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/