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To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions o

To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain. I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.

dagw 3y ago
I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity As do I, but if driverless taxis at even close to the price of public transport became a thing, I would never take a bus ever again.
- dathinab 3y ago
  but if you live in an area with a nicely sustainable population density and there are no subventions (e.g. for cars/roads) involved this seems quite impossible to ever be the case Which means it's probably will be the case for the US as most of the us is either has a less sustainable, too low (e.g. "typical" US metro area, and well the endless rural areas(1)) or too high (e.g. city center) density. (1): Through very rural areas might not be substainable for any self driving car service either, so people there will most most likely still have their own car. And for reasons of serviceability much more likely a non self driving car.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
I love public transport, however what driverless enable is very different: point-to-point personal transportation is something buses cannot achieve yet.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
For completion. You actually have real driverless public transport systems functioning for many years now with autonomous metro and rail systems across the world. It is obviously a much easier problem to solve due to its constraints. What is interesting to me is that we have completely altered our transport networks to fit the new paradigm of cars +100 years ago, widening roads, asphalting roads, building motorways, parking lots, etc. But somehow anything that comes after must be backwards compatible with this 1950's US Detroit vision of the car centric world.
- dathinab 3y ago
  > to fit the new paradigm of cars 1. because they brought major improvements to most peoples everyday live, much more then self driving will 2. it fit's the wide landscape of the us perfectly 2. it was pushed (lobbied) by much much more money then any of the self driving car or public transportation movements today (not just Oil and Car industry but also e.g. military for Tanks) 3. it fit the American dream perfectly, everyone can go everywhere, by themself, everyone gets their own house (which in turn is often noticeable far away from city centers so a car is needed) etc. 4. it aligned with a society which moved more from compacter communities to wide spread individualism 5. the US was growing a lot, this meant a lot of potential for changes 7. it aligned with (also in EU) very wide views about what a good future would be and how to get there, e.g. EU cities which grew a ton around 1950 often have (or had) similar problems 8. people where not dependent on walking, switching to cars was viable 9. it was a powerful tool to shape society in many ways, including for suppressing successful minorities by intentionally routing highways right through the middle of them Today the US isn't growing like that anymore nor can people at all in anyway agree anymore in which direction it should be heading wrt. urban planing. A lot of the grate ideas and shows of wealth and prosperity of the 50th have turned into liabilities. People are so dependent on being able to use cars that it has become a liability for the US where they need to make sure the huge majority of their population can at least somehow somewhat afford a car and gasoline for it, not doing so it not an option. But this leads to a chicken egg problem where for solving some problem you need to change how cars a treated but for changing that you need to first fix the problem. So the only option is to slowly do many small changes but at the same time this makes it much easier for Oil and Car lobbies to hinder the most essential changes.
- spookie 3y ago
  The constraints on autonomous public transport systems make them viable. You create a safer system that way. Additionally, you prevent unnecessary work getting multiple vehicles to the same location roughly at the same timeframe. I understand people want a faster solution! But mixing autonomous vehicles with human drivers isn't the way. Moreover, these companies commit statistical fallacies discussing safety. Human drivers have driven more, as the article suggests, and in a myriad of environments. Many variables are at play, and it's disingenuous to compare this way.
thfuran 3y ago
>why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. That doesn't create enough value for shareholders.
n2d4 3y ago
As a European, this seems like an impossible feat at this point. It has been tried, but the cities have evolved in a way where this is just unfeasible. EU cities have mostly been built to be dense around train & bus stations. US cities (besides NY) are extremely large, flat, and spread out. Even if you had public transportation, it would be practically impossible to get from A to B because there are no hotspots besides the downtown/city center. The concept of a "car city" is real. It's a vicious cycle that the US entered at some point, and besides rebuilding the cities entirely there's not much hope for public transport.
- komali2 3y ago
  Aren't there examples of European cities that "converted?" Amsterdam at least somewhat comes to mind: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
  - n2d4 3y ago
    According to the article, Amsterdam was still built with bicycles in mind: > At the start of the 20th century, bikes far outnumbered cars in Dutch cities and the bicycle was considered a respectable mode of transport for men and women. But when the Dutch economy began to boom in the post-war era, more and more people were able to afford cars Amsterdam also has 50% higher population density than Los Angeles, despite housing much fewer people.
    - komali2 3y ago
      Well fair enough, but I really don't think Americans should throw their hands up in the air and say "we just can't do it." This is the country that landed a man on the moon after all, it should be a solvable problem. Maybe the Europeans can't help with their own experience, but the American solution of "just add another lane" is self-evidently unsustainable. Something new is needed.
      - 3y ago
mnky9800n 3y ago
But then there would be slightly less money for guns and old people's free healthcare and monthly checks.
gghffguhvc 3y ago
I use Waymos in SF. For every Waymo trip I do maybe 8 e-bike trips and 20 walking commutes. I’ve taken Waymos to BART stations. Waymo has just replaced Uber for trips in SF for me. It would be nice if the city added more BART coverage but it seems unlikely one will ever be added within 10min walk of my house. There is already one 10min e-bike ride, but I’m not comfortable locking my e-bike there. To bus to the BART station is 10min walk + 3min wait avg then 10min on bus. Uber/Lyft/Waymo will always be part of my commuting solution for where I live. I just happen to find Waymo the more pleasant experience.
cipheredStones 3y ago
The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me. I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying. Yeah, it would be great if we all had amazing public transit instead of self-driving cars. But self-driving cars are making big advances, and transit isn't. In ten or twenty years, self-driving cars might be everywhere, and transit will probably be roughly as bad as it is today. That's why people are excited about one and not the other.
- Swenrekcah 3y ago
  It is because one of the go-to talking points for postponing and diffusing support for better transit is the promise of self driving cars that will somehow solve everything. It doesn’t make sense because the traffic jam problem with cars comes not from human drivers but the physics of the car itself, but it is a persistent talking point nevertheless.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    No it’s not a go-to talking point. Better transit has been deprioritized even when self driving was a complete fantasy.
    - wffurr 3y ago
      I have seen plenty of examples of urban planners talking about The Future of Transport as if self driving cars will take over any day now. Meanwhile the actual future of transport, absent public investment in transit systems, is electric micromobility devices.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    I don't think this is true at all. There are at least 5 talking points that are much more common and frankly more persuasive than the promise of self driving cars. 1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion. 2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in confined space with other people, and a variety of cultural factors make that more unpleasant than it is in other countries. There is no culture of shame here so people on public transit are commonly extremely annoying and there's no law enforcement in many large cities so you just have to deal with it. 3. Most americans live in suburbia where robust public transit just isn't possible. It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway. 4. We already have all the road infrustrure needed for transportation 5. Even in the best of circumstances public transit is more of a hassle than just driving directly from point a to point b
jstummbillig 3y ago
I am currently sitting in a European train that was a replacement for another train that had, at point of replacement, a delay of 30 minutes on a 55 minute trip. Since, well, everything could be much better and it's still fairly unclear who makes substantial progress on one of these problems, I am fairly happy to let various playbooks play out and see where progress can be made.
- tetris11 3y ago
  Rheinland? If so, they're expanding that line. Its a temporary problem?
- sersi 3y ago
  Germany? I don't think Germany is a good example of a working public transport infrastructure. Trains being actually on time is a cause worthy of celebration over there. The last time I took a train there, my train was so late that the next train on the same route (scheduled for 1 hour after) arrived first. Normally since it was not my train I wasn't allowed to board according to the announcement on PA. I played the confused foreigner card and boarded...
cbsmith 3y ago
Most public transit isn't driverless, and that's actually one of it's key negatives. Perhaps think about it this way: driverless cars are effectively driverless buses sized for the flexibility and efficiencies that come with not needing a driver.
lynx23 3y ago
Even metro is going for driverless in the not so distant future. In Vienna, the first driverless metro is about to go online in roughly 2 years IIRC.
omgJustTest 3y ago
As you point out there are solutions to the problem publicly promoted. I have always understood this double think in two ways: 1. The problem needs to make sense to the people who are working on the tech and people who might buy the tech, but it only needs to be and is preferable to be only adjacent to the real value proposition of the tech. This provides opportunities to incrementally capitalize (“businesses don’t make products they make money”) without providing too much value for “too little” money. 2. The “I want x” vs “I need x” is a chasm easily bridged by “this is entertaining to me”. Life is small experiences summed together, providing a blank canvas on which people can extrapolate is engaging but mostly wasted time except for a small number of people who can actually change the direction of the tech. It’s fun for people to dream.
- _lex 3y ago
  Hey, I want to get in contact with you - you're thinking the way I like folks in my company to think, and I want to hire you or do a deal with you. Check my profile and reach out.
pembrook 3y ago
You do realize that Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) as the US right? That alone explains literally every difference between Europe and America, in everything from public transportation down to socialist political leaning. Yes, as an engineer, it is absolutely more “efficient” if everyone lived in small government subsidized boxes, in centrally planned cities, taking centrally planned transport to only the places you’ve decided they should go. However, central planning and praying at the god of efficiency has its downsides. Namely a total lack of innovation or people having children. It turns out having 2 crying babies in your tiny 2 bedroom apartment and taking 2 trains and a bus to the pediatrician kind of sucks.
- watwut 3y ago
  America has huge spaces with basically no population at all and then very populated places.
  - matwood 3y ago
    And then huge space between the two extremes that is not easily serviced. It's this space (sprawl/suburbs/low density housing/commercial) that many people live and need to commute from.
caskstrength 3y ago
Maker of driverless cars (Waymo) obviously would promote their product. What is surprising to you about this? If you are talking about US users of HN who upvote such news I would venture I guess that they know that any new public transportation that could be built in California would have following deal-breakers for them: 1. It will (maybe) start operation in 10-20 years, long after they have sold they RSUs and moved to another state. 2. Will be huge money sink, potentially leading to tax increases. 3. Even if they live in alternative fairy tale timeline where is is built on time and on budget (and connects actual places where SDEs live, not Bakersfield!) they still won't use it because it would be full of homeless people and thieves snatching their latest iPhones and running away. Saying that last part out loud in Cali would just get you attacked as privileged rich SDE who is antihomeless Trump-supporting Rand-reading nazi or something. PS I also live in a place with good public transport and have never owned a car.
dathinab 3y ago
because due to multiple decades of bad lobbying seriously messing up regulations related to cars and trains in such a manifold multi layered an sometimes well hidden ways that it's basically impossible to build proper public transportation in many (not all) areas of the US this lead to a situation where a lot of well meant public transport projects had very underwhelming results worse if how in many areas trains just don't integrate well with the surrounding in the US. For public transportation to be usable it needs to be reachable. This means reliable and save walkways and/or bicycle ways to the next bus/train station (and having the schedule of trains and busses synced up even if they are from different providers). It also means you shouldn't have a massive parking lot directly in the front of the train station (don't mean there can't be a parking lot, just not in front) and similar Another problem is the approach to housing the US has, for public transportation to work well (especially wrt. cost) you need to have reasonable compact housing. For example in many EU citices where public transportation is the main transport factors the main used housing unit is a apartment block often something like 2-4 apartments per floor and 3-5 floors where even in the more rural close by city areas houses often have 2 or 3 apartments or if not are in general much smaller then housing in the US (but in many rural areas in the EU cars are the main transport mean, often followed by bicycles for "short trips to "close by" neighbors, restaurants etc.). If you combine that with the fact or how convenient privileged cars are in the US it really strongly favors self driving cars in many places (except some of the quite compact city centers, where cars of any form are a curse and self driving cars won't fix that).
konschubert 3y ago
> I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to. Is this place completely car free? Because otherwise, replacing the remaining cars with self-driving cars would have significant benefits: * Less space needed for parking. * Pedestrians and cyclists can move safely because cars follow the traffic rules. * Less cost for police, first responders and medical care because of fewer traffic accidents. If my city replaced all human-driven cars with self-driving cars today, I would actually cycle and walk more. Because I would feel safer to do so. And I am surely not the only one.
konschubert 3y ago
As a matter of fact, even places with good public transport, even here in perfect Europe, still have plenty of dangerous, human-driven cars.
kortilla 3y ago
Because it doesn’t work unless you burn down 75% of the homes and layout the cities all over again to be packed in like Europe/Asia in a public transit friendly manner.
arnaudsm 3y ago
In most cities in the US it's already too late. Urban sprawling and single-family-zoning lack the density for any public transport. Technology won't be enough, this is a political problem.
lostlastacc 3y ago
Due to automobile lobbying last century, the American city is very car dependent. At this point, creating good public transport in places with giant urban sprawl seems pretty much impossible without redesigning full cities.. Also Insane amount of money interested keeping it car-focused, which driverless cars fit in to. This does not explain why there is no good trains in highly populated corridors like Quebec City–Windsor Corridor tho.
lucasyvas 3y ago
I agree that driverless cars are very stupid technology compared to an investment in public transport. All the money wasted on this ridiculous idea is staggering. They could have plopped more tubes on rails that require nowhere close to this level of software and hardware difficulty and decongested roads at the same time. The invention of the personal automobile was largely a mistake and this just continues to double down. We should be moving away from cities designed for cars, not further toward it.
danielmarkbruce 3y ago
Because cars are extremely convenient. Even the cities with great public transport are full of cars. There is a reason.
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
Because it’s fucking gross and you get stabbed on it.
smugglerFlynn 3y ago
Not trying to be devil's advocate, but to solve public transportation you need regulations and organisations that would consolidate and refactor the existing system(s). Driverless cars can kinda evolve independently, with much less regulations introduced. At this point you can sit back and wait for driverless cars to improve without doing anything extra (public and private companies will continue doing all the work). You cannot sit back and expect public transport to fix itself - investments are needed, political push is required, risks need to be taken. Another big thing is demand for properly functioning public transportation - is it really there for US? No demand usually means no political effort or even attention invested into changing things.
lost_tourist 3y ago
Because we prefer the freedom of cars. I don't like to have to spend 3x as much time on a bus I would hopping in a car and getting to my destination while also dealing with weather concerns as well. It's fine if you like public transportation, please continue to vote and advocate for that, but don't expect the rest of us to have the same position as you.
montag 3y ago
For better or worse, Americans love cars. (Happy for you, though.)

dagw 3y ago

I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity As do I, but if driverless taxis at even close to the price of public transport became a thing, I would never take a bus ever again.

dathinab 3y ago
but if you live in an area with a nicely sustainable population density and there are no subventions (e.g. for cars/roads) involved this seems quite impossible to ever be the case Which means it's probably will be the case for the US as most of the us is either has a less sustainable, too low (e.g. "typical" US metro area, and well the endless rural areas(1)) or too high (e.g. city center) density. (1): Through very rural areas might not be substainable for any self driving car service either, so people there will most most likely still have their own car. And for reasons of serviceability much more likely a non self driving car.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

I love public transport, however what driverless enable is very different: point-to-point personal transportation is something buses cannot achieve yet.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago

For completion. You actually have real driverless public transport systems functioning for many years now with autonomous metro and rail systems across the world. It is obviously a much easier problem to solve due to its constraints. What is interesting to me is that we have completely altered our transport networks to fit the new paradigm of cars +100 years ago, widening roads, asphalting roads, building motorways, parking lots, etc. But somehow anything that comes after must be backwards compatible with this 1950's US Detroit vision of the car centric world.

dathinab 3y ago
> to fit the new paradigm of cars 1. because they brought major improvements to most peoples everyday live, much more then self driving will 2. it fit's the wide landscape of the us perfectly 2. it was pushed (lobbied) by much much more money then any of the self driving car or public transportation movements today (not just Oil and Car industry but also e.g. military for Tanks) 3. it fit the American dream perfectly, everyone can go everywhere, by themself, everyone gets their own house (which in turn is often noticeable far away from city centers so a car is needed) etc. 4. it aligned with a society which moved more from compacter communities to wide spread individualism 5. the US was growing a lot, this meant a lot of potential for changes 7. it aligned with (also in EU) very wide views about what a good future would be and how to get there, e.g. EU cities which grew a ton around 1950 often have (or had) similar problems 8. people where not dependent on walking, switching to cars was viable 9. it was a powerful tool to shape society in many ways, including for suppressing successful minorities by intentionally routing highways right through the middle of them Today the US isn't growing like that anymore nor can people at all in anyway agree anymore in which direction it should be heading wrt. urban planing. A lot of the grate ideas and shows of wealth and prosperity of the 50th have turned into liabilities. People are so dependent on being able to use cars that it has become a liability for the US where they need to make sure the huge majority of their population can at least somehow somewhat afford a car and gasoline for it, not doing so it not an option. But this leads to a chicken egg problem where for solving some problem you need to change how cars a treated but for changing that you need to first fix the problem. So the only option is to slowly do many small changes but at the same time this makes it much easier for Oil and Car lobbies to hinder the most essential changes.
spookie 3y ago
The constraints on autonomous public transport systems make them viable. You create a safer system that way. Additionally, you prevent unnecessary work getting multiple vehicles to the same location roughly at the same timeframe. I understand people want a faster solution! But mixing autonomous vehicles with human drivers isn't the way. Moreover, these companies commit statistical fallacies discussing safety. Human drivers have driven more, as the article suggests, and in a myriad of environments. Many variables are at play, and it's disingenuous to compare this way.

thfuran 3y ago

>why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. That doesn't create enough value for shareholders.

n2d4 3y ago

As a European, this seems like an impossible feat at this point. It has been tried, but the cities have evolved in a way where this is just unfeasible. EU cities have mostly been built to be dense around train & bus stations. US cities (besides NY) are extremely large, flat, and spread out. Even if you had public transportation, it would be practically impossible to get from A to B because there are no hotspots besides the downtown/city center. The concept of a "car city" is real. It's a vicious cycle that the US entered at some point, and besides rebuilding the cities entirely there's not much hope for public transport.

komali2 3y ago
Aren't there examples of European cities that "converted?" Amsterdam at least somewhat comes to mind: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
- n2d4 3y ago
  According to the article, Amsterdam was still built with bicycles in mind: > At the start of the 20th century, bikes far outnumbered cars in Dutch cities and the bicycle was considered a respectable mode of transport for men and women. But when the Dutch economy began to boom in the post-war era, more and more people were able to afford cars Amsterdam also has 50% higher population density than Los Angeles, despite housing much fewer people.
  - komali2 3y ago
    Well fair enough, but I really don't think Americans should throw their hands up in the air and say "we just can't do it." This is the country that landed a man on the moon after all, it should be a solvable problem. Maybe the Europeans can't help with their own experience, but the American solution of "just add another lane" is self-evidently unsustainable. Something new is needed.
    - 3y ago

mnky9800n 3y ago

But then there would be slightly less money for guns and old people's free healthcare and monthly checks.

gghffguhvc 3y ago

I use Waymos in SF. For every Waymo trip I do maybe 8 e-bike trips and 20 walking commutes. I’ve taken Waymos to BART stations. Waymo has just replaced Uber for trips in SF for me. It would be nice if the city added more BART coverage but it seems unlikely one will ever be added within 10min walk of my house. There is already one 10min e-bike ride, but I’m not comfortable locking my e-bike there. To bus to the BART station is 10min walk + 3min wait avg then 10min on bus. Uber/Lyft/Waymo will always be part of my commuting solution for where I live. I just happen to find Waymo the more pleasant experience.

cipheredStones 3y ago

The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me. I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying. Yeah, it would be great if we all had amazing public transit instead of self-driving cars. But self-driving cars are making big advances, and transit isn't. In ten or twenty years, self-driving cars might be everywhere, and transit will probably be roughly as bad as it is today. That's why people are excited about one and not the other.

Swenrekcah 3y ago
It is because one of the go-to talking points for postponing and diffusing support for better transit is the promise of self driving cars that will somehow solve everything. It doesn’t make sense because the traffic jam problem with cars comes not from human drivers but the physics of the car itself, but it is a persistent talking point nevertheless.
- kortilla 3y ago
  No it’s not a go-to talking point. Better transit has been deprioritized even when self driving was a complete fantasy.
  - wffurr 3y ago
    I have seen plenty of examples of urban planners talking about The Future of Transport as if self driving cars will take over any day now. Meanwhile the actual future of transport, absent public investment in transit systems, is electric micromobility devices.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  I don't think this is true at all. There are at least 5 talking points that are much more common and frankly more persuasive than the promise of self driving cars. 1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion. 2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in confined space with other people, and a variety of cultural factors make that more unpleasant than it is in other countries. There is no culture of shame here so people on public transit are commonly extremely annoying and there's no law enforcement in many large cities so you just have to deal with it. 3. Most americans live in suburbia where robust public transit just isn't possible. It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway. 4. We already have all the road infrustrure needed for transportation 5. Even in the best of circumstances public transit is more of a hassle than just driving directly from point a to point b

jstummbillig 3y ago

I am currently sitting in a European train that was a replacement for another train that had, at point of replacement, a delay of 30 minutes on a 55 minute trip. Since, well, everything could be much better and it's still fairly unclear who makes substantial progress on one of these problems, I am fairly happy to let various playbooks play out and see where progress can be made.

tetris11 3y ago
Rheinland? If so, they're expanding that line. Its a temporary problem?
sersi 3y ago
Germany? I don't think Germany is a good example of a working public transport infrastructure. Trains being actually on time is a cause worthy of celebration over there. The last time I took a train there, my train was so late that the next train on the same route (scheduled for 1 hour after) arrived first. Normally since it was not my train I wasn't allowed to board according to the announcement on PA. I played the confused foreigner card and boarded...

cbsmith 3y ago

Most public transit isn't driverless, and that's actually one of it's key negatives. Perhaps think about it this way: driverless cars are effectively driverless buses sized for the flexibility and efficiencies that come with not needing a driver.

lynx23 3y ago

Even metro is going for driverless in the not so distant future. In Vienna, the first driverless metro is about to go online in roughly 2 years IIRC.

omgJustTest 3y ago

As you point out there are solutions to the problem publicly promoted. I have always understood this double think in two ways: 1. The problem needs to make sense to the people who are working on the tech and people who might buy the tech, but it only needs to be and is preferable to be only adjacent to the real value proposition of the tech. This provides opportunities to incrementally capitalize (“businesses don’t make products they make money”) without providing too much value for “too little” money. 2. The “I want x” vs “I need x” is a chasm easily bridged by “this is entertaining to me”. Life is small experiences summed together, providing a blank canvas on which people can extrapolate is engaging but mostly wasted time except for a small number of people who can actually change the direction of the tech. It’s fun for people to dream.

_lex 3y ago
Hey, I want to get in contact with you - you're thinking the way I like folks in my company to think, and I want to hire you or do a deal with you. Check my profile and reach out.

pembrook 3y ago

You do realize that Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) as the US right? That alone explains literally every difference between Europe and America, in everything from public transportation down to socialist political leaning. Yes, as an engineer, it is absolutely more “efficient” if everyone lived in small government subsidized boxes, in centrally planned cities, taking centrally planned transport to only the places you’ve decided they should go. However, central planning and praying at the god of efficiency has its downsides. Namely a total lack of innovation or people having children. It turns out having 2 crying babies in your tiny 2 bedroom apartment and taking 2 trains and a bus to the pediatrician kind of sucks.

watwut 3y ago
America has huge spaces with basically no population at all and then very populated places.
- matwood 3y ago
  And then huge space between the two extremes that is not easily serviced. It's this space (sprawl/suburbs/low density housing/commercial) that many people live and need to commute from.

caskstrength 3y ago

Maker of driverless cars (Waymo) obviously would promote their product. What is surprising to you about this? If you are talking about US users of HN who upvote such news I would venture I guess that they know that any new public transportation that could be built in California would have following deal-breakers for them: 1. It will (maybe) start operation in 10-20 years, long after they have sold they RSUs and moved to another state. 2. Will be huge money sink, potentially leading to tax increases. 3. Even if they live in alternative fairy tale timeline where is is built on time and on budget (and connects actual places where SDEs live, not Bakersfield!) they still won't use it because it would be full of homeless people and thieves snatching their latest iPhones and running away. Saying that last part out loud in Cali would just get you attacked as privileged rich SDE who is antihomeless Trump-supporting Rand-reading nazi or something. PS I also live in a place with good public transport and have never owned a car.

dathinab 3y ago

because due to multiple decades of bad lobbying seriously messing up regulations related to cars and trains in such a manifold multi layered an sometimes well hidden ways that it's basically impossible to build proper public transportation in many (not all) areas of the US this lead to a situation where a lot of well meant public transport projects had very underwhelming results worse if how in many areas trains just don't integrate well with the surrounding in the US. For public transportation to be usable it needs to be reachable. This means reliable and save walkways and/or bicycle ways to the next bus/train station (and having the schedule of trains and busses synced up even if they are from different providers). It also means you shouldn't have a massive parking lot directly in the front of the train station (don't mean there can't be a parking lot, just not in front) and similar Another problem is the approach to housing the US has, for public transportation to work well (especially wrt. cost) you need to have reasonable compact housing. For example in many EU citices where public transportation is the main transport factors the main used housing unit is a apartment block often something like 2-4 apartments per floor and 3-5 floors where even in the more rural close by city areas houses often have 2 or 3 apartments or if not are in general much smaller then housing in the US (but in many rural areas in the EU cars are the main transport mean, often followed by bicycles for "short trips to "close by" neighbors, restaurants etc.). If you combine that with the fact or how convenient privileged cars are in the US it really strongly favors self driving cars in many places (except some of the quite compact city centers, where cars of any form are a curse and self driving cars won't fix that).

konschubert 3y ago

> I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to. Is this place completely car free? Because otherwise, replacing the remaining cars with self-driving cars would have significant benefits: * Less space needed for parking. * Pedestrians and cyclists can move safely because cars follow the traffic rules. * Less cost for police, first responders and medical care because of fewer traffic accidents. If my city replaced all human-driven cars with self-driving cars today, I would actually cycle and walk more. Because I would feel safer to do so. And I am surely not the only one.

konschubert 3y ago

As a matter of fact, even places with good public transport, even here in perfect Europe, still have plenty of dangerous, human-driven cars.

kortilla 3y ago

Because it doesn’t work unless you burn down 75% of the homes and layout the cities all over again to be packed in like Europe/Asia in a public transit friendly manner.

arnaudsm 3y ago

In most cities in the US it's already too late. Urban sprawling and single-family-zoning lack the density for any public transport. Technology won't be enough, this is a political problem.

lostlastacc 3y ago

Due to automobile lobbying last century, the American city is very car dependent. At this point, creating good public transport in places with giant urban sprawl seems pretty much impossible without redesigning full cities.. Also Insane amount of money interested keeping it car-focused, which driverless cars fit in to. This does not explain why there is no good trains in highly populated corridors like Quebec City–Windsor Corridor tho.

lucasyvas 3y ago

I agree that driverless cars are very stupid technology compared to an investment in public transport. All the money wasted on this ridiculous idea is staggering. They could have plopped more tubes on rails that require nowhere close to this level of software and hardware difficulty and decongested roads at the same time. The invention of the personal automobile was largely a mistake and this just continues to double down. We should be moving away from cities designed for cars, not further toward it.

danielmarkbruce 3y ago

Because cars are extremely convenient. Even the cities with great public transport are full of cars. There is a reason.

MagicMoonlight 3y ago

Because it’s fucking gross and you get stabbed on it.

smugglerFlynn 3y ago

Not trying to be devil's advocate, but to solve public transportation you need regulations and organisations that would consolidate and refactor the existing system(s). Driverless cars can kinda evolve independently, with much less regulations introduced. At this point you can sit back and wait for driverless cars to improve without doing anything extra (public and private companies will continue doing all the work). You cannot sit back and expect public transport to fix itself - investments are needed, political push is required, risks need to be taken. Another big thing is demand for properly functioning public transportation - is it really there for US? No demand usually means no political effort or even attention invested into changing things.

lost_tourist 3y ago

Because we prefer the freedom of cars. I don't like to have to spend 3x as much time on a bus I would hopping in a car and getting to my destination while also dealing with weather concerns as well. It's fine if you like public transportation, please continue to vote and advocate for that, but don't expect the rest of us to have the same position as you.

montag 3y ago

For better or worse, Americans love cars. (Happy for you, though.)