5 ms·

I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly spa

I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great. I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.

ElijahLynn 17d ago
Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited. But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.
- bakies 17d ago
  I can walk a mile. Rarely have to in the city.
- marssaxman 17d ago
  Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.
  - EA-3167 17d ago
    Let me guess… you live somewhere warm and mostly dry? Probably on the younger side and don’t have any kids.
    - marssaxman 17d ago
      Seattle, late middle age. Kid just started high school. My wife has a large e-bike with a passenger seat, but replaced it with a cargo basket a couple years ago after the kiddo outgrew it. I didn't say that scooters were a solution for everyone, you may note. I don't think there ought to be one solution for everyone, but given the option of micromobility, I really have no use for autonomous vehicles.
    - toasty228 17d ago
      I'm in a 200 inhabitants village in eastern Europe, we have 3 bus stops in the village (so at most you're 10min away from a stop), the bus goes to the closest city every hour from 4:30 to 22:30 except on Sunday (every two hours from 6 to 21), from there you can take a train to every major city in the country, my neighbor is a 76 year old widow who goes to the city by bus regularly and who bikes around a lot. Half of the kids go to school via this bus, many people go to work with it. It's free for kids and retired people too. When public transportation is designed properly it works fine for the extreme vast majority of people, and taking a taxi for the last mile if you're disabled, obese, lazy, etc. will cost you less than owning and maintaining a car. I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
      - PorciiVorbesc 17d ago
        >I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co When the bus (in your example) runs on a hourly schedule, while your car is always there when you spontaneously need it, then that freedom is real and not just propaganda. I did this type of commute before where I had to catch the bus to work, which was also once every hour, and the anxiety during my early morning routine to not miss the bus was crazy since missing it meant one more hour of wait, compared to the freedom of jumping in my car without a fixed schedule while also saving 1h/day of time compared to the public transit, the difference was night and day, not propaganda. Now if I had a train/subway to work, where I could sit down, and it ran every 15 minutes or less, then yeah, fuck driving and public transport all the way, but nobody sits in traffic for fun, but because of all options for their commute, driving is the better option.
  - vrosas 17d ago
    Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
    - alightsoul 17d ago
      They are very popular in china, such as the Wuling ev. In America, they are afraid of them because they are small. They want big cars to have a large crumple area in a crash.
      - Zambyte 17d ago
        And ideally enough mass to violently crush their neighbors.
    - marssaxman 17d ago
      Regulation kills the value proposition. You are basically describing a "neighborhood electric vehicle", but US law limits them to 25 mph, and it is not legal to drive them on many arterials, so they are only really useful inside communities which were designed for them.
    - efavdb 17d ago
      That’s the smart car
    - radarsat1 17d ago
      > I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries. I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.
    - warkdarrior 17d ago
      > I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries. Because they are completely unsafe against a twice-the-height, multi-ton Ford pickup truck.
  - edgarvaldes 17d ago
    >Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. Not so great for family trips, shopping around, etc.
    - ricardobeat 17d ago
      Those (rare) occasions are when you rent a car. You can do it many times per year before it becomes a financially worse option.
      - daedrdev 17d ago
        It’s currently 95 degrees. No thanks
        deleted 17d ago
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      - nonethewiser 17d ago
        Someone does not have kids.
        deleted 17d ago
        [deleted]
- embedding-shape 17d ago
  > the last mile it's pretty limited. Where is that last mile exactly? In many metropolitan areas, you typically have available a broad selection of trains, subways, trams and/or buses of different sizes that takes you last mile. Some places even have special buses, like the "Neighbourhood Bus" we have here (https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-pagina-interior/busito_2.jpg https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-...) for narrow and steep neighborhoods up on mountains. It's certainly doable, if you wanted to have last mile public transport.
  - iwontberude 17d ago
    Every time you make someone switch modes of transportation to complete their commute, the suffering increases exponentially in my personal experience. I much prefer going door to door and getting the benefit of resting my mind and body.
  - bretthoerner 17d ago
    You said both "tram" and "neighbourhood" so I'm assuming you aren't in the US. I truly mean no offense, but it's hard to express how spread out even the most metropolitan areas are in the US. Sure, NYC is one thing. But check out the ~10th largest city, Austin, where Waymo and other autonomous vehicles are (I think) in their largest deployment. Just on a map, or by density numbers, or whatever metric you want. I'm in Austin, and Waymos rule. I walk most places, bike others, and rarely drive. I very, very rarely get a rideshare (and often get Waymo by way of Uber lottery). Autonomous vehicles exist, are real, and serve an actual need in this very low density city that most people on HN have heard of. I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second. I would even pay for that to happen. If you're arguing about some idealistic society, that's one thing. In reality these things are way better than our public transit, and fixing public transit in a place this (not) dense is not as easy as you might think. The last mile is real, and people are coming from every direction and going every other direction and not willing to wait and transfers when these autonomous vehicles already solve the problems door to door so inexpensively.
    - 17d ago
- SrslyJosh 17d ago
  I think you need to re-read the parent comment, specifically this part: > I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. You're almost certainly an American, and you probably have no idea what public transit is like in countries that have been investing in it for decades instead of focusing 95% of their resources on infrastructure for cars.
- Clamchop 17d ago
  This is where I've always assumed things were going. People talk about one day owning a self-driving car but I look forward to the promise of not owning a car, never needing to buy, maintain, register, insure, or drive one. Not having to buy into a depreciating compromise, do I prioritize economy or seating or cargo or...? Gas, hybrid, electric? Not having to hunt or pay for parking. Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space. We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.
  - nonethewiser 17d ago
    Sure just ping Tesla Connect. You dont even need to use the app or scan a QR code. It just reads your neuralink.
- amelius 17d ago
  > when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited. That's like a 15 minute walk. And with sufficient infrastructure investments this can be 5 minutes.
  - deleted 17d ago
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  - infecto 17d ago
    And when folks are given that option or driving they will always take driving.
    - speedstyle 17d ago
      Obviously that's not true, but moreover it's meaningless – what counts as an option?
      - infecto 17d ago
        But it is. In America if you tell someone they are going to need to walk home for 15 minutes they will in the base case opt to take their car. This type of convo has come up in a number of different ways on HN and folks just hand wave away the problems in the US all the time. Americans don’t want to walk outside for an extended amount of time and the last mile(s) problem is quite hard. In most US cities you cannot economically solve the last mile problem efficiently with public transit and similarly most folks will already opt to take their car even if the public transit is great. You will likely be left with at least a few miles for someone to get home. So now are people transferring to other modes of transport because they are not taking a bicycle? So what are you trying to say?
- jokteur 17d ago
  I live in Switzerland. Public transit goes _everywhere_, even remote villages and mountains. This is by design, such that one can only use public transit to go almost everywhere in the country. Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we have a lot of money to spend. But many people, even if they own a car, will sometimes use public transit, because it is convenient, safe and comfortable. There are places in Switzerland where if you need to take a taxi or an Uber, you will have to wait more than 30 minutes before one gets there. At this point, it is more convenient to take the regional bus that goes every 30 minutes. Even if the public transit frequency is every hour, I can plan my journey to arrive on the correct time (also, public transit is synchronised in the whole country to avoid waiting times). I can see autonomous rideshares displacing taxi service and such. I think automonous rideshares still need density to be profitable. So if you need to subsidise rideshare to cover the whole country, why not properly invest in public transit?
  - infecto 17d ago
    Good for your country but also your country is quite small. I think a better analog is taking a trip from Zurich to Madrid. You could do it via train but it is probably going to be filled with lots of transfers and take 20 hours or you could take a 2 hour flight.
    - jokteur 17d ago
      Fun fact: you can do Zürich Madrid with 3 transfers and 14 hours. The car will take 16 hours. Obviously, nobody is going to do that, and the plane is a better alternative. Your example does not get solved by autonomous cars, I am quite certain nobody is going to do this in a rideshare either. Most people commute to the nearest city, move within a city, or go see friends in a neighboring city. Yes, US is much bigger, but I am quite certain that most people don't do more than 75km on a daily basis. The US still has plenty of medium and high density, where good public transit would make a lot of sense, but it is seriously lacking. It is a political decision, not a inevitable fact of life that the US has poor transit compared to other countries. The correct question to answer would be: how do you move people efficiently in a 75km radius? Are there trips that could be solved with a good train, tram or bus? Do you provide streets with bike lanes such that people feel safe riding the bike? What about pedestrians? Are autonomous cars really solving the congestion problem? Most of these cars still need to be parked during the night when demand is lower, exactly like a railyard. However, the space taken by one person in one car is much higher than any other forms of transit. My point here is: autonomous rideshares may displace taxi services and Uber. But most importantly, good street and city design, which is hard but not impossible, matters much more than solving the autonomous car problem.
jeffbee 17d ago
AVs and public transportation are not comparable. The cumulative lifetime investment in Waymo would not fund even half a year of capital expenses for the New York MTA, for example.
- Gigachad 17d ago
  I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The most expensive part of self driving cars is building the roads and highways. Would make more sense to compare Waymo to the operating expenses of PT, hiring the drivers and maintaining the trains.
  - jeffbee 17d ago
    You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?
    - Gigachad 17d ago
      No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.
      - jeffbee 17d ago
        I see. But Waymo investments are also vanishingly small compared to PT OpEx. If you for some reason could tap all of the Waymo money, operations and R&D and all of the rest of it, you could fund WMATA and that's it. Americans spend 100x more just on motor fuels than Waymo spends on itself. If you wanted to raise a similar amount of money you would need a mere 5¢ incremental gas tax. Private Americans furthermore spend $1 trillion every year just replacing and fixing their cars. You could double the public transit subsidy across the nation with a 5% car tax.
      - 16d ago
maxwellg 17d ago
We can have both. The resources aren't coming from the same bucket. Public transportation must be built by the local government, and is subject to that local government's ability to execute. In contrast, Self driving cars are largely siphoning resources from for-profit companies. I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.
- lazyasciiart 17d ago
  > Public transportation must be built by the local government, Amtrak is public transportation. Airlines are pretty close to public transportation. Local government doesn't need to be involved.
  - mdorazio 17d ago
    To my knowledge there are only a handful of public transit systems in the world that operate at a profit, let alone that operate at enough of a profit to recover construction costs. As in, maybe 5 if you squint really hard. Who do you expect to fund new ones if not the government?
    - asdff 17d ago
      Regional or state is better than local government. Local governments would struggle to raise the required funds for the costs of modern transit and would have a mandate to really support transit within their municipal borders vs a regional solution that is agnostic to the byzantine municipal borders.
daedrdev 17d ago
Public transit is too often a jobs program
arjie 17d ago
It does. About the same amount of money was spent in funding for Waymo as funding SFMTA over the period Waymo has existed. So in SF we are putting in as much money on public transit as Alphabet et al. is on Waymo and we both have the results we have.
1970-01-01 17d ago
>all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.
- oblio 17d ago
  Demand is based on time of day/week/month/year. Where do all those cars needed during peak demand go? They're going to be parked somewhere and it's not going to be in the middle of nowhere, because that's an awful customer experience.
  - 1970-01-01 17d ago
    The same place as existing taxis and busses? Busses are a worse customer experience than a 10 minute wait.
    - oblio 17d ago
      Do you realize the order of magnitude in difference? If we end up having as many self driving cars as taxis, they can just terminate Waymo tomorrow, what's the point in investing tens of billions? The goal is to replace many or most of the cars on the road. https://john-s-allen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/muenster_poster.jpg https://john-s-allen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/mue...
WD-42 17d ago
Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.
- dzhiurgis 17d ago
  Roads designed for buses (and trucks) also cost many orders of magnitude more than ones build for cars only. If you account for that, cost per passenger mile on fully loaded electric bus is more than uber chauffeur.
  - cletusw 16d ago
    Source? You can have many buses using a single BRT lane which is much cheaper to build and maintain than the number of lanes you would need to move the same number of people in private vehicles. Even more so once you start building grade-separated highways and their off ramps.
- koyote 17d ago
  So at 2am you would have thousands of cars driving around empty? Or would you still need a giant spot of land to park these things outside of peak hour?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 17d ago
    The giant spot of land could be in a much less convenient (= valuable) location if the car can take itself to and from there.
    - oblio 17d ago
      No. That's false. Riders will want a car to be at their location ASAP, or they will try to call another company. So the incentive will be to put/drive cars very close to where people are. That whole "cars will be stored at the periphery" is propaganda.
bsder 17d ago
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem. The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult. For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.
Rover222 17d ago
Cybercab is more efficient per rider mile than most public transit systems.
nonethewiser 17d ago
>If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great. I guess it depends on where we're talking about. The majority of the US is not inside a city. So just diverting all resources into public transportation is only serving the metros. If we're talking about a small country then sure.
- Tinned_Tuna 17d ago
  > The majority of the US is not inside a city. I think this isn't true for the US any more, maybe it hasn't been true for decades? WorldBank seems to have the ubranisation rate at around 80% for the US: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat... There is a bit of a definitional problem, with people living in suburbs identifying as rural, as do folks in exurbs. I don't think they're considered rural, and they're concentrated enough that well-designed public transit could serve them quite well. A decent public transit system means that families in sub/exurbs can go from 2 cars to 1 car without a major drop in quality of life, but they'd save $5k - $10k per year.
  - rrr_oh_man 17d ago
    It's much simpler than that. UN urbanization rate is based on the national definition. The U.S. definition of urban area is based on population (and has been changed recently): Under the old criteria, an urbanized area needed to have at least 50,000 residents. An urban cluster was defined as having at least 2,500 people, a threshold that had been around since 1910. Under this definition, almost 81 percent of the U.S. was urban and 19 percent was rural over the past decade. Under the new definition, hammered out after the 2020 census, the minimum population required for an area to be considered urban doubled to 5,000 people. Originally, the Census Bureau proposed raising the threshold to 10,000 people but pulled back amid opposition. The new criteria for urban areas shift the urban-rural ratio slightly, to 79.6 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively. Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-census-bureau-redefines-the-meaning-of-urban-areas-in-america https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-census-bureau-rede... ("U.S. Census Bureau redefines the meaning of urban areas in America", PBS, Dec 29, 2022)
TulliusCicero 17d ago
People always say this, but a) even countries known for good transit like Japan still have a ton of cars for various things, and b) there's no getting around that the money going into self-driving cars vs public transit isn't something that can really be swapped. It's coming from a different place for a different reason. We absolutely could invest into more trains even with the SDC money flowing anyway, it's not like the SDC money is blocking it. We collectively choose not to do this, and it's not Waymo's fault.
- tossandthrow 17d ago
  A better idea would just be to let drivers pay the real price for the infrastructure they occupy and their negative externalities. Then people would likely not have a issue with public transit.
  - rrr_oh_man 17d ago
    "Let's make car owners more miserable" is a typical sentiment held by young, healthy people who live in dense cities and ride an electric bicycle to work. Not everyone can do that. Many areas also completely lack the public transit infrastructure needed to support a normal life. E.g., a couple of days ago, I was shocked to learn just how bad the UK public transport system really is, apparently, outside of major metros (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286)
    - tossandthrow 17d ago
      The gas lighting in this comment is strong. > "Let's make car owners more miserable" I proposed to let people pay for the services they use. That is not an attack on redistribution to unhealthy older people living outside of the city. In the contrary. By reducing the load on the transport infrastructure you make it easier for them to use it. And for your wish to redistribute: That can easily be done without the city making the use of the land for roads free. You could literally just give subsidies to people who absolutely need cars.
  - 17d ago
dfabulich 17d ago
Small self-driving busses would do exactly what you want. The cost of increasing bus service is overwhelmingly the cost of bus drivers. If the busses could drive themselves, cities could afford to deploy a lot more busses, especially smaller busses, running much more often. As for light rail, in the US, light rail projects can typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. The NYC 2nd Avenue subway expansion cost billions of dollars per mile. And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
- solatic 17d ago
  If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation. It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale. [1]: https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit
  - asdff 17d ago
    That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.
    - xnx 16d ago
      It works even better with high demand because it's easier to find multiple people traveling to/from the same places.
      - asdff 16d ago
kstenerud 17d ago
The problem with transit systems is that they aren't designed for competition. They're costly to make, have few builder companies to choose from (who all know the game very well and go over budget as a tactic), and extremely difficult to overhaul/retrofit when more efficient tech becomes available. They're great for short distance travel in densely populated areas, but outside of that I doubt they'd hold up in long-term cost and efficiency vs autonomous electric cars for long. As for parking, a fully autonomous car service would allow a car to come to you and pick you up. So it wouldn't need to park near where you are.
tim333 17d ago
Google says annual public transport spend is ~£300bn. If you put all the self driving resources into it it wouldn't make a huge difference. Waymo like vehicles may also help with the last mile issues, giving disabled access to pedestrianised areas and the like.
sloob 17d ago
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ihsw 16d ago
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ElijahLynn 17d ago

Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited. But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.

bakies 17d ago
I can walk a mile. Rarely have to in the city.
marssaxman 17d ago
Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.
- EA-3167 17d ago
  Let me guess… you live somewhere warm and mostly dry? Probably on the younger side and don’t have any kids.
  - marssaxman 17d ago
    Seattle, late middle age. Kid just started high school. My wife has a large e-bike with a passenger seat, but replaced it with a cargo basket a couple years ago after the kiddo outgrew it. I didn't say that scooters were a solution for everyone, you may note. I don't think there ought to be one solution for everyone, but given the option of micromobility, I really have no use for autonomous vehicles.
  - toasty228 17d ago
    I'm in a 200 inhabitants village in eastern Europe, we have 3 bus stops in the village (so at most you're 10min away from a stop), the bus goes to the closest city every hour from 4:30 to 22:30 except on Sunday (every two hours from 6 to 21), from there you can take a train to every major city in the country, my neighbor is a 76 year old widow who goes to the city by bus regularly and who bikes around a lot. Half of the kids go to school via this bus, many people go to work with it. It's free for kids and retired people too. When public transportation is designed properly it works fine for the extreme vast majority of people, and taking a taxi for the last mile if you're disabled, obese, lazy, etc. will cost you less than owning and maintaining a car. I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
    - PorciiVorbesc 17d ago
      >I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co When the bus (in your example) runs on a hourly schedule, while your car is always there when you spontaneously need it, then that freedom is real and not just propaganda. I did this type of commute before where I had to catch the bus to work, which was also once every hour, and the anxiety during my early morning routine to not miss the bus was crazy since missing it meant one more hour of wait, compared to the freedom of jumping in my car without a fixed schedule while also saving 1h/day of time compared to the public transit, the difference was night and day, not propaganda. Now if I had a train/subway to work, where I could sit down, and it ran every 15 minutes or less, then yeah, fuck driving and public transport all the way, but nobody sits in traffic for fun, but because of all options for their commute, driving is the better option.
- vrosas 17d ago
  Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
  - alightsoul 17d ago
    They are very popular in china, such as the Wuling ev. In America, they are afraid of them because they are small. They want big cars to have a large crumple area in a crash.
    - Zambyte 17d ago
      And ideally enough mass to violently crush their neighbors.
  - marssaxman 17d ago
    Regulation kills the value proposition. You are basically describing a "neighborhood electric vehicle", but US law limits them to 25 mph, and it is not legal to drive them on many arterials, so they are only really useful inside communities which were designed for them.
  - efavdb 17d ago
    That’s the smart car
  - radarsat1 17d ago
    > I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries. I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.
  - warkdarrior 17d ago
    > I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries. Because they are completely unsafe against a twice-the-height, multi-ton Ford pickup truck.
- edgarvaldes 17d ago
  >Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. Not so great for family trips, shopping around, etc.
  - ricardobeat 17d ago
    Those (rare) occasions are when you rent a car. You can do it many times per year before it becomes a financially worse option.
    - daedrdev 17d ago
      It’s currently 95 degrees. No thanks
      - deleted 17d ago
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    - nonethewiser 17d ago
      Someone does not have kids.
      - deleted 17d ago
        [deleted]
embedding-shape 17d ago
> the last mile it's pretty limited. Where is that last mile exactly? In many metropolitan areas, you typically have available a broad selection of trains, subways, trams and/or buses of different sizes that takes you last mile. Some places even have special buses, like the "Neighbourhood Bus" we have here (https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-pagina-interior/busito_2.jpg https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-...) for narrow and steep neighborhoods up on mountains. It's certainly doable, if you wanted to have last mile public transport.
- iwontberude 17d ago
  Every time you make someone switch modes of transportation to complete their commute, the suffering increases exponentially in my personal experience. I much prefer going door to door and getting the benefit of resting my mind and body.
- bretthoerner 17d ago
  You said both "tram" and "neighbourhood" so I'm assuming you aren't in the US. I truly mean no offense, but it's hard to express how spread out even the most metropolitan areas are in the US. Sure, NYC is one thing. But check out the ~10th largest city, Austin, where Waymo and other autonomous vehicles are (I think) in their largest deployment. Just on a map, or by density numbers, or whatever metric you want. I'm in Austin, and Waymos rule. I walk most places, bike others, and rarely drive. I very, very rarely get a rideshare (and often get Waymo by way of Uber lottery). Autonomous vehicles exist, are real, and serve an actual need in this very low density city that most people on HN have heard of. I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second. I would even pay for that to happen. If you're arguing about some idealistic society, that's one thing. In reality these things are way better than our public transit, and fixing public transit in a place this (not) dense is not as easy as you might think. The last mile is real, and people are coming from every direction and going every other direction and not willing to wait and transfers when these autonomous vehicles already solve the problems door to door so inexpensively.
  - 17d ago
SrslyJosh 17d ago
I think you need to re-read the parent comment, specifically this part: > I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. You're almost certainly an American, and you probably have no idea what public transit is like in countries that have been investing in it for decades instead of focusing 95% of their resources on infrastructure for cars.
Clamchop 17d ago
This is where I've always assumed things were going. People talk about one day owning a self-driving car but I look forward to the promise of not owning a car, never needing to buy, maintain, register, insure, or drive one. Not having to buy into a depreciating compromise, do I prioritize economy or seating or cargo or...? Gas, hybrid, electric? Not having to hunt or pay for parking. Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space. We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.
- nonethewiser 17d ago
  Sure just ping Tesla Connect. You dont even need to use the app or scan a QR code. It just reads your neuralink.
amelius 17d ago
> when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited. That's like a 15 minute walk. And with sufficient infrastructure investments this can be 5 minutes.
- deleted 17d ago
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- infecto 17d ago
  And when folks are given that option or driving they will always take driving.
  - speedstyle 17d ago
    Obviously that's not true, but moreover it's meaningless – what counts as an option?
    - infecto 17d ago
      But it is. In America if you tell someone they are going to need to walk home for 15 minutes they will in the base case opt to take their car. This type of convo has come up in a number of different ways on HN and folks just hand wave away the problems in the US all the time. Americans don’t want to walk outside for an extended amount of time and the last mile(s) problem is quite hard. In most US cities you cannot economically solve the last mile problem efficiently with public transit and similarly most folks will already opt to take their car even if the public transit is great. You will likely be left with at least a few miles for someone to get home. So now are people transferring to other modes of transport because they are not taking a bicycle? So what are you trying to say?
jokteur 17d ago
I live in Switzerland. Public transit goes _everywhere_, even remote villages and mountains. This is by design, such that one can only use public transit to go almost everywhere in the country. Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we have a lot of money to spend. But many people, even if they own a car, will sometimes use public transit, because it is convenient, safe and comfortable. There are places in Switzerland where if you need to take a taxi or an Uber, you will have to wait more than 30 minutes before one gets there. At this point, it is more convenient to take the regional bus that goes every 30 minutes. Even if the public transit frequency is every hour, I can plan my journey to arrive on the correct time (also, public transit is synchronised in the whole country to avoid waiting times). I can see autonomous rideshares displacing taxi service and such. I think automonous rideshares still need density to be profitable. So if you need to subsidise rideshare to cover the whole country, why not properly invest in public transit?
- infecto 17d ago
  Good for your country but also your country is quite small. I think a better analog is taking a trip from Zurich to Madrid. You could do it via train but it is probably going to be filled with lots of transfers and take 20 hours or you could take a 2 hour flight.
  - jokteur 17d ago
    Fun fact: you can do Zürich Madrid with 3 transfers and 14 hours. The car will take 16 hours. Obviously, nobody is going to do that, and the plane is a better alternative. Your example does not get solved by autonomous cars, I am quite certain nobody is going to do this in a rideshare either. Most people commute to the nearest city, move within a city, or go see friends in a neighboring city. Yes, US is much bigger, but I am quite certain that most people don't do more than 75km on a daily basis. The US still has plenty of medium and high density, where good public transit would make a lot of sense, but it is seriously lacking. It is a political decision, not a inevitable fact of life that the US has poor transit compared to other countries. The correct question to answer would be: how do you move people efficiently in a 75km radius? Are there trips that could be solved with a good train, tram or bus? Do you provide streets with bike lanes such that people feel safe riding the bike? What about pedestrians? Are autonomous cars really solving the congestion problem? Most of these cars still need to be parked during the night when demand is lower, exactly like a railyard. However, the space taken by one person in one car is much higher than any other forms of transit. My point here is: autonomous rideshares may displace taxi services and Uber. But most importantly, good street and city design, which is hard but not impossible, matters much more than solving the autonomous car problem.

jeffbee 17d ago

AVs and public transportation are not comparable. The cumulative lifetime investment in Waymo would not fund even half a year of capital expenses for the New York MTA, for example.

Gigachad 17d ago
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The most expensive part of self driving cars is building the roads and highways. Would make more sense to compare Waymo to the operating expenses of PT, hiring the drivers and maintaining the trains.
- jeffbee 17d ago
  You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?
  - Gigachad 17d ago
    No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.
    - jeffbee 17d ago
      I see. But Waymo investments are also vanishingly small compared to PT OpEx. If you for some reason could tap all of the Waymo money, operations and R&D and all of the rest of it, you could fund WMATA and that's it. Americans spend 100x more just on motor fuels than Waymo spends on itself. If you wanted to raise a similar amount of money you would need a mere 5¢ incremental gas tax. Private Americans furthermore spend $1 trillion every year just replacing and fixing their cars. You could double the public transit subsidy across the nation with a 5% car tax.
    - 16d ago

maxwellg 17d ago

We can have both. The resources aren't coming from the same bucket. Public transportation must be built by the local government, and is subject to that local government's ability to execute. In contrast, Self driving cars are largely siphoning resources from for-profit companies. I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.

lazyasciiart 17d ago
> Public transportation must be built by the local government, Amtrak is public transportation. Airlines are pretty close to public transportation. Local government doesn't need to be involved.
- mdorazio 17d ago
  To my knowledge there are only a handful of public transit systems in the world that operate at a profit, let alone that operate at enough of a profit to recover construction costs. As in, maybe 5 if you squint really hard. Who do you expect to fund new ones if not the government?
  - asdff 17d ago
    Regional or state is better than local government. Local governments would struggle to raise the required funds for the costs of modern transit and would have a mandate to really support transit within their municipal borders vs a regional solution that is agnostic to the byzantine municipal borders.

daedrdev 17d ago

Public transit is too often a jobs program

arjie 17d ago

It does. About the same amount of money was spent in funding for Waymo as funding SFMTA over the period Waymo has existed. So in SF we are putting in as much money on public transit as Alphabet et al. is on Waymo and we both have the results we have.

1970-01-01 17d ago

>all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.

oblio 17d ago
Demand is based on time of day/week/month/year. Where do all those cars needed during peak demand go? They're going to be parked somewhere and it's not going to be in the middle of nowhere, because that's an awful customer experience.
- 1970-01-01 17d ago
  The same place as existing taxis and busses? Busses are a worse customer experience than a 10 minute wait.
  - oblio 17d ago
    Do you realize the order of magnitude in difference? If we end up having as many self driving cars as taxis, they can just terminate Waymo tomorrow, what's the point in investing tens of billions? The goal is to replace many or most of the cars on the road. https://john-s-allen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/muenster_poster.jpg https://john-s-allen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/mue...

WD-42 17d ago

Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.

dzhiurgis 17d ago
Roads designed for buses (and trucks) also cost many orders of magnitude more than ones build for cars only. If you account for that, cost per passenger mile on fully loaded electric bus is more than uber chauffeur.
- cletusw 16d ago
  Source? You can have many buses using a single BRT lane which is much cheaper to build and maintain than the number of lanes you would need to move the same number of people in private vehicles. Even more so once you start building grade-separated highways and their off ramps.
koyote 17d ago
So at 2am you would have thousands of cars driving around empty? Or would you still need a giant spot of land to park these things outside of peak hour?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 17d ago
  The giant spot of land could be in a much less convenient (= valuable) location if the car can take itself to and from there.
  - oblio 17d ago
    No. That's false. Riders will want a car to be at their location ASAP, or they will try to call another company. So the incentive will be to put/drive cars very close to where people are. That whole "cars will be stored at the periphery" is propaganda.

bsder 17d ago

> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem. The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult. For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.

Rover222 17d ago

Cybercab is more efficient per rider mile than most public transit systems.

nonethewiser 17d ago

>If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great. I guess it depends on where we're talking about. The majority of the US is not inside a city. So just diverting all resources into public transportation is only serving the metros. If we're talking about a small country then sure.

Tinned_Tuna 17d ago
> The majority of the US is not inside a city. I think this isn't true for the US any more, maybe it hasn't been true for decades? WorldBank seems to have the ubranisation rate at around 80% for the US: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat... There is a bit of a definitional problem, with people living in suburbs identifying as rural, as do folks in exurbs. I don't think they're considered rural, and they're concentrated enough that well-designed public transit could serve them quite well. A decent public transit system means that families in sub/exurbs can go from 2 cars to 1 car without a major drop in quality of life, but they'd save $5k - $10k per year.
- rrr_oh_man 17d ago
  It's much simpler than that. UN urbanization rate is based on the national definition. The U.S. definition of urban area is based on population (and has been changed recently): Under the old criteria, an urbanized area needed to have at least 50,000 residents. An urban cluster was defined as having at least 2,500 people, a threshold that had been around since 1910. Under this definition, almost 81 percent of the U.S. was urban and 19 percent was rural over the past decade. Under the new definition, hammered out after the 2020 census, the minimum population required for an area to be considered urban doubled to 5,000 people. Originally, the Census Bureau proposed raising the threshold to 10,000 people but pulled back amid opposition. The new criteria for urban areas shift the urban-rural ratio slightly, to 79.6 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively. Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-census-bureau-redefines-the-meaning-of-urban-areas-in-america https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-census-bureau-rede... ("U.S. Census Bureau redefines the meaning of urban areas in America", PBS, Dec 29, 2022)

TulliusCicero 17d ago

People always say this, but a) even countries known for good transit like Japan still have a ton of cars for various things, and b) there's no getting around that the money going into self-driving cars vs public transit isn't something that can really be swapped. It's coming from a different place for a different reason. We absolutely could invest into more trains even with the SDC money flowing anyway, it's not like the SDC money is blocking it. We collectively choose not to do this, and it's not Waymo's fault.

tossandthrow 17d ago
A better idea would just be to let drivers pay the real price for the infrastructure they occupy and their negative externalities. Then people would likely not have a issue with public transit.
- rrr_oh_man 17d ago
  "Let's make car owners more miserable" is a typical sentiment held by young, healthy people who live in dense cities and ride an electric bicycle to work. Not everyone can do that. Many areas also completely lack the public transit infrastructure needed to support a normal life. E.g., a couple of days ago, I was shocked to learn just how bad the UK public transport system really is, apparently, outside of major metros (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286)
  - tossandthrow 17d ago
    The gas lighting in this comment is strong. > "Let's make car owners more miserable" I proposed to let people pay for the services they use. That is not an attack on redistribution to unhealthy older people living outside of the city. In the contrary. By reducing the load on the transport infrastructure you make it easier for them to use it. And for your wish to redistribute: That can easily be done without the city making the use of the land for roads free. You could literally just give subsidies to people who absolutely need cars.
- 17d ago

dfabulich 17d ago

Small self-driving busses would do exactly what you want. The cost of increasing bus service is overwhelmingly the cost of bus drivers. If the busses could drive themselves, cities could afford to deploy a lot more busses, especially smaller busses, running much more often. As for light rail, in the US, light rail projects can typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. The NYC 2nd Avenue subway expansion cost billions of dollars per mile. And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.

solatic 17d ago
If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation. It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale. [1]: https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit
- asdff 17d ago
  That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.
  - xnx 16d ago
    It works even better with high demand because it's easier to find multiple people traveling to/from the same places.
    - asdff 16d ago

kstenerud 17d ago

The problem with transit systems is that they aren't designed for competition. They're costly to make, have few builder companies to choose from (who all know the game very well and go over budget as a tactic), and extremely difficult to overhaul/retrofit when more efficient tech becomes available. They're great for short distance travel in densely populated areas, but outside of that I doubt they'd hold up in long-term cost and efficiency vs autonomous electric cars for long. As for parking, a fully autonomous car service would allow a car to come to you and pick you up. So it wouldn't need to park near where you are.

tim333 17d ago

Google says annual public transport spend is ~£300bn. If you put all the self driving resources into it it wouldn't make a huge difference. Waymo like vehicles may also help with the last mile issues, giving disabled access to pedestrianised areas and the like.

sloob 17d ago

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ihsw 16d ago

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