5 ms·
Good public mass transit is absolutely superior. Waymo cars don't solve traffic, it only partly solves parking and paying a human. Having (on average) a single
by dymk 3y ago
Good public mass transit is absolutely superior. Waymo cars don't solve traffic, it only partly solves parking and paying a human.
Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.
- George83728 3y agoGood public mass transit presumably involves cops kicking out the smelly homeless people, right? I don't think that would fly in most places these days though, it isn't humane. Yet it's the only way to make public transit tolerable.
- pfsalter 3y agoA better idea might be to provide the homeless with a better standard of living, therefore making them nicer to be around on public transport
- 2devnull 3y agoSome of them aren’t merely lacking access to resources. Mental illness is part of the picture too. Trains and busses are warm comfortable places for such, as well as the criminal element. People think of bus and subway stations as dirty and often dangerous places, not just in the USA.
- George83728 3y agoYou can't make them wipe.
- xnx 3y agoI don't know if they're un-homed or not, but I've encountered a lot of people smoking, shouting, or making a mess with food in rail cars, making them unusable for everyone else.
- abecedarius 3y agoMost buses off rush hour are sparsely populated. Look up actual energy efficiency of American mass transit systems per rider mile. https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html Re traffic: with robot-driven cars, congestion pricing would be technically easy. This is an example of not considering possibilities created by the new tech.
- sagarm 3y agoMost roads off rush hour are sparsely populated; seems inefficient, let's pedestrianize them.
- xnx 3y agoWith autonomous vehicles we could! You could safely bike coast to coast on the shoulder of any highway. The possibilities are truly spectacular.
- sagarm 3y agoAutonomous vehicles will not make cycling or walking next to much faster multi-ton vehicles more pleasant, even if those vehicles are less likely to kill you. I mean, have you walked along even a 35mph road with significant traffic? It's extremely unpleasant due to the noise and air pollution. In fact, today the area around elevated freeways is often much cheaper than the surrounding area for several blocks.
- whitemary 3y agoThank you
- whitemary 3y ago> Look up actual energy efficiency of American mass transit systems per rider mile. Could you pick a worse example?
- jeromegv 3y agoGood for your rich tech salary utopia to have congestion pricing and pay for it to get ahead of the rest. People with lower income benefit from having a decent bus system that doesn’t require them to pay $10K a year on a car.
- stouset 3y agoNot only don’t autonomous cars solve traffic, they will actively make it worse. The marginal cost of operating a car drops dramatically when you remove the human drivers from them (who also suffer from pesky conditions like boredom and drowsiness), and so we can expect these vehicles to drive signficantly more frequently than their human-operated cousins. Think about uses like DoorDash. Instead of (in a city) walking to nearby restaurants, we now replace a larger share of those dinners with ones where cars are driving back and forth across the city to pick up the food and deliver it. This will only become more common when the cost drops by not having to pay a human being, and so we can expect a much greater volume of traffic from this one example use. Other currently-marginal use cases will see equivalent growth due to the similar economics.