days ago [-]
what's waymo?
0xWTF 3 days ago [-]
Dear American government regulators: nationwide autonomous driving is proving to be easier than delivering fiber to every home. Why do you hate Americans?
samso26 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
reindeer2 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sudeepsd__ 3 days ago [-]
[dead]
ape4 3 days ago [-]
Anyone with a credit card
wilg 3 days ago [-]
I'm sure you can imagine why it might be unnecessarily complicated for a Waymo to take cash.
vel0city 3 days ago [-]
There are tons of automated systems which take cash. I do agree it would add some complexity to the equipment in the car, but its not like it would be that difficult to do it. These cars have to go back to the depot eventually, emptying the cash bins would just be one more cleaning step. I do agree though they don't bother because it probably would cost more to manage in the end than the amount of rides they're losing not accepting cash.
Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
Accepting the cash can be easy enough, in and of itself.
I don't know who makes them, but the bill acceptors at the camera-driven self-checkouts at the Circle Ks in my ghetto have excellent behavior that is completely unlike the experience of fighting with a Coke machine in 1996.
A person can just put a stack of randomly-oriented, rough bills into the slot and it rapidly takes them off, one by one, and counts them up. I've probably used it a thousand times so far. I've tried to get it to screw up by feeding it bills in various states of decay and it has been perfectly accurate and trouble-free. It's quite a marvel. :)
The coin acceptor is similarly-good: It quickly turns a handful of loose change into a cup of coffee. Just drop it into the chute all at once, it makes some coin-sorter noises, and counts them up.
The combined contrivance is also very good at making change, in bills and coins.
So that part is certainly solvable, and that's good.
But now there's other problems: Those machines are big. That's fine for a convenience store, but it's probably not ideal for a car.
The machines are presumably full of money some of the time, and that can make them targets for thieves. Security is likely part of the reason why the ones at the Circle K are big. They might get emptied regularly, but a thief doesn't know whether they're empty or not until they break into it -- and they don't know if it's easy to break into or not until they make a mess of trying.
If they can make change (it seems like that would be a must-have feature), then they'll always need to have some amount of cash inside.
And then: It comes back to the depot. A worker empties it out and brings the cash inside. Now the depot itself is a target that it would not otherwise be.
And finally: They have to get rid of that cash. A regular person doing this has a big X on their back, so in big corpo world that's often the territory of men with guns and armored cars.
---
Or, you know: Maybe cashless payments are OK. If it would behoove Waymo to accept prepaid debit cards (I don't know if it does or not), then those are easy to buy and load with cash at name-brand convenience stores. This ultimately shifts the expense of the cash-handling burden to the consumer, but I guess that's better than them not getting a ride when they need it.
ventana 3 days ago [-]
Debit card works just fine with Waymo, just like with Lyft and Uber.
ssl-3 3 days ago [-]
Is that so?
When all I had was debit cards, I couldn't get any of them to work with Lyft or Uber in 2021.
I had plenty of money. I had nothing better to do than to try to make it work while I sat outside of that airport on a steamy July day in south Florida. I could not make it happen.
There were probably other ways to solve the problem, but I eventually got someone else to send me a car so I could get to where I was going.
(These days, I do have some credit cards. But amusingly, Uber won't let me log in at all unless I verify the number of a debit card that I had in 2021 -- a card that they refused to use, and which was associated with a bank that is itself no longer in business. That card is long gone.)
ventana 3 days ago [-]
It is. I do not use credit cards for about 8 years except for having just one credit card for renting cars a few times per year when I travel. I have zero problems paying for Uber, Lyft, hotels, and everything else with my debit cards.
1over137 3 days ago [-]
And presumably their app?, which requires either an Apple or Google account.
smt88 3 days ago [-]
Uber app only requires an email address
1over137 3 days ago [-]
Requires an app store though, no? And thus agreeing to the app store's terms.
smt88 3 days ago [-]
You can sideload Uber if your phone allows that
smt88 3 days ago [-]
What reason would someone have not to have a credit or debit card? Credit cards are literally free money, as long as you pay the balance off on time
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
Privacy? All your transactions are seen by Palantir in real time.
dymk 3 days ago [-]
Credit cards are not free money lmao
phoghed 3 days ago [-]
They mean the rewards. You can get some % cash back with no annual fee. Effectively my credit card costs me nothing, comes from the same bank as my checking and savings, and gives me cash back.
GuinansEyebrows 3 days ago [-]
the other end of this is that all of those rewards are paid for through merchant fees, which lead to higher prices at the register. it's not free money. it's a fraction of a percentage of the profit credit card companies receive in fees paid by the places you shop. i would not be surprised to learn that even with rewards points we spend more money now that those programs are commonplace.
bluGill 2 days ago [-]
> merchant fees, which lead to higher prices at the register
Only for merchants who have never done real accounting. They lose a lot more than merchant fees to cash. The clerk has to count and recount the money. Then the manager counts and recounts the till at the end of the shift. Then the manager counts all the money in the safe to prepare the daily deposit, and then they have to get that to the bank (at least the bank doesn't charge them after that, but the bank has costs handling their cash as well). This time is not free. That is before we get into the costs of theft, counterfeits - and all the equipment to keep cash safe.
Unless someone has actually added those costs up I'm going to remain convinced credit cards fees are cheaper than cash.
phoghed 3 days ago [-]
Still worth it so I can chargeback shitty merchants.
Example, my landlord specified in my original lease one time pet fee. In my newest year lease no pet fee. I was required to pay the pet fee through some saas dedicated to this. Now that website emailed me to let me know they’ll be charging my annual fee.
What fee? What for? They are providing no ongoing value to anyone as far as I can tell. They refuse to explain or cancel. Well they can explain to Mastercard and I’ll wash my hands of the situation.
inigyou 3 days ago [-]
Update: this guy was evicted 3 hours ago for doing a chargeback.
phoghed 2 days ago [-]
They’d lose a lot more money by trying to evict me and looking for a new tenant than they would by just dropping this dumb ass platform
dymk 3 days ago [-]
I know what they mean, the “rewards” are not free
smt88 3 days ago [-]
Credit cards are an interest-free loan of 1-2 months. That’s literally free money.
The rewards are also free to me in the sense that the merchant pays them. If the merchant has priced them in, then the rewards aren’t free, but using cash is throwing away something I’m still paying for.
Cider9986 3 days ago [-]
It does seem necessary to have cameras inside driverless cars but I don't want to if Google is running the show. Your biometrics will probably be stored for "enforcing Google's policies" at a minimum [1].
And then a Waymo dropped teenagers off at the police? I don't care if that was a human, I don't want no snitch car service [2].
Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliver anything you can live in.
So instead, Cities should lease Waymos (or other brands), and provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking.
Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing or you'll end up handing the keys back to the lender and bankrupt on the deal. Instead, if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units, that tenants have first priority to use for free (or an amount subsidized per month) up to reasonable limits, then you'd address the concern "where are people going to park and how to get to work?".
it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
What's it cost per year to lease? $30k? That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? The cars can be rented to the public on off hours to offset their operating cost.
It's a lot more cost efficient and can be done TODAY, not 5 years after complicated LIHTC financing with 4 layers of other public funding, 3 years of approvals, and 2 years of construction.
> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!)
I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita.
I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus
As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people!
It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus.
I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.
I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.
1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow.
2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency.
3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable.
4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.
2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet.
3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places.
4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop.
From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.
You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.
Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.
And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).
So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?
But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.
Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.
So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.
Holy shit, you have to walk a mile from a cul-de-sac just to get to a street with an intersection?
Who the hell designed these streets? (I guess Big Auto?)
It isn't big auto that designs these places. Big auto likes them, but the people like it because they don't know anything other than cars, and they know they hate living on a busy street with lots of cars. Those are the only two options they know about so don't bother replying with all the others you know about, they don't exist as options.
Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.
Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.
Can and implemented are often worlds apart.
A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.
Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?
A larger bus is needed for useful transit.
And I doubt that 4 or 12 is the ideal bus size in that place.
I guess you don't want to stop more times than needed, so maybe you'd want to cluster the demand somehow into "virtual stops", and you may lack some amenities like shelters.. so maybe the traditional bus route is good enough. Though it feels like it's ripe for optimisation (you know the classic no buses come for 30min then 3 arrive at once, or these buses are all full whilst others are roaming empty)
The faster you get out of the bus, the faster you liberate grandma and kids from a fall, being mugged, or from freezing to death while waiting, and instead you promote an active lifestyle.
Waymo-like transport is incredibly liberating for low middle class parents, that cannot be trust their young kids to ride a bus alone and take time off blue collar work to take their kids to X practice.
Plus, they are much cheaper and safer to operate long term
Buses are a solution today, but only for upper class americans & soccer moms, who don't realize the issues that low income or limited fixed income seniors face in their everyday life.
So people are using public transit in Germany not because they love to but because they are forced to.
And the system is far from perfect, Germans are complaining because public transportation is having a lot of delays. You can't reach every point you need, you have to wait and some times public transportation is dirty and filled with dirty, rude, violent people, drug addicts and drunks. Not a lovely way to travel.
I am pretty pro transit and urbanism but it really annoys me in these discussions when people (not you specifically) just wave their hands and go "add more buses, ez, problem solved", completely disregarding the physical realities of how we have constructed our civilization.
When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.
Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. If they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
After that, grab a pint and watch how your neighborhood transforms.
Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation.
Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.
My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that.
Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.
We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices?
The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them?
Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making.
Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.
I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.
I don't know where your flaws in logic is coming from, but I have seen the numbers enough different places to know there is one someplace.
Also, governance isn't like manufacturing, it doesn't get easier at scale, it gets so much harder.
Living in a perfectly planned super dense urban utopia where I can quickly walk wherever I want is extremely appealing to me. I would also like living in the wilds where once a week I drive to the general store and back as the full day's task. Suburban living is my least desired outcome. But everywhere there is room for it, it happens, even without a city to latch onto. There are good reasons for that.
I'm prepared to be wrong though. The question is, are you?..
I don't know how they managed to do the above. However we know that they have done it, and the costs must have not been excessive.
When you show me facts I'll change my mind. Until then the above facts are compelling.
Basically you are making correct observations but only for part of the picture. And if the discussion is about finances and economics, I would say that the part about where money comes from is pretty damn important, no? :)
Also, even from across the pond, I also saw historical photos of the old USA. Those suburbs from before WW2 were way closer to the Europe really. There were more small businesses everywhere, there were commerce blocks etc. And pre-WW2 infrastructure was much cheaper and less complex that contemporary one. So sure, old suburbs were probably much healthier economically.
As for the moderns suburbs (from 50s and up) you can view more knowledgeable people than me if you really wish to uncover facts and truth. I won't post spoilers, but you may guess them from the context easily.
Because from the 70s onward the former industrial northeast and miswest was actively de-urbanized and suburbanized with environmental and zoning law (don't blame this all on the locals, a lot of this rolls downhill from the states). This obviously coincided with de-industrialization. So basically all these former market and mill towns basically wound up underwater because they not only kicked out their economy but wound up in a situation where every stupid sidewalk repaving costs a bajillion bucks because pursuant to state law whatever it needs to be brought up to code which means some BS green space buffer, etc, etc.
Source: Live in one.
At the end of the day you're basically right it's a lie when it comes to some random Dallas suburb.
After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance.
There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested.
The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.
>The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas
So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic...
We did that though!
It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss.
Ex. Penn Station's real estate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...
I suspect this will only work in the US if the "rail company" is actually public.
- https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod
- https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.h...
A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an entirely different location for dinner. I think it would be incredibly hard to get that problem right and you would still be fighting an uphill battle that people don’t like to take the public bus.
Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.
Your comparison to Netherlands is rough because you are talking about a country that has a fairly mild climate and older cities that generally have density and not much sprawl. I don’t comprehend these examples.
Also those cities are incredibly tiny with probably a concentration of employment. Keep in mind the Netherlands is about 115 miles wide and maybe 180 north/south diagonally. That’s roughly the size of the Dallas metro area.
Someone who lives in Arlington might commute to downtown Dallas, an office building in Plano or downtown Fort Worth. You multiply that by millions of people and it becomes a very hard problem that a typical city bus cannot handle.
Now I do think there is probably opportunity for a Waymo like solution with 10 seats that could do driverless ride sharing but I don’t see how a city can build a bus system that works, people don’t want to take a bus unless it has zero transfers. The last mile problem is incredibly hard and places like Texas are hot. I asking through a strip mall parking lot is further than most of the cities in the Netherlands in that video.
If the Netherlands is the size of the Dallas metro area, then why isn't the Dallas metro area like the Netherlands? Dallas-Fort Worth has over 8 million people in it, it's not like it's a drastically smaller population than the Netherlands. This argument of "America has a bunch of empty space outside of metro areas" is irrelevant to the conditions inside of those metro areas.
Most Americans by population live in metropolitan areas. They don't live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, some people do, but 80%+ of Americans live in very much urban areas. So we can exclude the <20% of Americans from this "we should have decent public transit" debate if you would like, I am fine with that.
The Netherlands actually built out a lot of car-focused infrastructure in the mid-century just like the US. The difference is that they have since pushed that development mindset out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTSNWDTE888
This idea that America "can't go back" is a farce, because it makes an incorrect assumption that other countries never grew in population and therefore never built any new suburbs after the spread of the automobile.
The Netherlands grew from 11 million people in 1960 to 18 million people today. Do you think the Netherlands never built a new neighborhood in that time period?
This doesn't mean that people in the Netherlands or Japan don't own cars. Far from it. What it does mean is that driving a personally owned car in a one-person-per-car paradigm isn't necessary to survive and thrive in those places. Transit-oriented development means that they have other options.
You are concerned about how difficult the climate is, here is how Singapore stays walkable despite hot and rainy climate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_SJ1NBMrH0
Here is how people use public transit in Yakutsk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0
I will also inform you that buses are indeed air conditioned and have heaters, just like a car. You can think of a bus as a car but much larger and fits more people inside.
Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses? I transfer buses all the time in my city, or transfer from bus to train. That doesn't mean it takes me a long time go get around.
I will tell you why: because demand is induced. There isn't some innate human nature where we all automatically prefer cars and have decided by evolution that anything less than a car is less ideal. No, demand is instead induced: if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.
Induced demand is especially prevalent in the US because personal vehicles are heavily subsidized over other options. The US government engages in forever wars to secure low oil prices, subsidized by federal tax dollars. Gas taxes are underfunded and don't keep up with inflation to ensure driving is offered below the real cost. Society subsidizes traffic deaths as nobody, not even insurance companies, compensate society when a 19 year old dies in a drunk driving crash and all the economic activity they would have generated over their lifespan evaporates.
Personally owned cars at a ratio of one car per person are literally the most expensive way to get around on this planet until you get into stuff like private jets and helicopters. They're even more expensive than buying a plane ticket between many destinations. You say that people in Dallas don't want to take the bus, but if it was available, reliable, had a frequent schedule, and got them to everywhere they needed to be, they probably would be very excited to ditch the $5,000-10,000 annual total cost of vehicle ownership.
And, while public transit in Texas has a long way to go, Dallas Area Rapid Transit has ridership of 52,823,800 annually. If you are saying that people in Dallas don't want to transfer buses, I'd have to ask where those 52 million rides are coming from?
Because taking a bus there is much more inconvenient compared to driving. And not all people take a shower, someone undesirable sits next to you and so on.
The thing is that different countries have different cultures. I live in a country where big cities have public transport and relatively narrow roads. I wish we had bigger roads where everyone drove its own car. I can do whatever I want in my car as opposed to sitting in a crowded bus.
- Dallas is much much hotter than the Netherlands.
- Overall Netherlands population density (including rural areas) is higher than DFW metro.
- For most of the cities in the YouTube video shared they are a few miles by a few miles. The length of a typical Dallas frontage road. It makes sense to walk and bike in those small hamlets.
Going back to density, you are right the Netherlands moved back from a car centric life but that did not change population density before or after. Most cities in the Netherlands are a multiple of DFW so you have this tough argument. What works in the Netherlands is not necessarily a solution for DFW. You would need to rebuild the city to be denser, have more businesses located together and then build out transit while ignoring that it’s too hot for a good portion of the year to ride a bike or walk around outside.
My back of napkin math ended up with 30k sq ft per person in DFW compared to 20k sq ft per person in all of the Netherlands.
I think Waymo is a great step in the right direction.
EDIT: Your statement of "its not like its drastically smaller population" is also just not true. 8 is not about the same as 18. I ended up replying thinking they were closer without realizing this as well. So less than half the population on about the same area. Having half the average density before even thinking about how dense the clustering is really makes quite a difference!
Density of where people actually choose to live, which you've already alluded to with the things you're saying. Similar population, similar kind of area. But look at both on a satellite image. One actually has a lot of farmland for that area. Where people actually live its often a good bit denser.
Why is it like that? That's what people have voted for, that's what they've supported. Try actually talking to the people who live there and suggest to them they should live in a zero lot line home or a townhouse with shared walls.
> Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses?
I wouldn't mind transferring busses if there was good service. But instead transferring busses around here usually means sitting in the baking hot sun on a concrete bench in >100F heat for a half hour. If the next bus was in like 5 minutes, I probably wouldn't care.
It also often means you're probably taking a very suboptimal route instead of a direct route to the place. So not only do you have an additional wait to change busses, you then also have a much longer path to ride. And you're likely going to end up going a slower average speed, as you're having to stop to pickup/dropoff people along this longer route as opposed to just continuing on. For instance, it'll take me over an hour to go to where the new Dallas Stars arena will be in Plano as I need to make 4-5 bus changes. Its a 15 minute drive although it will probably be way more than that once 20k people try to leave at once.
Now, obviously, busses can change routes. They can get more busses and do more routes. They can get more busses and offer faster service. There's a lot of potential solutions to this. It doesn't have to be that way. But in the end getting people to put more funding into it is pretty challenging.
> if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.
Its often not very comfortable riding a bicycle in 110F heat index when you've got this air-conditioned box you could ride in sitting in your garage.
Literally what I'm advocating for is good service.
Practically all of those towns have had a focus of building walkable/bikeable spaces with dense mini-downtown areas for at least decades if not longer.
Its not impossible for this to eventually happen to these already built US suburbs, but a lot of these places were explicitly designed around everyone coming and going by car. A lot of these suburbs weren't even planned with the idea of pedestrians ever leaving the neighborhood. They'll have few actual entrances and exits, with those rarely connected to any kind of infrastructure outside other than busy roads.
> fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented
A lot of those fast-growing areas are in cities with zero transit and often don't even neighbor a city with any real transit. Look at places like Princeton, Celina, Melissa, Anna, etc. They border towns like Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, and more which also aren't connected to DART. All of these towns actively shun public transit. A lot of home buyers in these areas just don't care about transit access at all, with many actively opposed to transit. So what, maybe Princeton does decide to make some transit. Ok, where do I go with that? From one suburban house to another without a car? A bit easier time getting to Little Ceasars, Taco Bell, and Walmart? Its entirely disconnected from practically any other place the people there actually need to go, because its not like many people actually work in Princeton or Celina.
So it'll take a lot of additional development and rethinking of what these places are and how they ultimately function for transit to actually make sense there.
I'm not saying public transit and walkability/bikeability can't possibly happen in North Texas. I like biking around, I ride DART when it makes sense, and I do push for expansion of bike infrastructure and good DART access. But I also see the heat index for today is 105F, it'll be about 110F on Friday. I don't think I'll be riding a bike to get the groceries. I don't think the Netherlands often gets weeks where the heat index is >100F practically every day. And finally, it will take changing a lot of minds about public transit to get buy-in from a lot of the population to actually do it.
Cold weather transit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0
Transit is small towns and suburbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas. In 1960, 8 million fewer people lived in the Netherlands, and cars definitely existed and were mainstream back then. This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.
It's never too late to change course. It's not a black and white choice where we must suddenly give up our vehicles and never drive, it's more like a gradual increase in the number of trips that are feasible and enjoyable without a car.
I know people who lived in Cleveland who started using the bus to get to work when the HealthLine BRT line was completed. They still drive basically everywhere else, but that one bus line changed their daily habits dramatically.
There's a huge gulf between doing absolutely nothing and accepting the status quo and refusing to change at all.
This might be news to you, but it doesn't cost $130k to drive an old Toyota Camry around in DFW. Every home is pretty much guaranteed to have parking for 1+ cars.
If the average Singaporean could buy a car for $5k, the government mandated their apartment had a parking spot or two, and gas cost $0.79/L you think they'd all still want to be in the heat all the time?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying transit can't possibly work in hot places. But you're needing to convince people to leave a nice comfortable air-conditioned space to willingly go be outside in the heat. Singapore did that by making cars incredibly expensive to own. I can't imagine making a Toyota Corolla cost $130K to be a popular policy in the US.
> I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas.
I 100% agree with this. People are choosing to ride around in air-conditioned boxes instead of being in the heat. People choose to live in these sprawling suburban neighborhoods with zero walkability. People choose to prevent overturning parking minimums, people choose to expand highways and people choose to vote against bonds to build bike infrastructure. That is the choice tons of North Texans are making. I do think their decisions are rather short-sighted and often disagree with them, but those are the choices being made.
> This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.
I never said this. You're literally making a straw man here. In fact I'm saying the opposite of that. I agree its not impossible. Just a lot harder as people's mindsets are extremely different and the climate is very different.
If I had the weather of a lot of Germany or the Netherlands or UK or Norway I'd probably be outside a good bit more. I really don't mind riding a bike in the cold, exercise warms you up. If I was taxed like Singapore, I'd probably eschew the car.
Waymo is a step in a direction of an interesting future. If you can take the current blueprint and make it more efficient that sounds like a win to me?
While we're experiencing tons of growth in the far-flung suburbs with practically zero walkability, we're also seeing a good bit of redevelopment of places like Richardson, Garland, Carrolton, some parts of actual Dallas, and even some parts of Plano like the old downtown. A lot of these towns are trying to rebuild their downtown areas and more to be far more pedestrian, bike, and transit friendly.
Its entirely possible to live a car-free life in some places in DFW. There are definitely pockets where one can comfortably live without a car. I spent a bit of time without a car and got by with just a bicycle and motorcycle after my car was destroyed in a hailstorm. Because I had purposefully chosen bikeable places with decent transit to live near where I worked it really wasn't that big of a deal. But in the end you pretty much have to give up going to large parts on any kind of regular basis.
And yes, I do hope things like AVs can solve a bit of the current cost of operating bus lines. Nearly half of the cost to operate a line is the cost of the driver. We could run so much more capacity and really rethink a lot of the economics.
I still think it’s really hard because even with that self selection, what happens when your work changes. Probably some of my Silicon Valley bias of swapping companies every few years but it can throw a wrench in your commute easily.
I have never lived in Amsterdam but my obeservatiob is that these are older cities already baked in with density. So it’s much easier to switch back to bicycle and share infrastructure.
You can build a new city in Texas with transit in mind but people are still going to be commuting 30mins or more in every direction.
To give a clear answer that others have beat around: it is the network. Transit works when you can get places. When you can get many places it doesn't work.
The real question is how can Dallas get there - which is a hard problem is you need a massive network investment before it becomes useful to many people and so there is a lot of upfront investment needed first.
The US has a poor history with getting a good return on investment for transit. In general even where the investment does get good ridership, the amount spent was way out of line from what anyone else in the world would have spent for that system.
Good luck though! Just sharing as a member of the DFW community has taken dart and bikes a lot. The metro is absolutely not dense.
They also have a highly regarded school system... Turns out that is only the case as long as you don't have any special needs.
Genuinely and not trolling.
Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts.
My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens.
If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM.
Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car.
With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.
Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...
Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)?
As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact.
I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.
That makes the fixed route better than a flexible route. Sure the flexible route is faster in the best case. However it is unpredictable and people have deadlines of when they can arrive: a flexible route cannot meet those consistently enough.
Things like WalkScore show up on real estate listings as a value add.
In the end you waste long enough time to defend it to delay investments in affordable housing and public transit, both. You then funnel that money into road construction and fuel subsidies.
Cool, so if you have the numbers or graphs, paste a link
I of course believe you're lying. Probably out of the standard xenophobia.
It wouldn't make sense considering average US household infrastructure vs average EU household infrastructure so I sincerely doubt you're able to prove it, or whoever you're going to cite as proof.
Think about it.
I'm just making a note about life expectancy in the US and in Europe (which are both calculated the same way). I admit I was in teaching mode, and should have been explicit instead. If heat deaths had an oversized effect on Europeans, you should be able to see it in the graphs in summer 2023 and 2025, and not in the US (to a certain degree: US have to catch up like 5 years, so it's not an apple to apple comparison, but close enough)
I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble.
All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even.
Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.
In the typical suburb there is enough density for a good static network to work. Note that I said "good", and "network". A suburb cannot support a bus every hour, the service is too bad - but it can support a bus every 10 minutes or better because the service is acceptable. Also: network, not route - the important part is you need to be able to get to all the places you would normally go and that means the entire network matters and the ability to quickly/easially transfer to other routes is critical to success.
Also we should not assume only the bus. A train is a useful part of any large transport network. There should be a train between Dallas and Fort Worth that makes the trip in 10 minutes - you can't do that in a car (a race car with a professional driver could beat that if we block all traffic, but no normal car or driver can even if traffic is blocked). Sure the current train takes an hour, but we can make is faster with existing technology.
I really think this is completely wrong. You will convince approximately 0 people in Dallas to use a bus if this is what you are offering them.
Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.
Cambridge Dictionary (UK): "A system of vehicles such as buses and trains that operate at regular times on fixed routes and are used by the public."
Collins Dictionary: "A system of buses, trains, etc., running on fixed routes, on which the public may travel."
Is the city and county provided point-to-point transit for disabled people[0] not "public transit"? Is Line 0[1] not public transit? Most people say yes; the dictionary should be updated to reflect actual usage, not the other way around.
[0] https://www.mta.info/accessibility/access-a-ride
[1] https://fairtiq.com/en/blog/line-zero-the-public-transport-e...
That said, Waymo is indeed not the right tool for the actual inter-city trips.
Cars are the very bottom, by very considerable margin. You need to prove otherwise.
[citation needed]
Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.
> . If we could modulate form to meet demand precisely, like Uber but for all transit, it would be far quicker and more efficient.
Efficiency is not the only or even the primary goal. The primary goals are to "Get people from where they are, to where they want to be, when they want to go, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable price.
Your modulate demand fails at that. A fixed route bus is predictable. I know in advance when it will be there to pick me up and where/when it will drop me off. That means I can plan my day. With Uber or any other demand/response system you don't get that and have to hope every time that it will get you there in time.
Quicker is much harder to quantify. A bus can connect to a faster rail (which potentially can go 300 km/h - only a race car can do that). A bus can be given signal priority while the uber needs to stop and wait more. However a bus will stop to pick up others on the way. (but if your "modulate to meet demand" does that it is worse than either a bus or uber because you can no longer predict when you will get there). A bus network done right is also likely to drive changes in your city such that most of the places you go are where the bus is going and that makes it just as fast.
If only we could build a network of high speed, maglev trains covering the span of the entire planet, from the southern tip of Chile, through the Darien Gap, across the Bering Strait, all the way up to Paddington Station and down past the Suez Canal all the way to Johannesburg; that, plus airplanes and modular autonomous transit, should cover 90% of transit needs, and anything more than that will be served by older technologies, off-road vehicles, horseback/camel, and of course for the most treacherous environs, on foot is still best. But I cannot imagine a world where a traditional bus system would be superior to a highly coordinated system of autonomous modular transportation.
It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.
Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.
I jest, but not completely. The US is more dense but more distributed too. You can’t realistically link someone in a rural West Virginia holler up to a regular bus schedule, nor can you build a train between Morgantown and Pittsburgh that gets ridership.
America doesn’t do badly at public transit in places like Florida where private companies can fill the gap and the communities are within a reasonable distance and the geography is flat and simple. See the Brightline trains for proof of concept. But it’s kind of ridiculous to imagine Australia and the US to be comparable in that way.
I lived in one of the most walkable neighborhoods in Chicago for 30 years before moving to suburbia with 0 walkability. It is completely untrue that walkability is secretly better than suburbia and those suburbanites don’t know what they’re missing.
A bus could serve 40-100 daily. The infrastructure already exists - the same as for cars. It's pretty low cost also - especially electric buses that have lower maintenance costs. The problem is that you have to ride with other people.
Imo, the biggest problem is that of convenience. Convenience (time), cost, comfort, and (perceived) safety are the factors people use to make transportation mode choices.
If buses aren't prioritized in traffic above single occupant vehicles via dedicated bus lanes, signalling, etc. then they'll always be slower than a car because of the additional stops. Frequency is also a consideration that factors into timing, as well as transfers.
If any US city wants to get people onto transit, they need to prioritize transit above less efficient modes, amongst other things.
Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.
We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.
That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.
It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.
Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.
But since you asked in kind of a flippant way: who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.
Non-americans don't. To me, being socially expected to tip for a Taxi feels like a parody from a sketch comedy. ditto for tipping barbers or expecting tips over 10%. The only time I've tipped a Uber was when me and my friends were at risk of losing a train. The driver (unprompted) went pedal to the metal to make it on time, so afterwards I gave him a couple of bucks.
Tip culture is bad for rideshare drivers in aggregate anyways. The apps carefully manage the pay of drivers on each market so necessary supply is guaranteed at minimal cost. If a expectation of tipping exists, the platforms simply pay less. Now drivers also have maximize for tips instead of just driving the goddamn car.
FWIW, the real problem isn't tip culture, it is the power imbalance between labor and the company that is using that labor (without employing drivers), but I dunno how much of an audience that kind of argument has on this particular site.
I don't think that's why there is little tip culture in eg east Asia. It's just... the price the business expects you to pay is mostly advertised upfront, it's known to everyone involved, why would you pay more if you got exactly the service you have ordered? It simply does not make sense.
The US will never fix the externalization of salaries until the public refuses to tip at ridiculous percentages and situations. You'll see a 40% tip expectation at restaurants, your local dentist will install a tip screen. Just tip 10% at sitdown places and refuse emotional blackmail. If you feel any guilt, just make the habit to tally the dollar amount of "normal" tips and make monthly donations to your local food bank.
EDIT: My point is that tipping culture is unrelated to worker rights. Many countries with large informal economies (i.e minimum wage isn't enforced for most people) have no expectation of tipping. The reason Norwegians don't tip drivers isn't because they have a wonderful safety net, it's because there's isn't a social pressure to do so.
Mixing charity and payment of services is stupid and a moral hazard. Servers have shit wages in the US by law because people tip and the same is true (via algorithm) with rideshare drivers.
but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.
The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.
I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.
Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.
tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on.
Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.
I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.
I, and people like me create wealth. Some of that wealth is pooled at an administrative level that makes sense across a town, state, or nation. Its still wealth I created; and I expect it to be used to benefit me, ideally proportionally to the tax taken.
Unemployment can be justified as crime prevention; Disability and healthcare systems limit individual worst-case outcomes (especially if due to chance). Super-commuter subsidies do what?
I want a Ferrari. It would be good for me. Should taxes pay for it?
cities grow in capabilities in direct proportion to the number of people who have access to it and their capabilities. it might be cheaper labour leading to better roads, plumbing etc
I fully intend to pay my transportation costs myself.
It’s not about getting a free ride, it’s about being able to get to work while sleeping, saving money on housing, and pocketing the difference.
You could not efficiently run a bus service in most US cities at a level of “good service”. Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs but I don’t see that happening yet and Waymo is at least a nice step on the potential direction.
Even with great service it’s an uphill battle to get enough ridership.
Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car. That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.
Only because you can never get the political supported needed to get there. If you somehow got the needed support people would start using it and it would turn the US city into a transit city. Note that political support needs to last for at least 5 years, in the real world there is an election every 2 years and so before you can get your bus system working for 5 someone will win an election on "lets stop wasting all that money on the bus system" platform and kill the whole thing.
> Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs
We we cannot. you cannot optimize a 10 set ride share that much. They would be even more expensive at that scale. Nobody likes busy ride shares - you have a deadline of when you need to be there and flexible routes mean that some days you are late because the rideshare decided to take a detour to pick up (or drop off) someone else.
> Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car
Because the bus nearly everywhere provides terrible service. Sure some people can take a few trips via bus, but then the car they need for the rest is just sitting around while you still make payments (including taxes and insurance).
> That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.
You don't need to get there. You just need to get "close enough". If you give people a situation where they can REASONABLE do nearly everything on transit most will give up the car. However if there is even one semi-regular trip that needs a car they may as well use the car for everything.
- if you give someone the option of a bus with a transfer or taking a car they will almost always take a car (thinking of Dallas)
- if you can get me a bus that very nearly gets me door to door with low to no wait people will consider taking it over a car. Very nearly to me is 5-10 mins of walking at most. That’s like a single section of a frontage road in Dallas at best.
- I don’t see how you build that kind of service. Maybe you do live in DFW but it’s massive. Just walking from one intersection of a frontage road to the next would take me at least 10-15mins and thinking of job density there it’s pretty low and then thinking of those folks and how many are commuting from similar places is even lower.
You are arguing that if you could create a great bus service that people would take it and I am trying to point out that a great bus service in a place like Dallas is not economically feasible. It has nothing to do with politics at least from the upfront problem of it not being feasible.
I disagree. It is not politically feasible and so we won't get there, but the economics work out: a great transit network even in a place like Dallas could get enough riders to sustain itself. Problem is we need 50% of the families in Dallas Fort Worth to pay $200/month to pay for it, and nobody will stand for that - even though nearly every family in spending more than that per car.
I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.
So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.
It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.
The problem is rush hour. You still will need some kind of minibus that can serve 4-8 people efficiently, and take up way less space. An added benefit is that if you cut peak traffic volume by 3/4th, you can eliminate congestion.
This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc.
In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more.
The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains.
The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design).
So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.
It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.
I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there.
Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow.
The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful.
I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses.
I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated?
(Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)
(Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)
What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category.
You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries.
> to run bus routes
That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing.
Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero.
The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work.
In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.
Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.
And you think I live in fantasy land.
> if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country.
So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.
It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen.
> Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.
This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc.
I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.
> And you think I live in fantasy land.
Yes, you do.
https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/
> So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.
You must be a software guy. Moving atoms is very different from typing words into this textbox. Also, in the US, the 1950's to 1970's was a very, very different time. That was probably the peak of our industrialization phase. You had millions of men who came back from WW2 ready to work all kinds of jobs, an industrial based that had exploded due to WW2, massive entrepreneurial drive at every level and the ability to get shit done without the nonsense that kill even the most basic projects today.
Yes, a few decades can change things radically. In the decades since the period you use as the reference for this fantasy the US, Europe and other nations have deindustrialized to an alarming degree and China has become the world's factory. We make nothing here. To be able to to things you have to make things. On top of that, our political system has welcomed bat-shit-crazy ideologies, like the current push for down-right socialism/communism who's only recorded history is the destruction of nations.
So, yeah, yours is a fantasy. This is not the United States of the 1950's, 1960's or 1970's, not by a large margin.
To understand things at this level you need contact with reality. I've you've never tried to get a non-trivial project done in the real world, moving atoms, not bit, I can see how waving a magical wand and thinking we can do what was done five to seven decades ago might be possible. It is not. I've been in manufacturing my entire life. I assure you this is not the 1950's.
> This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments
Sure, but that's a different problem, isn't it? What we can change --over time-- is the relationship between where people work and where they live. If you take the greater Los Angeles area, the massive concentration of job centers in centralized "hubs" as I call them is tragically destructive. You have people driving into these hubs from every possible angle and you end-up with shit like the 405 freeway being a parking lot all day, every day.
This isn't about public transportation. It's about politicians being politicians (which I use to mean: incompetent) wasting decades of valuable intelligent planning. In the town I live in they absolutely refuse to grant permits for the kinds of job magnets that would have people from this town work here. As a result, if you are unfortunate enough to not have found work in this area, you are eating a one to two hour commute every day.
So, if you want to solve the housing and congestion problem, you need a long term intelligent planning policy that will incentivize businesses to build in areas that will reverse some of the flows.
To use a company I am very familiar with, SpaceX, just look at where they are in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the worst locations one could choose. And like that, probably hundreds of large employers in that area and a few miles north, south, east and west. A good policy would have looked at the concentration and created intelligent plans to incentivize companies to find locations that would balance flows and spawn new housing developments surrounding these centers of employment.
Instead of doing that, what you end-up with over time are companies leaving for other states where they have more favorable financial climates as well as the ability to, in some cases, build what they need and where they need it.
Moving atoms isn't easy. Some things we can do. Others we cannot. Public mass transportation is not likely to be some thing that will take over the US. Exceptions here and there, sure. I've completed non-trivial construction projects that don't even begin to approximate the zoning and political complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about, and every single one of them has been an expensive nightmare purely because our system has devolved into something that prevents progress rather than encouraging it.
Note that I am not at all opposed to the image you paint. I have travelled and worked in European and Latin American cities where public transport is wonderful and love it. I am just being realistic about who we are and we can actually accomplish in the US. We can't build a single new nuclear (or whatever) power plant while China is building a hundred. That should tell you something.
I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will. I agree, building things and changing minds often takes time.
But instead we've elected people who put people into power who thinks bike lanes are woke and need to be destroyed. So I guess it'll take a bit longer before we start making real progress on these issues.
You flying on that Joby tomorrow? I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing. I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.
This isn't about political will. Politicians are whores, it doesn't matter what side, they respond to money and votes. This is worse than that, this is about people not being intelligent enough to vote with a view towards future benefits --decades away. Politicians buy votes by promising crap that the masses eat-up and never get. This nonsense is as old as time. This is precisely the kind of thing that destroyed nearly every nation in Latin America. And now idiot voters are pushing the US in the same direction with these bat-shit-crazy socialist/communist politicians gaining ground in various places. Americans will eventually learn, however, and sadly, this might require a few decades.
In that context, the whole mass transit conversation is so utterly insignificant it isn't even worth the bits we have wasted in this chat.
> bike lanes are woke
No, they are not woke, they are stupid...in certain cities. Some of the things I have seen are truly horrific. One of my own kids, who decided commuting to work on a bike was a good idea, nearly got killed twice. A year later he bought a car.
Once again, there's reality and fantasy. They are not the same.
>You flying on that Joby tomorrow?
If I could, absolutely. I've talked to people who would never get in a Waymo. I have, many times, also through Uber. Great experience. Progress.
> I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing.
If you've never been involved in product development, manufacturing, testing and certification within a regulatory environment you don't have a real sense of just how hard and detailed these processes can be. Could it go faster? Sure. The point is, we probably don't really want them to in a case where safety is the top consideration. It will take as long as it will take.
> I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.
Sure, but it will happen and affordability is relative. For example, it costs me $120 each way for an Uber to the airport that could take one to two hours to get there. If I drive my own car, I still get to eat two hours on the road and spend about $300 parking it at the airport. So, if I can buy a 30 minute Joby ride for $300 to $500 round trip, with Uber car pickup and drop-off included, sign me up!
Also, people use helicopters today and they are not at all cheap to fly. So this isn't like comparably-priced options are not out there. In fact, a Joby solution integrated into Uber is far more likely to democratize short-range air transport than anything else.
There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost.
Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time.
And now, it is stuck this way.
Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?
We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed.
We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.
In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions.
Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them.
So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got.
And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button.
At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.
A lot of old train right of ways still pretty much exist. For many areas it often isn't too outlandish for those lines to be brought back, if there was a will to do so.
I don't feel like pinning down my location in public, but it is sufficient to say that I'm very familiar with a place in Ohio that was once a booming with every kind of rail.
I can walk around and see where things used to be, and sometimes it's very clear.
But mostly, it seems like it has been transformed. Whereas people used to build around the paths of the rails, they've now built atop of where they used to be. It was once a straight shot with an occasional (and very deliberate) bend, but now there's a house and a factory and a substation in the path.
Or, Columbus Ohio again. :) That place used to have a very diverse passenger rail network, with a somewhat grand Union Station right in the middle where it counts. Rail was such a thriving and important thing that at one point they raised the level of the main drag, High Street, to help reduce conflicts between trains, pedestrians, and the various horsemobiles. For some of the old buildings that still remain, what was once the first floor is now the basement.
And in what seems like something that real libertarians would dream about, these railways were built privately and were self-sustaining.
Things changed.
In ~1979, they finally tore down the old Union Station just weeks before it was likely to be ruled a protected historic site and then put a very immobile convention center in its place instead.
Columbus has been expanding pretty rapidly (by Ohio norms) for a couple of decades now. The old rail paths are hard to find at all while walking around or in aerial shots, never existed in newer neighborhoods, and whatever was there has been further decimated by the batshit highway network that is in a continuous process of changing.
It's possible that it could all come back again, but the cost would be intense beyond imagination.
And even if it did come back again, who would ride the things, anyway? They've already got busses that they hate. Folks would still have cars, and they'd still drive them. I guess people might eventually be able to adjust to using trains to get places, if that became practical for them, but I'd also guess that this transition would take multiple generations to really take effect.
Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for
Cars won _and_ and it wasn't a fair fight.
This was almost certainly not an isolated incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
[Edit] I am serious. Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.
No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park.
Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.
Waymo is literally a private company.
> make areas much more walkable and bikeable.
How so? Autonomous car companies have every incentive to continue lobbying for car only infrastructure? Why would they want infrastructure that increases competition?
How about if autonomous cars would be bigger, so from same apartment block people could ride-share to same office downtown?
What if those cars would be on rails - imagine how simpler the autonomous part would be? Lower friction and fuel costs savings will be a bonus.
/s on my part obviously.
... in the US
> Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing
Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world.
> if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units
Or some kind of vehicle that comes by every 15min and connects to a network of other transports that are time interval based.
Or have car share vehicles attached to the property. Something that is routinely done in Europe for decades.
> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
Except it doesn't last that long and is not that expensive unless you are incompetent and live in a broken society.
Cities in China added 100s of miles of metro since 2010. Making bad excuses and doubling down on car dependency are a big part on why its not happening.
And btw. the US has so many fucking roads already (btw they are also very expensive, but I guess that money doesn't count), if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system. But of course taking a lane away from cars wouldn't be acceptable, better give money to waymo so people can sit in traffic in a Waymo vehicle.
It is not about cost, its about political will and the societal believe that public transit is for the unwashed poor and racially inferiors, spending money on it is charity, not transportation policy, and that any upstanding citizen in a car needs to have unlimited freedom to drive everywhere and never get into trouble.
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily?
This has been done for many decades with carsharing already, its standard practice in many developments. What exactly does Waymo or self driving change here from an investor perspective? Ok maybe if its really close buy the Waymo can go back when you don't need it anymore. So maybe you need half as many. But of course the Waymo vehicle is also much more expensive and has capacity you don't need.
But of course, even with that carsharing concept, the far better solution that almost everybody in the developed world does, outside the US, is to simply have good public transport, you build it first, and then build the new housing around those transport links. Car sharing is only for very niche situations and that's a good thing, because more cars in cities are bad.
Building arrangements that would rely on them are mostly illegal anyways.
Allowing driverless cars to serve buildings without parking would be a huge step forward for those reasons alone.
For what it's worth, it's mostly illegal to build a housing that's the only served by buses too.
Last, the US has passed the point where it has the cheap labor and government competency for mass transit. Faster to do something now than wait for a new government or robotics that can replace all the construction workers and designers
You're hilariously wrong on most of your points because just spend 5 minutes researching how CA fails to build rail. Not even worth responding to further.
$346 million gets you utility improvements and 2 miles of bus lane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit
Dallas in the United States.
Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.
If waymo is willing to ban people for shitting or smoking meth in their shared cars, that's purely an advantage over government run transportation
Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then?
I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.
Back to the topic, why should I not be allowed a choice of having a subsidized/free waymo that prioritizes me and my neighbors (given I would be participating in this fully out of my own volition)?
If I am allowed to make that choice, do you believe that poors should have access to the same service and be allowed to make the same choices as non-poors in that regard? If no, then why not?
plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...
Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity: $595281000000.
How big to they have to be before they count as ‘big’ to you? In your ideal world, getting your Google account banned not only means losing all your photos, documents, contacts, conversations, and access to all your other accounts (GMail) but now also means you can't go anywhere besides what you can reach on foot, via whatever anemic local transit exists, or via similarly-expensive Uber/etc. Super cool; sign me up.
All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing.
Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run.
Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.
At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly.
The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe.
So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do.
That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.
Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher.
Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality.
I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization.
But yes, traffic is indeed an impact.
The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended
You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??
The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.
The overwhelming majority --overwhelming-- of cars, SUV's and trucks on the road have exactly one passenger, including the guy commuting to his office job in an F-250.
An autonomous vehicle doing a deadhead drive has a passenger count of 0. 0 < 1. You start tossing in a lot of miles with 0 in there on top of the vast majority of your trips being 1, and suddenly now you're less than the cars you're theoretically replacing.
A lot of these AVs at the moment at least are still roughly minivan/midsize SUV. On top of that, with safe distances adding another foot of the car to a highway scenario really doesn't increase the percentage of the total space that much. You need a lot of follow space ahead/behind the vehicle.
Maybe if they were like single person pods that teleported to their pickups and managed to group tightly together in packs on the road, but until then they're just another SUV on the road driving around sometimes with zero people in the car.
Whatever this will become, it will be a matter of decades and a real modernization of our traffic laws and other infrastructure. I will not pretend to know what form that will take, my crystal ball stopped working a few decades back.
There are so many questions. Just looking at a place like Los Angeles, I regularly drive right next to massive trucks moving containers and all kinds of cargo. Can we be more intelligent about this? An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway? Sure, as an idea and a fantasy. In the real world you'll have to contend with myriad issues spanning a range between our inability to build anything anymore in this country with how you are going to deal with millions of people losing their jobs if you automate cargo transport and clear large trucks from the highways. Etc.
It's nice to have these visions about the future. What will actually happen is a different matter. I am placing my bet on self driving cars as the first practical phase of a transition into something more sensible that will likely require three to five decades. The equation is very simple: Atomos are expensive and hard to move. Conventional cars and trucks manufactured and purchased today are going to stay on the roads for at least a decade. A mass transition to a different paradigm is measured in units of decades after the last conventional vehicle is manufactured and sold. Hence my five decade estimate for transportation utopia.
> An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway?
There's already cargo freight rail practically all across the country. Loads on trucks are on trucks because of the desired flexibility and point to point response time as opposed to having to load/unload rail.
Also, unless you're talking some really long distances, having rail in the middle of a highway doesn't always make much sense. You're not going to have the depots or stations in the middle of the highway after all. The train then needs to weave back and fourth across the highway to get to the places its routed to. Far better to just figure out its own right of way rather than stick it in the middle of a complicated place.
This will obviously change in future, once they start a truly mass rollout.
We're not willing to enforce basic safety on buses, let alone other norms. If Waymo is willing to do that, that will make it available to many more people. Even just not having to wait at the bus stop before sunrise can be a game changer.
It's not that people refuse to ride busses. In most places in the US this is either a non-existent or extremely impractical option. It's just reality.
And remember, the alternative is even worse: buses.
No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's a logistics nightmare that removes most advantages of owning a car.
It's also not clear to me why routing self-driving cars would be more efficient than what Lyft Line did which ended up super slow. The slowness want just the additional route but also other passengers getting in and out and in some cases waiting for them.
Ultimately the argument against lower congestion is even easier. Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion. Now Timmy can go to his activities by himself, so mom goes elsewhere. Again, when we make something cheaper, we increase demand.
> Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion.
That's fine. I did some modeling for that :)
Most of the optional commutes happen outside the rush hour, and the US roads have more than enough capacity for that. The true problem is the congestion due to low occupancy during the rush hour.
And if we want to speculate a bit more, self-driving cars offer an option of more flexible mass transit for truly bottlenecked cities. They can the make transfer from a larger bus into 2-seater local vehicles completely seamless. This is a more distant possibility, as it will require new infrastructure.
Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all.
Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same.
So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.
The sharing the bus with murder hobos argument is only relevant for daily commuters with relevantly decent transit routes that aren’t 3X longer than a car would be. Most people don’t get that far in the argument against transit.
Partially. Shitty people with zero manners usually end up in low-paying jobs (or in finance), so they tend to concentrate in transit that provides subsidized commutes to them. But the majority of people in transit are normal.
The real reason for not using transit is its slowness. Drop two points on a map of a large city randomly and plot the route between them using cars and transit. Transit will end up on average requiring 3-4x the time by car, even during the rush hour. Of course, people tend to optimize their commutes by choosing the workplace accordingly (this results in a toxic density-misery spiral), so on average transit is not _that_ terrible.
But it totally breaks down when you add more constraints. Like having several kids. Try to plot a route using transit between your workplace, a grocery store, a daycare, and a school. You'll find that it's impossible unless you package everything non-work-related into one spot.
> Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
Transit is WILDLY inefficient. It's amazing how inefficient and polluting it is.
The only reason sprawling suburbs can exist is because they are subsidized by inner cities.
Building and maintaining miles of roads and utilities is not cheap and the number of people in these areas makes it impossible for them to cover these costs unless they're astronomically wealthy.
There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing.
To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.
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.
We need to eliminate human drivers in the future. So the best solution should be both self driving cars and public transportation.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/subpoena
They have become completely normal, and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers. They are very predictable, and will always let you pull in front of them when changing lanes (unlike a lot of other LA drivers).
I have seen a few incidents where they seem 'stuck', and it was a bit annoying and kind of funny, but again, it does not happen nearly as often as for human drivers.
I also like taking them. It is nice to just get in and relax and not have to talk to anyone or worry about who is going to pick you up. You can control the temperature and music from your phone, you can drop the pin exactly where you want to be dropped off and picked up, and the ride is smooth and comfortable.
We can debate all the knock on effects of Waymos, but the user experience is pretty great.
Ironically the best way to verify this is that when they do cause traffic issues, it becomes national news.
Imagine breaking down and blocking an intersection in Edgewood Georgia, and then getting a call that night from your Uncle in Oregon saying he saw your breakdown on the news...
As a disclaimer, this is neither an anti-Waymo comment or a pro-Tesla comment, I just find in interesting how these small sample size incidents are both covered and perceived in the absence of actual verifiable safety statistics.
That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.
Also a common thing I see happening with the Tesla Autopilot for an accident is that it's often not the fault of the autopilot. It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second. Naturally the driver will lie or not even realize they were the problem as they may have had auto pilot active 1 second before the crash. I think it's that natural human instinct when you see something happening to crap the wheel or hit the pedal in that "oh shit" kind of reflex. And that sometimes causes the driver to make a mistake.
I actually was in a crash with a person driving a Tesla vehicle where I think this was the cause. 3 lane highway, they were in the center lane, I was in the left lane, transport truck in the right lane. The transport truck slightly drift towards the edge of their lane and the Tesla driver freaked out and over corrected their steering wheel to the left and came swerving into my lane and was losing control of their car between both lanes until they suddenly slammed on their brakes in front of me. I gotta say, the Tesla brakes combined with the regenerative braking have some impressive stopping power. Unfortunately that also meant they stopped way faster and so suddenly that I hit their rear a bit. I got very lucky that insurance ruled in my favour and had them 100% at fault.
Apologies for the tangent, just trying to illustrate a point via a personal story of how even when the system is working well and keeping the driver safe, they can still make a human-like overreaction which overrides the autopilot and leads to a crash.
I get pretty annoyed when I see news articles with the headlines "Tesla crashed while auto pilot activated", but then there has yet to be an investigation and we actually don't know whether autopilot was in fact active or not yet. It's a clickbait style headline that I think makes people more hesitant about the progress of Waymo and Robotaxi vehicles.
Per The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/05/the-vehic...It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.
I think overall though as self-driving becomes more mainstream the system will only get safer. Not only will the computer systems themselves have better software and hardware to make them smarter, but there will be less and less human drivers doing stupid things that they have to account for. The roadways will have more predictable and sane self-driving vehicles on it.
I think the problem we have right now is that you almost do need these half-assed systems that still rely on human interventions to get over the initial hurdles of having people accept this technology. People want to feel like they still are in control while using something they may not fully trust. And regulators in many areas often also have this same desire. While I don't think we currently are at the ideal situation for self-driving, I think we are definitely getting there. I think Tesla's self-driving features really opened up the minds of people that human-less self-driving is a viable option that we can explore and that it can also be done safely.
I'm sure a time will come where we can switch to selling fully automated cars that people can buy for themselves with no human intervention needed, but I think we still aren't at that phase yet. People are starting to accept things like Waymo, but I still think many people would not accept having no control of their own personal vehicle when navigating around, even though I think it would be safer that way.
"As the Waymo approached the double-parked SUV, a child ran out from behind the SUV and into the roadway, directly in front of the Waymo."
Waymo cannae change the laws of physics. Braking distances exist for AI-driven vehicles just as much as human-driven ones.
"The child reported minor injuries and did not require transportation to a hospital. ... Waymo said at the time that the child ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV and that the vehicle braked hard before contact, reducing speed significantly before impact."
Edit: Waymo's blog[2] says it "reduc[ed] speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made", and that "our peer-reviewed model[3] shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph".
[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/new-details-released-in-way...
[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/01/a-commitment-to-transparency-...
[3] https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety/
Reaction times differ, though, and abilities to blend deceleration and turning and awareness of what else is around.
(Waymo's tendency to be a good defensive driver and bleed a few miles per hour at anything odd help too... though it is worth noting that if Waymo was 1MPH slower, that 6MPH collision wouldn't have happened at all).
I love when HN mentions my state or city, but that's the road and neighborhood one block down from me. I feel seen.
To add something more substantive to this thread, apparently Google's deal with Uber for distribution has become incredibly adversarial in our state. Uber won't explicitly let you book a Waymo or let you know if you're in the Waymo range.
Okay two, Avenue and the shopping center.
On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Which means that self-driving cars need to be a magnitude of order safer than humans.
And even though a self-driving car will never road rage or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets, we'll still tolerate humans driving more than one odd 1-in-a-billion ai-error caused incident.
Would you rather have a X% chance of a loved one dying from a human-category mistake? Or a 0.5X% chance of a loved one dying from a ML-category mistake? I would take the latter in a heartbeat. Why waste time optimizing for "categories" when you can optimize for your loved ones not dying
You and I are thinking with a purely logical thought process, but most people don’t reason that way.
A lot of people want to be able to hold someone accountable, and that is more important than the pure probabilities.
They want to be able to blame a person for making a mistake.
Add something that is new/unknown + lack of control, and you will have to clear a very high threshold to be considered 'acceptably safe'. My guess is a minimum of a 0.1x.
Once people get used to taking robotaxis, they won't care. The bar is "safe enough for very few people to have a bad experience." If you take 10 robotaxi rides in a row and they all go flawlessly your subjective interpretation of the risk will be that there isn't any.
I feel confident saying this because if you die in the US to anything other than old age, it was almost certainly a car crash. Despite this, most people don't think twice before getting in a car.
Humans fail chaotically. AVs, at least Waymos, fail safely. In urban environments, there is a case to be made within a few years for banning (or making it massively cumbersome) to manually pilot a private vehicle.
If a Waymo failed because it missed a stop sign, and then another Waymo failed because it was confused about some strange markings on the road, is that not failing "the same way" in the same sense that a person failing to yield or driving drunk?
Nobody would make excuses for a rookie driver coming to a stop in a busy interchange. Only someone with the moral character of a career politician would attempt to construe that as anything other than detracting from overall safety. But a computer does it and it's fine?
People will trust them by familiarity, not by any objective measures. Their trust grow as they see them more often, without bad accidents.
I live East of DTLA and twice I’ve seen people driving them around, presumably to map those areas out. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t use them for my late night commutes yet, but I’m eagerly looking forward to when I can!
So... not so sure. Every AV I've ever been in has driven incredibly cautiously compared to a human driver.
On the contrary, autonomous vehicles (especially if something like automated package delivery becomes an offered service) allow car bombs without the suicide bomber inside. Instead you just place an explosive in the device and send it to the intended destination - as an organization the primary concern then becomes whether the ride is traceable back to you which might be do-able given how "frictionless" rideapps are as long as you get a burner phone, prepaid credit card and are very careful about making sure the device is clean and can't be tied to your person.
Right now the tech is limited to places where carbombings aren't commonplace, but I think driverless cars open a huge potential issue in other markets. I absolutely agree they're safer than drivers are, but let's not be hyperbolic.
Every city has courier services, including Uber.
You are lacking in creativity and vision. With networked autonomous vehicles, all cars can be used as a weapon simultaneously.
Any company that builds self driving cars or operates them should show how reliable they think they are. Not by showing pr material or stats, that's all 'free'.
Make yourself, as the company, legally liable. If you think it's good, put your name on it and own the risk.
When that happens, I'll trust whoever says it's safe.
Robot cars would be the same. Insurance is financially responsible, and if the accident is deemed caused by a flaw, it would be the company that made them that is held responsible for fixing it.
I feel like you could come up with long lists of cases where there is no direct human to blame. Someone may be at fault down the chain, but nobody who was directly controlling the machine. Just like if a mechanic screws up my brakes and I end up crashing, it wasn't directly me who caused the crash, even though I was sitting in the seat.
Unless there’s a very bad and widespread issue. Then you join a class action and get $24 on a visa giftcard you can’t figure out how to redeem and then forget about.
When a robot car makes a mistake, all robot cars learn from the experience. When a human messes up, only that human learns from it.
The company owning and operating the robot?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM
This was the hypothesis. But based on e.g. FSD, it doesn’t seem borne out in reality.
Most self-driving enterprises are trying very hard to ensure their non-driver continues to carry this liability instead of their company.
This helps a them v. us attitude. The company needs to be trusted widescale by the public, and do seem to undercut their own PR efforts on that, repeatedly.
It comes down to accountability, IMO. We tend to be forgiven to humans because we are humans too and we know we, humans, make mistakes, and these can have serious consequences.
When a human makes a mistake, they are immediately accountable, and therefore judged and forgiven (or not). When technology makes a mistake, who's to blame? The CEO? The software developer who wrote the code? The tester? The architect?
Yes, we want technology to be an order of magnitude safer than humans for this reason, because we know that, given the current way our judicial system works, when technology makes a mistake, no one is held accountable.
I completely disagree with this. I don't "give a pass" to humans killing other humans with a car.
Every year that skeptics delay adoption of autonomous driving is another year where tens of thousands of deaths could be prevented.
It's also likely that if a switchover is aggressively pursued it'll cause a massive social backlash and likely evolve into a culture war issue.
I've seen lots of people talking, but when I dig in I quickly discover they either don't have access to the full data; or they have reason to be biased and so cannot be trusted. There are many ways to "lie with statistics". You don't even have to be that smart to make some educated guesses. (for starters all drivers include drunk drivers who are a tiny minority and yet make up for an outsized share of issues. As someone who doesn't drink at all their statistics should not compare to me personally)
unless I'm missing something, you meant "order of magnitude"
I would not compare the user experience to drivers, or the safety record to private cars. I would compare the user experience and the safety record to human driven taxis, buses, light rail, and metro. I am curious if the rider experience is actually any better then taking the M train from the Castro to SF state or the 49 bus between the Mission and Geary. The latter is certainly cheaper, and orders of magnitude more efficient.
But if where you're going is only served by bus or requires some walking... it really depends on how you feel. Waymo is pretty expensive, but I have had some truly miserable bus rides in SF.
Since the BRT lane on Van Ness, taking the 49 is more like taking a more shaky Muni train honestly. Frequent enough that it doesn’t get crowded, and it doesn’t get stuck in traffic, meaning much faster ride. As San Francisco builds more of these bus lanes, the case for the robo-taxis is only going to get weaker.
That's really cool but makes sense. Can't wait for them to be available in London. I'd use them instead of Uber even if they cost much more.
I can’t wait for broader adoption of self driving cars.
I prefer not to live like that.
That depends on how low they can get the costs. Waymo took delivery of the last Jaguar i-Pace, and are scaling up production of the Zeekr-based EVs, which I assume are significantly cheaper.
I think the math works, using car rental companies as an anchor point: they are (mostly) profitable*; they have relatively lower Cost of Revenue, but Waymo will have much fatter margins.
* There was a blip when Hertz had to write-down its bold bet on EVs didn't quite work out.
Substitute in whatever numbers you think are reasonable.
So yes, I think they will be able to turn a profit by charging more for the experience. Which is a humanless car.
Right now, Tuesday 3pm, Waymo will cost me 13.76 cross town. UberX 10.95, Lyft 11.95. If I don't tip Lyft/Uber they'll be cheaper but I definitely don't tip the Waymo.
This does match my earlier observations, where the prices were pretty damn close.
Austin, Houston and San Antonio are hub and spoke cities. They are designed with their downtowns as loci for their metros with suburbs sprawling around them concentricly. Waymo gets you to a lot of places within these cities for that reason.
Dallas is built around and between Dallas and Fort Worth, kind of like LA, but more sparse. Fort Worth is still very attached to their downtown (Sundance Square and University); Dallas is very much not. When I think of Dallas, I think of Addison, Plano, Grapevine/Irving/Las Colinas, Carrollton, Richardson, and the HEB (Hurst/Euless/Bedford) none of whom are represented in this service area.
This will be useful for hanging out in Bishop Arts and Deep Ellum, and the rich SMU grads up in old money Dallas, but I hope they're doing this to train up on highway driving.
(My critique of Waymo's service area also applies to DART, their public transit network. They have trains built around downtown in a way that's meaningless for most folks that want to use it for daily commutes. With most of their non-downtown bus routes running on hourly schedules, it's no surprise that DART posts anemic ridership numbers every year.)
But also I support the critique. Especially of DART, which I don’t see how the rail service ever works in a city designed like this. With residents who hop all over the metroplex on a somewhat random and sporadic basis, covering great distances. I think Waymo/robot is the best path for mass transit until we use it so much we stop buying cars. Then, the city can build rails and hopefully robots can be more efficient with less lanes of road. The Waymo solution gives A to B where a rail requires ABCD, in a metro where first and last mile may be 10+ miles each, that just doesn’t work. Also, rail has a chicken and egg problem. It really needs critical mass to run more frequently and justify the expense but it can’t get much usage at all because of this first and last mile problem. So it is kind of like a zombie of solution, we invest in it to seem modern and whatnot, but in reality it’s mostly a transportation subsidy for lower income people that can’t drive, it supplements the bus system which many car owners would never use and don’t consider an option for their first/last miles (it’s a class thing in Texas, just is, most people will never use a public bus). A small percentage of the population use it more than twice a year.
Idk, just thoughts.
(Somehow we lived in the DFW for five years and hardly spent time there (and not for a lack of trying!), and we went out A LOT. Then again, we were more brewery kind of people, and outside of the Fashion District, most of the breweries in town were (and are) all over the place. While we did live in the HEB, we were happy to drive wherever for a good time. We frequented Deep Ellum sometimes and Bishop Arts less frequently than that, but Dallas wasn't really a draw for us. This is very much unlike Houston, where pretty much everything is in the Inner Loop, and we found ourselves driving there every weekend when we lived in the deep suburbs during our first few years here.)
I definitely agree with your second paragraph. It's a real shame that Dallas has the most robust rail network in the South...and it serves basically no-one at the moment because of its bus network being the Achilles' Heel it is. Like, it's a real shame that the TRE (Trinity Railway Express; proper heavy commuter rail that runs on dedicated track) only services 5900 passengers/day and doesn't run on Sundays. (For contrast, the Long Island Rail Road in NYC services almost 330k riders/day.) Waymo will be a SUPER DUPER useful microtransit option to close the gap.
It's my take, that it's largely due to traffic, and although people in DFW complain - traffic here has no comparison to Houston traffic. People "easily" commute 40-50 or more miles one way. It's part of the Plano problem, if you lived in Plano an commuted to Legacy West, you are likely in the minority. Most Plano workforce, likely does not work in Plano at all. It's why 75 and DNT get traffic. Most of Plano jobs, likely held by non-Plano residents. The same story plays out everywhere here. In Houston, when I lived there, if you lived in Katy you pretty much stayed in Katy. Maybe you'd jump over to the Woodlands, or Sugarland, or go towards inner Houston on a weekend. The people that commuted downtown for work, the often woke up and drove at 4-5AM to avoid the traffic (they've added new roads since I lived there, toll roads that make this easier). But still, if you're on the West or North side or even in the Loop - dipping down to Galveston can be a significant road trip even though it's just ~50 miles from downtown. We simply don't have that kind of traffic in DFW. The commutes are long because traffic is light enough that people choose to live/work great distances away - then they complain about their commute/traffic. This is also why any type of fixed public transit won't work here, I think it has to do a lot with how the roadways are laid out differently - whole other rabbit hole I could go on about that, but DFW actually does do traffic a bit better than Houston which effectively unlocks the entire DFW area for people to use just like how you explained in your brewery patron example. I can't imagine a brewery in Pearland gets many visitors from the Kingwood or Woodlands or even Katy.
The urban core of Dallas is a failed experiment in my opinion. It's referred to as the Central Business District. And so, almost by definition, it's just office spaces. Covid hit it hard and it's slowly turning/gaining residential which will eventually bring back some life there. The nightlife in Uptown is very personality driven, if you're a preppy/posh type person you probably love it. It sounds like that's just not your cup of tea.
This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean the cars? How are others thinking about this?
The reason I say Waymo specifically is that I don't think it's well appreciated the tech advantage Waymo has by using Google's unequalled geospatial data. Elon keeps claiming that Teslas will do the same thing much cheaper and everywhere, but there's no actual evidence that that is possible. Grinding out larger and larger service areas in more cities is likely to be the way automated rides expand for the next several years.
Why should Google leave money on the table? They will raise the price until it's just below what people are already paying.
Hardware gets commodified and cheaper, not services usually. Do you pay less for cable tv now compared to 20 years ago?
It's interesting this hasn't happened with cable I somewhat agree with you there. However you have alternatives that are just as good like Netflix and cost 20 bucks or less if you can live with ads.
The cost threshold should be pretty low. No fuel (only electricity), and no drivers. Those are two of the larger cost factors here.
- ChatGPT
I never thought of this, but I think this is a valid concern. Uber drivers will end up spending in their locality while money that goes to Waymo will be used for further investment that’s probably concentrated in the Bay Area. I will say this though, Uber it self somehow takes > 50% of the cut a driver and makes and once again spends it on engineers in California, so Uber is guilty of this same issue, but Waymo is probably worse at this than Uber.
In general AI is guilty of destroying the demand for normal human labour and accumulating money into companies with highly paid engineers.
I've seen Walmart and similar companies criticized countless times for driving local shops out of business. It has been a common attack for decades, IME.
This doesn't mean the big corporate option is always inherently bad, but it's weird to me that their defenders often attack the very notion that there could be tradeoffs and downsides.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
^1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461563
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Work 5 days a week = 10 rides. Plus four rides on the weekend, or not. That's why I used 14.
Where do you get 40 rides per week?
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Even if someone did 40 rides per week at your posited average of $25/ride, that's $4,000, not $1,000. Are you letting an LLM do math for you?
If work happens 5 days per week, each workday requires two rides, and there are 4 weeks in a month, then there are 40 rides per month. If each of those rides costs $25, then:
5 × 2 × 4 × $25 = $1,000, per month
Guess you didn't notice that I quoted him.
I especially liked the part where you quoted "1'000$/month" and got yourself all confused about the intended conclusion anyway!
Good chat, my friend!
It was clearly a per month calculation.
Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…
Waymo's got the legal go ahead to use freeways, but they're working on some of the subtleties of self-driving on the freeway vs city streets before enabling it for everybody. (Specifically, California car culture is you merge left early instead of staying in the right lane until you have to. Apparently the Waymo driver was staying in the right lane.)
In this situation, you absolutely can (and are encouraged to) press the support button in the car to talk to a human agent. They have the ability to tell the car to go somewhere it normally wouldn't go for any situation that humans can reason about.
> ...they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago
It was for the best; the Kalanick-era company culture wasn't (/isn't?) compatible with the levels of public trust required for successful self driving.
At $200, you might as well add lidar. At $50,000 vision only made more sense.
A trained marksman may be able to hit a clay pigeon with a 22, but it's easier with a shotgun.
So saying a human can do something doesn't mean it's the easiest way.
It will be logic and driving behavior that makes the difference between Waymo/Tesla/others rather than whether the perception accuracy is micron level or not.
Tesla also has a robotaxi service in Dallas, FWIW, in testing.
Uber does 1 billion, for reference.
There's still a long, long way to go. Waymo has proven it can operate a high-priced service in a handful of cities in good weather, it hasn't yet demonstrated true scale and affordability.
Jokes aside I always thought this was a crap argument. If you can get more useful signals into a system, it's likely to perform better. Duh!
But never argue with a CEO: their interest is profit, not honest conversations.
Y’all -> group of people (howdy yall)
All y’all -> everyone (all yall need to listen up!)
All’s yall -> only thing (alls yall need is another beer)
All y’all’s -> singular possessive of everyone’s stuff (put all y’all’s shit away)
All’s y’all’s -> plural possessive of everyone’s stuff (alls y’all’s cars are blocking me in). This one is a bit awkward and most people just use all y’all’s instead
Hmm. Maybe in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris,_Texas?
Also, do you have the same issue with the demonyms Manhattanite or Seattleite?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Réunion_(Dallas)
Dallards?
It should be Dallan?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0
Even if you don't agree with the advocacy part of it, I think it's still valuable to watch to get the "urban planning professional" perspective on it
I used to be frustrated at their poorly thought-out arguments until I realized none of it matters. The videos are made for a certain demographic to jerk off about their special interests. The real world is going to move on and stuff is going to get implemented. These people and their opinions have no real world impact and don't matter outside of their niche little social groups.
Self driving cars will happen, and not because "billionaires and big companies with lots of money", but because it'll provide increased automation. It'll make it easier for people to get from point A to point B, even if it's not using buses that people like NJB and his ilk are for some reason obsessed with.
Yes, studying a specific thing can commonly produce particular perspectives but that doesn't inherently discredit the discipline.
If the car I'm in cause a big damage or kill someone? I guess the damage will be paid by the insurance but whom insurance? Mine or waymos? And what about criminal implications? Insurance doesn't cover thoose for sure.
I imagine Google has enough money that they can self-insure. Particularly since it's a very low accident rate.
PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.
Please state your concerns.
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for > 3 months
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for < 1 month
Inclement weather is likely the differentiator. Blue state California gets Waymo in its biggest cities, which handily do not get much snow. The other Waymo cities are all below the Mason-Dixon Line.
The only surprising thing about this is that other states did not require changes in law. It's Good, Actually, that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us.
In any case, there are more than 2-3 "blue" states. We can note that it's also not running in cold "red" states either. The climate angle fits the data best and aligns with what Waymo says, which aligns with what we have known about the tech for at least a decade.
(That note also suggests they are still testing their cold-weather kit and are not quite ready.)
1 - https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/back-to-boston/
Earlier this year, Waymo had a permit to test 8 autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in NYC. The permit was not renewed [1]. Waymo can no longer drive autonomously (even with a safety driver) in NYC.
What changed between when the testing permit was issued and when a renewal of permit was declined? NYC had a political shift in leadership.
[1] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/06/waymo-driverless-...
Not if they’re stupid laws!
Sure. OP's point is these products and investments are accruing disproportionately to red cities and states. Sinking together isn't a great pitch.
My state (CA) is doing well this. If your state is not, and this is important to you, I suggest you get involved in the process.
Having companies ignore the law is not an alternative to the democratic process.
Yup. And I invest there. I’m pulling back from New York, which is a shame, because I love it and still have interests there.
> Having companies ignore the law is not an alternative to the democratic process
Straw man. Nobody said this. The point is the current system of incumbent worship is not working. If it takes flipping parties to prove that, I guess yeah, but that won’t result in more rule of law.
Is this true at the city level?
> Sinking together isn't a great pitch.
Surely it's a worse pitch to suggest that companies can ignore laws they don't like, and operate above the law?
It’s also worse to murder kittens. That isn’t the choice at hand.
The difference is between states adapting with a regulatory framework and those sticking with economic incumbents.
(Also, when the taxi medallion industry was at its peak, lenders did run roughshod over the law.)
>> that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us
> Not if they’re stupid laws!
States won't adapt to new technologies at the same time, this is embedded in the design of federalism.
…how are you missing this.
I’m saying the states failing to adapt need to do so or have their governments replaced. That all of these states are also facing multi-party insurgencies doesn’t strike me as a coïncidence. Pretending the corruption in e.g. New York around this is fine is just such a weird take.
Yeah, you added that in a later comment because your original comment did read as "ignore stupid laws."
Yes, I agree state governments should be responsive to the citizens. Corruption is bad. Ignoring "stupid" laws also goes hand in hand with corruption, and is antithetical to responsive government.
> multi-party insurgencies
This is interesting in that we kind of expect a healthy representative government to have vigorous competition among multiple groups. I'm not sure this is bad...
But a key point of federalism is that each state will adapt in different ways due to having different priorities. Mississippi adapts to the realities of 2026 in very different ways than California. I suspect the same will be true in 2056 and 2096.
A government that listens to the people it governs is a good government.
https://www.twu.org/twu-tech-newsletter-waymo-no-mo-in-nyc-f...
Waymo is not currently testing in NYC for political reasons.
[1] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/06/waymo-driverless-...
There is close to zero chance it gets approval in NYC before 2030. I'd be totally floored if he goes against the union, but the optics are absolutely terrible for cabs.
[1] https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
People hate human drivers more than they hate the idea of AI drivers
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/business/uber-sexual-assa...
In reality I think you can get better experiences than a taxi with a rideshare service (which they really haven't been for a very long time), but it's very hit or miss.
So less consistently bad as a taxi service... but far from consistently good.
https://www.worldatlas.com/places/the-most-dangerous-highway...
Does that include the suburbs?
so, no suburbs, only enclaves
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e71380706dc865d40a6f...
> As of July 23, 2026, we have temporarily removed our safety analysis from this report, as well as relevant references to the analysis throughout the report (denoted in-text by a reference to this section). We were made aware of data discrepancies between City agency data for New York City for-hire vehicle crashes with serious injuries or deaths, as well as City agency data definitions related to such crashes. We are working to resolve these discrepancies and ensure our findings properly represent the data and the driving records of New York City for-hire vehicle drivers and Waymo vehicles. Other than this section, the remainder of our report remains unchanged.
My guess is jdlyga read this report before it was modified.
https://www.openplans.org/who-we-are
You can have strong anti- "car-culture" views and still be committed to the truth.
Would they have published that result with the same fanfare?
this reddit thread has excerpts from the report and some comments explaining why the comparison was fraught
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1v1qiz0/waymo_has...
Our light changed to green and the Waymo waited until the next red turned green and then proceeded into the intersection in anticipation of the cars ahead moving.
To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:
* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute
* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles
* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch
* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent
The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.
That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.
If the cybercab was 1/5 the price it would be $14k. It won't be $14k.
Also, whereas the stock Jaguar I-Pace was $70k, the Waymo one with all its sensors and compute have estimates ranging from $150k to $200k. In a comment made in late 2024, Waymo CEO Dmitri Dolgov mentions that the sensors and compute themselves cost $100k [3].
> The equipment on Waymo’s fifth-generation robot taxis — electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles — costs as much as $100,000, Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s co-chief executive, said on a podcast in February.
That is the same generation as the current I-Pace fleet that makes up the majority of Waymos.
[1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/waymo/waymos-retrofitted-robota...
[2] https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/2073967445509882286?s=20
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/technology/waymo-expansio...
So wouldn't that be the reason the figures would look 2.5x worse than the regular Jaguar? I'm sure there are other factors of course since running the computer systems, lidar and all the other features will also consume more power, so I'm sure from a baseline it will be less efficient anyway, I just think because of the kind of driving it engages in, this will make it also look far less efficient.
My guess for the poor reported number is excessive idle time w/ HVAC and compute stuff on within the trip interval.
1. My whole house AC only consumes 3 kW when the outside is really hot, like 36 degrees C, and I seriously doubt that car AC can consume 5 or 6 kW
2. With hotter weather, the density of air also decreases and air resistance is reduced. This partially offsets the need for extra cooling (of both the occupants and the battery), so range is only perhaps impacted by 5-10%.
And if the cybercab is cheaper because it doesn't include the sensors needed to actually see the world around it, that's not great either.
I read this as Tesla Cybertruck and was mightily confused for a minute.
Looking it up in Wikipedia I see it has no driver support (steering, pedals, etc). Is that even road-legal?
Being smaller does not help that much much in cost per mile, but has a big cost for functionality.
The cameras, LIDAR, and sensors are all fixed costs. You need them on even a single-person car. And they’re extremely costly.
If you have a large enough battery to deliver sufficient range for an electric taxi (driving around most of the day, hopefully, if it is well-utilized), with 4 wheels for stability... I doubt that you could really get significantly smaller where the smaller size would make a big difference.
I still think you could build single person cars that are more secure than traditional cars and use less space and energy
If profit is the primary motive than India makes no sense, but that isn't the only motive.
Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.
I don't know who makes them, but the bill acceptors at the camera-driven self-checkouts at the Circle Ks in my ghetto have excellent behavior that is completely unlike the experience of fighting with a Coke machine in 1996.
A person can just put a stack of randomly-oriented, rough bills into the slot and it rapidly takes them off, one by one, and counts them up. I've probably used it a thousand times so far. I've tried to get it to screw up by feeding it bills in various states of decay and it has been perfectly accurate and trouble-free. It's quite a marvel. :)
The coin acceptor is similarly-good: It quickly turns a handful of loose change into a cup of coffee. Just drop it into the chute all at once, it makes some coin-sorter noises, and counts them up.
The combined contrivance is also very good at making change, in bills and coins.
So that part is certainly solvable, and that's good.
But now there's other problems: Those machines are big. That's fine for a convenience store, but it's probably not ideal for a car.
The machines are presumably full of money some of the time, and that can make them targets for thieves. Security is likely part of the reason why the ones at the Circle K are big. They might get emptied regularly, but a thief doesn't know whether they're empty or not until they break into it -- and they don't know if it's easy to break into or not until they make a mess of trying.
If they can make change (it seems like that would be a must-have feature), then they'll always need to have some amount of cash inside.
And then: It comes back to the depot. A worker empties it out and brings the cash inside. Now the depot itself is a target that it would not otherwise be.
And finally: They have to get rid of that cash. A regular person doing this has a big X on their back, so in big corpo world that's often the territory of men with guns and armored cars.
---
Or, you know: Maybe cashless payments are OK. If it would behoove Waymo to accept prepaid debit cards (I don't know if it does or not), then those are easy to buy and load with cash at name-brand convenience stores. This ultimately shifts the expense of the cash-handling burden to the consumer, but I guess that's better than them not getting a ride when they need it.
When all I had was debit cards, I couldn't get any of them to work with Lyft or Uber in 2021.
I had plenty of money. I had nothing better to do than to try to make it work while I sat outside of that airport on a steamy July day in south Florida. I could not make it happen.
There were probably other ways to solve the problem, but I eventually got someone else to send me a car so I could get to where I was going.
(These days, I do have some credit cards. But amusingly, Uber won't let me log in at all unless I verify the number of a debit card that I had in 2021 -- a card that they refused to use, and which was associated with a bank that is itself no longer in business. That card is long gone.)
Only for merchants who have never done real accounting. They lose a lot more than merchant fees to cash. The clerk has to count and recount the money. Then the manager counts and recounts the till at the end of the shift. Then the manager counts all the money in the safe to prepare the daily deposit, and then they have to get that to the bank (at least the bank doesn't charge them after that, but the bank has costs handling their cash as well). This time is not free. That is before we get into the costs of theft, counterfeits - and all the equipment to keep cash safe.
Unless someone has actually added those costs up I'm going to remain convinced credit cards fees are cheaper than cash.
Example, my landlord specified in my original lease one time pet fee. In my newest year lease no pet fee. I was required to pay the pet fee through some saas dedicated to this. Now that website emailed me to let me know they’ll be charging my annual fee.
What fee? What for? They are providing no ongoing value to anyone as far as I can tell. They refuse to explain or cancel. Well they can explain to Mastercard and I’ll wash my hands of the situation.
The rewards are also free to me in the sense that the merchant pays them. If the merchant has priced them in, then the rewards aren’t free, but using cash is throwing away something I’m still paying for.
And then a Waymo dropped teenagers off at the police? I don't care if that was a human, I don't want no snitch car service [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027861
[2] https://www.404media.co/waymo-called-police-on-teens-san-mat...