4 ms·

>> 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

>> 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?
  - fnordpiglet 2y ago
    An example: Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette reported two of the four e-buses Colorado Springs' Mountain Metropolitan Transit acquired in 2021 are not running. They cost $1.2 million a piece, mostly paid for by government grants. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/electric-buses-sitting-unused-cities-across-the-us https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/electric-buses-sitting-... A London double decker is 30 feet long https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-length-of-a-London-double-decker-bus https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-length-of-a-London... (I had better PDF specs but was loading slowly) A suburban - a massive SUV is 18ft long. This is not a normal SUV though. Where I am, in seattle, buses are from 60 ft to 30 ft long. This is the same as a London bus, but the double length buses are pretty common too. https://metro.kingcounty.gov/advisory-groups/service-guidelines-task-force/pdf/notebook/10-notebook-metro-background.pdf https://metro.kingcounty.gov/advisory-groups/service-guideli...

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?
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  An example: Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette reported two of the four e-buses Colorado Springs' Mountain Metropolitan Transit acquired in 2021 are not running. They cost $1.2 million a piece, mostly paid for by government grants. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/electric-buses-sitting-unused-cities-across-the-us https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/electric-buses-sitting-... A London double decker is 30 feet long https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-length-of-a-London-double-decker-bus https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-length-of-a-London... (I had better PDF specs but was loading slowly) A suburban - a massive SUV is 18ft long. This is not a normal SUV though. Where I am, in seattle, buses are from 60 ft to 30 ft long. This is the same as a London bus, but the double length buses are pretty common too. https://metro.kingcounty.gov/advisory-groups/service-guidelines-task-force/pdf/notebook/10-notebook-metro-background.pdf https://metro.kingcounty.gov/advisory-groups/service-guideli...