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I guess-estimated the numbers from several angles. What I came up with is that a single occupancy (i.e. one person per car) cost will be less than $10/hour, wh
by kjksf 8y ago
I guess-estimated the numbers from several angles.
What I came up with is that a single occupancy (i.e. one person per car) cost will be less than $10/hour, which is competitive with public transport ($2.50 (subsidized) bus ticket in San Francisco, assume an average 15 min ride).
And it would drop significantly when sharing (2 to 4 people per car) or when deploying mini buses (they cost more to build and operate but can carry 12 to 16 people, like Chariot buses).
And in the longer term (10+ years) they'll be even cheaper thanks to mass production of cars, transitioning to electric cars, continuously improving reliability of cars based on analyzing what breaks most frequently, contracting own solar plants for cheapest charging etc.)
The obvious conclusion is that not only traditional taxis and uber and lyft are done but also buses because it makes no sense to subsidize them with hundreds of millions per year (for San Francisco) when private alternative is cheaper and better.
You can see my full reasoning at https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/ac23f6cdd3b543b3b89d9f68e00435b8/predicted-cost-of-robo-taxis.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/ac23f6cdd3b543b3b89d9f68... and https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e79db1cb2fcf4329ac37591bfbb00782/how-profitable-can-waymo-be.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e79db1cb2fcf4329ac37591b...
- nicoburns 8y agoPresumably self-driving buses would be cheaper still!
- Skunkleton 8y agoMaybe. If the model were changed so that people scheduled rides ~15 mins in advance and met for pickup/dropoff at a semi-centralized location.
- QML 8y agoThis idea naturally lends itself to a clustering problem such as k-means! We can imagine a geographical density as a cluster and that semi centralized pickup point as a centroid. As for deciding k, the number of cluster-centroid pairs, we can leave that up to market prices. One way to adapt the k-means algorithm to this would be to add a “regularizing” or penalizing term proportional to the number of cars needed to be deployed — you can think of this as the cost per car.
- gwern 8y agoPeople hate using real buses because they are so expensive in all the non-financial ways. Robot buses won't be much different: https://ideas.4brad.com/sharing-ride-less-sharing-better-transit-more-sharing-better-cars https://ideas.4brad.com/sharing-ride-less-sharing-better-tra...
- cozzyd 8y agoIndeed, estimates indicate 75-80 percent of the cost of running buses is labor. If you could quadruple the frequencies of buses, that would make a big difference.
- shkkmo 8y agoMany bus rides are much longer, available to people who don't have a credit card, and have better traffic density.
- cozzyd 8y agoA monthly bus pass costs $75.