You are describing a bus company ;)

"a shared fleet of cars continuously picking up and dropping off passengers within cities"

And just like existing bus companies, the self-driving ones will also require you to take a detour so that other passengers can be picked up or dropped off along the way.

So the main novelty is that you eliminate about $0.2 per minute in salary, but in exchange you now have to maintain much more complicated vehicles with much more expensive replacement parts.

Oh and have you ever considered that the same people that you hate meeting on the bus could also be combined into your ride? Except that now they are not 3 weirdos out of 80 people but 3 out of 4.

So unless this is so expensive that most people cannot afford it, it'll have the same drawbacks that rich people currently hate about taking a public bus.

I expect these companies to lead to more traffic, because afterwards you will have the regular poor-people bus and in addition the almost empty rich-people bus vehicles.

I’m wondering if you have ever ridden a bus, and also a shared Uber? The car gets you where you are going a lot faster than the bus, because you need to wait for at most 2 other stops instead of 17 or whatever, and you never need a transfer. Whether or not this argument convinces you, experiencing it yourself makes the difference obvious. It’s one of those things where you can actually do an experiment to find out the answer instead of just arguing about it. You could also try entering a destination into google maps and compare the estimated arrival time with bus vs Uber.

The self-driving car will presumably be a similar experience to the Uber, but addresses the labor issues that are the main problem with that model.

The Uber-like "pick me up where I am" is a pre-fit incentive that will be dropped later.

I take buses regularly. Uber too. Taxis too.

All in all, the de-humanizing/automation part that's getting traction from capital. It's not a strictly human/modern need that's being met, it's an addictive service (faster, exclusive) that's being sold and cost-optimized.

You can be certain that the day Uber-automated-cars are the norm for transit, for cost/efficiency reasons, you will be kindly asked to join a specific pick-up point; and off-loaded at a specific location as well.

Those locations will be computed & decided by the provider, not you (you know, bus). Unless you pay another premium (taxis).

What you describe is a car service with an automated driver. Car services have existed for decades, and saving $20-25/hr on a driver isn't really that big of a net gain. The biggest innovation Uber offered is app-based dispatch.

There is a lot of skepticism that automated vehicles will ever happen without massive infrastructure changes that remove human drivers from the road in large numbers. The liability issues are huge -- accidents will happen and people will die. In a case where fault must be determined between an autonomous vehicle and a human driver, human judges / juries are going to overwhemlingly side with the human. If anything, automated vehicles will require more costly regulation than human drivers do.

Car services are a hard business to make money in because the job isn't very skilled, so there was a lot of regulation in place to ensure those services were priced in such a way that they continued to be reliable. Uber sidestepped a lot of that regulation through creative accounting and VC subsidization, but my guess is that when Uber and Lyft implode in a year or two, much of it will be reintroduced to fill the smoking hole they will leave in last-mile transit since they put the taxi companies out of business.

> In a case where fault must be determined between an autonomous vehicle and a human driver, human judges / juries are going to overwhemlingly side with the human.

I think you're right, but _because_ there is sensor data to back it up we won't have to "take the person's word for it" that the driver-less car "cut off" the human when the human was going twice the speed limit (as an example).

Getting rid of the driver is huge. Even with mass transit, where there is a huge ratio of drivers to passengers, labor is the dominant cost.

> Personnel expenses are the largest portion of Metrobus budget. For FY2019, personnel cost is estimated at $522.5 million or 80.2 percent of Metrobus budget, which represents a decrease of $27.7 million from FY2018 budget.

Is that just drivers or also the mechanics, planners, IT, etc. There are many more personnel than drivers necessary to run a giant public transit dept, and many would still be necessary with self driving cars/busses.

Depends on how market will act in that regard. If it's profitable to pick up at exact location then if Uber tries to optimize by sending you to a pickup location then someone else will jump in to provide the more luxurious option. It's really hard to say how exactly market will reach equilibrium but it necessarily has to be better than it is right now without the self driving aspect

>it's an addictive service (faster, exclusive) that's being sold and cost-optimized.

I'm not convinced it's being cost-optimised... Uber is the most unprofitable company in existence! Unless cost-optimising means undercutting competitors with dirt cheap labour and by burning unholy amounts of cash, on the order of billions per quarter.

> All in all, the de-humanizing/automation part that's getting traction from capital. It's not a strictly human/modern need that's being met, it's an addictive service (faster, exclusive) that's being sold and cost-optimized.

Getting where you want to go in a timely manner is a human need. Currently people fulfill it with private vehicles, because buses can’t get you to work on time. (Part of the fault is government-when I lived in Delaware, bus drivers would randomly decide to end their shift early and skip all the remaining pickups. The other part is structural limitations in the nature of bus service.)

> Getting where you want to go in a timely manner is a human need.

Which is already served in a more than reasonable manner, that an automated car won't significantly speed up.

> Currently people fulfill it with private vehicles, because buses can’t get you to work on time.

Depends a lot on infrastructure and governance. Where I live (moderately large city in France, but still serviced by Uber too), you go faster where you want by bike or buses than by car. Notwithstanding that it is more sustainable (economics).

And Uber does not go much in the countryside. Buses do.

I live in a city of 1 million people and getting from end to end of the city takes me either 20 minutes by car or 90 minutes by public transport when out of rush hour. During rush hour the train is the best option

> Which is already served in a more than reasonable manner, that an automated car won't significantly speed up.

Hardly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Paris

The average public transit rider in Paris spends over two hours a day commuting. In most of America, drivers spend half that time. Replacing the current mix of cars and transit with point to point vans would dramatically speed up commutes.

I've lived in (and outside) Paris. Worked there too. For years. Walked. Biked. Buses. By subways. By car, own, taxis, ubers.

Going by a mix of foot, bike, bus/metro has _always_ been faster, more flexible and less costly than by car.

The only exception is when you've got a large/heavy package to pick/deliver.

No amount of additional cars will improve the trafic there.

Perhaps you were reading those statistics from another source or version of the page, but from the article you linked to:

"The average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Paris, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 64 min. 15% of public transit riders, ride for more than 2 hours every day."

During rush hour where I live (NYC), hundreds and hundreds of people ride the same bus I do. If each group of ~4 had their own car, everything would break down, and I shudder to think of the impact on the environment.

The main problem w/ the model is people having to travel non-walkable/bikeable distances twice a day. Until we invent teleportation, not a lot is gonna change that basic math.

> During rush hour where I live (NYC), hundreds and hundreds of people ride the same bus I do. If each group of ~4 had their own car, everything would break down, and I shudder to think of the impact on the environment.

You're forgetting the other half. What if we remove 3/4 of the existing car volume at the same time?

> and I shudder to think of the impact on the environment.

Despite it being electric?

What do you mean reducing car volume? You asymptotically approach "bus" the more people you put in a vehicle. Turning one bus that holds ~50 people into 12 smaller buses that each hold 4 people doesn't solve anything as far as I can see.

Re: electric, this is a good step but we still produce most of our electricity (by far) by burning fossil fuels. Plus we lose energy in transmission/storage so it's a net loss.

Why are you ignoring all the traffic right now that isn't busses?

Let's say we currently have one bus and twenty cars.

If we replace that with 12 vans and 5 vans, respectively, that leaves us with 17 vans.

The road is now less congested and less polluting.

(There's no reason to expect all the current cars to be replaced, but there's no reason to expect all the busses to be replaced either.)

I guess I'm not super interested in the pretty small difference between van and bus. Grandparent's point was cars are better because they don't make a bunch of stops and they don't wait for people to get on/off. As you add people into vehicles you lose those advantages, but you lower your overhead.

But as more and more people work (global population is still increasing), this doesn't scale. Commuting is the problem, not humans having yet to find the perfect commuter to axle ratio.

This is my problem with self driving tech in general. So much energy and engineering has gone into solving a problem we don't need to solve. The answer is more light rail and more remote work. And if you think it's a tech solution to a political problem, I'd point you to all the political problems Uber is having. It's just, idk bad planning or something.

New York is a special case and you can't use it to make general statements about transportation at all. Due to its density, not owning a car is pretty common in NYC, but unheard of elsewhere in the US. The vast majority of the population lives in low or medium density places where mass public transportation is a huge waste of time and effort.

I think you're missing my point(s) a little. Most of the important tradeoffs between public transportation and individual automobiles are the same no matter the density, and it's all a function of how many people are "on the road" at a given time. You can cram 'em onto buses, or deploy a fleet of rideshares, but the core problem is moving billions of people non-walkable/bikeable distances twice a day.

Grandparent's point was self-driving cars solves the labor problem, and thus the benefits of ridesharing totally outshine the benefits of mass transit. I'm saying I don't think a labor shortage is the main problem (no matter how much you think those drivers are making, it's not a lot). Rather, I think the problem is "every American worker gets a car and is transported ~16 miles twice a day" isn't scalable.

To be clear, I think self-driving cars beat busses on quality of service. There simply isn’t a bus that exists that will take most people from where they are where they want to go. Dynamically generated routes beat fixed routes, because they get people to their destination. UberPool accomplishes the same thing, but uses more drivers per passenger than a bus, which leads to labor exploitation. Self-driving fixes that problem.

And no, I don’t want to shut down the busses. I’m describing why so few people are using them, and why self-driving cars have a better chance of success. In fact, I think self-driving is a necessary ingredient for a public transit system that meets everyone’s needs in the US. I think buses are a natural park of a self-driving network - a dynamic dispatch system can use them on the most in-demand routes.

Right now in America, the vast majority of people are driving solo to work. Even if self-driving vehicles merely double the capacity those vehicles handle, that seems enough to fix our transit problem.

> To be clear, I think self-driving cars beat busses on quality of service.

Yeah if your metric is how much time you spend walking, or privacy I guess, then a car is better than a bus (a car with no driver even more so).

But in NYC many people don't have cars, and while "parking in the city is impossible" is one reason, there are other way more popular ones:

- mass transit is much, much safer

- it's more environmentally friendly

- it's faster (trains, not buses, although with bus lanes and lights that might be changing)

- car maintenance is expensive and tedious

- cars are expensive assets that depreciate incredibly fast

- you can do other things while on mass transit

> There simply isn’t a bus that exists that will take most people from where they are where they want to go.

You might be surprised. There's a bus around the corner from me that takes me directly to my subway station. My total walk time is maybe 2 minutes. It doesn't make any sense to me to figure out self-driving cars to save me 4 minutes of walking a day, in fact that's probably a bad idea and pattern in general.

> I’m describing why so few people are using them, and why self-driving cars have a better chance of success.

Again you might be surprised. In NYC, 2.25 million people ride the bus every weekday. I don't know what rideshare stats are, but I bet they're lower.

In places without expansive and deep mass transit systems, people don't ride buses for exactly the reason you said. But the answer isn't to figure out self-driving cars, the answer is more buses (and other vehicles like light rail), drivers, and routes.

> In fact, I think self-driving is a necessary ingredient for a public transit system that meets everyone’s needs in the US.

Well, it doesn't exist at all right now, so I think that's pushing it when it comes to "needs". Something else that would satisfy that is if we installed light rail and started switching wholesale to remote work, things we know how to do super well right now. It's also even safer than self-driving cars, easier on the environment, cheaper, etc.

Self-driving cars remind me a lot of blockchain: a solution looking for a problem. It's a little more vexing than blockchain though, because commuting really seems like a drive time problem, but the root problem there isn't that a working human has to drive, it's that a working human has to move 30 miles every workday. The smart, efficient solution here is better mass transit and more remote work.

Getting somewhere faster doesn't necessarily mean it's better.

Recently I lost my car (I used to have a company car in front of my door, but switched jobs), now I am solely using public transport and my bicycle. It takes more time, doesn't really cost me anything more than having a car and because it takes more time I have more space to clear my mind. To let my mind wander for a while to process thoughts.

I'm talking about distances that typically take 5 - 20 minutes by car, that are now maybe 15 - 40 minutes by public transport.

See also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mental-downtime/

All else being equal, getting places faster is better. Remember, most people don’t have jobs where they are paid to be “in the zone” three or four hours a day. They spend eight hours processing loan applications or serving customers.

The average public transit commute in most cities is twice as long as the average driving commute: https://abc7news.com/5289025

> The study found San Diego had the nation's shortest commute times with an average of just 26 minutes by car, but 52 minutes by public transit.

That’s an hour a day (total) that public transit commuters aren’t spending with their families.

Even during rush hour in DC, it’s slightly faster for me to get to work driving clear across the city instead of getting on at the rail station at the edge of the city and taking a train straight to the station 8 minutes from my office.

I wanted to provide an anecdotal example, my bus commute is about 30 minutes and by car would be about 15 minutes. The extra time I spend commuting is ~150 hours per year (- WFH days/personal days/sick days). Owning a car and buying parking would cost me about $4506 more than having a bus pass per year. So I'm essentially getting paid ~$30/hr for those 150 hours each year to read books / listen to podcasts in public. I understand this is leaving out a lot of details. And if my commute times were twice as long I would only be getting paid ~$15/hr, still not bad if you already enjoy reading books or listening to podcasts for free.

If your city is anything like a typical US city, note that your bus pass costs 3-5 as much as you think you’re paying for it. The rest of the cost is covered by the taxes you are paying. This means that you are paying 70-80% of the public transport’s fare regardless of whether you’re actually using it. If you account for that, it might not change your calculations, because you cannot opt out of the transportation tax anyway, but it should make you think as to why buses are really so attractive after all.

That's true, I hadn't thought of that and in my city 70% of PT is indeed funded by taxes. But if there wasn't PT my city would probably need to be less dense because of the additional required parking, roads, suburbs, etc and therefore generate less taxes per acre. Also once a high enough percentage of people use PT, it could pay for itself through fares (Tokyo apparently?). The entire situation is complex and hard to measure IMO.

Well, if you want another anecdote, I used to live in a neighborhood close to DC/Beltway, and my commute by car was 20-22 minutes.

By public transportation, it would be north of 1:15, because it takes 20-25 minutes just to walk to the nearest bus stop.

Maybe you can concentrate and do work on a bus, but I can't, so for me it's just wasted time (almost 2 hrs every work day, adding up to 400+ hrs/year). Having a car is essential (unless you live and work downtown, for which you're paying a premium, obviously)

> All else being equal, getting places faster is better.

It's true, but at least on an individual level, it's worth looking at what happens to the extra time. I'm a four season bike commuter, and my ride is 30 mins each way (~7.5km). It would be about a 10-15 minutes drive.

So I'm losing a half hour each day to my commute, but those five hours a week are essentially all the exercise I get— taking time to play an organized sport or go to the gym with three kids at home? Forget about it. I'm so reliant on this that I really noticed over the summer when I switched to my Boosted Board for a few weeks that I wasn't getting the workout I needed.

Anyway, it's not for everyone, and not every workplace has decent parking or would permit you to show up a bit sweaty. But between that and the savings associated with not owning a second car, biking to work is a no-brainer for me.

> All else being equal, getting places faster is better.

> The average public transit commute in most cities is twice as long as the average driving commute: https://abc7news.com/5289025

The average public transit system in the US is woefully inadequate compared to those in other developed countries, so it's hardly fair to pin this on public transit in general.

The whole point of the discussion around the future of transportation is to align the individual incentive to get some place faster and cheaper with the broader societal goals of affordability, access, and decongestion. Better mass transit is the probably best option we have for that so far. Continuing to grow the individual car based commute likely isn't, definitely not in our ever-growing and increasingly congested metropolises.

Even if today the best solution for a lot of people is to get in a personal car doesn't mean that we can't build better transport systems in the future. This is about making improvements, not about attachment to the currently dominant way of getting from point A to point B.

Getting more mass transit will not be easy - the barriers are as much cultural as they are geospatial - but let's not dismiss a solution that demonstrably works elsewhere.

While a longer route with public transport is certainly an opportunity to let your mind wander (as long as it is not that crowded and you can autopilot transfers), it is still a forced one. You might find that's not a problem for you, and I believe you, but that's a privileged position to be in and you're the odd one out. Most people, I believe, would rather be in control of when they let their mind wander and when they get to their family or friends faster. I am not arguing against public transit here, I wish for a carless city as much as the next person, but I'm not blind to the fact that public transit is far from perfect and almost certainly not the full answer to a carless city.

If you're losing 20 minutes * 2 trips per day, that adds up to probably 7 days of lost time per year that you could have been doing something with.

Like, reading a book. Or listening to a podcast. Wait, I can do that on a bus too.

Not every minute of your life has to be optimised.

And of course some of the same people who complain of this lost time pay hundreds a year to join a gym to spend an hour running on the spot...

Haha, great irony :-)

> Like, reading a book. Or listening to a podcast. Wait, I can do that on a bus too.

Not on some of the buses I've ridden.

We'd have to solve a dozen or so social issues before buses were reliably a good place to do relaxing activities.

Lucky me, I feel qualified to make a comparison here because I have traveled 20+ countries by train and bus, as well as taken 500+ Uber and Grab rides :)

In many bigger cities in Europe, there are dedicated lanes reserved for public transport. You can grab an Uber and get stuck on the public lanes in a big traffic jam. Or you take the bus and arrive in half the time. Plus the bus is dirt cheap at a fixed-price $40 per month no matter how much you use it. I used to travel 12km by bus twice every working day and it took roughly 20 minutes per direction. Good luck getting an Uber ride for $1 per trip that'll average 36km/h = 22 miles/h through the rush-hour traffic in any big US city.

Oh and don't get me started on the Berlin / Hamburg / Singapore MRT systems. Trains every 3 minutes with dedicated underground tunnels that usually arrive faster than it takes you to pay a parking ticket and get your car out of the 3rd parking deck. Plus, the Singapore MRT is so spotless clean and people are so careful and polite, I'd be willing to sit down with a blanket on the floor and have my dinner there. Eating in the MRT is forbidden, though.

Also, I'm not sure if I had beginner Uber drivers untypically often or if they just have such a high turnover, but in 1 out of 4 rides the driver had problems finding me, despite having my GPS location and my street address. Having waited for 10 minutes only for the driver to then cancel and Uber support to scold me for hiding, I now usually walk to the bus stop and call the Uber from there. Much easier to find, even for beginners. But that kind of negates a big benefit that Uber was supposed to have, if they cannot pick me up where I am.

And speaking of beginners, I have been in almost-accidents more often than I can remember, both with Uber and Grab. The driver is texting on his phone, or trying to readjust the app's map, not paying attention to the road, and then we have to stop tires screeching to avoid running over a cyclist. I have never ever had a bus driver as careless as about half of the app drivers.

And then, there's the crazy aspect. When someone pukes in a shared bus, you can move to another seat. When your neighbor pukes in a shared Uber, you can only choose between accepting the smell or waiting 10+ minutes for the next Uber. Sadly, I speak from personal experience here.

I’ve had some great experiences with public transit in some of the cities you listed, and I would never suggest trying to replace those well-working systems. However a lot of cities have really broken public transit that almost nobody uses, and are dominated by people driving solo in gasoline-fueled cars.

Thank you for sharing the life experience you've had on your travels, but this is a service based in San Francisco. Discussion would be more productive if scope was narrowed to the topic of OP.

Good point. For SF, I'm out. I would probably just insist on working remotely to avoid the daily commute there.

I don't know if my experience is usual, but readily ride buses and trains that air so crowded I almost have to physically force my way into them, and I take Lyfts occasionally, but I never, ever opt for the shared ride.

Maybe it's just me, but something about sharing a ride with one or two random people in the back seat of a sedan just seems unpleasantly awkward. Whereas a bus has enough people that you're a face in the crowd.

(context: US, Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area)

> The car gets you where you are going a lot faster than the bus

Of course, you pay more!

It's even impacting the environment more, cities cannot plan for it and chose the path they should follow and ,in the end, why didn't you share your personal car with the people you know before Uber came along?

Because you want a cab and a driver to - if it's necessary - share with people like you, not a shared means of transportation that's doing a service to a larger community

It isn't a max of 2 stops. It's a max of 2 pickups and 2 stops. Also sometimes you end up taking detours for the pickups and stops, not to mention waiting for the people to show up. Happened to me. I think the bus got to my destination first.

A halfway solution is something like Via, which is "bus-like" for frequent routes.

https://ridewithvia.com/

There are a few very big benefits compared to buses:

- The car carries fewer people at any given time, so needs to stop in fewer places.

- The cars are smaller and cheaper, so can be more numerous (hence more frequent/available).

- The car has dynamic routing, so instead of carrying you along a predetermined route, it can carry you anywhere you want to go and you don't need to wait for the "right" car.

You're making the assumption that there's no maintenance costs involved with non self driving cars. The costs are a bit higher depending on the technology used but the cost is spread across 4x paying customers and a car thats able to service customers 24x7 which is about double the productivity of a non self driving car. Technology drives costs down, and once companies figure out best practices on self driving cars, many smaller companies will start copying the approach.

OP here: I love the bus! I take it all the time in Los Angeles, where I currently live without a car.

I imagine this could be a fantastic complement — not replacement — to a bus, specifically for low ridership areas, last-mile connections, and lower-frequency routes, so busses could focus on what they’re best at: high frequency arterials with dedicated ROW carrying many passengers at once.

I wonder how long it will take the average Bay Area commuter to find an adversarial driving pattern for this.

Cruise has been operating a pretty dense fleet continuously in San Francisco for some time. Of course those vehicles have safety drivers, but they’re already facing SF drivers.

Honestly I believe a system trained on so many millions of driving interactions would tend to act like an average good driver in SF, and so would ultimately blend in.

It is also clearly designed for airport trips given the layout of the interior cabin.

Which is genius as in every city that is (a) the most lucrative taxi route and (b) the one with the newest and safest roads.

>(b) the one with the newest and safest roads.

Yeah that doesn't describe 101 around SFO one bit.

Navigating around the airport is tricky, but the roads are ok. Where it's bad is 101 after the 280 split. It's packed, the lanes are narrow, the road is windy (by freeway standards), and exits are old, awkward, and beyond their capacity.

If you ever get a chance to travel to Sydney, you'll find a nice outlier for road quality near the airport.

> (b) the one with the newest and safest roads.

What? You should try driving the roads around DTW. Bring your off-road tires.

Many airports across the rust belt and northeast of the US suffer the plague of under-maintained infrastructure. CLE and BWI are coming to mind as well. And driving any highway in ATL can hardly be considered safe.

It sounds like you're describing a very sophisticated bus route that every city in the world already has.

The buses in my city are not close-to-on-demand, stop frequently, don't adjust their route based on requests and cost over $5/trip (without a multi-trip card).

I imagine something like this will arrive more quickly, not stop 15 times on the way, and get people closer to their home/work.

I come from a city where public transport is unreliable, so everyone use private cars. Which are reliable until you hit traffic jam (always) or have to park them (usually the time to find a spot is a large percentage of the entire trip)

The city is a pretty big one: Rome, Italy.

The only real solution is ban private cars. I don't like it, but it's unfortunately like cancer: kill it before it kills you.

In many places, I think it will happen gradually by removing or charging more for street parking. Then driving yourself becomes an expensive hassle and automated ridesharing looks more and more attractive as the cost drops and convenience improves.

My city has a bus route from the airport to a particular central place in the city. It does not have a bus route going straight to every district of the city, much less to my home.

It may share 90% of the trip with that bus route, but the remaining 10% are very important.

Except taking the bus sucks. It takes forever and I have to get harassed by crazies when I'm just trying to get home.

Sorry for the off-topic, but this is something that blew my mind while traveling around the USA.

I could count with my fingers the amount of crazy people I saw in my life while in public transport or on the streets in general. The same while traveling around Europe.

But in the USA, it was incredible to see the amount of crazy people going around, talking alone, yelling out of nowhere, or "having episodes" (e.g. one guy rubbing a plastic fork intensely on the top of his head for like 15 mins while staring into space).

I wonder what would be the reason for that? (Maybe the lack of a public/universal health service?)

The US lack of mental healthcare institutions. Like an impressive number of problems in this country, it traces back to Reagan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...

Here in Germany I happen to share a few tram stops with a group of clearly challenged people who apparently have a commute overlapping with mine. They never bother anyone. Because someone is taking care of them (I can only assume, the group travels unaccompanied, my guess is that it's a bunch of co-workers from some form of sheltered workshop), giving them enough support to live a life they can manage that is neither behind bars nor being left to their own insufficient devices. Thrown out into "full difficulty mode" life I'm sure many of them would end up as annoying outcasts harassing random strangers in a futile attempt to get a trace of human interaction.

Would I like to ride a tram with only smart and beautiful people? Sure I would, but I could not enjoy it knowing about the implications.

Being exposed to a sample of society is actually one of the things I like most about public transport. But it's only a positive if the sample is at least somewhat representative and not a self-selected showcase of the down and out. Classic chicken/egg. Where I live, subway and tram are fine whereas urban buses sharing the same general are and ticket are borderline depressing (suburban buses are somewhat ok, rural buses are completely devoid of driving age population).

No this isn’t it. Deinstitutionalisation is a worldwide trend. It’s the lack of mental healthcare itself that is the problem.

There isn’t a good reason why it should be this way in a wealthy country. It amounts to saying ‘Let the people that need the most help wither and die.’

It's the perfect SV solution: you have problems caused by underfunded public transport, large income inequality and homelessness? Let's not fix those underlying issues, we can just spend a ton of VC money on artifical intelligence to work around the consequences instead!

Within the existing civil rights framework, there is no “fixing” crazies on the bus. The state cannot lock people up or force them to take their meds just because they make you uncomfortable. Nor can it deny them public services. They have the same rights to the commons, their freedom, and their medical decision-making as you do. Smelling bad, shouting nonsense, and talking to strangers in public are not crimes.

Which means if you want to be comfortable, you’re going to have to minimize time spent in the commons.

> Smelling bad, shouting nonsense, and talking to strangers in public are not crimes.

And neither are they symptoms of a specific biological malfunction. We just happen to be highly social animals and if we are continually denied social interaction we'll start to do increasingly stupid things to provoke a reaction. Programs that give those people an outlet for their interaction needs will work wonders for almost all of them. Zero care freedom versus lockup/forced medication is a false dichotomy.

The state (or we) can fund treatment programs that at least make an attempt to respect the rights and wishes of people who need treatment. I spent some time trying to help a friend get I into a program... There are suprisingly few good options and all the halfway decent options don't even accept insurance, let alone offer free services.

> Nor can it deny them public services

If only accessible mental health services were easy to reach for those whose lives are so crippled by mental health that they have little other options (even if some would still "opt out") ...

> and their medical decision-making as you do

For many, there is zero medical decision-making involved because there is zero or near zero access to mental health care.

As an EMS provider, I truly believe (and I'm certainly not alone) that the two major health crises facing the US are mental health and opioid use, misuse and abuse.

> Smelling bad, shouting nonsense, and talking to strangers in public are not crimes.

But you could certainly make rules about doing the first two on a bus.

I don't know how it works in your country, but in mine enforcement of rules on busses is pretty patchy.

After all, do you deny boarding to people who look like they might break the rules? Ask them nicely to disembark if they start? Have the driver manhandle them off? Stop the bus and call the cops? Rely on scowls and tutting from other passengers?

With that said, I spent a few years riding busses in university, and didn't encounter problems from other passengers. Punctuality, service frequency, crowding and journey times were much bigger problems for me.

This is about civil rights, not the practicality of enforcement.

Rules? We have ceased to be a society of rules. (And soon we will stop being a society of rule followers, which will signal the end of our civilization, but that’s a different rant.) Here in DC, we won’t even enforce the “rule” that you have to pay the fare. Good luck enforcing anything else.

Haven't people been avoiding fares since the invention of fares?

Most people don’t avoid fares. I’m of the view that the point of criminal law isn’t deterrence as such, but rather norm setting. We punish people for fare evasion so people know it’s a bad thing. The norm keeps most people from evading the date. But when you stop punishing people for it, the norm is diminished.

I can see my city getting these to help seniors get out and about. Hmm wheelchair support might suck.

It actually is. When entrenched power structures prevent economically efficient outcomes, you bypass the power structures instead of reforming them. You reform by killing the king instead of helping him be kinder.

And this is how progress has always looked. Life will be better for this.

The market is a close analog for lightning. It's finding the fastest path.

And let me tell you, the Bay Area is flush with money. Funding is not the problem.

> taking the bus sucks

Yes. Buses are cheap, but slow and uncomfortable.

Buses are big and unmaneuverable. That makes them slow over long distances. In low densities, the size means lots of inefficient stops. In high density, the manoeuvrability means subpar navigation and traffic avoidance.

Buses are also uncomfortable. If you raise ticket prices to buy a better ride, the quantity demanded drops and one ends up with vans.

Vans are expensive because they need drivers. Driverless vans are superior to private cars and buses for their market. (Nobody is close to providing this.)

The subpar navigation and traffic avoidance are a function of road design in high density environments.

We know how to make that go away: create separated bus only right of way with traffic light synchronization.

Now imagine you sitting in the same Cruise Origin with 2 crazies and one drunk. Where's the improvement?

To be honest sitting in a car with 2 "crazies" and a drunk doesn't sound any worse than sitting on a bus with 50 "crazies" and 25 drunks would be for the other 25 people.

You can skip that and take another one without waiting for 20m?

Well from the sound of it, its an Uber-like service? I'd hope they have an option to book a private one.

Sounds like a job for a passenger rating system as well. With all the ups and downs of that.

Even if we agree that the technical hurdles will eventually be overcome, I think that the problem will remain that a lot of people will want to keep their cars. Uber has provided a car-on-demand service for years, and yet in cities there is still congestion on the roads and cars parked wherever you look.

> there is still congestion on the roads

Uber has probably made this worse. The only way it's helped with congestion is fewer people looking for parking.

I would estimate if the cost of Uber cost even just 30% less than it is now it would probably see 2x greater utilization (at least I think I personally would use it 2x more often at such a price)

If a self-driving vehicle like OP could hit such a price point (a big if, admittedly) I think it could make a substantial dent in inner city driving, beyond what Uber is able to achieve.

I think you're right, but cultural values like these can take way longer than just a few years to change. Cars, car ownership, car tinkering, etc are such a part of American culture at this point that it'll take a long time for any ownership numbers to reflect the realities of shared models. I think.

Waymo launched a service that does just this in December 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/waymo-one-driverless-car-ser...

Waymo also dabbled in these cutesy future car designs back in 2014 [0], and later just decided to stick with vans.

While it is clear that self-driving cars won't have steering wheels in the future, these prototypes are jumping the gun and a waste of time. As Waymo quickly realized, you can iterate much faster staying away from these futuristic prototypes.

[0] https://qz.com/1005083/the-cutest-thing-google-has-ever-made...

> As Waymo quickly realized, you can iterate much faster staying away from these futuristic prototypes.

Cruise has one advantage that Waymo didn't - General Motors. They don't need to build an automotive product development and manufacturing org from scratch; it's already there and it's got a hundred years of institutional memory.

Since GM has been working on things like this for decades, I imagine it gives Cruise the opportunity innovate on the vehicle itself quite capably without taking their eye off the ball.

Sure, but Waymo also doesn't do manufacturing from scratch. They partner with existing manufacturers such as Chrysler for their vans, and could've easily found partners to develop more futuristic "prototypes" if they wanted.

The point still stands that it's mostly a waste of time and resources while we are still years away from fully functioning self-driving cars. You could argue that if GM has artists and designers who are bored and need a side project, it may be worth the news cycle generated by the reveal, but other than that it doesn't add much to the conversation.

There have been plenty of such prototypes; just at CES a few weeks ago, LG had an almost identical prototype [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5SRXzAtcuY

Yeah, but they also have a hundred years of depending on handouts to not keep going out of business so we don't really know that they know how to build a product that works long enough to keep them in business.

How would a neverending stream of self-driving vehicles competing for access to riders free up right-of-way. If these work (which they won’t), the will only worsen traffic.

No way. Way easier to optimize with fewer than more coordinated players and reduced demand for parking.

What you're describing is an automated taxi service. But no car owner will want to replace their car with a Cruise Origin, because most people don't want random strangers to ride in their car all day.

I'm really excited about this. I can't even imagine how much public space we will reclaim with zero car ownership.