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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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I remain irritated we're spending so much money on self driving cars instead of buses, trains, and improving our living spaces to support them.
Like you could spend billions to try to get self driving cars to work, and get part way there. And you'd still have a car-first dystopia.
Or you could spend billions to deploy buses and make walkable neighborhoods. Well understood, many good side effects.
I hate cars as much as the next rational man. But I'm ironically really into the self driving car hype.
I think of transport like a pyramid.
Walking is at the top followed by micro mobility and cycling. Then at the bottom is trains, with metros/ trams above and buses above that.
The issue comes from two things. The last mile problem. You need to get to the railway station and sometimes it's too far for a walk or a bike, or you need a bike at both ends. The "obvious" solution to that is to drive to the station. But then it just becomes easier to drive the whole way (especially if you need transport at the next station).
So people start driving and then there is less demand for public transport and more cars mean less people want to cycle.
I think self driving cars will be game changing. They solve the last mile problem which means metro and railway usage could very easily increase. Much, much higher usage of ride hailing means more people in each vehicles (might even replace buses with mini buses), those vehicles don't need to park in say a cycle lane or even downtown. This frees up land and opportunity for more walking and cycling. Also people will be more comfortable cycling closer to a self driving car.
I really hope this causes a cultural shift and that shift is well utilised. But it could do absolutely nothing if those car brains foam at the mouth and complain about a new cycle path and bike storage no matter the positives.
Do you imagine these self driving cars are not owned by individuals, and go off to some dedicated place when not in use? That's marginally better than "everyone owns their own car that spends most of the time idle. I try to ride a bike here in the city and there's so much space given up to cars parked on the street.
It sounds grotesquely inefficient to have a car pick up guy 1 and drive him to the train, a car pick up his neighbor guy 2 and drive him to the train, a car pick up the guy on their corner and drive him to the station. Which I guess is what we're doing today, except the cars get parked at both ends idle all day. So maybe it would be an improvement.
But it can't be the end-state. We should still be working towards denser, walkable, living spaces. I don't want to continue with the idea that the suburbs are ok.
Waymo cars are not owned by individuals, so that seems like their idea is already implementable as-is.
Cars being parked idle all day isn't necessarily going to be a bad thing, most Vehicles self driving out there are EV's and even if it's a standard combustion, those have migrated over to an engine off when stopped ideology where it just doesn't run until someone presses the gas. It wouldn't be infeasible for the company's developing the technology to have an electronic climate control system that just auto-offs when there isn't a passenger in the seat, a sensor that would be a hard requirement for a self-driving vehicle anyway. Which means that it's very likely that the vehicle could even if it was a combustion engine be idle for extended period of time without it taking up too much more resources.
That being said I do believe that electric vehicles would be the optimal vehicle for this, as the only thing it would need to do when it didn't have an order would be have the radio transmitter on which shouldn't take all that much electricity which means it shouldn't drain the battery and furthermore there could be designated charging stations that the car can idle at near these population hotspots like described.
You have to remember as well that once Society transitions to a system that's like that, there is going to be people that don't bother having vehicles themselves so I believe that there's going to be more space freed than space used by doing this change
My complaint specifically was about cars parked on the street where I'd rather have a bike lane, wider sidewalk, outdoor dining, or almost anything else other than a parked car taking up that space.
Yeah but specifically they usually would have been parked in a designated parking area due to the fact that they would need to charge in between uses as well so it's unlikely that those Vehicles would be parked on the sidewalk like standard consumer vehicles are
I think what happened here is I went off topic and was making a complaint about cars in general and how all the space they take up is annoying, but you stayed on topic and are talking more specifically about self driving cars and waymo. So given that I see what you're saying.
I will say that building parking structures (is: homes for cars) instead of homes for people feels kind of bad.
I'm team Waymo. They seem to be the leaders and to be following a path I most agree with. Basically and taxi model like uber except Waymo owns the cars.
I still follow /r/waymo and /r/selfdrivingcars on reddit if you fancy reading more.
Currently people drive all the way to the destination and all the way back. If taxis funnelled them to trains that is a huge improvement if nothing else. And like you say parking gets freed up and that land can be used for more density, more parks and more cycling without losing roads then all good. (Roads should be reduced I'm just saying politically it will be easier to turn an unused carpark into a park than to turn a road into a park).
It terms of cost. I think that will be a huge boom for the economy. High milage, electric cars fueled by cheap renewables is going to make upfront costs non existent and lower per milage costs. That will increase riders verses personal cars.
Then I think that will cause a higher density per car. Ride sharing with uber works but it isn't great. The more people that use it the higher likelihood you have of people going to the same area so the time cost of ride sharing will decrease as usage increases. The UK actually experimented with on demand buses (Demand Responsive Transport) which I really liked but the uptake hasn't been as good as hoped. Think this will be more common.
All these factors I believe will make walking/cycling/ trains safer and more accessible and allow for more infrastructure and better cost per rider.
I agree but the political will isn't there. Getting rid of parking and a lane here or there is achievable on the current trajectory. Once that's done, I hope more change like you mention comes.
But it's also the built it and they will come factor. Who wants more cyclists? People that cycle. If the self driving car makes more cyclist more people will want more cycling. I'm really hoping for a self feeding cycle grown from the self driving car.
That seems... Fine, on a skim. Plausible.
But like... are we sure we come out ahead spending decades on machine vision and self driving versus just having more human taxi drivers, and spending the money on the end goals we actually want?
I guess that's a shit job, driving taxis at weird times and places, and doesn't scale super well. But machine vision and self driving seems to be a decades long project.
Related: I'm not really comfortable with critical infrastructure (eg: transit) being privately owned and operated. So that might be a problem.
Though the political will being absent for anything good remains a problem, too.
Human driving cost is forever. A self driving programme cost is for today only.
The money has been spent. Waymo is operating without a driver in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco.
Ultimately it's private money. No public money is being spent on it. The government can (and should) invest in public transport also. But how alphabet spends their money isn't up to the government.
Anything can be nationalised.
But didn’t it come out recently that Waymo has human “drivers” behind a remote control and that it is nearly a 1:1 relationship of driver to car because the self driving tech just hasn’t made it far enough?
I think you might be thinking of Cruise?
https://gizmodo.com/cruise-robotaxi-human-assistance-kyle-vogt-1850997279
I haven't heard anything about that. Got a link? I don't even see how that would work in real time. Waymo is a very safe driver and can Indians even drive in the US on their licence because it's so crap?
This story came out recently about Amazon shopping:
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4?amp
You thinking of that?
No but that was a similar story that came out at the same time. I think I may be thinking about the Cruise vehicles.
With the way cars are now self driving wouldn't solve the problem of people just using cars to get everywhere. Cause people would own their own self driving car and then you get the same exact problem as you mentioned before except now you also get the convenience of not having to actively drive so why use public transit at all if you can just let your car do all the work to take you to where you need to go. The real solution to the last mile problem is to make better walking/biking infrastructure and to have larger transit networks so people don't have to go super far to get access to transit. Also you mention having to bike at both ends of your transit and that's a problem I don't get cause you can just bring your bike with you on the train/bus. Or since you seem to be leaning towards a rental ride sharing model anyway rental bikes also solve that problem perfectly.
Everything you said could have been out in place within the last 50 years and it hasn't been done.
Like yes I agree. But also I just don't see it happening.
In terms of realistic positive impact I think more will be gained in the next 20 years from self driving cars than an increase in taxes and huge government spending.
I just don't see any gains from self driving cars. We already have ride share services that would allow what you're talking about to happen but people don't do it cause it's expensive. I doubt companies like Uber and Lyft are gonna lower their prices when self driving cars become a thing, they're just gonna take the extra profit for themselves. All it's gonna do is encourage more people to drive cause now one of the benefits of public transit, not having to actively drive and being able to do other things while traveling, will now be a benefit of self driving cars too. And on top of that it's gonna encourage more of the bad practices from the software industry to leak over into cars such as subscriptions services which companies have already been trying to push. Overall I don't see self driving cars being a benefit for society other than making driving more convenient and pushing even more towards dangerous car focused infrastructure.
Because it will be cheaper.
That's not how capitalism works as much as this website disagrees. Uber is already a good example of a company that undercut the competition.
Higher density in vehicles alone will make a huge difference.
Except that is how capitalism works time and time again. Companies will lower prices to gain market share then once they have a large control of the market will happily raise prices and keep any gains in productivity for themselves. The only reason Uber is trying to undercut people right now is because the industry is new and they want to try and capture the market for themselves. Once they do or some situation forms like what we have with internet with Comcast and other providers avoiding competing you can expect prices to not ever be lowered again. If anything this is another reason why I favor public transit over self driving cars because public transit investment is owned by the government and therefore the people, it's not gonna try and milk people for profit. Whereas these ride share companies already have shown they're willing to act shitty towards their drivers to drive up their own profits, I imagine these companies would continue to find ways to milk more profit out of the service with self driving cars and with drivers being gone that's gonna come at the expense of the users.
Then competition comes in.
Explain to me how public transport is going to suddenly become this thing that will replace cars when it has had 100 years to achieve that and hasn't?
I mean one example in the US I can look to is a city I lived in for a bit, Seattle. They have been actively expanding their public transit and even when I lived there I didn't use a car to get around and honestly the only problems I had was trips taking a bit longer sometimes and busses running not on time both of which are problems that can be fixed and with the expansions are actively being fixed. If you want an end game for what public transit can look like Europe is a great example. While I don't think America can ever quite reach that level I think we could definitely reach a point where cars are still required but only for people living further out in the country. Heck if you want a good example for public transit in a larger country the high speed rail China has been building is pretty impressive. Don't know the most about it but I've heard fairly good things about it (of course ignoring the other problems with China, but that isn't related to public transit). Overall public transit does work and works well especially in the cities that actively invest in it like Seattle and Portland (both of which I've lived in/near). The problem in America with adoption just comes from a very car centric attitude which at least in the cities I mentioned before has been slowly getting better as people start to realize that public transit benefits everyone, including drivers. Just because we have to fight to show that it benefits everyone and that building bigger roads doesn't help doesn't mean we should just surrender to car infrastructure because it's hard and takes a long time to push for public transit investments.
Oh Lord.
Well we are having two different conversations then. Because I am from Europe and I travelled a lot. Public transport is horrific. Here I was thinking of a future that is better than the crap that is in Europe but you don't even expect to reach that level.
I mean I will admit I don't know a lot about European public transit and it is quite a broad region. I mostly have looked at Amsterdam as that's the big example people use so when I say America won't reach that level I'm more referring to how nice it is there. I have visited the UK once and I have step family there and the public transit/trains were nice there to actually have them as options compared to America which often times just doesn't. When I visited I only visited Newcastle and London so again don't have a ton of knowledge but in general seemed nice. But from my experience not owning a car in America travel within cities is already starting to get pretty good where I've lived and I just wish more cities would invest in it and create high speed rail lines between cities for longer trips.
I'm not going to look too far into it but half of all trips in Netherlands are made by car and 36% in London (which is probably significantly lower than the rest of the country). I don't see either of those figures significantly changing. Netherlands is wayyyy denser than USA so you won't even get close to 50% car trips with the Netherlands system.
That's not to say you should copy what the Dutch do, you should. But it won't solve the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_the_Netherlands
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_London
While I get that as a stop gap when your city hasn't built enough PT, car to the station sounds like a good last mile solution. But my personal preference, and how good public transport is set up, is that in 90% o more of the trips around your city, public transport should never be more than a walk away.
This is not to say that cars should be removed entirely (for disabled people where PT accommodations are difficult, delivery, emergency vehicles etc). Just that you shouldn't nearly as many cars for the last mile, in a well designed system.
This is how I try to live, mostly. Can't get there by public transport? Well I'm not going unless I have to then 👍 because cars are expensive and I'll get a cab or rent one if I have to. But I live in a fairly car-centric city. It's totally possible to have your entirely city be accessible by foot + PT.
I'm not sure if the driverless car tech would ever be viable, and why not just do driverless BRT conversions, which is possible right now, and not that expensive.
If the tech bros really wants self driving transportation we can give them that:
Self driving subway, goes 75km/h in the city center, fully electric, convenient, consistent, safe.
Trains are way easier to make self driving too, we've had autonomous trains since the 60s.
The only reason trains are not self-driving is humans designed the whole system in a too complicated way. Trains had all the ingredients for safe self-driving for decades.
In the US a few decades ago the big rail companies were given the ultimatum to upgrade their safety infrastructure or have a national speed limit of 79 mph imposed on them.
Guess which they did?
Trains have even more obnoxious horns though.
And are legally required to blast them in populated areas
They usually only use the horn at crossings. Automated trains are grade separated. The SkyTrain rolls through Vancouver all night and you can hardly hear it.
Dear god, imagine... Billions spent on public transportation, and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. Can you imagine? Just.. imagine. I'm in awe
Because you can make every kind of excuse, when it comes to privately owner corporations, but you quickly run out of them, when improving public systems.
We've already seen it countless times, how the American government gives money to someone, to complete a project, but completely ignores any binding contracts, so all that money literally just goes into someone's pocket instead
Corruption is a problem. It doesn't help that one of two major parties doesn't believe government can work, and they'll make every effort to prove it.
"See, if you don't give any funding to public transit it doesn't work. And if you gut the regulatory agencies, then there's all sorts of corruption. Better privatize it, and I have just the guy to sell it to."