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I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years o

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more cities like Seattle with its rail expansion and fewer New York City where the infrastructure is finally getting money so it doesn't fall apart. There are already so many tax breaks going into driverless companies. If Alphabet or Here want to do this on their own, go for it; but governments around the world should stop giving tax breaks and municipal incentives for this technology. I can see it being more useful in Europe, where so much of the country is connected and it'd help sold the last leg problem. But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity, not just for those who can afford to live in the city, but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks.

save_ferris 8y ago
> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.) I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  > driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution <Insert obligatory Portal reference.>
- stephengillie 8y ago
  I'd like to join in on the bikeshedding mass transit into solar-powered self-driving car-apartments that can always drive anywhere with no congestion for free, need no maintenance, and aren't controlled by a monolithic entity with an abysmal reputation for profit over users. Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?
  - anamexis 8y ago
    Chariot, for one. (For some definition of "bus") https://www.chariot.com/ https://www.chariot.com/
  - lighttower 8y ago
    Bridj which went bust a little while back. It was awesome. I was an early adopter in Boston
  - curun1r 8y ago
    > How many bus companies have ever applied to YC Does Remix (https://www.remix.com/ https://www.remix.com/) count?
- dpc59 8y ago
  >A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to) and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and comfort will spend it without looking back.
  - abawany 8y ago
    My experience in my multiple Montreal soujourns has been so different that I consider the Metro to be a jewel. I admit that some stations are grungier than others (once I had to duck an errant basketball at Cote-des-Neiges) but that was once out of around 100 trips. I do agree that the air conditioning is marginal.
  - paganel 8y ago
    > That's because it is It largely depends on the country or even city. Me and my gf went to Switzerland by car a couple of years ago (we live in Eastern Europe) and I’d had expected that we’d visit different parts of the country by car. What happened once we got there is that we “forgot” the car in the hotel’s parking lot for a week and we did all our travel by train, it was wonderful. Even traveling inside the city itself (we were based in Lausanne) was a very nice thing, I’ve started building a soft spot in my heart for the city’s trolley-buses (electric public transport rocks, btw, always has, alwsys will).
    - cjslep 8y ago
      American living in Switzerland. From what I understand, access to public transportation seems to be considered a basic human right here. No one is expected to have to buy and upkeep car maintenance. While the electrification of the mass transit systems is super nice, unfortunately it came about because of the World Wars. Switzerland was hit really hard, and no one wanted to trade their precious coal away (Switzerland had no coal mines). Thus out of sheer necessity they began electrifying all the trains. So unfortunately there's not replicable policies other countries can use to achieve what Switzerland has achieved in terms of electrification, so it'd take some creativity.
- beneTleilax 8y ago
  Hmmm, weird idea here, but maybe that's the answer then? If self driving cars are terrible at coping with the chaos humans grit their teeth and deal with, maybe software for engineering cooperative bumper-to-bumper traffic jams involving clogs of slow-moving self driving cars, that reduce the road speeds to constant 20 MPH (the /constant/ part being important), and eliminate chaotic lane changing to near zero for the group, is one way to bootstrap self driving cars. In other words, low-performance self driving cars might work fine, and since people can lounge about, and disengage from the guidance and navigation tasks, why not go slower? Then, add swarming to the mix, such that cars going to the same place, all travel slowly in a single group. It's against the law to obstruct traffic, or violate minimum speed requirements, so certain laws would need to change. For example, zero emission vehicles can idle indefinitely, and software-controlled vehicles can interface with an external control network, approved to operate in such ways, with points of contact at operations centers for resolving problems, technical or otherwise. So change laws to permit idle electric vehicles (in more places and controlled, desginated places, not just anywhere), and permit large slow moving groups to occupy certain corridors, at certain times, when jammed traffic is a known quantity, that driverless systems aren't the cause of. Driverless networks can cut into a slice of the jam, and possibly improve outcomes for members only at first, and eventually boost efficiency within the jammed system by augmenting flow through expert participation.
- aij 8y ago
  I live in the countryside but work in the city. This is in the US, so there is no bus I could take for my daily commute, though I've lived in countries where a similar arrangement would have a bus route within walking/biking distance. The thing is, if there were a bus, it would have to stop to pick up / drop off passengers along the way, which would make it so much slower than driving that it really would be for the poor. I've been on such buses as a kid. Even when traffic is bad, bumper-to-bumper in a car (taking the fastest route) is going to be faster than bumper-to-bumper in a bus (taking a more circuitous route and stopping frequently along the way) I think the only way buses will stop being for the poor, is when they stop become faster than more expensive alternatives. (Or at least nearly as fast and significantly cheaper.) If you can save a lot of time by spending a little bit of money, which would you choose? What if you could spend a lot of money but it wouldn't save you any (or much) time? In cities where congestion is a major problem, dedicated bus lanes/roads can help balance the equation in favor of buses. Usually there aren't enough dedicated bus routes though. (I might point out that the people deciding how to balance bus/car traffic are not the people who ride the bus.) I still think self-driving cars are far in the future, but I find them appealing because they would make "buses" more efficient. A lot of the cost of operating buses is paying the drivers. To maximize economies of scale, buses are large, which means they have to make a lot of stops to pick up and drop off passengers, which in turn makes them slow. Self-driving buses could be a lot smaller and wouldn't need to make as many stops. If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. At some point, the lines between bus/ridesharing/taxi get pretty blurry.
  - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
    The problem with buses isn't picking people up or stopping. It's just that without dedicated lanes or busways, they're not better than cars. Same traffic, + stops is a recipe for failure for people who can afford it. My bus takes a busway and skips huge traffic jams. I save 25 mins riding the bus and I don't pay to park. > If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. Everytime selfdriving tech comes up people say things similar to this, this problem is 100% solvable now. Why are we waiting for self driving cars to solve this problem?
- resu_nimda 8y ago
  A lot of people think ... the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want. Well that's because it's actually true for a lot of people. Sure, there's no freedom in commuting between SF and south bay by car, or navigating the most dense downtown environments. But I definitely use my car on a daily basis for things that would be impossible or incredibly time consuming by transit. And yes, many of the transit patrons around here would probably prefer a car if they could afford it. Most places are not like NYC where the subway is often the most effective option regardless of wealth. I don't think it's really feasible for more spread out suburban environments to implement effective mass transit. The anti-car idealists often seem to forget that there are a lot of people living outside of dense city centers.
- kwillets 8y ago
  I suspect that driverless cars will end up somewhere on the spectrum between buses and human-operated cars. They're extremely cautious and will be a lot slower than human-operated.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  >Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.) I can count on 1 hand (ok, maybe both hands) the number of times I've been in bumper-to-bumper traffic in my life. One of those was in Austin. There's lots of places to go that aren't big cities.
- scythe 8y ago
  >A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.) What the hell is going on in Austin? Bumper-to-bumper traffic happens mostly at commute hours in commercial zones and during special events. It's very much not the norm for driving at other times. To wit, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest and least car-friendly cities in the U.S., but the last time I returned from a road trip, I traversed the whole city corner-to-corner -- from crossing the Bay Bridge to arriving at my home near the zoo -- in less than fifteen minutes. Why? Because it was midnight! Cars provide unparalleled mobility for irregular trips outside of peak commuting times, even in the largest cities. I wholeheartedly support deprioritizing car infrastructure and working towards a norm where most people do not drive to work, but I nonetheless believe that car ownership provides a lot of independence and ought to be accessible to the modal citizen, at least outside of the very dense coastal cities (SF/LA/NY). Cars work really well for irregular trips outside of rush hour. They work terribly when large amounts of people need to go to the same place at once.
jazzyjackson 8y ago
This is the part that drives me crazy - America HAD electric railroads all over the place. Or at least Illinois (my homestate) did. You can look up 'Illinois InterUrban' and see maps of rails connecting every rural city. Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over) The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...
- camjohnson26 8y ago
  Unfortunately Illinois borrowed from future generations and horribly mismanaged the economy. Now they're struggling just to avoid bankruptcy, let alone building out huge public transit projects. Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.
  - rory096 8y ago
    >Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help. That project is privately funded. The Block 37 station was the expensive vaporware.
- 100ideas 8y ago
  Freight traffic dominates the utilization of the rail network in the US and is prioritized over other traffic. Freight trains travel slowly. This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe. > The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.) > So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6] - area of Continental US: 3.12 million sq mi [1] - area of Europe: 2.306 million sq mi [1] - rail network length, US: 141,808 mi [2] - rail network length, Europe: 157,667 mi [3] - goods carried, US: 1.558 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) (world rank: 1st) (2015 estimate) [4] - goods carried, "Europe": 0.32604 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continental+united+states+%7C+total+area+%2F+europe+%7C+total+area https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continental+united+sta... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+States+%7C+railway+length https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+Europe+%7C+railway+length https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+Europe+%7C+r... [4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+States+%7C+railway+length https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [5] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Europe+%7C+rail+transport+%7C+goods+carried+%7C+sum https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Europe+%7C+rail+transp... [6] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847 https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847
wiz21c 8y ago
> America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. c'mon, who is gonna dream about that ? </cynism>
lemoncucumber 8y ago
Exactly. Driverless trains are a solved problem, so why don't we just build some of those?
- petre 8y ago
  The ECA has recently made an assesment of high speed rail and they found out things are not as rosy as they seem: https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=46398 https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=46398
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I think the competition for cars are not high speed lines, but normal, everyday commuter trains.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - lemoncucumber 8y ago
    That link requires HTTP basic auth. But my understanding is that at least as far things like subways go, driverless trains aren't a difficult problem.
    - freedryk 8y ago
      Vancouver, BC has been operating a driverless train system for its rapid transit since 1986.
- mythbuster2001 8y ago
  Driverless trains are not a problem to begin with. If you have a train and it carries hundreds of people [or trainload of cargo], it is economically irrelevant whether it has a human operator or not. So it is safer to have a human there just in case.
  - 8y ago
seiferteric 8y ago
I love the idea because it would remove the need for me personally to own a car. Also it was supposed to happen in the scale of a few years, instead of the decades needed to build the heavy infrastructure projects you mentioned, but remains to be seen. Also, it could quicken the move to electric vehicles if uber/waymo etc fleet was all electric.
Eridrus 8y ago
I think it's pretty clear that Waymo & maybe Cruise are the leaders in this space. If you take a look at the quota from Waymo "it will be “longer than you think” for self-driving vehicles to be everywhere." - the key part is "everywhere". Maybe it will take 15 years for it to be everywhere, but I'm still fully expecting a deployment in Phoenix this year or next. I'm not really clear what tax break you're complaining about, AFAIK there is no extra tax break for Waymo.
- dmix 8y ago
  And regardless no tax break could be comparable or relevant compared to the cost of nation wide improvements to mass transit. Plus driverless car tech is global. The US infrastructure problems are irrelevant to me as a Canadian or the billions of people in Asia.
  - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
    Asian cities have far worse infrastructure than the US for cars. Toronto has horrible traffic too.
    - dmix 8y ago
      Calling for better US gov infrastructure still doesn't solve this problem for them. Nor will American or Chinese tech companies. In the meantime I'll take driverless electric cars who are actually making progress pls. Instead of fantasizing about the day modern nation states are marginally functional at delivering services, like they were half a century ago. Basically everything they touch, especially under the false guise of 'private' partnerships ends up a decade late and 2-4x the cost (in billions). And often delivering only half of what was originally planned. The less we gamble on such a trainwreck the better IMO. Unless, of course, something changes. But every year and every election it seems to get worse.
      - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
        You act as if self driving cars are independent of infrastructure. These cars need roads. And if these cars are your solution to mass transit, far more will be on the road, requiring more upkeep. Roads are huge money sinks. You seem to think self driving cars are magnificent devices that just glide over roads and don't need bridges or tunnels. For some reason, we never include these costs with cars when compared to mass transit. That is simply unfair. I'm not against self driving cars by any means. But people misrepresent them all the time.
gist 8y ago
> I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." And honestly any number is simply just 'pulled out of the ass' anyway. It's not as if they can see daylight on all the problems that need to be solved or predict various soft issues (the government only one example). So this is not that someone is building the atomic bomb and can realistically judge more or less the scope of the problems that need to be solved and then build in a bit of leeway.
- ModernMech 8y ago
  Sure, the number is pulled out of the air in a way, but that's not what is important. People in the field know what is holding things back, and even if they don't don't see all the way to the end, they know enough about the journey to recognize that newcomers don't completely appreciate what they're up against, and rosy predictions about the proliferation of driverless cars is a reflection of that naivete.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  my rule of thumb is: Anything over 5 years is n to infinity +/- 1 year.
baybal2 8y ago
In level of stupidity, the concept of self driving car in my opinion is second only to a flying car. The second disregard, that well... there are airplanes. The first, that driverless busses that creep at 30km/h and do emergency brake every every 10 minutes thanks to overattentive collision avoidance system also been around for decades.
- emiliobumachar 8y ago
  We've had flying cars for decades. They're called helicopters. Unfortunately they're much too expensive for the masses. But I don't see why anyone would consider the concept stupid.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    My point is that the popular image of flying cars with retractable wings and wheels turning into jet engines is ludicrous, and that yes, light personal airplanes and helicopters are there. And the same parallel for driverless car, except for even when well executed it is kinda of arguable usefulness/value.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      arguable usefulness/value Are regular cars useful? A self-driving car is just as useful for someone who can't drive: minors, many seniors, many people with disabilities - or people who just don't have a driving licenses, like me.
      - baybal2 8y ago
        For them, a 30km/h crawler with overattentive collision avoidance system may well be useful. This is not much different to how public transport drivers have to drive. I expect them facing same issues like trams and trolleybuses - terribly bad experience in traffic. You only see risky people aggressively trying to overtake and scratching their paint, while leaving the driver no opportunity to move an inch.
Zigurd 8y ago
"Driverless car" is probably not the outcome for autonomous vehicles. At one end of the scale, cities will use road space vastly more efficiently with optimized vehicles for groups of riders, and at the other end of the scale, short-haul air travel will be challenged by door-to-door 150mph+ highway vehicles. None of these will look much like a personal car, and only the wealthy will consider owning one that will become rapidly obsolete and have a meagre duty cycle a sensible idea. For many people the answer will be a bicycle because the roads will become a safe place for cycling.
- boxcardavin 8y ago
  Self-delivering bicycles my man, too light to kill people in impacts, slow when autonomous.
  - Zigurd 8y ago
    When cars don't crash they won't have to be crashworthy. They could be much lighter.
gist 8y ago
> but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks. Maybe people need to take personal responsibility and not spend money as if the government will make things easier for them and solve all problems. I am not claiming this is possible for everyone there are truly people who need help. But the vast majority of people can try to live in a way that they can have personal transportation (which has been around how long now?) and is reasonably enough priced currently. Separately back before autos wouldn't people have had the same issue with horses or with even machines that they needed to run their lives or their business? Isn't it part of being human to plan for breakdowns of various things that you need that you can plan around failure?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 8y ago
  > people need to take personal responsibility Whenever someone says this I assume the opposite; America is not a place of uniquely irresponsible people. People have had cashflow issues since the dawn of cash, often mitigated by complex family informal credit systems.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kyrra 8y ago
BTW, Waymo already agreed with you[0]. They are partnering with Phoenix transit authority to drop people off at bus and train stops. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoenix-to-connect-people-to-public-transit/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoeni...
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  This seems like the inevitable conclusion: autonomous cars bring you from your house to your destination, unless you are traveling through a thoroughfare. In which case they will drop you at a tram (ideally drop you at the platform), the tram gets you through the bottleneck, and another private car will take you from the tram stop to your actual destination. There’s no efficient way for busses to get people close to their door. It makes no sense. Mass transit should relieve congestion on major routes, it’s not an efficient solution to the last mile problem.
stale2002 8y ago
Driverless cars might be a bad idea. City driving is a hard problem space, and all we'd achieve is cooler taxis. The real game changer is instead driverless trucks. Shipping is both a trillion dollar industry, and the problem space of "highway driving when it is sunny out" is much much easier than the consumer usecase, while still being extremely valuable.
- slavik81 8y ago
  > all we'd achieve is cooler taxis I think you underestimate the impact of ubiquitous, free valet parking on urban design. We surround everything with parking to minimize walking distance to/from our vehicles, but you could organise things very differently if everyone was picked up and dropped off. You could also park cars bumper-to-bumper, because you don't need trusted human drivers to move the cars boxing you in. Removing isles from the parking lot would nearly double the number of cars that could fit in a given space. It's counter-intuative, but I think driverless cars may eventually make cities more walkable.
100ideas 8y ago
"in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity" - ...because why? I am assuming in good faith you might say: because a world in which a greater proportion of people travel via multi-passenger vehicles like the buses and trains of public transport networks is a better world because these transportation solutions are 1) more efficient per passenger (does this help w/ reducing carbon emissions?); 2) economically more accessible because passengers pay per trip instead of purchasing vehicle outright; 3) potentially less expensive to operate due to economies of scale (purchasing & maintaining a large fleet of vehicle vs a single vehicle) and higher equipment utilizationl; 4) perahaps encourage more social connection amongst passengers; 5) passengers do not have to focus on driving and can "recover" the time that would have been spent driving a car doing something else. I ask because I think the endgame for self-driving car companies is not so much to sell cars (self-driving in this case) to individual consumers, but rather to to win the zero-sum-game of becoming the largest on-demand "elastic" self-driving vehicle transportation platform; i.e. 80% of the cars Ford makes in 2030 it reserves for its automated fleet, which it dispatches on a per-ride bases to subscribers/customers for a single trip, a day, a month, etc. The ultimate technological opportunity here is effectively "packet switching" for physical transport via the highway network. While it's possible (and desirable, in my opinion) the fleet of vehicles enabling this automated transport network could be a composition of myriad different vehicles, from many different vendors, contributed dynamically by everyone from families (or groups of families) that own a single vehicle and rent it out when its not in use to the fleets of large companies like ups, hertz, ford, etc... it seems more realistic that a few giant companies (Waymo, Uber) will be the ones that can scale up a working network fastest and cheapest by building, owning, and operating huge fleets of vehicles made up of just a few vehicle variants. Anyway, imagine 60% of the cars on the roads today were capable of participating in an automated-vehicle-on-demand transportation network. This scenario seems like it has the same benefits I attributed to public transportation. What do you think - is it an equally desirable solution, or are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate?
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  > are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate? - Substantially reduced traffic on surface streets (a bus or subway is MUCH more densely packed with humans than a road full of cars). - Encourage more walking and overall fitness - Improved safety for non-mechanized road and sidewalk users (reduced traffic will do more for pedestrian safety than automated traffic will, I promise). - Less space required to be devoted to parking and streets, so better land utilization.
stcredzero 8y ago
I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." Driverless. Technology of the future. Always was. Always will be. But seriously, how much would it take to mostly handle driving trucks on limited access highways between exurb mega-warehouses? By "mostly," I mean, be able to handle 98% of all situations, and be able to flag attention from a remote control human supervisor for the other 2%. I suspect we're pretty close.
outside1234 8y ago
Why does it have to be either/or? I think driverless has the potential to be both - we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient.
- QML 8y ago
  we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient This doesn't seem to require driverless busses. I can see an argument of why self driving taxis would be helpful -- cost of labor is near zero -- but with busses, the cost of labor is amortized across passengers.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
> America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to .... I don’t think the killer market for driverless cars in America in the first place. Places like China that have all that (commuter rail, subway) but lack places for new roads and parking would benefit greatly from optimizing their limited road infrastructure. They already have people who are used to taking taxies everywhere, now make the ring roads automated only to triple their capacity. Europe, Asia, can be benefit greatly from driverless cars because they have a different situation from America.
- mikepurvis 8y ago
  Most North American cities also lack the space for new roads and parking, at least in the places people actually want to go to.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Not on similar scales. I found traffic in NYC to be a dream compared to Beijing.
imrelaxed 8y ago
America’s economic bread and butter is innovation. We’re creating an entirely new market segment. That’s why new driverless cars are far more attractive than improving public transport infrastructure.
dwighttk 8y ago
rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it. How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses? What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these lakes in the middle of nowhere? What about hauling larger personal watercraft? Just don't do that? Store it at the body of water you've chosen to exclusively use your boat/jetski on? Rely on Amazon to handle the logistics of shipping hay for your livestock? Maybe these are all just cultural things that need to disappear and be replaced by magical super-efficient factory farms or not replaced at all. But there are other ways of life than just living in an apartment and commuting to an office.
- rockinghigh 8y ago
  We're talking about commute and long-distance travel. In most scenarios, you don't carry that much luggage. You don't carry your horses and kayaks when you go to work or travel overseas.
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    My dad regularly drives 8 hrs with his kayaks to fish for bass. Though he usually leaves them behind when he flies to Mexico to fish. People do carry their horses to work with them. They aren't just luxury goods.
- zrail 8y ago
  Of course there are going to be wide swaths of the United States where passenger rail and bus service isn't going to make much of a dent for local transportation. Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if people could easily commute by rail to the bigger city 45 minutes away? I bet people would be more interested in living in that small town.
WalterSear 8y ago
"The idea that sharing rides is good has become almost axiomatic in transportation discussions. At conferences I have seen people declare that robocars are pointless if they are not shared -- ie. people who are not travelling together ride together in them. The positive of sharing is so axiomatic that public transit is seen almost as a good in and of itself, rather than a means towards real goals like energy efficiency, low cost, and higher road utilization. It has has attained this status as revealed truth because it is indeed roughly true -- more people together in a vehicle done right will indeed use less energy per person and less road space. But the "done right" is very important as it is commonly done quite wrong. As I have studied robocars, this has led me to the discovery that some of our old assumptions are wrong. In particular, more sharing is not always good, and the styles of sharing (including the vehicle sizes) of current public transportation are almost certainly not the optimum sizes, and that smaller vehicles are likely more optimal once we eliminate the need for drivers and move to a highly communicating world. I believe there are strong arguments that while shared travel is beneficial, we actually have too much of it in most transit systems, and not enough in private cars. That the 'shared' future is one of van-sized group vehicles with a mixed fleet of more personal cars with 1-4 seats." https://ideas.4brad.com/sleeper-cars-and-unexpected-efficiency-solo-transport https://ideas.4brad.com/sleeper-cars-and-unexpected-efficien...
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
Yep. And driverless, electric locomotives are decades-old technology.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  It's amazing the serious face some people keep "re-discovering" 100+ years old, derived from basic principles technology. The ultimate of this is the autonomous truck convoy: wouldn't it be amazing if we could just have trucks follow each other closely and save a ton on air drag? Well, yeah, it exists, it's called a train, it's magnitudes longer than any "autonomous truck convoy" ever will be, and instead of the billion dollar AI machine learning big data system we have to keep them close together, we use a fricking mechanical linkage.
  - anticensor 8y ago
    And the train will not fail if one single brakepad fails unlike a truck convoy.
Shivetya 8y ago
municipal rail is a money sink. currently across the nation there is over a hundred billion dollars of deferred maintenance on municipal rail; light and heavy. worse bus service tends to suffer because they try to force people to use rail by making bus service less attractive which in effect is just damages the concept of public transport. no the real solution is get over this mythological idea that America is too car heavy. everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport. what automation will bring is freedom to those who cannot drive so we best better figure out how to get cars talk to each other and which areas will be reserved for automated driving only. funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/500m-hole-how-hot-economy-city-requests-punctured-sound-transits-lynnwood-light-rail-budget/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/500...
- moultano 8y ago
  > everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport. They have freedom to travel, but not freedom to live where they want. The United States has entirely banned dense housing in everywhere that people want to live, and this consequently makes transit impractical. Get rid of zoning restrictions on housing, and we'd be in a much different place.
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  It seems that way because the costs are centralized, but cars are as well, and it's disingenuous to compare this way. If you look at how many people go in debt to own cars or the amount of credit on cars, you would see poor numbers there as well. Cars are incredible money sinks. There is a reason why Uber doesn't operate its own fleet. If public transit billed by value it would easily be kept afloat. But the value proposition in most cities in America just isn't there, because they simply aren't dense enough. It's not a mythological idea. It's simple math. > funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly. Funny you mention things going over budget because nearly all infrastructure projects in this country do - yes, including roads. This is a problem with our government, not mass-transit solely. In your very own article, the reasons stated for the price increase have nothing to do with mass transit inherently. They would be true of any infrastructure project.
dv_dt 8y ago
I suspect that if someone could deliver a fully autonomous car at say 2x the cost of a regular car, the next immediate problem would be massive autonomous traffic jams where you would still need mass transit to work back scaling costs on the transport networks.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  At least now the 4 hours you spend in traffic every day can be useful — catch up on some sleep, check your email, train your car's AI by playing "I spy"...
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    That's at the heart of the problem. Once traffic time is lower 'cost', then people will likely immediately start spending that savings. A one hour acceptable commute becomes shifts to 4 hrs being acceptable, and you get maybe 4x more traffic into the same commerce centers.
QML 8y ago
From an economic standpoint, investing in fast mass-transit (e.g. high speed rail) would probably result in a larger net positive than self driving cars. Why? 1. I would theorize that the economic benefits of transportation are directly proportional to how fast the service is, and how much people it can move. As an estimation, I'd say cars are limited to 60 mph while high speed rail would be limited to 200 mph. 2. With fixed-path mass transit, the problem of traffic is greatly simplified. Self driving cars may solve a labor issue but they won't solve the traffic problem: cars routing themselves selfishly will not result in the lowest travel time possible. You can argue that a central coordinator can exist to coordinate routes, but if there's an incentive for a person (not necessarily a driver) to deviate from their set path, why wouldn't they take it?

save_ferris 8y ago

> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.) I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.

bunderbunder 8y ago
> driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution <Insert obligatory Portal reference.>
stephengillie 8y ago
I'd like to join in on the bikeshedding mass transit into solar-powered self-driving car-apartments that can always drive anywhere with no congestion for free, need no maintenance, and aren't controlled by a monolithic entity with an abysmal reputation for profit over users. Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?
- anamexis 8y ago
  Chariot, for one. (For some definition of "bus") https://www.chariot.com/ https://www.chariot.com/
- lighttower 8y ago
  Bridj which went bust a little while back. It was awesome. I was an early adopter in Boston
- curun1r 8y ago
  > How many bus companies have ever applied to YC Does Remix (https://www.remix.com/ https://www.remix.com/) count?
dpc59 8y ago
>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to) and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and comfort will spend it without looking back.
- abawany 8y ago
  My experience in my multiple Montreal soujourns has been so different that I consider the Metro to be a jewel. I admit that some stations are grungier than others (once I had to duck an errant basketball at Cote-des-Neiges) but that was once out of around 100 trips. I do agree that the air conditioning is marginal.
- paganel 8y ago
  > That's because it is It largely depends on the country or even city. Me and my gf went to Switzerland by car a couple of years ago (we live in Eastern Europe) and I’d had expected that we’d visit different parts of the country by car. What happened once we got there is that we “forgot” the car in the hotel’s parking lot for a week and we did all our travel by train, it was wonderful. Even traveling inside the city itself (we were based in Lausanne) was a very nice thing, I’ve started building a soft spot in my heart for the city’s trolley-buses (electric public transport rocks, btw, always has, alwsys will).
  - cjslep 8y ago
    American living in Switzerland. From what I understand, access to public transportation seems to be considered a basic human right here. No one is expected to have to buy and upkeep car maintenance. While the electrification of the mass transit systems is super nice, unfortunately it came about because of the World Wars. Switzerland was hit really hard, and no one wanted to trade their precious coal away (Switzerland had no coal mines). Thus out of sheer necessity they began electrifying all the trains. So unfortunately there's not replicable policies other countries can use to achieve what Switzerland has achieved in terms of electrification, so it'd take some creativity.
beneTleilax 8y ago
Hmmm, weird idea here, but maybe that's the answer then? If self driving cars are terrible at coping with the chaos humans grit their teeth and deal with, maybe software for engineering cooperative bumper-to-bumper traffic jams involving clogs of slow-moving self driving cars, that reduce the road speeds to constant 20 MPH (the /constant/ part being important), and eliminate chaotic lane changing to near zero for the group, is one way to bootstrap self driving cars. In other words, low-performance self driving cars might work fine, and since people can lounge about, and disengage from the guidance and navigation tasks, why not go slower? Then, add swarming to the mix, such that cars going to the same place, all travel slowly in a single group. It's against the law to obstruct traffic, or violate minimum speed requirements, so certain laws would need to change. For example, zero emission vehicles can idle indefinitely, and software-controlled vehicles can interface with an external control network, approved to operate in such ways, with points of contact at operations centers for resolving problems, technical or otherwise. So change laws to permit idle electric vehicles (in more places and controlled, desginated places, not just anywhere), and permit large slow moving groups to occupy certain corridors, at certain times, when jammed traffic is a known quantity, that driverless systems aren't the cause of. Driverless networks can cut into a slice of the jam, and possibly improve outcomes for members only at first, and eventually boost efficiency within the jammed system by augmenting flow through expert participation.
aij 8y ago
I live in the countryside but work in the city. This is in the US, so there is no bus I could take for my daily commute, though I've lived in countries where a similar arrangement would have a bus route within walking/biking distance. The thing is, if there were a bus, it would have to stop to pick up / drop off passengers along the way, which would make it so much slower than driving that it really would be for the poor. I've been on such buses as a kid. Even when traffic is bad, bumper-to-bumper in a car (taking the fastest route) is going to be faster than bumper-to-bumper in a bus (taking a more circuitous route and stopping frequently along the way) I think the only way buses will stop being for the poor, is when they stop become faster than more expensive alternatives. (Or at least nearly as fast and significantly cheaper.) If you can save a lot of time by spending a little bit of money, which would you choose? What if you could spend a lot of money but it wouldn't save you any (or much) time? In cities where congestion is a major problem, dedicated bus lanes/roads can help balance the equation in favor of buses. Usually there aren't enough dedicated bus routes though. (I might point out that the people deciding how to balance bus/car traffic are not the people who ride the bus.) I still think self-driving cars are far in the future, but I find them appealing because they would make "buses" more efficient. A lot of the cost of operating buses is paying the drivers. To maximize economies of scale, buses are large, which means they have to make a lot of stops to pick up and drop off passengers, which in turn makes them slow. Self-driving buses could be a lot smaller and wouldn't need to make as many stops. If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. At some point, the lines between bus/ridesharing/taxi get pretty blurry.
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  The problem with buses isn't picking people up or stopping. It's just that without dedicated lanes or busways, they're not better than cars. Same traffic, + stops is a recipe for failure for people who can afford it. My bus takes a busway and skips huge traffic jams. I save 25 mins riding the bus and I don't pay to park. > If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. Everytime selfdriving tech comes up people say things similar to this, this problem is 100% solvable now. Why are we waiting for self driving cars to solve this problem?
resu_nimda 8y ago
A lot of people think ... the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want. Well that's because it's actually true for a lot of people. Sure, there's no freedom in commuting between SF and south bay by car, or navigating the most dense downtown environments. But I definitely use my car on a daily basis for things that would be impossible or incredibly time consuming by transit. And yes, many of the transit patrons around here would probably prefer a car if they could afford it. Most places are not like NYC where the subway is often the most effective option regardless of wealth. I don't think it's really feasible for more spread out suburban environments to implement effective mass transit. The anti-car idealists often seem to forget that there are a lot of people living outside of dense city centers.
kwillets 8y ago
I suspect that driverless cars will end up somewhere on the spectrum between buses and human-operated cars. They're extremely cautious and will be a lot slower than human-operated.
dwighttk 8y ago
>Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.) I can count on 1 hand (ok, maybe both hands) the number of times I've been in bumper-to-bumper traffic in my life. One of those was in Austin. There's lots of places to go that aren't big cities.
scythe 8y ago
>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.) What the hell is going on in Austin? Bumper-to-bumper traffic happens mostly at commute hours in commercial zones and during special events. It's very much not the norm for driving at other times. To wit, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest and least car-friendly cities in the U.S., but the last time I returned from a road trip, I traversed the whole city corner-to-corner -- from crossing the Bay Bridge to arriving at my home near the zoo -- in less than fifteen minutes. Why? Because it was midnight! Cars provide unparalleled mobility for irregular trips outside of peak commuting times, even in the largest cities. I wholeheartedly support deprioritizing car infrastructure and working towards a norm where most people do not drive to work, but I nonetheless believe that car ownership provides a lot of independence and ought to be accessible to the modal citizen, at least outside of the very dense coastal cities (SF/LA/NY). Cars work really well for irregular trips outside of rush hour. They work terribly when large amounts of people need to go to the same place at once.

jazzyjackson 8y ago

This is the part that drives me crazy - America HAD electric railroads all over the place. Or at least Illinois (my homestate) did. You can look up 'Illinois InterUrban' and see maps of rails connecting every rural city. Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over) The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...

camjohnson26 8y ago
Unfortunately Illinois borrowed from future generations and horribly mismanaged the economy. Now they're struggling just to avoid bankruptcy, let alone building out huge public transit projects. Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.
- rory096 8y ago
  >Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help. That project is privately funded. The Block 37 station was the expensive vaporware.
100ideas 8y ago
Freight traffic dominates the utilization of the rail network in the US and is prioritized over other traffic. Freight trains travel slowly. This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe. > The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.) > So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6] - area of Continental US: 3.12 million sq mi [1] - area of Europe: 2.306 million sq mi [1] - rail network length, US: 141,808 mi [2] - rail network length, Europe: 157,667 mi [3] - goods carried, US: 1.558 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) (world rank: 1st) (2015 estimate) [4] - goods carried, "Europe": 0.32604 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continental+united+states+%7C+total+area+%2F+europe+%7C+total+area https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continental+united+sta... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+States+%7C+railway+length https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+Europe+%7C+railway+length https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+Europe+%7C+r... [4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+States+%7C+railway+length https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [5] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Europe+%7C+rail+transport+%7C+goods+carried+%7C+sum https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Europe+%7C+rail+transp... [6] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847 https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847

wiz21c 8y ago

> America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. c'mon, who is gonna dream about that ? </cynism>

lemoncucumber 8y ago

Exactly. Driverless trains are a solved problem, so why don't we just build some of those?

petre 8y ago
The ECA has recently made an assesment of high speed rail and they found out things are not as rosy as they seem: https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=46398 https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=46398
- adrianN 8y ago
  I think the competition for cars are not high speed lines, but normal, everyday commuter trains.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- lemoncucumber 8y ago
  That link requires HTTP basic auth. But my understanding is that at least as far things like subways go, driverless trains aren't a difficult problem.
  - freedryk 8y ago
    Vancouver, BC has been operating a driverless train system for its rapid transit since 1986.
mythbuster2001 8y ago
Driverless trains are not a problem to begin with. If you have a train and it carries hundreds of people [or trainload of cargo], it is economically irrelevant whether it has a human operator or not. So it is safer to have a human there just in case.
- 8y ago

seiferteric 8y ago

I love the idea because it would remove the need for me personally to own a car. Also it was supposed to happen in the scale of a few years, instead of the decades needed to build the heavy infrastructure projects you mentioned, but remains to be seen. Also, it could quicken the move to electric vehicles if uber/waymo etc fleet was all electric.

Eridrus 8y ago

I think it's pretty clear that Waymo & maybe Cruise are the leaders in this space. If you take a look at the quota from Waymo "it will be “longer than you think” for self-driving vehicles to be everywhere." - the key part is "everywhere". Maybe it will take 15 years for it to be everywhere, but I'm still fully expecting a deployment in Phoenix this year or next. I'm not really clear what tax break you're complaining about, AFAIK there is no extra tax break for Waymo.

dmix 8y ago
And regardless no tax break could be comparable or relevant compared to the cost of nation wide improvements to mass transit. Plus driverless car tech is global. The US infrastructure problems are irrelevant to me as a Canadian or the billions of people in Asia.
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  Asian cities have far worse infrastructure than the US for cars. Toronto has horrible traffic too.
  - dmix 8y ago
    Calling for better US gov infrastructure still doesn't solve this problem for them. Nor will American or Chinese tech companies. In the meantime I'll take driverless electric cars who are actually making progress pls. Instead of fantasizing about the day modern nation states are marginally functional at delivering services, like they were half a century ago. Basically everything they touch, especially under the false guise of 'private' partnerships ends up a decade late and 2-4x the cost (in billions). And often delivering only half of what was originally planned. The less we gamble on such a trainwreck the better IMO. Unless, of course, something changes. But every year and every election it seems to get worse.
    - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
      You act as if self driving cars are independent of infrastructure. These cars need roads. And if these cars are your solution to mass transit, far more will be on the road, requiring more upkeep. Roads are huge money sinks. You seem to think self driving cars are magnificent devices that just glide over roads and don't need bridges or tunnels. For some reason, we never include these costs with cars when compared to mass transit. That is simply unfair. I'm not against self driving cars by any means. But people misrepresent them all the time.

gist 8y ago

> I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." And honestly any number is simply just 'pulled out of the ass' anyway. It's not as if they can see daylight on all the problems that need to be solved or predict various soft issues (the government only one example). So this is not that someone is building the atomic bomb and can realistically judge more or less the scope of the problems that need to be solved and then build in a bit of leeway.

ModernMech 8y ago
Sure, the number is pulled out of the air in a way, but that's not what is important. People in the field know what is holding things back, and even if they don't don't see all the way to the end, they know enough about the journey to recognize that newcomers don't completely appreciate what they're up against, and rosy predictions about the proliferation of driverless cars is a reflection of that naivete.
dwighttk 8y ago
my rule of thumb is: Anything over 5 years is n to infinity +/- 1 year.

baybal2 8y ago

In level of stupidity, the concept of self driving car in my opinion is second only to a flying car. The second disregard, that well... there are airplanes. The first, that driverless busses that creep at 30km/h and do emergency brake every every 10 minutes thanks to overattentive collision avoidance system also been around for decades.

emiliobumachar 8y ago
We've had flying cars for decades. They're called helicopters. Unfortunately they're much too expensive for the masses. But I don't see why anyone would consider the concept stupid.
- baybal2 8y ago
  My point is that the popular image of flying cars with retractable wings and wheels turning into jet engines is ludicrous, and that yes, light personal airplanes and helicopters are there. And the same parallel for driverless car, except for even when well executed it is kinda of arguable usefulness/value.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    arguable usefulness/value Are regular cars useful? A self-driving car is just as useful for someone who can't drive: minors, many seniors, many people with disabilities - or people who just don't have a driving licenses, like me.
    - baybal2 8y ago
      For them, a 30km/h crawler with overattentive collision avoidance system may well be useful. This is not much different to how public transport drivers have to drive. I expect them facing same issues like trams and trolleybuses - terribly bad experience in traffic. You only see risky people aggressively trying to overtake and scratching their paint, while leaving the driver no opportunity to move an inch.

Zigurd 8y ago

"Driverless car" is probably not the outcome for autonomous vehicles. At one end of the scale, cities will use road space vastly more efficiently with optimized vehicles for groups of riders, and at the other end of the scale, short-haul air travel will be challenged by door-to-door 150mph+ highway vehicles. None of these will look much like a personal car, and only the wealthy will consider owning one that will become rapidly obsolete and have a meagre duty cycle a sensible idea. For many people the answer will be a bicycle because the roads will become a safe place for cycling.

boxcardavin 8y ago
Self-delivering bicycles my man, too light to kill people in impacts, slow when autonomous.
- Zigurd 8y ago
  When cars don't crash they won't have to be crashworthy. They could be much lighter.

gist 8y ago

> but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks. Maybe people need to take personal responsibility and not spend money as if the government will make things easier for them and solve all problems. I am not claiming this is possible for everyone there are truly people who need help. But the vast majority of people can try to live in a way that they can have personal transportation (which has been around how long now?) and is reasonably enough priced currently. Separately back before autos wouldn't people have had the same issue with horses or with even machines that they needed to run their lives or their business? Isn't it part of being human to plan for breakdowns of various things that you need that you can plan around failure?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 8y ago
> people need to take personal responsibility Whenever someone says this I assume the opposite; America is not a place of uniquely irresponsible people. People have had cashflow issues since the dawn of cash, often mitigated by complex family informal credit systems.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kyrra 8y ago

BTW, Waymo already agreed with you[0]. They are partnering with Phoenix transit authority to drop people off at bus and train stops. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoenix-to-connect-people-to-public-transit/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoeni...

erikpukinskis 8y ago
This seems like the inevitable conclusion: autonomous cars bring you from your house to your destination, unless you are traveling through a thoroughfare. In which case they will drop you at a tram (ideally drop you at the platform), the tram gets you through the bottleneck, and another private car will take you from the tram stop to your actual destination. There’s no efficient way for busses to get people close to their door. It makes no sense. Mass transit should relieve congestion on major routes, it’s not an efficient solution to the last mile problem.

stale2002 8y ago

Driverless cars might be a bad idea. City driving is a hard problem space, and all we'd achieve is cooler taxis. The real game changer is instead driverless trucks. Shipping is both a trillion dollar industry, and the problem space of "highway driving when it is sunny out" is much much easier than the consumer usecase, while still being extremely valuable.

slavik81 8y ago
> all we'd achieve is cooler taxis I think you underestimate the impact of ubiquitous, free valet parking on urban design. We surround everything with parking to minimize walking distance to/from our vehicles, but you could organise things very differently if everyone was picked up and dropped off. You could also park cars bumper-to-bumper, because you don't need trusted human drivers to move the cars boxing you in. Removing isles from the parking lot would nearly double the number of cars that could fit in a given space. It's counter-intuative, but I think driverless cars may eventually make cities more walkable.

100ideas 8y ago

"in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity" - ...because why? I am assuming in good faith you might say: because a world in which a greater proportion of people travel via multi-passenger vehicles like the buses and trains of public transport networks is a better world because these transportation solutions are 1) more efficient per passenger (does this help w/ reducing carbon emissions?); 2) economically more accessible because passengers pay per trip instead of purchasing vehicle outright; 3) potentially less expensive to operate due to economies of scale (purchasing & maintaining a large fleet of vehicle vs a single vehicle) and higher equipment utilizationl; 4) perahaps encourage more social connection amongst passengers; 5) passengers do not have to focus on driving and can "recover" the time that would have been spent driving a car doing something else. I ask because I think the endgame for self-driving car companies is not so much to sell cars (self-driving in this case) to individual consumers, but rather to to win the zero-sum-game of becoming the largest on-demand "elastic" self-driving vehicle transportation platform; i.e. 80% of the cars Ford makes in 2030 it reserves for its automated fleet, which it dispatches on a per-ride bases to subscribers/customers for a single trip, a day, a month, etc. The ultimate technological opportunity here is effectively "packet switching" for physical transport via the highway network. While it's possible (and desirable, in my opinion) the fleet of vehicles enabling this automated transport network could be a composition of myriad different vehicles, from many different vendors, contributed dynamically by everyone from families (or groups of families) that own a single vehicle and rent it out when its not in use to the fleets of large companies like ups, hertz, ford, etc... it seems more realistic that a few giant companies (Waymo, Uber) will be the ones that can scale up a working network fastest and cheapest by building, owning, and operating huge fleets of vehicles made up of just a few vehicle variants. Anyway, imagine 60% of the cars on the roads today were capable of participating in an automated-vehicle-on-demand transportation network. This scenario seems like it has the same benefits I attributed to public transportation. What do you think - is it an equally desirable solution, or are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate?

InitialLastName 8y ago
> are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate? - Substantially reduced traffic on surface streets (a bus or subway is MUCH more densely packed with humans than a road full of cars). - Encourage more walking and overall fitness - Improved safety for non-mechanized road and sidewalk users (reduced traffic will do more for pedestrian safety than automated traffic will, I promise). - Less space required to be devoted to parking and streets, so better land utilization.

stcredzero 8y ago

I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." Driverless. Technology of the future. Always was. Always will be. But seriously, how much would it take to mostly handle driving trucks on limited access highways between exurb mega-warehouses? By "mostly," I mean, be able to handle 98% of all situations, and be able to flag attention from a remote control human supervisor for the other 2%. I suspect we're pretty close.

outside1234 8y ago

Why does it have to be either/or? I think driverless has the potential to be both - we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient.

QML 8y ago
we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient This doesn't seem to require driverless busses. I can see an argument of why self driving taxis would be helpful -- cost of labor is near zero -- but with busses, the cost of labor is amortized across passengers.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

> America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to .... I don’t think the killer market for driverless cars in America in the first place. Places like China that have all that (commuter rail, subway) but lack places for new roads and parking would benefit greatly from optimizing their limited road infrastructure. They already have people who are used to taking taxies everywhere, now make the ring roads automated only to triple their capacity. Europe, Asia, can be benefit greatly from driverless cars because they have a different situation from America.

mikepurvis 8y ago
Most North American cities also lack the space for new roads and parking, at least in the places people actually want to go to.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Not on similar scales. I found traffic in NYC to be a dream compared to Beijing.

imrelaxed 8y ago

America’s economic bread and butter is innovation. We’re creating an entirely new market segment. That’s why new driverless cars are far more attractive than improving public transport infrastructure.

dwighttk 8y ago

rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it. How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses? What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these lakes in the middle of nowhere? What about hauling larger personal watercraft? Just don't do that? Store it at the body of water you've chosen to exclusively use your boat/jetski on? Rely on Amazon to handle the logistics of shipping hay for your livestock? Maybe these are all just cultural things that need to disappear and be replaced by magical super-efficient factory farms or not replaced at all. But there are other ways of life than just living in an apartment and commuting to an office.

rockinghigh 8y ago
We're talking about commute and long-distance travel. In most scenarios, you don't carry that much luggage. You don't carry your horses and kayaks when you go to work or travel overseas.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  My dad regularly drives 8 hrs with his kayaks to fish for bass. Though he usually leaves them behind when he flies to Mexico to fish. People do carry their horses to work with them. They aren't just luxury goods.
zrail 8y ago
Of course there are going to be wide swaths of the United States where passenger rail and bus service isn't going to make much of a dent for local transportation. Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if people could easily commute by rail to the bigger city 45 minutes away? I bet people would be more interested in living in that small town.

WalterSear 8y ago

"The idea that sharing rides is good has become almost axiomatic in transportation discussions. At conferences I have seen people declare that robocars are pointless if they are not shared -- ie. people who are not travelling together ride together in them. The positive of sharing is so axiomatic that public transit is seen almost as a good in and of itself, rather than a means towards real goals like energy efficiency, low cost, and higher road utilization. It has has attained this status as revealed truth because it is indeed roughly true -- more people together in a vehicle done right will indeed use less energy per person and less road space. But the "done right" is very important as it is commonly done quite wrong. As I have studied robocars, this has led me to the discovery that some of our old assumptions are wrong. In particular, more sharing is not always good, and the styles of sharing (including the vehicle sizes) of current public transportation are almost certainly not the optimum sizes, and that smaller vehicles are likely more optimal once we eliminate the need for drivers and move to a highly communicating world. I believe there are strong arguments that while shared travel is beneficial, we actually have too much of it in most transit systems, and not enough in private cars. That the 'shared' future is one of van-sized group vehicles with a mixed fleet of more personal cars with 1-4 seats." https://ideas.4brad.com/sleeper-cars-and-unexpected-efficiency-solo-transport https://ideas.4brad.com/sleeper-cars-and-unexpected-efficien...

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

Yep. And driverless, electric locomotives are decades-old technology.

stefan_ 8y ago
It's amazing the serious face some people keep "re-discovering" 100+ years old, derived from basic principles technology. The ultimate of this is the autonomous truck convoy: wouldn't it be amazing if we could just have trucks follow each other closely and save a ton on air drag? Well, yeah, it exists, it's called a train, it's magnitudes longer than any "autonomous truck convoy" ever will be, and instead of the billion dollar AI machine learning big data system we have to keep them close together, we use a fricking mechanical linkage.
- anticensor 8y ago
  And the train will not fail if one single brakepad fails unlike a truck convoy.

Shivetya 8y ago

municipal rail is a money sink. currently across the nation there is over a hundred billion dollars of deferred maintenance on municipal rail; light and heavy. worse bus service tends to suffer because they try to force people to use rail by making bus service less attractive which in effect is just damages the concept of public transport. no the real solution is get over this mythological idea that America is too car heavy. everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport. what automation will bring is freedom to those who cannot drive so we best better figure out how to get cars talk to each other and which areas will be reserved for automated driving only. funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/500m-hole-how-hot-economy-city-requests-punctured-sound-transits-lynnwood-light-rail-budget/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/500...

moultano 8y ago
> everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport. They have freedom to travel, but not freedom to live where they want. The United States has entirely banned dense housing in everywhere that people want to live, and this consequently makes transit impractical. Get rid of zoning restrictions on housing, and we'd be in a much different place.
ntsplnkv2 8y ago
It seems that way because the costs are centralized, but cars are as well, and it's disingenuous to compare this way. If you look at how many people go in debt to own cars or the amount of credit on cars, you would see poor numbers there as well. Cars are incredible money sinks. There is a reason why Uber doesn't operate its own fleet. If public transit billed by value it would easily be kept afloat. But the value proposition in most cities in America just isn't there, because they simply aren't dense enough. It's not a mythological idea. It's simple math. > funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly. Funny you mention things going over budget because nearly all infrastructure projects in this country do - yes, including roads. This is a problem with our government, not mass-transit solely. In your very own article, the reasons stated for the price increase have nothing to do with mass transit inherently. They would be true of any infrastructure project.

dv_dt 8y ago

I suspect that if someone could deliver a fully autonomous car at say 2x the cost of a regular car, the next immediate problem would be massive autonomous traffic jams where you would still need mass transit to work back scaling costs on the transport networks.

akvadrako 8y ago
At least now the 4 hours you spend in traffic every day can be useful — catch up on some sleep, check your email, train your car's AI by playing "I spy"...
- dv_dt 8y ago
  That's at the heart of the problem. Once traffic time is lower 'cost', then people will likely immediately start spending that savings. A one hour acceptable commute becomes shifts to 4 hrs being acceptable, and you get maybe 4x more traffic into the same commerce centers.

QML 8y ago

From an economic standpoint, investing in fast mass-transit (e.g. high speed rail) would probably result in a larger net positive than self driving cars. Why? 1. I would theorize that the economic benefits of transportation are directly proportional to how fast the service is, and how much people it can move. As an estimation, I'd say cars are limited to 60 mph while high speed rail would be limited to 200 mph. 2. With fixed-path mass transit, the problem of traffic is greatly simplified. Self driving cars may solve a labor issue but they won't solve the traffic problem: cars routing themselves selfishly will not result in the lowest travel time possible. You can argue that a central coordinator can exist to coordinate routes, but if there's an incentive for a person (not necessarily a driver) to deviate from their set path, why wouldn't they take it?