No no no, not the percentage of cars that sometimes carry a load, the percentage of cars on the road that are currently carrying such a load.

If you do that once a week, then you can use transit the other 90% of the time. If people use transit 90% of the time, then we can build smaller roads and de-prioritize cars. That's the argument here, that transit can dominate in co-existence with self-driving cars, not that we'd need to get rid of cars. And especially in the context of waymo there's no effect of "I'm already paying a ton of money to own and insure a car, I might as well use it every trip".

(And again, this is in moderately dense areas where transit works and you actually care about how many cars are on the road to begin with. And it doesn't have to be 90% in particular.)

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glitchc a day ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't work that way. Once a car is obtained, it has fixed costs. My monthly finance payments can't be pro-rated to the days I actually use the car. Ditto for insurance. In many cases, the best deal for insurance is to pay for the year up-front. Bears repeating, a year, up-front. Insurance companies incentivize this. Between those two, that's 80% of the TCO. Fuel and maintenance are actually incidentals based on usage and account for < 20% of annual ownership costs.

Ergo, it's no surprise that people want to use them as often as possible. They want to recoup value from those fixed costs. It's simple economics.

	▲	Dylan16807 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Did you not read my entire comment? I directly addressed that. > in the context of waymo there's no effect of "I'm already paying a ton of money to own and insure a car, I might as well use it every trip"

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dgfitz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> And again, this is in moderately dense areas where transit works and you actually care about how many cars are on the road to begin with. And it doesn't have to be 90% in particular.

This caveat destroys the rest of your points, as logical as they may seem.

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Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent [-]

The first caveat or the second one?

Remember the original argument was "I think public transit will continue to dominate in parts of the world where it currently dominates" I'm taking that and strengthening it to a significant expansion of transit, but obviously not everywhere can do transit.

If the lanes on the road can fill up, you have enough traffic to sustain some busses.

In emptier areas that's a pretty different discussion, but importantly you still wouldn't need to design around cars. Slap in a very basic road and it'll handle all the cars fine.

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glitchc a day ago | parent [-]

If you need an alternative mode to get to public transit, it has already lost the battle. I can walk to my car in 20 seconds. I can carry many items in its trunk, making it worthwhile to make multiple stops on my journey. Public transit is not meeting my use-cases.

	▲	Dylan16807 a day ago \| parent [-]
		>If you need an alternative mode to get to public transit No one was suggesting that. > I can carry many items in its trunk, making it worthwhile to make multiple stops on my journey. Public transit is not meeting my use-cases. Well the guy I was talking to was only worried about one or few trips per month, and we only need most people to use transit for the scenario to work.