They're extremely complimentary. In LA (for example) mass transit has a tendency to strand you, and traditional taxis and car services have gigantic no-go areas unless you're a VIP.

I can take a bus or train anywhere at any time, knowing that if I'm, for example, south of Washington at any time of day or downtown after 2am, I can call a car and still get home. In the 00s, the only way out of those zones was to bring your own car or be prepared for a "Falling Down" style 10 mile walk.

Yellow cabs (then and still) don't enter a massive buffer zone around regions where they might get a black guy as a fare even if you called, but Uber serves those areas reliably, 24/7.

Absolutely agree with this. There is no reason we can't move people the way we move goods. Public transit, trains/planes, etc serve as the distribution network. Self-driving cars are the "last mile" delivery service.

LA is uniquely sprawled, and like I said it only works for less dense suburban areas.

Wherever it's deployed you have to conisder the traffic and congestion repercussions if everyone uses it, not just rich people.

Transit has to move poor and middle class people too.

Having lived in California for 30 years—in arguably every major city in the state (LA, SF, San Diego, San Jose), multiple times in multiple neighborhoods of each—fully autonomous point-to-point car sharing networks honestly sound less pie-in-the-sky to me than a mass transit system that is efficient OR well funded.

But we did just spend twenty billion dollars on a bullet train from Bakersfield to Merced, so there's that, I guess.

Public transit in SF sucks. It takes 45 minutes on the so-called "rapid" bus to go 5 miles. The Geary corridor is one of the busiest in the country, approaching (EDIT: well over!) 100k passengers per day if you include the 4 parallel bus lines running 1 block away from each other. It desperately needs a subway. But we're still 5 years away from even a BRT line, which will still take a minimum of 35 minutes.

I think it's a fair bet that autonomous cars will come before Geary BRT is completed, and it's a certainty that they'll come before Geary gets a subway. And while Geary is one of the worst, there are a half dozen similar bus corridors in the city. Also, most of the rail is above ground and similarly slow and crowded.

While I generally think rail and autonomous cars can be symbiotic, autonomous cars are likely to kill buses. Middle-income people ride the bus only out of necessity. High-income people never ride the bus, though they will ride a decent subway system. Once autonomous cars and autonomous shuttles come out, middle-income riders will flock to them, the only people riding busses will be the poor and working class, and the system will collapse, sooner in most other places, but it'll also happen in San Francisco.

Because San Francisco doesn't have a real subway network, SF MTA is in for some rough times in the not too distant future. I wouldn't be surprised if San Francisco bans or heavily taxes private autonomous systems. If they were smart they'd be digging tunnels as fast as possible. Some cities, like Madrid, seemed to have learned to do it cheaply, and the savings aren't just because of geology.

i don't understand why nobody sees them as a symbiosis. We haven't solved anything if driverless cars are clogging up the highway, but they can solve one of the biggest problems for mass transit, the last/first kilometres. I don't know anything specific about the bullet train, but most of the time the problem is getting to/from the bullet-train. If it shortens your travel by one hour, but you have to wait 2 hours for a bus to get to the station it's not going to work.

Heh, I live in Toronto, 5th largest city in North America.

I've accepted the fact that public transit systems here will never be great. It will only be ever be barely good enough. There are a ton of factors affecting this, but at this point my faith is with the private sector.

After moving to San Francisco, I miss the TTC, YRT/Viva, and GO Transit a lot.

Not for fast point-to-point travel.

Why can't self-driving electric cars be government/co-op owned to provide mass transit? It would be orders of magnitude less expensive than light rail in almost all major metros (NY, SF, CHI all have the benefit of being fairly dense, allowing subways or elevated tracks).

I'm in Tampa most of my time, and it will be impossible to service that much sprawl with light rail or bus service. And if you don't like sprawl, you're going to need to change public policy to deal with dense real estate costs.

There is no free urban planning lunch.

Areas with sprawl are best suited to car ownership.

Dense urban areas are better suited to mass transit.

Uber fills a niche of point to point transport that's current overutilized because of VC subsidization.

Even if you get rid of the driver, you can't expect everyone in an urban core to do point to point transit, especially with the inefficiencies of pick up and drop off.

I know a LOT of people who prefer Uber to self-driving. Expect that to be an emergent behavior once the cost of the driver is subtracted.

I agree.

separate from the perspective of optimising for cost is the goal of optimising for energy efficiency: you get much better energy efficiency by moving more people at once for the cross-sectional area of air that needs to be pushed out of the day. trains are about 50x more energy efficient for moving people than cars.

i agree that at some point low-density sprawl wouldn't make centralised public transport economic (even supposing global regulation existed to force the cost of pollution to be accounted for in market prices)

at this point in our global human predicament it'd be a bit of a shame not to realise that some ideas that were okay in the past aren't very good ideas any more.

What about self driving public transit?;)