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I agree with your take on public transport, but I don't understand your point. Tesla's robotaxis are not trying to replace public transport, they are trying to

I agree with your take on public transport, but I don't understand your point. Tesla's robotaxis are not trying to replace public transport, they are trying to replace taxis, and eventually private cars. Uber made taxis more accessible and it scaled plenty, perhaps Tesla can do the same thing, in principle, with another degree of accessibility and cost-effectiveness. If anything, they may reduce the number of cars on the streets if more of them are shared. I haven't yet formed a strong opinion on the viability of their vision, but that's beside the point. Public transport is the last thing they will replace, and it is to a large degree complementary just like it has been for the last century. Public transport is of course far more efficient if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of immediacy and, well, interacting with the public. For the rest there's the private transport option, with various degrees of who drives and how much you own the car, that's where Tesla is aiming.

zhoujianfu 1y ago
Also, I realized a side effect of a hypothetical world where everybody rode in robotaxis/waymos/even ubers is we’d effectively get congestion pricing everywhere (due to “surge” pricing), and the use of roads would actually fit into regular supply and demand market forces!
- dougSF70 1y ago
  Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. I cant see how congestion can be reduced...the worst congestion happens during rush hour...replacing personal cars with a Waymo will have no effect.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans. That is why parking lots make places un-walkable.
    - josephcsible 1y ago
      > Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans. But that's not what congestion means.
      - mrpippy 1y ago
        If it’s parked on the street, that is taking up a lane that could be carrying traffic. (And in some cities it’s common for parallel street parking to turn into a lane from 4-8 PM or similar)
      - joseda-hg 1y ago
        It's adding indirectly, more space taken by parking lots means that you have to spread further, which begets the need for more cars Less parking spaces > denser enviroments > more walking(Or other more compact forms of transport) > less cars (To an extent) > less congestion The US has multiple (smaller) countries worth of parking space
        josephcsible 1y ago
        I'm immediately suspicious of any chain that links "denser environments" to "less congestion", since everywhere I've ever been, the densest environments have the most congestion.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        joseda-hg 1y ago
        It's a bit like adding extra lanes, to some degree, demand expands to meet capacity (But I mantain that in this case the net effect is possitive) There would be less space to be congested by fewer vehicles, but in this context, less congestion also means fewer people experience the congestion directly (because it also works to disincentivize car usage), but those affected have it the same or worse. I wouldn't take my car to a large city center if I can at all avoid it, which seems to be the common reaction. These people are "transparent" to the congestion—they don't add to it and (mostly) aren't affected by it.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. Presumably they're not just roaming around aimlessly. They're also providing transportation to whoever's sitting inside.
    - dougSF70 1y ago
      Anecdotally, what I observe in SF is empty waymo cars driving around
    - rainsford 1y ago
      Unless every passenger pickup is at the location of the last drop off and the timing is perfect, some portion of robotaxi driving must be empty as the taxi drives to the next pickup or at least goes somewhere to park. And I'm honestly not sure Waymos are smart enough to know where it is and isn't legal to park for some unknown period of time while waiting for the next trip, so that might not even be an option. Contrast this with personal vehicles, which are always transporting at least one person to their destination. It seems essentially impossible that robotaxis could result in less congestion unless people share robotaxis significantly more frequently than they do personal cars or regular taxis.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion Of course it is. Banning street-side parking would double or triple most cities’ navigable road space.
    - doubled112 1y ago
      You can only fit 3 cars across on most side streets near me. You have more space, but does it really create better flow? Many of these side streets and neighbourhoods are designed and modified NOT to flow, because then people would use them to get to work. Would this change that? While I admit I see these more in the ‘burbs, this is becoming more widespread and is no longer exclusive to them.
      - dougSF70 1y ago
        Waymo isn't really the answer to congestion, busses and other public transport solutions are. If Waymo is the answer, what is the question?
        deepvibrations 1y ago
        Q: How can I get to the gym and use the treadmill without having to walk all the way to the bus stop?
    - olyjohn 1y ago
      Its been proven over and over, and there are tons of studies that show that more lanes doesnt help congestion.
      - queenkjuul 1y ago
        Who said they had to be car lanes
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > more lanes doesnt help congestion It does increase throughput. And it’s not relevant to a weighing of reducing ridesharing and increasing lanes—both would induce demand. And as another person said, a single streetside-parked car has made that entire street more dangerous for bikers. Take out streetside parking and you can add lanes for cars, light rail, busses, bikes or even just widen sidewalks and add more trees. Parked cars add to congestion far more uselessly than taxis, ride sharing vehicles or AVs.
detourdog 1y ago
The scaling problem is the Robotaxi implementation details. Waymo is scalable in the way you describe. Tesla’s Robotaxi current restrictions make is what is holding back scalability.
wsatb 1y ago
It has not scaled, it has put more cars on the road causing more traffic and more accidents. [1] It has also over time made this type of travel more expensive once their VC backed subsidies stopped. They essentially destroyed an entire industry to make it less safe, more expensive, and more difficult to attain in some areas. I also think it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation. The federal government is also cutting funding at the same time. [2] [1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/ride-hailing-services-may-be-driving-traffic-deaths https://news.uchicago.edu/story/ride-hailing-services-may-be... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-29/us-mass-transit-funding-crisis-threatens-commuters-travel https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-29/us-mass-t...
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation Anecdote: I wouldn’t be able to take public transit to the airport in San Francisco or New York without the last (EDIT: first) mile being done in a rideshare. The alternative would be calling a private car for the whole journey.
  - dmart 1y ago
    I don’t know what you mean by this, unless there’s a personal reason. LGA has a free shuttle bus from the subway, JFK and EWR have AirTrains connected to the subway, and SFO has a direct BART connection. I use public transit exclusively to get to all of those airports.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      I have a place on 26th & Broadway. If I have a heavy case or a pet or it’s raining, I need a way to get to Penn Station. And I’m incredibly close to multiple subway stations. As for the Bay Area, it’s all suburbs.
Dmitropher 1y ago
Taxis just aren't that highly demanded of a service. It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle. One car owned per adult is very inconvenient to deviate from in a car friendly urban environment, even if robotaxis can be made to have overall cost parity to car ownership. The net result, I think, is that robotaxis can only ever increase the total number of cars and concurrent drivers. Would you disagree? Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis? Or, similarly, for single people to switch from 1 car or no car, just transit, to robotaxis? Robotaxis seem to me to have potential well solve the niches human taxis are bad at: late night safe driving, very long point to point going out of an urban core into a rural area, perhaps even personal cargo shipping, if a robo van could enable you to do furniture shopping without renting a truck. But these are edge cases that compete with private cars pretty intensely. I'd only prefer a late night taxi if I'm drunk. I'd only want a robotaxi to a rural area if I'm an urban living rock climber or hiker, and I don't care to own a car. The total available market is just wildly incompatible with the current and speculated valuation, as far as I see it.
- jt2190 1y ago
  > Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis? Why wouldn’t the cost of car ownership be a factor?
- wodenokoto 1y ago
  > It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle. That’s because you live with scarce and expensive taxi service. I know plenty of people in Dubai who use taxi or uber/Careem for their daily commute and I have done so in periods too.
  - ponector 1y ago
    Cheap taxi could be only if there are cheap cars and cheap (imigrant) labor available.
pjmlp 1y ago
> Uber made taxis more accessible and it scaled plenty, Maybe in US, turns out most of the rest of the world didn't had the same problem, nor the lack of regulations US suffers from. Across African countries we were already calling into taxi like systems via WhatsApp, some European countries had taxi apps, and the US gig economy doesn't work here, so not only is Ûber regulated after a few court cases, it is also integrated with the taxi network.

zhoujianfu 1y ago

Also, I realized a side effect of a hypothetical world where everybody rode in robotaxis/waymos/even ubers is we’d effectively get congestion pricing everywhere (due to “surge” pricing), and the use of roads would actually fit into regular supply and demand market forces!

dougSF70 1y ago
Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. I cant see how congestion can be reduced...the worst congestion happens during rush hour...replacing personal cars with a Waymo will have no effect.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans. That is why parking lots make places un-walkable.
  - josephcsible 1y ago
    > Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans. But that's not what congestion means.
    - mrpippy 1y ago
      If it’s parked on the street, that is taking up a lane that could be carrying traffic. (And in some cities it’s common for parallel street parking to turn into a lane from 4-8 PM or similar)
    - joseda-hg 1y ago
      It's adding indirectly, more space taken by parking lots means that you have to spread further, which begets the need for more cars Less parking spaces > denser enviroments > more walking(Or other more compact forms of transport) > less cars (To an extent) > less congestion The US has multiple (smaller) countries worth of parking space
      - josephcsible 1y ago
        I'm immediately suspicious of any chain that links "denser environments" to "less congestion", since everywhere I've ever been, the densest environments have the most congestion.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        joseda-hg 1y ago
        It's a bit like adding extra lanes, to some degree, demand expands to meet capacity (But I mantain that in this case the net effect is possitive) There would be less space to be congested by fewer vehicles, but in this context, less congestion also means fewer people experience the congestion directly (because it also works to disincentivize car usage), but those affected have it the same or worse. I wouldn't take my car to a large city center if I can at all avoid it, which seems to be the common reaction. These people are "transparent" to the congestion—they don't add to it and (mostly) aren't affected by it.
- gruez 1y ago
  >Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. Presumably they're not just roaming around aimlessly. They're also providing transportation to whoever's sitting inside.
  - dougSF70 1y ago
    Anecdotally, what I observe in SF is empty waymo cars driving around
  - rainsford 1y ago
    Unless every passenger pickup is at the location of the last drop off and the timing is perfect, some portion of robotaxi driving must be empty as the taxi drives to the next pickup or at least goes somewhere to park. And I'm honestly not sure Waymos are smart enough to know where it is and isn't legal to park for some unknown period of time while waiting for the next trip, so that might not even be an option. Contrast this with personal vehicles, which are always transporting at least one person to their destination. It seems essentially impossible that robotaxis could result in less congestion unless people share robotaxis significantly more frequently than they do personal cars or regular taxis.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion Of course it is. Banning street-side parking would double or triple most cities’ navigable road space.
  - doubled112 1y ago
    You can only fit 3 cars across on most side streets near me. You have more space, but does it really create better flow? Many of these side streets and neighbourhoods are designed and modified NOT to flow, because then people would use them to get to work. Would this change that? While I admit I see these more in the ‘burbs, this is becoming more widespread and is no longer exclusive to them.
    - dougSF70 1y ago
      Waymo isn't really the answer to congestion, busses and other public transport solutions are. If Waymo is the answer, what is the question?
      - deepvibrations 1y ago
        Q: How can I get to the gym and use the treadmill without having to walk all the way to the bus stop?
  - olyjohn 1y ago
    Its been proven over and over, and there are tons of studies that show that more lanes doesnt help congestion.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      Who said they had to be car lanes
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > more lanes doesnt help congestion It does increase throughput. And it’s not relevant to a weighing of reducing ridesharing and increasing lanes—both would induce demand. And as another person said, a single streetside-parked car has made that entire street more dangerous for bikers. Take out streetside parking and you can add lanes for cars, light rail, busses, bikes or even just widen sidewalks and add more trees. Parked cars add to congestion far more uselessly than taxis, ride sharing vehicles or AVs.

detourdog 1y ago

The scaling problem is the Robotaxi implementation details. Waymo is scalable in the way you describe. Tesla’s Robotaxi current restrictions make is what is holding back scalability.

wsatb 1y ago

It has not scaled, it has put more cars on the road causing more traffic and more accidents. [1] It has also over time made this type of travel more expensive once their VC backed subsidies stopped. They essentially destroyed an entire industry to make it less safe, more expensive, and more difficult to attain in some areas. I also think it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation. The federal government is also cutting funding at the same time. [2] [1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/ride-hailing-services-may-be-driving-traffic-deaths https://news.uchicago.edu/story/ride-hailing-services-may-be... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-29/us-mass-transit-funding-crisis-threatens-commuters-travel https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-04-29/us-mass-t...

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> it’s a pretty naive take to think they’re not trying to replace public transportation Anecdote: I wouldn’t be able to take public transit to the airport in San Francisco or New York without the last (EDIT: first) mile being done in a rideshare. The alternative would be calling a private car for the whole journey.
- dmart 1y ago
  I don’t know what you mean by this, unless there’s a personal reason. LGA has a free shuttle bus from the subway, JFK and EWR have AirTrains connected to the subway, and SFO has a direct BART connection. I use public transit exclusively to get to all of those airports.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    I have a place on 26th & Broadway. If I have a heavy case or a pet or it’s raining, I need a way to get to Penn Station. And I’m incredibly close to multiple subway stations. As for the Bay Area, it’s all suburbs.

Dmitropher 1y ago

Taxis just aren't that highly demanded of a service. It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle. One car owned per adult is very inconvenient to deviate from in a car friendly urban environment, even if robotaxis can be made to have overall cost parity to car ownership. The net result, I think, is that robotaxis can only ever increase the total number of cars and concurrent drivers. Would you disagree? Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis? Or, similarly, for single people to switch from 1 car or no car, just transit, to robotaxis? Robotaxis seem to me to have potential well solve the niches human taxis are bad at: late night safe driving, very long point to point going out of an urban core into a rural area, perhaps even personal cargo shipping, if a robo van could enable you to do furniture shopping without renting a truck. But these are edge cases that compete with private cars pretty intensely. I'd only prefer a late night taxi if I'm drunk. I'd only want a robotaxi to a rural area if I'm an urban living rock climber or hiker, and I don't care to own a car. The total available market is just wildly incompatible with the current and speculated valuation, as far as I see it.

jt2190 1y ago
> Is there some compelling reason I'm missing the motivation for families to switch from 2.5 cars to 1 because of robotaxis? Why wouldn’t the cost of car ownership be a factor?
wodenokoto 1y ago
> It's also very hard for me to imagine a world where today's two car family switches to a one-car plus robotaxi lifestyle. That’s because you live with scarce and expensive taxi service. I know plenty of people in Dubai who use taxi or uber/Careem for their daily commute and I have done so in periods too.
- ponector 1y ago
  Cheap taxi could be only if there are cheap cars and cheap (imigrant) labor available.

pjmlp 1y ago

> Uber made taxis more accessible and it scaled plenty, Maybe in US, turns out most of the rest of the world didn't had the same problem, nor the lack of regulations US suffers from. Across African countries we were already calling into taxi like systems via WhatsApp, some European countries had taxi apps, and the US gig economy doesn't work here, so not only is Ûber regulated after a few court cases, it is also integrated with the taxi network.