While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this.

A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)

I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.

That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to) and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and comfort will spend it without looking back.

New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind.

And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some places even smaller cities and towns have excellent public transit networks that pretty much everyone uses (maybe not always, but when convenient). Freiburg, Germany is one example I've seen.

NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as good as Germany or DC.

Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instructions in other languages might have well used Google translate. Tokyo was one of the more difficult public transport systems I’ve used and I’ve been around the world a bit.

I was surprised that the machines only took cash, but it was annoying as hell that we were 10yen short and the nearest ATM was 2 blocks away under the street then back up again.

The rush for the 11-11:30pm trains are nuts. I've never seen so many black suits filled by unsmiling faces than the last train out near Tsukiji.

Did you just claim DC public transit is good? Wow. Coherent bus lines are few and far between. Light rail is non-existent. And the Metro is falling apart at the seems... Prone to excessive delays. Entire lines are brought down for extended periods to perform decades of deferred maintenance. There's no ring routes - to get from Dulles to Rockville, you have to go all the way downtown and back out again. The system was built without consideration for express lines. And neither of the DC airports are on the same line as Union Station.

My wife tried to use Metro for her Reston->downtown commute. It was a disaster - rail delays made it completely untenable. Then she tried the bus. It was more consistent, but overcrowded. She ended up driving 4/5 days because it was faster, cheaper, and more consistent.

That's probably only hold true for (Western) tourists. And I don't think it is fair to compare on that. Tokyo (and Japan in general) rail system can be really intimidating but that's just because its sheer size, but once you know your way around it, it's gotta be among the best rail system in the world.

So for the two of us, a Muni trip is

  - total cost: $5
  - usually takes 30-60 min to get wherever we want to go in the city. 
  - we need to to figure out the optimal route, schedule, and entry & exit stops. 
  - we need to make sure we will arrive at the stop on-time.
  - we need to walk 5-10 min to closest stop on either end

However... a low-cost Uber or Lyfts pool ride for two is

  - total cost: $5-12 (same serice area as Muni)
  - duration: 15-45 min
  - we don't have to plan the route or schedule
  - we don't have to worry about going to a remote pick-up stop on-time
  - we get dropped off directly at our destination

Of course, here in SF ride share vehicles are definitely not allowed to use the special public-transportation-only lanes of some of the major roads, which remain reserved for the exclusive use of Muni buses and taxis to improve their transit times.

(edited to fix indentation)

Sure there are worse systems that don’t have any coverage (El Paso for example) but they are not functioning so I don’t count those.

Problems with muni include:

    - To many stops (like every two blocks).
    - Hardly any dedicated bus lanes, bus gets stuck
      in traffic too many times.
    - Slow and un-intuitive routes.
    - Small and overcrowded busses.
    - No transfer to BART or ferries.

[1]: Sometimes too frequent, I sometimes see the 14 being stuck in congestion of other 14s

If public transit i.e. Muni serves 10x or 100x riders each day vs ride sharing than I see your point... I think.

Wait. Maybe you could spell it out?

On the other hand, 99% of vehicle trips in SF are either private cars or TNCs.

Neither of these was my point, though. My point was that comparing cost between a per-trip price and a per-person price will always favor the former when there are multiple people. But most trips don't involve multiple people, which is why such an analysis is besides the point.

1: http://tncstoday.sfcta.org/ 2: https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership 3: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/ridership

I think what’s actually happening is Uber drivers are paid peanuts and provide and maintain their own vehicles. There’s a technology innovation (eg the efficiency of knowing if and where someone needs a ride) coupled with a labor innovation in paying drivers less than minimum wage.

Huh. This is interesting. The "Learn More About TNCs" button on the page you linked to leads to some more facts, including:

> "On a typical weekday, TNCs make more than 170,000 vehicle trips within San Francisco, approximately 12 times the number of taxi trips, representing 15% of all intra-San Francisco vehicle trips." - https://www.sfcta.org/tncstoday

So: 1,333,333 intra-San Francisco vehicle trips each day, including Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), and from your other links, 1,165,000 MUNI+BART trips per day, for a total of 2,498,333 rides per day

The population of the city during business hours is ~1,100,000... Oh of course, most people make round trips so it makes sense for the total number of rides to be >2x the city population.

> "On an average weekday, more than 5,700 TNC vehicles operate on San Francisco streets during the peak period"[sfcta.org/tncstoday]

So if TNCs provide ~30 trips a day, and all 1,165,000 MUNI+BART passengers switched to TNCs, there would have to be an additional ~40k TNC vehicles in the city :).

Maybe it would work if they were really, really small.

In cities that were designed or entirely remade to support the automobile, the automobile works better than everything else. This is almost a tautology, but it's remarkable how often it's overlooked in this discussion. If cities were re-designed around transit (with more density, smaller roads, and more space for alternative transportation modes), then transit would work better and cars would be worse. †

In summary, yes, obviously cars work better in cities designed for cars! But cities that work well for cars aren't a natural feature of the universe. It took a lot of work to get them to look like that.

† An important implication of this is that transit will never overtake the automobile in low-density, sprawl-heavy cities. Transit use is high where the transit infrastructure is good and driving is painful. Both things have to be true. ††

And the tension here is direct. Sprawl-heavy areas can't support good transit infrastructure and high-density, pedestrian-friendly areas are awful to drive in. A choice for one is a vote against the other.

†† This is why arguments about the superiority of cars based on revealed preference are usually spurious. If you put a light rail system in a town built for cars, then people will keep using the thing the town was built for. But those people are revealing their preference for cars in an environment built for cars. Where the built environment is different, people behave differently.

It largely depends on the country or even city. Me and my gf went to Switzerland by car a couple of years ago (we live in Eastern Europe) and I’d had expected that we’d visit different parts of the country by car. What happened once we got there is that we “forgot” the car in the hotel’s parking lot for a week and we did all our travel by train, it was wonderful. Even traveling inside the city itself (we were based in Lausanne) was a very nice thing, I’ve started building a soft spot in my heart for the city’s trolley-buses (electric public transport rocks, btw, always has, alwsys will).

While the electrification of the mass transit systems is super nice, unfortunately it came about because of the World Wars. Switzerland was hit really hard, and no one wanted to trade their precious coal away (Switzerland had no coal mines). Thus out of sheer necessity they began electrifying all the trains. So unfortunately there's not replicable policies other countries can use to achieve what Switzerland has achieved in terms of electrification, so it'd take some creativity.

Well that's because it's actually true for a lot of people. Sure, there's no freedom in commuting between SF and south bay by car, or navigating the most dense downtown environments. But I definitely use my car on a daily basis for things that would be impossible or incredibly time consuming by transit. And yes, many of the transit patrons around here would probably prefer a car if they could afford it. Most places are not like NYC where the subway is often the most effective option regardless of wealth.

I don't think it's really feasible for more spread out suburban environments to implement effective mass transit. The anti-car idealists often seem to forget that there are a lot of people living outside of dense city centers.

If self driving cars are terrible at coping with the chaos humans grit their teeth and deal with, maybe software for engineering cooperative bumper-to-bumper traffic jams involving clogs of slow-moving self driving cars, that reduce the road speeds to constant 20 MPH (the /constant/ part being important), and eliminate chaotic lane changing to near zero for the group, is one way to bootstrap self driving cars.

In other words, low-performance self driving cars might work fine, and since people can lounge about, and disengage from the guidance and navigation tasks, why not go slower?

Then, add swarming to the mix, such that cars going to the same place, all travel slowly in a single group.

It's against the law to obstruct traffic, or violate minimum speed requirements, so certain laws would need to change. For example, zero emission vehicles can idle indefinitely, and software-controlled vehicles can interface with an external control network, approved to operate in such ways, with points of contact at operations centers for resolving problems, technical or otherwise.

So change laws to permit idle electric vehicles (in more places and controlled, desginated places, not just anywhere), and permit large slow moving groups to occupy certain corridors, at certain times, when jammed traffic is a known quantity, that driverless systems aren't the cause of. Driverless networks can cut into a slice of the jam, and possibly improve outcomes for members only at first, and eventually boost efficiency within the jammed system by augmenting flow through expert participation.

Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?

https://www.chariot.com/

Does Remix (https://www.remix.com/) count?

The thing is, if there were a bus, it would have to stop to pick up / drop off passengers along the way, which would make it so much slower than driving that it really would be for the poor. I've been on such buses as a kid. Even when traffic is bad, bumper-to-bumper in a car (taking the fastest route) is going to be faster than bumper-to-bumper in a bus (taking a more circuitous route and stopping frequently along the way)

I think the only way buses will stop being for the poor, is when they stop become faster than more expensive alternatives. (Or at least nearly as fast and significantly cheaper.) If you can save a lot of time by spending a little bit of money, which would you choose? What if you could spend a lot of money but it wouldn't save you any (or much) time?

In cities where congestion is a major problem, dedicated bus lanes/roads can help balance the equation in favor of buses. Usually there aren't enough dedicated bus routes though. (I might point out that the people deciding how to balance bus/car traffic are not the people who ride the bus.)

I still think self-driving cars are far in the future, but I find them appealing because they would make "buses" more efficient. A lot of the cost of operating buses is paying the drivers. To maximize economies of scale, buses are large, which means they have to make a lot of stops to pick up and drop off passengers, which in turn makes them slow. Self-driving buses could be a lot smaller and wouldn't need to make as many stops. If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. At some point, the lines between bus/ridesharing/taxi get pretty blurry.

> If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead.

Everytime selfdriving tech comes up people say things similar to this, this problem is 100% solvable now. Why are we waiting for self driving cars to solve this problem?

What the hell is going on in Austin?

Bumper-to-bumper traffic happens mostly at commute hours in commercial zones and during special events. It's very much not the norm for driving at other times. To wit, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest and least car-friendly cities in the U.S., but the last time I returned from a road trip, I traversed the whole city corner-to-corner -- from crossing the Bay Bridge to arriving at my home near the zoo -- in less than fifteen minutes. Why? Because it was midnight! Cars provide unparalleled mobility for irregular trips outside of peak commuting times, even in the largest cities.

I wholeheartedly support deprioritizing car infrastructure and working towards a norm where most people do not drive to work, but I nonetheless believe that car ownership provides a lot of independence and ought to be accessible to the modal citizen, at least outside of the very dense coastal cities (SF/LA/NY). Cars work really well for irregular trips outside of rush hour. They work terribly when large amounts of people need to go to the same place at once.

I can count on 1 hand (ok, maybe both hands) the number of times I've been in bumper-to-bumper traffic in my life. One of those was in Austin. There's lots of places to go that aren't big cities.

<Insert obligatory Portal reference.>

Maybe it will take 15 years for it to be everywhere, but I'm still fully expecting a deployment in Phoenix this year or next.

I'm not really clear what tax break you're complaining about, AFAIK there is no extra tax break for Waymo.

Plus driverless car tech is global. The US infrastructure problems are irrelevant to me as a Canadian or the billions of people in Asia.

Toronto has horrible traffic too.

Instead of fantasizing about the day modern nation states are marginally functional at delivering services, like they were half a century ago. Basically everything they touch, especially under the false guise of 'private' partnerships ends up a decade late and 2-4x the cost (in billions). And often delivering only half of what was originally planned.

The less we gamble on such a trainwreck the better IMO. Unless, of course, something changes. But every year and every election it seems to get worse.

You seem to think self driving cars are magnificent devices that just glide over roads and don't need bridges or tunnels. For some reason, we never include these costs with cars when compared to mass transit. That is simply unfair.

I'm not against self driving cars by any means. But people misrepresent them all the time.

Cheers.

Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over)

The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...

Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.

That project is privately funded. The Block 37 station was the expensive vaporware.

This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe.

> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)

> So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6]

  - area of Continental US: 3.12 million sq mi [1]
  - area of Europe: 2.306 million sq mi [1]
  - rail network length, US: 141,808 mi [2]
  - rail network length, Europe: 157,667 mi [3]
  - goods carried, US: 1.558 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) (world rank: 1st) (2015 estimate) [4]
  - goods carried, "Europe":  0.32604 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) 

I guess it feels like the distances involved in the US are more advantageous to freight, and in the EU are more advantageous to passengers

Since then railroads have to be completely self-supporting in the US, they focus on how they can achieve the highest productivity: giant, slow trains on shoddy track.

It also means the infrastructures are competing with one another, so there are redundant, shoddy, competing rail networks, rather than a network for slow and heavy freight trains, and a network for fast and light passenger trains.

City driving is a hard problem space, and all we'd achieve is cooler taxis.

The real game changer is instead driverless trucks.

Shipping is both a trillion dollar industry, and the problem space of "highway driving when it is sunny out" is much much easier than the consumer usecase, while still being extremely valuable.

I think you underestimate the impact of ubiquitous, free valet parking on urban design. We surround everything with parking to minimize walking distance to/from our vehicles, but you could organise things very differently if everyone was picked up and dropped off.

You could also park cars bumper-to-bumper, because you don't need trusted human drivers to move the cars boxing you in. Removing isles from the parking lot would nearly double the number of cars that could fit in a given space.

It's counter-intuative, but I think driverless cars may eventually make cities more walkable.

Driverless. Technology of the future. Always was. Always will be.

But seriously, how much would it take to mostly handle driving trucks on limited access highways between exurb mega-warehouses? By "mostly," I mean, be able to handle 98% of all situations, and be able to flag attention from a remote control human supervisor for the other 2%. I suspect we're pretty close.

And honestly any number is simply just 'pulled out of the ass' anyway. It's not as if they can see daylight on all the problems that need to be solved or predict various soft issues (the government only one example). So this is not that someone is building the atomic bomb and can realistically judge more or less the scope of the problems that need to be solved and then build in a bit of leeway.

It has has attained this status as revealed truth because it is indeed roughly true -- more people together in a vehicle done right will indeed use less energy per person and less road space. But the "done right" is very important as it is commonly done quite wrong.

As I have studied robocars, this has led me to the discovery that some of our old assumptions are wrong. In particular, more sharing is not always good, and the styles of sharing (including the vehicle sizes) of current public transportation are almost certainly not the optimum sizes, and that smaller vehicles are likely more optimal once we eliminate the need for drivers and move to a highly communicating world.

I believe there are strong arguments that while shared travel is beneficial, we actually have too much of it in most transit systems, and not enough in private cars. That the 'shared' future is one of van-sized group vehicles with a mixed fleet of more personal cars with 1-4 seats."

https://ideas.4brad.com/sleeper-cars-and-unexpected-efficien...

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoeni...

There’s no efficient way for busses to get people close to their door. It makes no sense. Mass transit should relieve congestion on major routes, it’s not an efficient solution to the last mile problem.

1. I would theorize that the economic benefits of transportation are directly proportional to how fast the service is, and how much people it can move. As an estimation, I'd say cars are limited to 60 mph while high speed rail would be limited to 200 mph.

2. With fixed-path mass transit, the problem of traffic is greatly simplified. Self driving cars may solve a labor issue but they won't solve the traffic problem: cars routing themselves selfishly will not result in the lowest travel time possible. You can argue that a central coordinator can exist to coordinate routes, but if there's an incentive for a person (not necessarily a driver) to deviate from their set path, why wouldn't they take it?

How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses?

What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these lakes in the middle of nowhere?

What about hauling larger personal watercraft? Just don't do that? Store it at the body of water you've chosen to exclusively use your boat/jetski on?

Rely on Amazon to handle the logistics of shipping hay for your livestock?

Maybe these are all just cultural things that need to disappear and be replaced by magical super-efficient factory farms or not replaced at all. But there are other ways of life than just living in an apartment and commuting to an office.

This conversation is about the 62% of Americans that live and work in 3.5% of the land area. (Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....)

There’s no reason for rural America to act like these ideas are crazy, nor for urban America to act like these problems are universal. So often these two sides act in opposition to each other when they really have no conflict with each other - except perhaps that both side has a hard time relating to the other lifestyle.

FWIW those 62% live in "incorporated paces" or cites, which would include my town (as long as I'm understanding that correctly.) Down under "new incorporated places" it mentions Sandy Point, TX, population 200. It's crazy that even including little towns like that you're still only talking about 3.5% of the land.

I think it also speaks to how relatively solvable some of the urban problems are in the sense that we could be intentionally building new cities (not just attached suburbs) if we wanted to, and that would - if it worked - take some of the pressure off the places that are struggling right now.

For whatever reason America just stopped doing that after WW2. Maybe it’s time to start again?

Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if people could easily commute by rail to the bigger city 45 minutes away? I bet people would be more interested in living in that small town.

And that is just going to the nearest larger city... What if you want to go to a different city? Or a smaller town? Or a random place that doesn't have a bus station?

I predict very few people would participate.

Despite being slow and expensive, those trains are packed, day after day, with commuters who would rather live out of the city, and not spend 15-20 hours of their week sitting in traffic on the 401. They recently extended two of the trains with additional carriages to handle the capacity.

We've been clamouring for hourly bidirectional service for over a decade and it's only in recent years that the relevant authorities have finally gotten their act together to build out the necessary infrastructure to make it possible (twinning a bunch of track sections, building a bypass for US-bound freight, and electrification).

People do carry their horses to work with them. They aren't just luxury goods.

Maybe people need to take personal responsibility and not spend money as if the government will make things easier for them and solve all problems. I am not claiming this is possible for everyone there are truly people who need help. But the vast majority of people can try to live in a way that they can have personal transportation (which has been around how long now?) and is reasonably enough priced currently.

Separately back before autos wouldn't people have had the same issue with horses or with even machines that they needed to run their lives or their business? Isn't it part of being human to plan for breakdowns of various things that you need that you can plan around failure?

Whenever someone says this I assume the opposite; America is not a place of uniquely irresponsible people.

People have had cashflow issues since the dawn of cash, often mitigated by complex family informal credit systems.

I don’t think the killer market for driverless cars in America in the first place. Places like China that have all that (commuter rail, subway) but lack places for new roads and parking would benefit greatly from optimizing their limited road infrastructure. They already have people who are used to taking taxies everywhere, now make the ring roads automated only to triple their capacity.

Europe, Asia, can be benefit greatly from driverless cars because they have a different situation from America.

I think driverless has the potential to be both - we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient.

This doesn't seem to require driverless busses. I can see an argument of why self driving taxis would be helpful -- cost of labor is near zero -- but with busses, the cost of labor is amortized across passengers.

c'mon, who is gonna dream about that ? </cynism>

We also need to focus on the actual problem we're faced with. Cities are hitting limits to growth due to congestion and we can't build more roads. The state of tech right now is capable enough to solve that problem by increasing the throughput of the major arteries of LA / DC / etc.

https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=46398

But my understanding is that at least as far things like subways go, driverless trains aren't a difficult problem.

because a world in which a greater proportion of people travel via multi-passenger vehicles like the buses and trains of public transport networks is a better world because these transportation solutions are 1) more efficient per passenger (does this help w/ reducing carbon emissions?); 2) economically more accessible because passengers pay per trip instead of purchasing vehicle outright; 3) potentially less expensive to operate due to economies of scale (purchasing & maintaining a large fleet of vehicle vs a single vehicle) and higher equipment utilizationl; 4) perahaps encourage more social connection amongst passengers; 5) passengers do not have to focus on driving and can "recover" the time that would have been spent driving a car doing something else.

I ask because I think the endgame for self-driving car companies is not so much to sell cars (self-driving in this case) to individual consumers, but rather to to win the zero-sum-game of becoming the largest on-demand "elastic" self-driving vehicle transportation platform; i.e. 80% of the cars Ford makes in 2030 it reserves for its automated fleet, which it dispatches on a per-ride bases to subscribers/customers for a single trip, a day, a month, etc. The ultimate technological opportunity here is effectively "packet switching" for physical transport via the highway network.

While it's possible (and desirable, in my opinion) the fleet of vehicles enabling this automated transport network could be a composition of myriad different vehicles, from many different vendors, contributed dynamically by everyone from families (or groups of families) that own a single vehicle and rent it out when its not in use to the fleets of large companies like ups, hertz, ford, etc... it seems more realistic that a few giant companies (Waymo, Uber) will be the ones that can scale up a working network fastest and cheapest by building, owning, and operating huge fleets of vehicles made up of just a few vehicle variants.

Anyway, imagine 60% of the cars on the roads today were capable of participating in an automated-vehicle-on-demand transportation network. This scenario seems like it has the same benefits I attributed to public transportation. What do you think - is it an equally desirable solution, or are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate?

- Substantially reduced traffic on surface streets (a bus or subway is MUCH more densely packed with humans than a road full of cars).

- Encourage more walking and overall fitness

- Improved safety for non-mechanized road and sidewalk users (reduced traffic will do more for pedestrian safety than automated traffic will, I promise).

- Less space required to be devoted to parking and streets, so better land utilization.

--- So... this got really long. It was just supposed be a quick back-of-the-napkin sanity check estimate of the economics of some rural autonomous vehicle service scenarious and it got a little out of hand. If anyone else also finds this interesting, drop me a line or comment! ---

Lets also consider the merits of these two transportation scenarios when depoloyed to serve regional/rural populations too. I don't think any of these benefits are significant for the other much less dense half of the US population (but by 2033 or something this fraction will fall to like 1/3 I've heard).

I grew up in Northern Michigan, where 99% of all daily trips were between 5-40 miles and required a personal car because there was no availability of taxis (too expensive per ride) or buses (because population density was too low to marshal enough passengers per bus route). In cities, where density is high and distances are low, buses/trains that batch passengers into one vehicle that's part of an interchange network works pretty well. But in rural areas where the opposite is true, passengers can't be batched together as easily, so buses don't work and an interchange takes too long to transit because of the distances.

A personal car is a necessity for most people living in rural areas because there is no other practical way to get to a job, store, movie, friends house, hospital etc when these locations may be 10-40 miles away. The time spent traveling to these places may be about the same as the commute time for a city-dweller, but rural residents have to do the driving themselves. Aha, so the critical question is: what, if any, features of personal transportation via on-demand self-driving-cars-as-a-service in rural areas might make it competitive with or more desirable than owning a personal car?

If costs per year are roughly equal, then I would love a self-driving car that I could work in. Or self-driving land-yacht office RV for 4-8 people.

Say a personal car costs $3000-6000/year in gas, maintenence, payments, etc. If a person travels 200 days a year and takes 2 trips a day, that's 400 trips a year. This is hard to estimate. To be conservative lets say self-driving-cars-as-a-service would be competitive if it allowed a customer to take 400-800 trips a year for the price of owning a car. That works out to $3.75-$7.5 per trip for the ex-owner of a cheap car, and $7.5-$15 per trip for the ex-owner of a mid-range car. I guess if these are electric self-driving cars, the fuel cost might be $0.50-$2 per day. Hmmmm. If the vehicle cost ~$50,000 and the profit per ride was $4, then it would take ~12,500 rides to break even. If a vehicle can get 10 average fares per day, 350 days a year, thats 700 fares per year.

So actually, the economics are not toally insane. At $4 profit per ride, it would take ~2 years to break even on a $50,000 vehicle assuming 10 rides a day that that take 1 hour, have a rider only one of those two ways, and only have 1 rider at a time. These vehicles might be operating at 20 hours a day though. Not sure they would last 2 years. So... what startups are working on self-driving Land Yacht Office co-working-commuting vehicles?

Now I see a significant portion of the fleet should be something that could pick up at least a few passengers along a route, otherwise there would need to be basically as many vehicles in the fleet as there are riders to support solo rides during commuting hours. $200,000 land yacht, 5 riders, $5/ride: 8000 trips to break even, 10 rides a day = ~2 years. But for a region of 40,000 riders, that might require 5000-8000 land yachts that cost $200,000; so $1-1.6 billion in vehicle costs. Aw man. What's ubers valuation? 70bn? And goog is 820bn? hmm.

Ah so here's the problem. Because of the distances involved in rural trips, it might take 15-60 minutes after requesting a ride for an automated fleet vehicle to travel to the pickup location. That might be ok for occasional travel, especially if trip times are 3+ hours, but it wouldn't be convenient for daily travel. So rural passengers would probably prefer owning their own car, or sharing an automated land-yacht with a couple local other folks, because they need it to be physically nearby most of the time to minimize the time-to-pickup.

In conclusion, InitialLastName's comment leads me to imagine a future in which the dense core of urban areas is served by high-capacity public transit, a significant portion of the central surface streets are closed and used for other purposes, with small-vehicle parking and pick-up/drop-off hubs are sprinkled throughout and around the city that link transport throughtout the wider region and state via privately owned vehicles (for daily commuters) and automated on-demand vehicle fleets (rolling offices) for the ocassional traveler.

Personally, I find it hard to do productive work on public transit, largely because transfers interrupt continuous work and the passenger compartments prioritize density over work surfaces. I think I would be ok paying 2x the fare of public transit for a trip that took 1.5x as long if the vehicle was outfitted with normal office furniture (desks) ~6 passengers. A relatively low-density vehicle for its size, scheduled a couple of hours in advance, providing a hub-to-door trip with no transfers. Ha. Yeah. Self-driving-land-yacht-office-as-a-service company?*

* we could validate it right now... SF <-> Palo Alto, 6 round trips per day per vehicle, 6 passengers per trip, $19 fare, $200,000 vehicle cost, $19/hr for driver, and lets ignore fuel costs. So say revenue of $600/day, that leads the vehicle break-even within a year. hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Well, yeah, it exists, it's called a train, it's magnitudes longer than any "autonomous truck convoy" ever will be, and instead of the billion dollar AI machine learning big data system we have to keep them close together, we use a fricking mechanical linkage.

no the real solution is get over this mythological idea that America is too car heavy. everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport. what automation will bring is freedom to those who cannot drive so we best better figure out how to get cars talk to each other and which areas will be reserved for automated driving only.

funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/500...

If you look at how many people go in debt to own cars or the amount of credit on cars, you would see poor numbers there as well. Cars are incredible money sinks. There is a reason why Uber doesn't operate its own fleet.

If public transit billed by value it would easily be kept afloat. But the value proposition in most cities in America just isn't there, because they simply aren't dense enough. It's not a mythological idea. It's simple math.

> funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly.

Funny you mention things going over budget because nearly all infrastructure projects in this country do - yes, including roads. This is a problem with our government, not mass-transit solely.

In your very own article, the reasons stated for the price increase have nothing to do with mass transit inherently. They would be true of any infrastructure project.

By way of contrast the Millau Viaduct[2] cost approx. €400 million and the Øresund Bridge[3] cost approx €2.6 billion — and represents an order of magnitude more engineering challenge.

Civil engineering in the US just seems to cost a lot more than in other developed countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bridg...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Øresund_Bridge

They have freedom to travel, but not freedom to live where they want. The United States has entirely banned dense housing in everywhere that people want to live, and this consequently makes transit impractical. Get rid of zoning restrictions on housing, and we'd be in a much different place.

The second disregard, that well... there are airplanes.

The first, that driverless busses that creep at 30km/h and do emergency brake every every 10 minutes thanks to overattentive collision avoidance system also been around for decades.

But then, you effectively get a copy of a rail system, only without rails. Saudi experimental city once played with the concept

And the same parallel for driverless car, except for even when well executed it is kinda of arguable usefulness/value.

Are regular cars useful? A self-driving car is just as useful for someone who can't drive: minors, many seniors, many people with disabilities - or people who just don't have a driving licenses, like me.

I expect them facing same issues like trams and trolleybuses - terribly bad experience in traffic.

You only see risky people aggressively trying to overtake and scratching their paint, while leaving the driver no opportunity to move an inch.