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As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverl

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliver anything you can live in. So instead, Cities should lease Waymos (or other brands), and provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking. Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing or you'll end up handing the keys back to the lender and bankrupt on the deal. Instead, if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units, that tenants have first priority to use for free (or an amount subsidized per month) up to reasonable limits, then you'd address the concern "where are people going to park and how to get to work?". it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. What's it cost per year to lease? $30k? That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? The cars can be rented to the public on off hours to offset their operating cost. It's a lot more cost efficient and can be done TODAY, not 5 years after complicated LIHTC financing with 4 layers of other public funding, 3 years of approvals, and 2 years of construction.

oblio 2mo ago
America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.
- Analemma_ 2mo ago
  I get what you're saying, but in this particular case we're talking about Texas. The people down there think that bike lanes and walkable neighborhoods are a plot to send in UN soldiers who will forcibly vaccinate them with 5G nanobots. I'm only slightly exaggerating.
- eagleinparadise 2mo ago
  i know multiple developers with public dollars to build housing $800k-$1.2M per unit. so i don't know, maybe come up with a better solution I'd be happy to hear your idea that is realistic and will deliver more units at a lower cost.
  - theappsecguy 2mo ago
    Have you tried "building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods"?
    - s1artibartfast 2mo ago
      Buyers aren't willing to pay for it. Its not really up to the developers anyways. [Edit] I am serious. Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.
      - eagleinparadise 2mo ago
        I can't tell if this person is joking or actual serious. It's sad, because this is exactly the kind of ridiculousness developers experience day to day by the general public. No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park. Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.
  - nixass 2mo ago
    You seem braggy too much
    - Barbing 2mo ago
      Eh, the more details they’re willing to reveal the better. It’s probably their reality.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- ssl-3 2mo ago
  It's important to understand the history, wherein: There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost. Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time. And now, it is stuck this way.
  - financetechbro 2mo ago
    Cars clearly won… or did the car industry use its monopolistic powers to acquire and shut down our train networks while also relentlessly lobbying for more (and permanent) car infrastructure? Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for
    - ssl-3 2mo ago
      Both things are true. Cars won _and_ and it wasn't a fair fight. This was almost certainly not an isolated incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
  - jakintosh 2mo ago
    > And now, it is stuck this way. Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?
    - ssl-3 2mo ago
      Let's talk about trains. We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed. We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed. In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions. Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them. So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got. And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button. At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- robomartin 2mo ago
  > America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc. In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more. The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains. The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design). So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.
  - vel0city 2mo ago
    You say it can't be done, but it's literally happened several times before. The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.
    - ssl-3 2mo ago
      Busses. I rode on a public bus once while visiting Columbus Ohio. I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there. Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow. The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful. I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses. I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated? (Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)
- xnx 2mo ago
  Self driving cars are public transportation and make areas much more walkable and bikeable.
  - TranquilMarmot 2mo ago
    If they are owned and operated by mega-corporations like Alphabet, they are not public
  - oblio 2mo ago
    > Self driving cars are public transportation Waymo is literally a private company. > make areas much more walkable and bikeable. How so? Autonomous car companies have every incentive to continue lobbying for car only infrastructure? Why would they want infrastructure that increases competition?
Lammy 2mo ago
> provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.
- eagleinparadise 2mo ago
  "huge corpos" - obviously you don't know what you're talking about. Most affordable housing is owned and operated by non-profit organizations or entities, most of which are very small. plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.
  - Lammy 2mo ago
    > "huge corpos" - obviously you don't know what you're talking about. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426000048/goog-20260331.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426... Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity: $595281000000. How big to they have to be before they count as ‘big’ to you? In your ideal world, getting your Google account banned not only means losing all your photos, documents, contacts, conversations, and access to all your other accounts (GMail) but now also means you can't go anywhere besides what you can reach on foot, via whatever anemic local transit exists, or via similarly-expensive Uber/etc. Super cool; sign me up.
- filoleg 2mo ago
  > Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces. Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then? I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.
  - Lammy 2mo ago
    The point is that some people have other options. Personally I will always choose to go where I want, when I want, in the privacy of my own vehicle. Even if Waymo were completely free I'd still choose those things, and I am thankful I have the option to choose.
panick21_ 2mo ago
> Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing ... in the US > Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world. > if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units Or some kind of vehicle that comes by every 15min and connects to a network of other transports that are time interval based. Or have car share vehicles attached to the property. Something that is routinely done in Europe for decades. > it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. Except it doesn't last that long and is not that expensive unless you are incompetent and live in a broken society. Cities in China added 100s of miles of metro since 2010. Making bad excuses and doubling down on car dependency are a big part on why its not happening. And btw. the US has so many fucking roads already (btw they are also very expensive, but I guess that money doesn't count), if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system. But of course taking a lane away from cars wouldn't be acceptable, better give money to waymo so people can sit in traffic in a Waymo vehicle. It is not about cost, its about political will and the societal believe that public transit is for the unwashed poor and racially inferiors, spending money on it is charity, not transportation policy, and that any upstanding citizen in a car needs to have unlimited freedom to drive everywhere and never get into trouble. > That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? This has been done for many decades with carsharing already, its standard practice in many developments. What exactly does Waymo or self driving change here from an investor perspective? Ok maybe if its really close buy the Waymo can go back when you don't need it anymore. So maybe you need half as many. But of course the Waymo vehicle is also much more expensive and has capacity you don't need. But of course, even with that carsharing concept, the far better solution that almost everybody in the developed world does, outside the US, is to simply have good public transport, you build it first, and then build the new housing around those transport links. Car sharing is only for very niche situations and that's a good thing, because more cars in cities are bad.
- paulddraper 2mo ago
  > ... in the US Dallas in the United States.
cyberax 2mo ago
Self-driving cars will kill off your kind of real estate developers once and for all. Because there is no such thing as "affordable housing". All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing. Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run. Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.
- randomblock1 2mo ago
  By your definition a Lamborghini is affordable, because someone can afford it. I don't think that holds up.
  - cyberax 2mo ago
    Yes, it is. That's why "affordable" is a bad term. There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing. To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.
- ajmurmann 2mo ago
  How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas
  - robomartin 2mo ago
    > How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly. The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe. So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do. That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.
PsylentKnight 2mo ago
As someone who knows anything about Texas cities, I assure you that parking space is not an issue in Dallas
- eagleinparadise 2mo ago
  yes it is. it's still a cost. but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.
- vel0city 2mo ago
  As someone who has lived in and around Dallas for a long time, parking is a constant source of tension, going in both directions of not having enough and having too much. It's a massive cost factor as well.
SoftTalker 2mo ago
I'd go further and say that in most smaller cities that try to run a bus service but just don't have the ridership to support adequate service they would be better off just subsidizing Ubers or Waymos or whatever is available. Pare down the bus service to only the heavily used routes and run them way more often.
- infecto 2mo ago
  100%. Most bus routes are terribly expensive to run, multiple drivers, benefits and then the physical equipment. It would be interesting if you could work out a subsidy program for low income riders.
  - bluGill 2mo ago
    A route is expensive to run, but there is no reason you cannot automate a bus driver just like a car driver.
    - infecto 2mo ago
      Sure but most folks don’t want to take a bus in the US. Perhaps you build mini ride share busses that are driverless and I think this is where something like Waymo would actually go to.
      - bluGill 2mo ago
        Nobody understands their why. They say they don't want to, but what they really mean is service sucks so they can't and assume that means they don't want to. It is regularly proved around the world that when you give good service people suddenly want to ride.
        infecto 2mo ago
        I think that is a pretty broad generalization that lacks cultural differences and regional challenges. There are indeed many whys but one of the core issues in American is the rooted desire to be free by driving a car. It’s kind of similar to how folks argue small cars should be manufactured in the US when in reality most folks don’t want to buy them. You could not efficiently run a bus service in most US cities at a level of “good service”. Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs but I don’t see that happening yet and Waymo is at least a nice step on the potential direction. Even with great service it’s an uphill battle to get enough ridership. Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car. That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.
strulovich 2mo ago
Aren’t Waymo prices above Uber’s? That’s what I’ve seen in SF. That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.
- jdm2212 2mo ago
  Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.
  - LightBug1 2mo ago
    What's the product vs an Uber? Genuine question.
    - catchnear4321 2mo ago
      No human in the car?
      - mathisfun123 2mo ago
        This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product). Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.
        free652 2mo ago
        huh, definitely will pay more for not having a driver to be constantly on the phone.
        2mo ago
dinobones 2mo ago
Here's another idea: The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws. I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work. Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.
- eagleinparadise 2mo ago
  Why should a tax payer in Dallas pay for your [affordable] transportation from the outskirts of Houston or OK to commute to Dallas? tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on. Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.
  - bitpush 2mo ago
    Perhaps I'm understanding things wrong, but isnt the idea of taxes for public good and some / all of it might never reach you? I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.
    - s1artibartfast 2mo ago
      That doesn't sound like a public good. It sounds like a private good. I want a Ferrari. It would be good for me. Should taxes pay for it?
    - SloppyDrive 2mo ago
      Ive never liked this framing; "the public good" is too nebulous an idea to justify how tax should be spent. I, and people like me create wealth. Some of that wealth is pooled at an administrative level that makes sense across a town, state, or nation. Its still wealth I created; and I expect it to be used to benefit me, ideally proportionally to the tax taken. Unemployment can be justified as crime prevention; Disability and healthcare systems limit individual worst-case outcomes (especially if due to chance). Super-commuter subsidies do what?
rawgabbit 2mo ago
Or you can offer subsidized ride shares for $1.50 a ride. https://www.dcta.net/getting-around/gozone-demand https://www.dcta.net/getting-around/gozone-demand
- nunez 2mo ago
  And get to your destination in two hours instead of 20 mins
m_a_g 2mo ago
God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport
- yostrovs 2mo ago
  It's effectively xenophobic to comment such as you did about "Americans" without addressing the points by the author, which deal with real, structural issues.
- Guestmodinfo 2mo ago
  One thing about private car ownership in the US is that it is a VERY BIG country and sparsely populated so who will pay for the public transport connecting every nook and corner because in the US it's so sparsely populated. Even in India I see metro train being very successful in places which are densely populated but in states like Rajasthan which are very big and sparsely populated there public transport is a failure because who will pay for the fuel when people are not enough. Walking and public transport are good options in Europe because European countries are small and are more densely populated
  - pibaker 2mo ago
    The US is ten times more dense than Australia. And yet Australian cities tend to have comparable if not better transit than similarly sized American cities. The overall population density of a country is largely irrelevant in this discussion because 99% of day to day travels are contained within the same metro areas.
    - annzabelle 2mo ago
      > comparable if not better transit Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.
danans 2mo ago
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? A bus could serve 40-100 daily. The infrastructure already exists - the same as for cars. It's pretty low cost also - especially electric buses that have lower maintenance costs. The problem is that you have to ride with other people.
- milkytron 2mo ago
  Riding with other people is _a_ problem, but I don't think it's the primary problem for why transit isn't used in the US. Imo, the biggest problem is that of convenience. Convenience (time), cost, comfort, and (perceived) safety are the factors people use to make transportation mode choices. If buses aren't prioritized in traffic above single occupant vehicles via dedicated bus lanes, signalling, etc. then they'll always be slower than a car because of the additional stops. Frequency is also a consideration that factors into timing, as well as transfers. If any US city wants to get people onto transit, they need to prioritize transit above less efficient modes, amongst other things.
- servo_sausage 2mo ago
  As infrastructure, busses don't make sense if you assume self driving EVs are going to be widespread. Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.
  - master-lincoln 2mo ago
    Disagree because of the amount of space wasted for parking
    - servo_sausage 2mo ago
      What? Autonomous cars can park wherever...
      - master-lincoln 2mo ago
        But they take up much more space than busses/trains per passenger.
Grombobulous 2mo ago
With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read. > it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!) I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita. I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people! It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus. I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.
- servo_sausage 2mo ago
  Because a transit method that follows a fixed route, on a schedule, is inherently worse than an on demand one; unless you can separate the traffic.
  - alooPotato 2mo ago
    I think we should let autonomous, shared EVs use bus lanes (just like how some cities let taxis use them). They are just so good for society.
  - trymas 2mo ago
fzeroracer 2mo ago
Waymo cannot ever be fully sustainable because cars are subject to variable and constantly increasing size. As more individuals own cars the throughput of a transit network relying on ride-sharing or autonomous cars gets less and less efficient. It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.
xyst 2mo ago
Quite possibly the worst of both worlds.
namdnay 2mo ago
The problem with people is that they tend to all want to do the same thing at the same time. Drop kids off at school, go to work, come back from work, go out on Sunday etc. Using taxis isn’t really scalable, you’re going to end up needing a nearly 1:1 ratio
zero_k 2mo ago
Build walkable cities instead. Stop car-brain-rot. Your cities could be beautiful, full of life and children running around and having fun. Walking, cycling, and taking public transport, brings life to a city. It allows random connections and makes you see "the other". It could significantly improve your quality of life. Open up your eyes, there's a whole beautiful world out there.
- HDThoreaun 2mo ago
  People who live on Dallas clearly do not want this. Telling them their lifestyle is wrong and if they just open their eyes they will see the folly of their ways accomplishes nothing. If you work with their actual preferences instead of foisting your own into them you will see that there are still ways to make progress such as removing parking restrictions by utilizing self driving cars. I lived in one of the most walkable neighborhoods in Chicago for 30 years before moving to suburbia with 0 walkability. It is completely untrue that walkability is secretly better than suburbia and those suburbanites don’t know what they’re missing.
  - Breza 1mo ago
    GP is talking about government-subsidized housing. So it's not "their lifestyle is wrong" so much as "how should we subsidize housing costs with taxpayer money?" I just don't think building housing in the suburbs and buying residents a $30,000/year Waymo gift card is the most efficient or desirable approach.
trymas 2mo ago
I hope it's sarcasm? How about if autonomous cars would be bigger, so from same apartment block people could ride-share to same office downtown? What if those cars would be on rails - imagine how simpler the autonomous part would be? Lower friction and fuel costs savings will be a bonus. /s on my part obviously.
Yizahi 2mo ago
This is like building your business on the FAANG monster corpo's API and then getting shut down a few years down the line, but with your life and housing instead of the business. After Waymo will shut down or "do strategy shift and pivot" or just raises prices beyond your affordability, a homeowner in such a place will "suddenly" discover that he or she is completely stranded now and there are neither cars nor public transport available. Yay for our benevolent corporate overlords, I guess...
torginus 2mo ago
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily The problem is rush hour. You still will need some kind of minibus that can serve 4-8 people efficiently, and take up way less space. An added benefit is that if you cut peak traffic volume by 3/4th, you can eliminate congestion.

oblio 2mo ago

America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.

Analemma_ 2mo ago
I get what you're saying, but in this particular case we're talking about Texas. The people down there think that bike lanes and walkable neighborhoods are a plot to send in UN soldiers who will forcibly vaccinate them with 5G nanobots. I'm only slightly exaggerating.
eagleinparadise 2mo ago
i know multiple developers with public dollars to build housing $800k-$1.2M per unit. so i don't know, maybe come up with a better solution I'd be happy to hear your idea that is realistic and will deliver more units at a lower cost.
- theappsecguy 2mo ago
  Have you tried "building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods"?
  - s1artibartfast 2mo ago
    Buyers aren't willing to pay for it. Its not really up to the developers anyways. [Edit] I am serious. Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.
    - eagleinparadise 2mo ago
      I can't tell if this person is joking or actual serious. It's sad, because this is exactly the kind of ridiculousness developers experience day to day by the general public. No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park. Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.
- nixass 2mo ago
  You seem braggy too much
  - Barbing 2mo ago
    Eh, the more details they’re willing to reveal the better. It’s probably their reality.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
ssl-3 2mo ago
It's important to understand the history, wherein: There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost. Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time. And now, it is stuck this way.
- financetechbro 2mo ago
  Cars clearly won… or did the car industry use its monopolistic powers to acquire and shut down our train networks while also relentlessly lobbying for more (and permanent) car infrastructure? Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for
  - ssl-3 2mo ago
    Both things are true. Cars won _and_ and it wasn't a fair fight. This was almost certainly not an isolated incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- jakintosh 2mo ago
  > And now, it is stuck this way. Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?
  - ssl-3 2mo ago
    Let's talk about trains. We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed. We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed. In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions. Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them. So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got. And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button. At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.
deleted 2mo ago
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robomartin 2mo ago
> America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc. In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more. The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains. The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design). So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.
- vel0city 2mo ago
  You say it can't be done, but it's literally happened several times before. The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.
  - ssl-3 2mo ago
    Busses. I rode on a public bus once while visiting Columbus Ohio. I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there. Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow. The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful. I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses. I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated? (Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)
xnx 2mo ago
Self driving cars are public transportation and make areas much more walkable and bikeable.
- TranquilMarmot 2mo ago
  If they are owned and operated by mega-corporations like Alphabet, they are not public
- oblio 2mo ago
  > Self driving cars are public transportation Waymo is literally a private company. > make areas much more walkable and bikeable. How so? Autonomous car companies have every incentive to continue lobbying for car only infrastructure? Why would they want infrastructure that increases competition?

Lammy 2mo ago

> provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.

eagleinparadise 2mo ago
"huge corpos" - obviously you don't know what you're talking about. Most affordable housing is owned and operated by non-profit organizations or entities, most of which are very small. plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.
- Lammy 2mo ago
  > "huge corpos" - obviously you don't know what you're talking about. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426000048/goog-20260331.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426... Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity: $595281000000. How big to they have to be before they count as ‘big’ to you? In your ideal world, getting your Google account banned not only means losing all your photos, documents, contacts, conversations, and access to all your other accounts (GMail) but now also means you can't go anywhere besides what you can reach on foot, via whatever anemic local transit exists, or via similarly-expensive Uber/etc. Super cool; sign me up.
filoleg 2mo ago
> Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces. Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then? I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.
- Lammy 2mo ago
  The point is that some people have other options. Personally I will always choose to go where I want, when I want, in the privacy of my own vehicle. Even if Waymo were completely free I'd still choose those things, and I am thankful I have the option to choose.

panick21_ 2mo ago

> Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing ... in the US > Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world. > if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units Or some kind of vehicle that comes by every 15min and connects to a network of other transports that are time interval based. Or have car share vehicles attached to the property. Something that is routinely done in Europe for decades. > it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. Except it doesn't last that long and is not that expensive unless you are incompetent and live in a broken society. Cities in China added 100s of miles of metro since 2010. Making bad excuses and doubling down on car dependency are a big part on why its not happening. And btw. the US has so many fucking roads already (btw they are also very expensive, but I guess that money doesn't count), if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system. But of course taking a lane away from cars wouldn't be acceptable, better give money to waymo so people can sit in traffic in a Waymo vehicle. It is not about cost, its about political will and the societal believe that public transit is for the unwashed poor and racially inferiors, spending money on it is charity, not transportation policy, and that any upstanding citizen in a car needs to have unlimited freedom to drive everywhere and never get into trouble. > That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? This has been done for many decades with carsharing already, its standard practice in many developments. What exactly does Waymo or self driving change here from an investor perspective? Ok maybe if its really close buy the Waymo can go back when you don't need it anymore. So maybe you need half as many. But of course the Waymo vehicle is also much more expensive and has capacity you don't need. But of course, even with that carsharing concept, the far better solution that almost everybody in the developed world does, outside the US, is to simply have good public transport, you build it first, and then build the new housing around those transport links. Car sharing is only for very niche situations and that's a good thing, because more cars in cities are bad.

paulddraper 2mo ago
> ... in the US Dallas in the United States.

cyberax 2mo ago

Self-driving cars will kill off your kind of real estate developers once and for all. Because there is no such thing as "affordable housing". All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing. Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run. Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.

randomblock1 2mo ago
By your definition a Lamborghini is affordable, because someone can afford it. I don't think that holds up.
- cyberax 2mo ago
  Yes, it is. That's why "affordable" is a bad term. There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing. To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.
ajmurmann 2mo ago
How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas
- robomartin 2mo ago
  > How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly. The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe. So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do. That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.

PsylentKnight 2mo ago

As someone who knows anything about Texas cities, I assure you that parking space is not an issue in Dallas

eagleinparadise 2mo ago
yes it is. it's still a cost. but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.
vel0city 2mo ago
As someone who has lived in and around Dallas for a long time, parking is a constant source of tension, going in both directions of not having enough and having too much. It's a massive cost factor as well.

SoftTalker 2mo ago

I'd go further and say that in most smaller cities that try to run a bus service but just don't have the ridership to support adequate service they would be better off just subsidizing Ubers or Waymos or whatever is available. Pare down the bus service to only the heavily used routes and run them way more often.

infecto 2mo ago
100%. Most bus routes are terribly expensive to run, multiple drivers, benefits and then the physical equipment. It would be interesting if you could work out a subsidy program for low income riders.
- bluGill 2mo ago
  A route is expensive to run, but there is no reason you cannot automate a bus driver just like a car driver.
  - infecto 2mo ago
    Sure but most folks don’t want to take a bus in the US. Perhaps you build mini ride share busses that are driverless and I think this is where something like Waymo would actually go to.
    - bluGill 2mo ago
      Nobody understands their why. They say they don't want to, but what they really mean is service sucks so they can't and assume that means they don't want to. It is regularly proved around the world that when you give good service people suddenly want to ride.
      - infecto 2mo ago
        I think that is a pretty broad generalization that lacks cultural differences and regional challenges. There are indeed many whys but one of the core issues in American is the rooted desire to be free by driving a car. It’s kind of similar to how folks argue small cars should be manufactured in the US when in reality most folks don’t want to buy them. You could not efficiently run a bus service in most US cities at a level of “good service”. Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs but I don’t see that happening yet and Waymo is at least a nice step on the potential direction. Even with great service it’s an uphill battle to get enough ridership. Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car. That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.

strulovich 2mo ago

Aren’t Waymo prices above Uber’s? That’s what I’ve seen in SF. That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.

jdm2212 2mo ago
Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.
- LightBug1 2mo ago
  What's the product vs an Uber? Genuine question.
  - catchnear4321 2mo ago
    No human in the car?
    - mathisfun123 2mo ago
      This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product). Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.
      - free652 2mo ago
        huh, definitely will pay more for not having a driver to be constantly on the phone.
      - 2mo ago

dinobones 2mo ago

Here's another idea: The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws. I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work. Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.

eagleinparadise 2mo ago
Why should a tax payer in Dallas pay for your [affordable] transportation from the outskirts of Houston or OK to commute to Dallas? tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on. Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.
- bitpush 2mo ago
  Perhaps I'm understanding things wrong, but isnt the idea of taxes for public good and some / all of it might never reach you? I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.
  - s1artibartfast 2mo ago
    That doesn't sound like a public good. It sounds like a private good. I want a Ferrari. It would be good for me. Should taxes pay for it?
  - SloppyDrive 2mo ago
    Ive never liked this framing; "the public good" is too nebulous an idea to justify how tax should be spent. I, and people like me create wealth. Some of that wealth is pooled at an administrative level that makes sense across a town, state, or nation. Its still wealth I created; and I expect it to be used to benefit me, ideally proportionally to the tax taken. Unemployment can be justified as crime prevention; Disability and healthcare systems limit individual worst-case outcomes (especially if due to chance). Super-commuter subsidies do what?

rawgabbit 2mo ago

Or you can offer subsidized ride shares for $1.50 a ride. https://www.dcta.net/getting-around/gozone-demand https://www.dcta.net/getting-around/gozone-demand

nunez 2mo ago
And get to your destination in two hours instead of 20 mins

m_a_g 2mo ago

God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport

yostrovs 2mo ago
It's effectively xenophobic to comment such as you did about "Americans" without addressing the points by the author, which deal with real, structural issues.
Guestmodinfo 2mo ago
One thing about private car ownership in the US is that it is a VERY BIG country and sparsely populated so who will pay for the public transport connecting every nook and corner because in the US it's so sparsely populated. Even in India I see metro train being very successful in places which are densely populated but in states like Rajasthan which are very big and sparsely populated there public transport is a failure because who will pay for the fuel when people are not enough. Walking and public transport are good options in Europe because European countries are small and are more densely populated
- pibaker 2mo ago
  The US is ten times more dense than Australia. And yet Australian cities tend to have comparable if not better transit than similarly sized American cities. The overall population density of a country is largely irrelevant in this discussion because 99% of day to day travels are contained within the same metro areas.
  - annzabelle 2mo ago
    > comparable if not better transit Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.

danans 2mo ago

> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? A bus could serve 40-100 daily. The infrastructure already exists - the same as for cars. It's pretty low cost also - especially electric buses that have lower maintenance costs. The problem is that you have to ride with other people.

milkytron 2mo ago
Riding with other people is _a_ problem, but I don't think it's the primary problem for why transit isn't used in the US. Imo, the biggest problem is that of convenience. Convenience (time), cost, comfort, and (perceived) safety are the factors people use to make transportation mode choices. If buses aren't prioritized in traffic above single occupant vehicles via dedicated bus lanes, signalling, etc. then they'll always be slower than a car because of the additional stops. Frequency is also a consideration that factors into timing, as well as transfers. If any US city wants to get people onto transit, they need to prioritize transit above less efficient modes, amongst other things.
servo_sausage 2mo ago
As infrastructure, busses don't make sense if you assume self driving EVs are going to be widespread. Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.
- master-lincoln 2mo ago
  Disagree because of the amount of space wasted for parking
  - servo_sausage 2mo ago
    What? Autonomous cars can park wherever...
    - master-lincoln 2mo ago
      But they take up much more space than busses/trains per passenger.

Grombobulous 2mo ago

With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read. > it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!) I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita. I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people! It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus. I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.

servo_sausage 2mo ago
Because a transit method that follows a fixed route, on a schedule, is inherently worse than an on demand one; unless you can separate the traffic.
- alooPotato 2mo ago
  I think we should let autonomous, shared EVs use bus lanes (just like how some cities let taxis use them). They are just so good for society.
- trymas 2mo ago

fzeroracer 2mo ago

Waymo cannot ever be fully sustainable because cars are subject to variable and constantly increasing size. As more individuals own cars the throughput of a transit network relying on ride-sharing or autonomous cars gets less and less efficient. It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.

xyst 2mo ago

Quite possibly the worst of both worlds.

namdnay 2mo ago

The problem with people is that they tend to all want to do the same thing at the same time. Drop kids off at school, go to work, come back from work, go out on Sunday etc. Using taxis isn’t really scalable, you’re going to end up needing a nearly 1:1 ratio

zero_k 2mo ago

Build walkable cities instead. Stop car-brain-rot. Your cities could be beautiful, full of life and children running around and having fun. Walking, cycling, and taking public transport, brings life to a city. It allows random connections and makes you see "the other". It could significantly improve your quality of life. Open up your eyes, there's a whole beautiful world out there.

HDThoreaun 2mo ago
People who live on Dallas clearly do not want this. Telling them their lifestyle is wrong and if they just open their eyes they will see the folly of their ways accomplishes nothing. If you work with their actual preferences instead of foisting your own into them you will see that there are still ways to make progress such as removing parking restrictions by utilizing self driving cars. I lived in one of the most walkable neighborhoods in Chicago for 30 years before moving to suburbia with 0 walkability. It is completely untrue that walkability is secretly better than suburbia and those suburbanites don’t know what they’re missing.
- Breza 1mo ago
  GP is talking about government-subsidized housing. So it's not "their lifestyle is wrong" so much as "how should we subsidize housing costs with taxpayer money?" I just don't think building housing in the suburbs and buying residents a $30,000/year Waymo gift card is the most efficient or desirable approach.

trymas 2mo ago

I hope it's sarcasm? How about if autonomous cars would be bigger, so from same apartment block people could ride-share to same office downtown? What if those cars would be on rails - imagine how simpler the autonomous part would be? Lower friction and fuel costs savings will be a bonus. /s on my part obviously.

Yizahi 2mo ago

This is like building your business on the FAANG monster corpo's API and then getting shut down a few years down the line, but with your life and housing instead of the business. After Waymo will shut down or "do strategy shift and pivot" or just raises prices beyond your affordability, a homeowner in such a place will "suddenly" discover that he or she is completely stranded now and there are neither cars nor public transport available. Yay for our benevolent corporate overlords, I guess...

torginus 2mo ago

> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily The problem is rush hour. You still will need some kind of minibus that can serve 4-8 people efficiently, and take up way less space. An added benefit is that if you cut peak traffic volume by 3/4th, you can eliminate congestion.