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A comment on Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success. Parent comment

Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by toomuchtodo on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:32PM (#12323627)
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.

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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by chrischen on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:43PM (#12323732)
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.

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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by trestles on Friday August 19, 2016 @06:47PM (#12324066)
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.
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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by toomuchtodo on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:46PM (#12323752)
I agree.
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Re:Lyft Is Said to Seek a Buyer, Without Success by shoo on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:53PM (#12323796)
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.

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