| ▲ | BarryMilo 10 hours ago |
| Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized... Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS services so far. |
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| ▲ | nine_k 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This only works in neighborhoods that are veritable city blocks, with buildings several stories tall standing close by. Not something like northern Houston, TX; it barely works for places like Palo Alto, CA. You cannot run buses on every lane, at a reasonable distance from every house. The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar. Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns. Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed. |
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| ▲ | hamdingers 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car Maybe for you, I already don't own it and have not found that to be true. I pretty much order an uber whenever I don't feel like riding my bike or the bus, and that costs <$300 most months. Less than the average used car payment in the US before you even consider insurance, fuel, storage, maintenance, etc. I also rent a car now and then for weekend trips, that also is a few hundred bucks at most. I would be surprised if robotaxis were more expensive long term. |
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| ▲ | dfabulich 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Self-driving municipal busses would be fantastic. |
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| ▲ | nine_k 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Also, a real nightmare for the municipal trade unions. (Do you know why every NYC subway train needs to have not one but two operators, even though it could run automatically just fine?) | | |
| ▲ | koakuma-chan 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why? | | |
| ▲ | nine_k 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because the Transport Workers Union fought tooth and nail for it. Laying off hundreds of operators would be a politically very dangerous move. | | |
| ▲ | koakuma-chan 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Huh. I wonder if that makes any sense. It doesn't seem to make sense to keep employing people if you no longer need them. It sucks to be layed off, but that's just how it works. | | |
| ▲ | supertrope 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It also shows a lack of imagination. If you have to provide a union with a job bank, why not re-deploy employees to other roles? With one person per train, re-deploy people to run more trains therefore decreasing the interval between trains. Stations used to have medics but this was cut. How about re-train people to be those medics? The subway could use a signaling upgrade and positive train control. Installing platform screen doors to greatly reduce the incidence of people falling onto the tracks is going to need a lot of labor. |
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| ▲ | cyberax 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why would you need buses? | | |
| ▲ | supertrope 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Mass transit is a capacity multiplier. If 35 people are headed in the same direction compare that with the infrastructure needed to handle 35 cars. Road capacity, parking capacity, car dealerships, gas stations, repair shops, insurance, car loans. | |
| ▲ | onlyrealcuzzo 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Believe it or not, in some cities that have near grid-lock rush-hour traffic - there's between 50-100%+ as many people traveling by bus as by car. If all of those people switch to cars, you end up with it taking an hour to travel 1 mile by car. It's almost as if they have busses for a reason. | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | First, these cities should be fixed by removing the traffic magnets. It's far past the point where we used the old obsolete ideology of trying to supply as much traffic capacity as possible. But anyway, your statement is actually not true anywhere in the US except NYC. Even in Chicago, removing ALL the local transit and switching to 6-seater minivans will eliminate all the traffic issues. | | |
| ▲ | toast0 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > First, these cities should be fixed by removing the traffic magnets. If you remove the jobs and housing, traffic does get a lot better. But it's not much of a city without jobs and housing. | |
| ▲ | supertrope 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Car traffic magnets like highways inside urban cores? Or people traffic magnets like office buildings, colleges, sports stadiums, performing arts venues, shopping malls? | |
| ▲ | dfabulich 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 6-seater self-driving municipal minivans would be fantastic, too. (I would still call that a "bus", but I don't care what we call it.) |
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| ▲ | boredatoms 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though Efficient for who, is the problem |
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| ▲ | Sayrus 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware. Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits? |
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| ▲ | bluGill 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Cars and personal computers have advantages over shared resources that often make them worth the cost. If you want your transport/compute in busy times you may find limitations. (ever got on the train and had to stand because there are no seats? Every had to wait for your compute job to start because they are all busy? Both of these have happened to me). | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I ran the numbers, and for most non-braindead cities something like a fleet of 6-seater minivans will easily replace all of local transit. And with just 6 people the overhead if an imperfect route and additional stops will be measured in minutes. And of course, it's pretty easy to imagine an option to pay a bit more for a fully personal route. | | |
| ▲ | dpkirchner 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This exists in a way -- I'd wager every city has a commercial service that will shuttle you to, say, the airport. They're not cheap, however. | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yep. And it's indeed a good model for this mode of transportation. And they ARE cheap. For example, in Seattle I can get a shared airport shuttle for $40 with the pick-up/drop-off at my front door. And this is a fully private ADA-compliant commercial service, with a healthy profit margin, not a rideshare that offloads vehicle costs onto the driver. And a self-driving van can be even cheaper than that, since it doesn't need a driver. Meanwhile, transit also costs around $40 per trip and takes at least 1 hour more. And before you tell me: "no way, the transit ticket is only $2.5", the TRUE cost of a transit ride in Seattle is more than $20. It's just that we're subsidizing most of it. So you can see why transit unions are worrying about self-driving. It'll kill transit completely. |
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| ▲ | bluGill 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | you made too many false assumptions if you came up with those routes. Experts have run real numbers including looking at what happens in the real world. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit - (as I write this you need to scroll to the second article to find the useful rebuttal of your idea) | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, yeah: "Major US Public Transit Union Questions “Microtransit”" Read it. Go on. It's pure bullshit. The _only_ issue with the old "microtransit" is the _driver_. Each van ends up needing on average MORE drivers than it moves passengers. It does solve the problem of throughput, though. But once the driver is removed, this problem flips on its head. Each regular bus needs around 4 drivers for decent coverage. It's OK-ish only when the average bus load is at least 15-20 people. It's still much more expensive and polluting than cars, but not crazily so. | | |
| ▲ | bluGill 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Scroll down to the other articles as I said in the first place. self driving changes some things, but there are a lot of other points in the many article linked from there that don't change. | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | This article is just a bunch of propaganda. You can tell that by the picture with people in the shape of a bus next to the line of cars. Every time you see it, you can immediately blacklist the author and ignore whatever they are saying about cars. Can you guess why? Hint: think about the intervals between buses and how you should represent them to stay truthful. And that buses necessarily move slower than cars. And that passengers will waste some time due to non-optimal routes and transfers. And that passengers will waste some time because they need to walk to the station. So back to my point, can you tell me EXACTLY what I should read in that article? Point out the paragraph, please. |
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| ▲ | brookst 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits? Even better — charge 10% less and corner the market! As long as nobody charges 10% less than you… | |
| ▲ | theLiminator 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits? Yeah, this would rely on robust competition. | |
| ▲ | nradov 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nah, I don't want to share my car with anyone. It's my own personal space where I can keep some of my stuff and set it up exactly the way I want. | | |
| ▲ | recursive 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's how some people feel about airplanes. Presumably you're not one of them. For some people, the inconvenience of being responsible for a car would outweigh the benefit of setting up their stuff inside of one. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's not even an inconvenience. I like my cars. Dealing with ride hailing services (autonomous or not) is certainly far more inconvenient than owning a car (unless maybe you're stuck living somewhere without convenient parking). |
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