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> 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

> 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.

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.