4 ms·

3.5x better at injuries, 10x the capex per vehicle, 100x the operational capex of a normal taxi service. Plus you get to own the vehicles, pay costs for all mai

3.5x better at injuries, 10x the capex per vehicle, 100x the operational capex of a normal taxi service. Plus you get to own the vehicles, pay costs for all maintenance, store them when not in use, carry all liability. We need actual mass transit that works for people, not a roving science experiment on wheels.

VirusNewbie 2y ago
I see buses driving around my city all the time. They're noisy, pollute, take up space, and often have one or two people on them. Why do you think the TCO is less for a bus than for a self driving car? Why would it be more efficient to have mass transit when you don't have extremely high density? Can you share some data?
- jimberlage 2y ago
  He might have meant trains rather than buses when he brought up mass transit. It's rare I've been on a train in a metro area only carrying one or two people.
- iamleppert 2y ago
  If self driving cars were really capital efficient, why hasn't Google replaced their fleet of busses that travel the south bay to SF with their self driving cars? It's not because of anything technical, it's because it doesn't make any financial sense to replace a bus (even one that carries a few people) with a self-driving car. That, and the business unit that actually operates the shuttle busses lives in the real world.
  - creato 2y ago
    Google's buses looked pretty full a lot of the time (a few years ago at least). The economics of those are probably pretty good. That said: I doubt city buses are that bad either. Data is needed for both of these points, speculation is a waste of time.
  - VirusNewbie 2y ago
    >t, why hasn't Google replaced their fleet of busses that travel the south bay to SF They ARE slowly replacing busses with ride share and will probably move to self driving once the city approves it.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    the business unit that actually operates the waymos operate in the real world, and so are subject to real life scaling problems. Assume the self driving cars are capital efficient and could actually make the drive from San Francisco to Mountain view (they legally are allowed to, but Waymo has not unlocked this ability to the general public). yYu still need to manufacture the damn things, and Google isn't a car company. Manufacturing is hard. Tesla making 5,000 Model 3's that fist quarter was considered an impossible accomplishment. Google is reliant on many third parties to produce Waymos. How long do you think is should take them to replace busses assuming those priors? It's gonna take some time. Regardless of the economics of it, they can't just magic up a fleet of Waymos. That production has been planned for and allocated and remember, they don't actually offer rides down the peninsula that the shuttle busses do yet. That said, I can't wait for Waymo technology to mature and be cheap enough for cities to use them on mini buses.
- id00 2y ago
  Maybe your city should invest in better buses, road infrastructure (eg bus lanes) so they not stuck in traffic, and optimize the schedule and then you will see that the public transit is actually a more efficient alternative to self driving taxis
  - VirusNewbie 2y ago
    Can you clarify your argument? Is it that "no, buses are not more efficient, but with enough investment they can be?". Do you have some data to share to show this is true in suburban environments? I live in a very wealthy area, budget is not a problem for the city, the busses are clean and well run. But they're often empty...
  - Turing_Machine 2y ago
    > road infrastructure (eg bus lanes) so they not stuck in traffic Bus lanes aren't going to do anything to help with the real bottleneck in city bus transport: having to stop every couple of blocks to let people on and off.
BenFranklin100 2y ago
I don’t know whether the specifics of your numbers are true or not, but if efficient transit for the masses in urban areas is the goal, self-driving cars have proven they are not the solution. Even with a 100% safety rating, cars don’t scale to denser urban environments such as SF, NYC, Boston, Seattle, etc… For that we need buses, trams, and subways. My preference would be self-driving dedicated bus rapid transit lanes.
- cameldrv 2y ago
  No you don’t. AVs with 2-4 riders provide excellent passenger density and provide way higher quality service than traditional mass transit. Trip times are typically less than half of even a good mass transit system, and it’s a far more relaxed environment. The biggest problem with mass transit is that it is slow, and while you can improve a system to make it faster, there are ultimate necessary limits because the passenger has to walk to a stop, wait for a vehicle, and then wait while the vehicle stops and passengers get on and off, and then walk to their destination. You cannot fix this, it’s inherent to the medium.
  - BenFranklin100 2y ago
    I seem to recall a startup or two working on AV ‘micro-buses’. That is, AV buses that held 4-8 passengers and that would have broader route patterns than traditional buses. Anything ever happen to those? I can see how those could complement traditional mass transit very well.
    - cameldrv 2y ago
      There are a few. Zoox comes to mind in that their vehicle is somewhat bus-like in that it has bus type doors, and somewhat bus like seating and interior (plastic/vinyl, easy to clean), but it only holds 4 passengers. Uber and Lyft already have a similar (with a driver) service that they've rejiggered a few times. I used it a fair bit pre-covid to commute. The price wasn't much more than driving myself, and the speed was good -- usually it was only about 5 minutes slower on a 30-40 minute drive, and I could use the time to catch up on email, read, etc. The same ride on transit would have been about 1.5 hours, or 1 hour if I took a bike on the train instead of using busses or walking for part of the trip. Transit was also a bunch of broken up blocks of time either standing waiting, or sitting on a train or getting on and off/in/out of a station. With the shared ride vehicle, it was just wait a few minutes for pickup and then I had a solid block of time in a fairly comfortable environment. I really think that this is the future of transit. If you have enough usage, you could probably push these vehicles up to 8-10 people and still get reasonable travel times (way better than transit) at transit-competitive costs. People who wanted better speed and more privacy could order smaller vehicles for a higher price. If these were popular it would massively reduce congestion because people would actually want to take them instead of driving themselves.
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
I love it. It’s clean. Quiet. Relaxing. And I don’t have to deal with other people. You couldn’t pay me to take public transportation over a Waymo. What a joke. I can’t wait until this tech makes it to private vehicles.
creato 2y ago
If the technology matures and is mass produced, those costs are going to come way down. You probably don't like single/low occupancy vehicles, and that's fine, I'm not here to convince you otherwise. But this particular argument is nonsense, it applies to every new technology ever.
bonton89 2y ago
If your human bus driver crashes you place all the blame on that guy, fire him and move on with your business. If your AI that is used to drive every vehicle your fleet screws up you're potentially looking at grounding the entire fleet and running an extended PR campaign. At the very least you'll need to stick a human behind the wheel to take the blame when the technology fails like Tesla does. You can't remove humans from the corporation centered blame shifting society because you remove available scapegoats leaving the company without a blame shield. Perhaps they'll hire third world people for lower wages to remotely watch the AI car feed all day and auto-fire them in the event of a crash. This is all still a worse deal than Uber hiring humans to do it all, they outsource all of the maintenance and liability onto some rando that they can ban from the app if they get uppity and then take a cut of the profit in exchange for running a data center and some ads.

VirusNewbie 2y ago

I see buses driving around my city all the time. They're noisy, pollute, take up space, and often have one or two people on them. Why do you think the TCO is less for a bus than for a self driving car? Why would it be more efficient to have mass transit when you don't have extremely high density? Can you share some data?

jimberlage 2y ago
He might have meant trains rather than buses when he brought up mass transit. It's rare I've been on a train in a metro area only carrying one or two people.
iamleppert 2y ago
If self driving cars were really capital efficient, why hasn't Google replaced their fleet of busses that travel the south bay to SF with their self driving cars? It's not because of anything technical, it's because it doesn't make any financial sense to replace a bus (even one that carries a few people) with a self-driving car. That, and the business unit that actually operates the shuttle busses lives in the real world.
- creato 2y ago
  Google's buses looked pretty full a lot of the time (a few years ago at least). The economics of those are probably pretty good. That said: I doubt city buses are that bad either. Data is needed for both of these points, speculation is a waste of time.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  >t, why hasn't Google replaced their fleet of busses that travel the south bay to SF They ARE slowly replacing busses with ride share and will probably move to self driving once the city approves it.
- fragmede 2y ago
  the business unit that actually operates the waymos operate in the real world, and so are subject to real life scaling problems. Assume the self driving cars are capital efficient and could actually make the drive from San Francisco to Mountain view (they legally are allowed to, but Waymo has not unlocked this ability to the general public). yYu still need to manufacture the damn things, and Google isn't a car company. Manufacturing is hard. Tesla making 5,000 Model 3's that fist quarter was considered an impossible accomplishment. Google is reliant on many third parties to produce Waymos. How long do you think is should take them to replace busses assuming those priors? It's gonna take some time. Regardless of the economics of it, they can't just magic up a fleet of Waymos. That production has been planned for and allocated and remember, they don't actually offer rides down the peninsula that the shuttle busses do yet. That said, I can't wait for Waymo technology to mature and be cheap enough for cities to use them on mini buses.
id00 2y ago
Maybe your city should invest in better buses, road infrastructure (eg bus lanes) so they not stuck in traffic, and optimize the schedule and then you will see that the public transit is actually a more efficient alternative to self driving taxis
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  Can you clarify your argument? Is it that "no, buses are not more efficient, but with enough investment they can be?". Do you have some data to share to show this is true in suburban environments? I live in a very wealthy area, budget is not a problem for the city, the busses are clean and well run. But they're often empty...
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  > road infrastructure (eg bus lanes) so they not stuck in traffic Bus lanes aren't going to do anything to help with the real bottleneck in city bus transport: having to stop every couple of blocks to let people on and off.

BenFranklin100 2y ago

I don’t know whether the specifics of your numbers are true or not, but if efficient transit for the masses in urban areas is the goal, self-driving cars have proven they are not the solution. Even with a 100% safety rating, cars don’t scale to denser urban environments such as SF, NYC, Boston, Seattle, etc… For that we need buses, trams, and subways. My preference would be self-driving dedicated bus rapid transit lanes.

cameldrv 2y ago
No you don’t. AVs with 2-4 riders provide excellent passenger density and provide way higher quality service than traditional mass transit. Trip times are typically less than half of even a good mass transit system, and it’s a far more relaxed environment. The biggest problem with mass transit is that it is slow, and while you can improve a system to make it faster, there are ultimate necessary limits because the passenger has to walk to a stop, wait for a vehicle, and then wait while the vehicle stops and passengers get on and off, and then walk to their destination. You cannot fix this, it’s inherent to the medium.
- BenFranklin100 2y ago
  I seem to recall a startup or two working on AV ‘micro-buses’. That is, AV buses that held 4-8 passengers and that would have broader route patterns than traditional buses. Anything ever happen to those? I can see how those could complement traditional mass transit very well.
  - cameldrv 2y ago
    There are a few. Zoox comes to mind in that their vehicle is somewhat bus-like in that it has bus type doors, and somewhat bus like seating and interior (plastic/vinyl, easy to clean), but it only holds 4 passengers. Uber and Lyft already have a similar (with a driver) service that they've rejiggered a few times. I used it a fair bit pre-covid to commute. The price wasn't much more than driving myself, and the speed was good -- usually it was only about 5 minutes slower on a 30-40 minute drive, and I could use the time to catch up on email, read, etc. The same ride on transit would have been about 1.5 hours, or 1 hour if I took a bike on the train instead of using busses or walking for part of the trip. Transit was also a bunch of broken up blocks of time either standing waiting, or sitting on a train or getting on and off/in/out of a station. With the shared ride vehicle, it was just wait a few minutes for pickup and then I had a solid block of time in a fairly comfortable environment. I really think that this is the future of transit. If you have enough usage, you could probably push these vehicles up to 8-10 people and still get reasonable travel times (way better than transit) at transit-competitive costs. People who wanted better speed and more privacy could order smaller vehicles for a higher price. If these were popular it would massively reduce congestion because people would actually want to take them instead of driving themselves.

andrewmcwatters 2y ago

I love it. It’s clean. Quiet. Relaxing. And I don’t have to deal with other people. You couldn’t pay me to take public transportation over a Waymo. What a joke. I can’t wait until this tech makes it to private vehicles.

creato 2y ago

If the technology matures and is mass produced, those costs are going to come way down. You probably don't like single/low occupancy vehicles, and that's fine, I'm not here to convince you otherwise. But this particular argument is nonsense, it applies to every new technology ever.

bonton89 2y ago

If your human bus driver crashes you place all the blame on that guy, fire him and move on with your business. If your AI that is used to drive every vehicle your fleet screws up you're potentially looking at grounding the entire fleet and running an extended PR campaign. At the very least you'll need to stick a human behind the wheel to take the blame when the technology fails like Tesla does. You can't remove humans from the corporation centered blame shifting society because you remove available scapegoats leaving the company without a blame shield. Perhaps they'll hire third world people for lower wages to remotely watch the AI car feed all day and auto-fire them in the event of a crash. This is all still a worse deal than Uber hiring humans to do it all, they outsource all of the maintenance and liability onto some rando that they can ban from the app if they get uppity and then take a cut of the profit in exchange for running a data center and some ads.