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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 Yo
by jeffbee 27d 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 27d agoI'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 27d agoYou 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 27d agoNo 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 27d agoI 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.
- xnx 26d agoRoads are used by everyone. Transit right-of-ways are limited to use by transit and are extremely underutilized. In many cases, it would be better to turn those in to bike and/or AV lanes.
- dzhiurgis 27d agoBuilding roads for buses are _few orders of magnitude more_ expensive than roads for cars only. Unfortunately we still have trucking, but it's starting to feel we should build separate roads for them and for special cases only allow multi-axle delivery trucks on normal roads.
- dublinben 26d agoYou’re right, we should! We could even build these special purpose, heavy duty roads out of something stronger than asphalt, like metal. Then once we have these sturdy new metal roads for trucks, we can raise the weight limit to allow them to carry heavier loads. And since there’s no little cars getting in the way, we could even group together multiple trucks going in the same direction for better logistical efficiency. You can see where I’m going with this. ;-)
- dzhiurgis 26d agoI don't. Railways are failing around the world, including freight.
- TheCoelacanth 26d agoRailways have always been prone to failure, even in back when rail was the hot new technology transforming the economy and minting fortunes.