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The promises of self driving cars have always seemed weird to me. Sure, I would love to have a world where all cars are self driving. The security benefits seem

• LtWorf 4y ago
  But it's not nearly as profitable…
  • atoav 4y ago
    Profitable. For whom? For the municipiality a 6 lane street vs a two lane street with public transport and bicycle lanes can make the difference between neverending debt and prosperity. Places with good public transport and bicycle infrastructure and denser mixed use pay more tax revenue. Spread out urban sprawls and suburbs give the municipiality a lot of street surface to maintain, for very little tax revenue in return. A good introduction on that part is the strong towns playlist by the youtube channel Not Just Bikes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
    • LtWorf 4y ago
      Municipalities are generally managed to dry the funds in favour of the friends of whomever is in power. Usually such considerations come last. For example in Italy many municipalities removed public transport so that FIAT could sell cars. And USA is at least just as corrupt.
      • atoav 4y ago
        > Municipalities are generally managed to dry the funds in favour of the friends of whomever is in power. Usually such considerations come last. I think you should strike the word generally here. Even in Italy there are many municipialities with great public transport (grew up not far from the Italian border). In Europe it is generally not rare to have municipialities with nice or even exceptional public infrastructure. Corruption is always a thing that can exist, but if your place becomes dysfunctional for it, maybe consider your might be missing some of the core ingredients that lead to good democratic decisions (education, will by common folk to participate in regional politics, a working system of law that works against corruption, etc.)
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      well you see when the municipality is doing well, we don't call it profit, so you can't win the game by definition.
• sleepychu 4y ago
  But you have to give up point to point, of course the overall throughput is better but the individual experience is (perceived) worse. This is why I love the idea of "public luxury" make sitting on a train or a bus nicer than sitting in a brand new mercedes.
  • rob_c 4y ago
    • planb 4y ago
      Harsh reply for a perfectly valid argument. I'm all for pushing public transport, but in most places of the world it is still more convenient to drive a car for 20 minutes than to walk 5 minutes, jump in a bus for 5 minutes, wait for 10 minutes at a station, jump in a train for 15 minutes, walk 5 minutes, even if you have to drive yourself. And remember we were talking about self-driving cars here.
      • atoav 4y ago
        Where I live the subway is typically faster than the car because of congestion and parking place search. And the bicycle is faster than the subway, because it goes the direct way.
      • yakubin 4y ago
        Also, when you change trams/buses along the way, any delay by a vehicle in the middle of the chain gets compounded instead of just being added to the time of your arrival, since it makes you miss subsequent vehicles. With a car, if you leave 5 minutes later than you should, you should arrive 5 minutes late, not 30. And public transport is so unreliable, the delays are pretty much guaranteed for every trip, so you need to add huge time buffers to all of them if you want to be on time.
      • rob_c 4y ago
  • 4y ago
• rob_c 4y ago
  > Cheap, well developed, reliable public transport will beat autonomous cars on throughput and resource use any day. Remember, this is happening in a state with massive multiple public health crisis that go un-reported and has maps of human excrement in their inner-cities. The priorities here are completely in the wrong direction I agree.
  • BoorishBears 4y ago
    Are you in a state without an underreported health crisis?
    • rob_c 4y ago
      Yes, Britain, the state of the NHS is very well known issue
      • BoorishBears 4y ago
        Which public health issue does California have that is less reported than the broken state of the NHS? You don't even live in the country and you know of the issues, how much harder can you contradict yourself?
• moffkalast 4y ago
  > cheap > well developed > reliable Speaking as a guy in Europe where we generally have "good" public transport, I think you can only ever have ONE of those at the same time, with some exceptions. Cheap fares? You get decrepit busses from the 80s and the timetable's just a suggestion (what my city used to have) Well developed? Development isn't cheap so fares get expensive, busses are Mercs that run on CNG and the timetable's still just a suggestion - but you get live boards showing arrival times at least (what my city has today) Reliable? You'll have to go to Switzerland or Japan to experience that, no other place truly has it. And those places aren't cheap... but they would count as having well developed route networks, so 2/3 for them I suppose.
  • Bromeo 4y ago
    > so 2/3 for them I suppose In Zürich, a monthly city ticket is around $50, and a monthly country wide public transport ticket is $340 (and really gets you almost everywhere). Annual tickets are slightly cheaper. I would argue while not "very cheap", the prices are still reasonably cheap, especially when compared to reoccurring car costs.
    • michaelscott 4y ago
      Switzerland also solved the last mile problem with Mobility, if you really need it
    • jokteur 4y ago
      Also, the median salary in Switzerland is high enough such that $50 per month is absolutely affordable.
  • amq 4y ago
    Vienna, Austria: public transport costs 1 EUR per day without any limits. It is also extremely well developed and reliable. Most people, especially without kids don't even consider getting a car.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
• sofixa 4y ago
  Is there anything to indicate that autonomous vehicles would even help with congestion? Why would they? If anything more people might take them at the worst hours (because it would be less annoying for them without the stress of dealing with bumper to bumper traffic). Cheap, reliable, dense public transit with diverse "last mile" options is clearly a much better choice from the congestion, efficiency cost point of views.
• pembrook 4y ago
  I’ve lived in and frequently traveled to cities with what is considered the best public transportation in the world (Paris, NYC, London, HK, Singapore, Zurich, etc etc). In almost all the above places, there have been frequent instances where I’ve had to use taxis and/or rent a car. And that was while living/staying in the core of these cities. 99.99% of places on earth aren’t nearly as densely populated as the ones above, so increase the need for cars proportionally if you ever want to go elsewhere. We need both good public transport and autonomous vehicles. It’s not one or the other. Whenever I see people citing public transport as a panacea for all problems, it’s typically a wealthy, single, childless, digital minimalist 20-something who lives in the core of the aforementioned cities, and never does much outside of it. You ever wonder where the food you eat gets grown and how it gets delivered to that fast casual restaurant you love down the street? It’s not public transport.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    "You ever wonder where the food you eat gets grown and how it gets delivered" the argument is strange, they don't exactly deliver 40 tons of wheat to the bakery with a taxi. Noone is arguing against cargo and utility vehicles unless they can be substituted by railway (which could be better designed, etc) https://www.tescoplc.com/updates/2021/how-tesco-is-turning-to-trains-to-help-cut-the-emissions-it-takes-to-get-food-on-our-plates/ https://www.tescoplc.com/updates/2021/how-tesco-is-turning-t...
    • pembrook 4y ago
      When public-transport-as-panacea folks create laws to disincentivize vehicles, they typically don't make distinction between cargo/utility and personal travel. Gasoline and vehicle import taxes, and anti-vehicle urban design and laws hit all forms of vehicular travel equally. But again we're still stuck talking about cities. In any area where food is grown (or literally anywhere on earth outside of the .0001% of land that constitutes megacities), there is no public transport. Do you think the people who grow your food are living as indentured servants on the land they cultivate, and never need to go anywhere? Again, public transport is a fantastic solution for dense areas (ie. city cores). But cars are also a fantastic solution for the 99.9999% of places on earth that aren't a city core. A feel-good PR greenwashing campaign by Tesco doesn't change that. There's 8 billion of us, all living in different areas with different constraints. We can have both!
• ciphol 4y ago
  Most of the cost of a taxi is the driver. In the long term driverless taxis will be much cheaper. Access to affordable taxis will greatly improve mobility for the young, old, poor, disabled, etc. It will also enable many people who currently drive to ditch their car (saving lots of money) while having comparable mobility. Of course driverless taxis will not help much with congestion. That will require different solutions.
• throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >But decreasing congestion? We already know how to do that, Anything, automation included, that allows things to flow more smoothly will decrease congestion for a specific number of vehicles on the road allowing roads/intersections/etc to flow closer to their ideal capacity. (This principal holds whether you're talking about cars or buses, train networks, industrial facilities, etc.) For example, if self driving solves some decent fraction of the morons who can't seem to merge in the size space that the engineers specifically allocated because it was sufficient for that purpose or can't turn left even through sufficiently sparse cross traffic you've just alleviated a lot of congestion. In practice transit networks are bounded by the daily peaks so you'll never not have traffic jams and packed subway cars at rush hour but efficiency improvements mean these conditions will exist for a smaller slice of the day.