5 ms·
Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.
by blks 6mo ago
Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.
- loeg 6mo agoAt the margin, it substitutes for some trips.
- Schiendelman 6mo agoThe cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases, like lower population density neighborhoods. It may save the public money to centralize transit on major corridors and then subsidize trips on Waymo in some areas and at some times.
- danaw 6mo agohow many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?
- coryrc 6mo agoDoesn't matter if there's only four people willing to ride on a given schedule.
- jrflowers 6mo agoThat is an argument for buses on well-designed routes and schedules, not an argument against buses. It is like saying “that bus would be useless at the bottom of a lake” well, yeah. The first step would be not driving it into a lake
- cameldrv 6mo agoIt depends on the population density. You may have a perfectly well designed route for the area, but there are only so many people per hour that want to take a trip. You can delete routes and make people walk further, but that makes the trip take longer and not everyone can or wants to walk a long ways to the bus stop. Different population densities have different optimal vehicle sizes. It's the same reason a small city airport might have one or two regional jets per day serving it instead of 2 747s per week.
- jrflowers 6mo agoYep, you definitely want a range of bus sizes. Some areas are served perfectly well with a couple of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Minotour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Minotour
- Schiendelman 6mo ago"Centralize transit on major corridors" is about full buses. But transit agencies spend as much per hour on an empty bus as a full one. Transit agencies run empty buses on routes that are rarely full, and run vans and even microtransit that may just be a waste of money.
- bryanlarsen 6mo agoThe OP you're responding suggested using Waymo's to help fill the buses, not get rid of buses.
- Schiendelman 6mo agoI suggested both. Milk runs through suburban neighborhoods likely make sense to get rid of entirely.
- bryanlarsen 6mo agoWhich are almost always fairly empty so the critic's comments about bus capacity is irrelevant.
- malfist 6mo ago> cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases You can fit 40-50 people in your car?
- HDThoreaun 6mo agoThis only works if the bus is popular. How often do buses in Portland have more than 5 people on them?
- malfist 6mo agoHow often do cars have more than 5 people in them?
- tetromino_ 6mo agoPer [1], a typical Portland public bus causes about 730 times more road wear than a full size pickup truck (which is about the worst case for road wear from a personal vehicle). How many buses have more than 700 people riding in them? (I am of course ignoring the scaling for fuel, maintenance, pollution, and traffic costs of personal vehicles; but my point is that most people severely underestimate just how awful the economic case for an underused full size bus is. Now, minibuses and microbuses are a different story; but US public transit systems don't use them.) [1] https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-damage-1000-cars/283-2cf2e8bf-3add-4fed-b598-6d7570a9799d https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
- kristjansson 6mo agoIf it can deliver transit to the public at a reasonable price…
- jazzypants 6mo agoEven five dollars a ride would be twice the price. It's just not comparable.
- thereisnospork 6mo agoHow many tax dollars go into subsidizing a public transit ride? Varies from place to place but it's not insignificant.
- danaw 6mo agohow many tax dollars go to roads and bridges just for cars?
- rootusrootus 6mo agoVaries from place to place but it's not insignificant
- coryrc 6mo agoToo many, but at least some are directly on vehicles. Transit (in the USA, on the West coast) is funded >90% by taxes on income, property, vehicle registration, fuel, etc not by the people using it.
- xnx 6mo agoEveryone uses the roads. You have to reach for very obscure examples to find commerce that doesn't utilize roads. Every bit of concrete and steel to build transit was at some point transported over roads.
- amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
- ggreer 6mo agoIn 2025, TriMet had 262 million passenger miles at a system cost of $812 million, for a cost of $3.09 per passenger mile.[1] Fares covered 7.8% of their costs. The other 92.2% came from payroll taxes and federal grants. For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile. 1. https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf
- array_key_first 6mo agoThis is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept. Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains. The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder. For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.
- coryrc 6mo ago> in your comment you're excluding road cost Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.
- jandrewrogers 6mo agoFWIW, some States require roads be funded exclusively with gas and use (e.g. vehicle registration) taxes. This does seem to significantly incentivize efficiency and long-term planning because their budget has to anticipate variable revenue.
- bsder 6mo ago> Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport. Why not both? The absolute biggest problems with mass transit in the US are the "first mile" and the "last mile". If I wanted to take mass transit, I had to show up before 7:00 AM in order to park my car. Every single train after 7:00AM became useless to commuters. That's idiotic. And then I needed a car at the destination station to drive to my workplace. So, a bunch of us had completely idle cars parked at the commuter station that we used roughly 15 minutes per day but needed parking at both the station AND the workplace--just to use the train. Good lord that is stupid. Waymo at the right price solves a whole bunch of these issues. Suddenly utilization of your train can go up because you've decoupled train utilization from train station parking. In addition, train utilization isn't so dependent upon close distance to the station. Now, you can build a transit station and allow it to organically fill in instead of getting killed because it's an expensive money sink for 10+ years until housing builds around it. etc. Sure, you should be able to take a bicycle from the station; that's not how the US is laid out so you have to deal with what you are stuck with today. Sadly, this isn't the old days where everybody works at the mill and dropping a station right there gets you 80% of the population; you have to put that station in and wait a decade while things adjust. Waymo gets you across the interim while the mass transit convenience transitions from poor to something useful over multiple decades.