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Have you spent a lot of time riding urban busses in the US? Most of them are almost entirely empty. There are some lines, particularly commuter lines, where th

Have you spent a lot of time riding urban busses in the US? Most of them are almost entirely empty. There are some lines, particularly commuter lines, where that isn’t the case. But by and large they are incredible NOT dense. They are also not convenient. They don’t provide direct point to point transit. They follow a schedule and require transfers to get to any location not on the local route. As a practical matter they’re generally not compelling for most people outside of specific uses like commutes. Even in NYC for the decade I was there I almost never used a bus because the experience was so unpleasant, I stuck to the subway and Uber. So, without some sort of draconian mandate requiring divestiture of cars, autonomous cooperative cars are a substantial advantage. I’d note you also don’t need autonomous cooperative cars to have as much seating. A single person autonomous vehicle could be a single person sized car and it wouldn’t feel like a death trap because accidents would be effectively nonexistent. Traffic density could be bumper to bumper with high rates of flow. In that sense you could actually jam many more people into the space of a current (largely or completely) empty bus.

amluto 2y ago
For urban busses to work well you need a culture where even people who can afford cars think the bus is reasonable. And you need a frequent bus schedule and either efficient enough busses or bad enough traffic that busses are competitive. Boston mostly checks these boxes.
YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
>> Have you spent a lot of time riding urban busses in the US? Most of them are almost entirely empty. There are some lines, particularly commuter lines, where that isn’t the case. But by and large they are incredible NOT dense. When public transport is overcrowded it's unattractive- nobody takes the bus anymore, it's too crowded. When it's not overcrowded it's inefficient. Catch 22! The US can't have public transit. Everyone else in the developed world seems to manage just fine but the US is special. Here's an idea: use all those big server farms and AI talent to optimise public transport. If there's too many passengers for a route, add more buses. If there aren't enough, reroute the buses where there's more demand. Maybe get those leapfrogging self-driving AIs to drive buses, instead of personal cars, and get the buses to flock instead of cars? There are social solutions, institutional solutions and technological solutions to the problems in mass transit. A nation that considers itself a leader in science and technology should be able to make a dent there. Companies who advertise their self-driving AI as beneficial for its safety and efficiency could make more than a dent if they used their considerable means to attack a real problem. But - noooo! It's gotta be self-driving cars. More cars! More cars to solve the problems caused by too many cars in the first place.
- tim333 2y ago
  Uber pool provided something a bit like that.
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  Ok - but if you made the buses much smaller and individually routable you would end up with exactly what I’m discussing. The idea that buses must be enormous vehicles belching along the roadway packed with people is an anachronism. A much smaller vehicle with a smaller engine and less mass overall designed to transport a small number of people directly to their destination in a large collaborative fleet of autonomous vehicles would be more efficient in literally every dimension. The obsession with the form factor of the bus as being somehow ideologically ideal weirds me out. Here’s a middle ground - in US cities where buses are largely empty but are still enormous behemoths, why not reduce them down to vans and do more dispatched transport? This is specifically your idea but is more achievable because the issue with rerouting buses and sending more out etc is the cost per bus of the typical form factor bus costs between $500k-$1m. You could buy a fleet of 10 EV vans for a single bus. The second greatest cost for operations is the driver. Autonomous cooperative vans lets you scale that to 15-20 vans for the cost of one bus. If you move from vans to smaller 2-3 person passenger vehicles rather than a larger van you can increase that to 30-40. Now you’re transporting 60-120 people point to point with the same cost structure as an empty bus taking a few people on long circuitous routes belching noise and air pollution. The problem people seem to have with this idea is that it’s not a bus, which, again, appears to be more ideologically driven than rational. If you took that bus, carved every row of seats into its own autonomous EV, you would end up with a more efficient better utilized infrastructure that would entirely obviate the need for private car ownership.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    >> The idea that buses must be enormous vehicles belching along the roadway packed with people is an anachronism. Oh, absolutely. I've been taking buses (and trains, and trams, and trolleys) all my life and I've never been on an enormous vehicle belching along the roadway packed with people. Where does that imagery come from? Mad Max? Where I live now, in the UK, buses look like this: https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/buses/ https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/buses/ You can see the people beside the bus for size comparison. I don't have the exact numbers but the typical double-decker takes about 5/3s the space on the road that an SUV takes and a substantial fraction are electric or hybrid, so no, I don't think your maths pan out. Edit: btw a single-decker EV bus will set you back ~£340,000. Hybrids and hydrogen cell ones are more expensive, around £500k (around $590k). Dirty petrol and diesel double deckers cost £20-30k but those are no longer allowed according to the mayor's green policy: https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/how-much-london-bus-actually-22355188 https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/how-much-london-b... What bus is it that costs $1 million?

amluto 2y ago

For urban busses to work well you need a culture where even people who can afford cars think the bus is reasonable. And you need a frequent bus schedule and either efficient enough busses or bad enough traffic that busses are competitive. Boston mostly checks these boxes.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago

>> Have you spent a lot of time riding urban busses in the US? Most of them are almost entirely empty. There are some lines, particularly commuter lines, where that isn’t the case. But by and large they are incredible NOT dense. When public transport is overcrowded it's unattractive- nobody takes the bus anymore, it's too crowded. When it's not overcrowded it's inefficient. Catch 22! The US can't have public transit. Everyone else in the developed world seems to manage just fine but the US is special. Here's an idea: use all those big server farms and AI talent to optimise public transport. If there's too many passengers for a route, add more buses. If there aren't enough, reroute the buses where there's more demand. Maybe get those leapfrogging self-driving AIs to drive buses, instead of personal cars, and get the buses to flock instead of cars? There are social solutions, institutional solutions and technological solutions to the problems in mass transit. A nation that considers itself a leader in science and technology should be able to make a dent there. Companies who advertise their self-driving AI as beneficial for its safety and efficiency could make more than a dent if they used their considerable means to attack a real problem. But - noooo! It's gotta be self-driving cars. More cars! More cars to solve the problems caused by too many cars in the first place.

tim333 2y ago
Uber pool provided something a bit like that.
fnordpiglet 2y ago
Ok - but if you made the buses much smaller and individually routable you would end up with exactly what I’m discussing. The idea that buses must be enormous vehicles belching along the roadway packed with people is an anachronism. A much smaller vehicle with a smaller engine and less mass overall designed to transport a small number of people directly to their destination in a large collaborative fleet of autonomous vehicles would be more efficient in literally every dimension. The obsession with the form factor of the bus as being somehow ideologically ideal weirds me out. Here’s a middle ground - in US cities where buses are largely empty but are still enormous behemoths, why not reduce them down to vans and do more dispatched transport? This is specifically your idea but is more achievable because the issue with rerouting buses and sending more out etc is the cost per bus of the typical form factor bus costs between $500k-$1m. You could buy a fleet of 10 EV vans for a single bus. The second greatest cost for operations is the driver. Autonomous cooperative vans lets you scale that to 15-20 vans for the cost of one bus. If you move from vans to smaller 2-3 person passenger vehicles rather than a larger van you can increase that to 30-40. Now you’re transporting 60-120 people point to point with the same cost structure as an empty bus taking a few people on long circuitous routes belching noise and air pollution. The problem people seem to have with this idea is that it’s not a bus, which, again, appears to be more ideologically driven than rational. If you took that bus, carved every row of seats into its own autonomous EV, you would end up with a more efficient better utilized infrastructure that would entirely obviate the need for private car ownership.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  >> The idea that buses must be enormous vehicles belching along the roadway packed with people is an anachronism. Oh, absolutely. I've been taking buses (and trains, and trams, and trolleys) all my life and I've never been on an enormous vehicle belching along the roadway packed with people. Where does that imagery come from? Mad Max? Where I live now, in the UK, buses look like this: https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/buses/ https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/buses/ You can see the people beside the bus for size comparison. I don't have the exact numbers but the typical double-decker takes about 5/3s the space on the road that an SUV takes and a substantial fraction are electric or hybrid, so no, I don't think your maths pan out. Edit: btw a single-decker EV bus will set you back ~£340,000. Hybrids and hydrogen cell ones are more expensive, around £500k (around $590k). Dirty petrol and diesel double deckers cost £20-30k but those are no longer allowed according to the mayor's green policy: https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/how-much-london-bus-actually-22355188 https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/how-much-london-b... What bus is it that costs $1 million?