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>Who cares if they have a 90 minute commute to work if they can eat or sleep or work or play games during that time. You can do all that on public transport ye

by _dain_ 5y ago

>Who cares if they have a 90 minute commute to work if they can eat or sleep or work or play games during that time. You can do all that on public transport yet people still prefer shorter commutes.

criddell 5y ago
That's because public transportation, as it's run today, is generally a pretty awful experience. In my own vehicle I'm going point-to-point, I can reroute for coffee or food, I can play the music I want, set the temperature to what I want, etc... Also, a big factor these days, using public transportation puts you in contact with a lot of people and your chances of picking up COVID are higher. Although, maybe by living in a high density area you have to accept greater risk during this and future pandemics. Self-driving vehicles could change a lot of that. Every bus system could morph into something closer to a shared fleet model.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I don't know how much I believe that car travel is so drastically superior to public transit. Cars are definitely more comfortable, but I still think that most people prefer a moderate walk to a short ride. We do have one thing we can look at as a comparison: trains. People still don't like long train rides where you have pretty convenient access to food and drinks - along with a comfortable temperature and spacious seating.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    >We do have one thing we can look at as a comparison: trains. People still don't like long train rides where you have pretty convenient access to food and drinks - along with a comfortable temperature and spacious seating. Part of the problem can be frequency. You have to factor in the time spent waiting at the station and changing between trains. If you can just walk to the station and not have to consult a timetable because you know there'll be one coming by within 5-10 minutes, that's a much more attractive proposition than having your whole day ruined because you arrived too late and the next one isn't for 2 hours. It could be the most comfortable train in the world and it wouldn't make up for that inconvenience.
  - greedo 5y ago
    I love trains. I just can't afford to take them anywhere since the cost in both time and $$ is so high compared to other options.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  >That's because public transportation, as it's run today, is generally a pretty awful experience. Where you live, maybe. Where I live, it is pleasant, practical, and affordable. Yes, private vehicles have the advantages you list. But the disadvantages: expense (borne both by the owner and by the taxpayer through subsidies), immense space requirements, parking, congestion, noise, pollution, pedestrian fatalities, encouragement of sprawl development patterns, and so on. EVs and autonomous vehicles only solve a few of these. As for COVID -- hate to break it to you, but you're going to catch it no matter what, if you haven't already. Why is it that people dismiss the idea of making public transit (and other transportation modes) better, and hang their hopes on fantastically complicated and unproven engineering and software efforts like self-driving vehicles? There are plenty of examples of cities and whole countries achieving the former, while the latter is a -- well, I don't want to say a pipe dream, but there's no concrete proof it would work as advertised at scale. The part about replacing buses with a shared autonomous fleet seems crazy to me. You have 20 people in a single bus, replaced with 20 people in 20 individual autonomous cars. That's at least an order of magnitude more space taken up on the roads. AI or not, they're gonna make more traffic!

by _dain_ 5y ago

>Who cares if they have a 90 minute commute to work if they can eat or sleep or work or play games during that time. You can do all that on public transport yet people still prefer shorter commutes.

criddell 5y ago

That's because public transportation, as it's run today, is generally a pretty awful experience. In my own vehicle I'm going point-to-point, I can reroute for coffee or food, I can play the music I want, set the temperature to what I want, etc... Also, a big factor these days, using public transportation puts you in contact with a lot of people and your chances of picking up COVID are higher. Although, maybe by living in a high density area you have to accept greater risk during this and future pandemics. Self-driving vehicles could change a lot of that. Every bus system could morph into something closer to a shared fleet model.

munk-a 5y ago
I don't know how much I believe that car travel is so drastically superior to public transit. Cars are definitely more comfortable, but I still think that most people prefer a moderate walk to a short ride. We do have one thing we can look at as a comparison: trains. People still don't like long train rides where you have pretty convenient access to food and drinks - along with a comfortable temperature and spacious seating.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  >We do have one thing we can look at as a comparison: trains. People still don't like long train rides where you have pretty convenient access to food and drinks - along with a comfortable temperature and spacious seating. Part of the problem can be frequency. You have to factor in the time spent waiting at the station and changing between trains. If you can just walk to the station and not have to consult a timetable because you know there'll be one coming by within 5-10 minutes, that's a much more attractive proposition than having your whole day ruined because you arrived too late and the next one isn't for 2 hours. It could be the most comfortable train in the world and it wouldn't make up for that inconvenience.
- greedo 5y ago
  I love trains. I just can't afford to take them anywhere since the cost in both time and $$ is so high compared to other options.
_dain_ 5y ago
>That's because public transportation, as it's run today, is generally a pretty awful experience. Where you live, maybe. Where I live, it is pleasant, practical, and affordable. Yes, private vehicles have the advantages you list. But the disadvantages: expense (borne both by the owner and by the taxpayer through subsidies), immense space requirements, parking, congestion, noise, pollution, pedestrian fatalities, encouragement of sprawl development patterns, and so on. EVs and autonomous vehicles only solve a few of these. As for COVID -- hate to break it to you, but you're going to catch it no matter what, if you haven't already. Why is it that people dismiss the idea of making public transit (and other transportation modes) better, and hang their hopes on fantastically complicated and unproven engineering and software efforts like self-driving vehicles? There are plenty of examples of cities and whole countries achieving the former, while the latter is a -- well, I don't want to say a pipe dream, but there's no concrete proof it would work as advertised at scale. The part about replacing buses with a shared autonomous fleet seems crazy to me. You have 20 people in a single bus, replaced with 20 people in 20 individual autonomous cars. That's at least an order of magnitude more space taken up on the roads. AI or not, they're gonna make more traffic!