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What's the theory of change here? FSD fundamentally is going to make keeping a car moving on the road cheaper, and making something cheaper makes it happen more
by QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
What's the theory of change here? FSD fundamentally is going to make keeping a car moving on the road cheaper, and making something cheaper makes it happen more.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoFSD could largely eliminate privately owned vehicles, it could also allow cities to get rid of most parking infrastructure.
- garbawarb 9mo agoBut a good mass transit system, pedestrian/cycling infrastructure, and efficient urban design are already proven ways of doing that.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoAnd FSD would just be one more thing to add to that list.
- rayiner 9mo agoThey come with fundamental compromises that Americans aren’t willing to live with, namely having to adhere to schedules, ride with other people, and not going directly to their destination.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoNot just Americans, all the big European cities with good public transportation are usually full of cars.
- amanaplanacanal 9mo agoImagine how much worse it would be without the public transportation siphoning off so many riders.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoFor sure, but in many places it just couldn't realistically be much worse and the main consequences would probably be on the local economy rather than the amount of road use. Less people would be able to travel at all, inevitably leading to reduced need for travel.
- triceratops 9mo agoFSD can make mass transit cheaper. Imagine not having to pay bus drivers' salaries. Being able to adjust vehicle sizes to the route's demand dynamically.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoThe biggest win is probably dynamic routing, just select your pickup-point and a destination and a bus will get automatically routed. You'd never be forced to waste time driving past a stop for which there's no customer demand on that particular trip.
- cogman10 9mo agoDoesn't work (IMO). Very functional mass transit lives and dies on predictability. Having dynamic routing would be the antithesis to that. Maybe your trip will take 20 minutes, maybe it'll be 1 hour. It'd be impossible to tell which one it'll be because the route changes based on when you request and who else has requested. If you wanted something like dynamic routing, then what you'd do is have it as a supplement to standard routing. Effectively taxi to the nearest bus stop.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoFor the same amount of trips, this system could reliably allow shorter and more frequent trips than previously possible. Given that the system would work better, it would need to scale up to meet increased demand. There's absolutely no reason for dynamic routing to not reliably be faster than or as fast as static routes.
- idontwantthis 9mo agoThat’s public transportation except tiny vehicles taking one person at a time instead of large vehicles taking many. It’s not an improvement.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoWhy do you think it's not an improvement over tiny vehicles used by only one person ever? A single Waymo can replace multiple private vehicles.
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoYou could also create virtual paths, whereby you're heading north in one Waymo until say 38th street, and then you hop out and grab another waiting for you in just 30 seconds. Now you move east for 5 more blocks and arrive home without fiddling around at any other stops or stations.
- JasonADrury 9mo agoSure, and you could totally do this with multiple passengers at a time too. You could even profile your passengers to avoid any unpleasant partner choices, restrict this to specific hours, etc. You could even design vehicles for transporting multiple individual passengers in totally separate spaces. There are endless improvements to the status quo you can achieve with self driving vehicles, things which will simultaneously improve quality of life for literally everybody.
- idontwantthis 9mo agoIt can replace multiple private vehicles sitting at home doing nothing. Moving individuals in individual vehicles cannot replace individual vehicles moving individual people on the road at one time.
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoYou assume FSD would jam traffic as it does with human drives, but you need to make the case for this as it's apples and oranges in terms of traffic. Why almost all traffic jams occur is distracted and poor driving.
- bryanlarsen 9mo agoNumber of cars isn't the relative metric for congestion, it's number of miles driven. FSD makes driving easier / cheaper / better. It'll increase the number of miles driven.
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoIt eliminates traffic, parking, and alll the other pain points of owning a vehicle just to get from A to B when a car is the only true option. Certainly, FSD buses would be a win-win for cities too.
- bryanlarsen 9mo agoSo instead of parking the FSD cars will be dead-heading from one pickup to another, increasing traffic.
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoIt's important to make the distinction that flowing traffic and sitting traffic are different things to people. I really don't think a flowing river of FSD is worse than a static jam, but I could be wrong here, as there has never been a full self-driving city.
- Analemma_ 9mo agoIt's very much a question mark whether FSD would eliminate traffic. If people can zone out and be on their phone while their car drives them, that encourages a lot more trips which might not otherwise be taken because of bad traffic. I can easily see FSD making traffic much worse.
- triceratops 9mo agoIt doesn't eliminate traffic without congestion pricing. FSD reduces the annoyance cost of driving in traffic, which means there's going to be a lot more traffic.