Yeah, self driving cars would be a step backward as currently imagined.

We need high speed rail to connect our cities.

They wouldn't be a step backwards, they'd be a step sideways.

What about inside those cities? Like from my apartment on this side of town to the other side.

What about the inside? I live in NYC and its metro and bus system is amazing, and even then it's still worse than what I experienced in Asia, we're for example in Seoul, I did not have to walk more than five minutes to be able to get on a train or bus and when I got off, I similarly did not have to walk more than five minutes to get to my end destination.

What about someone who doesn’t want to travel with other people in public transport, and also doesn’t want to walk the 10 minutes of the journey?

Then I guess it's their loss. Unless they're unable to use public transport, I shouldn't have to have the externalities of them using cars, such as carbon emissions, parking space that would otherwise be used, noise and light pollution, etc.

I guess the people having to deal with the externalities could consider them their loss.

They could pay more to cover the externalities, and enjoy relatively empty roads.

Town centers will soon be inaccessible by car, so they'll still need public transport occasionally for that.

> and also doesn’t want to walk the 10 minutes of the journey?

If they have a pre-existing medical condition: sure, they can use an alternative method of transportation.

If they don't want to walk for 10 minutes, they're bound to have a medical condition soon-ish.

Walking seems like a waste of time to me. It's a slow form of transportation and a very inefficient form of exercise.

Yet most people don't exercise, obesity is skyrocketing and personal responsibility is failing.

But hey, you got yours so who cares about others, right?

If you want avoid other people like that you probably shouldn’t live in a city.

subways, trams and buses. good systems can easily be faster than cars dinner thru don't have traffic and you don't need to find parking. for short distances, bikes are also great.

I know I'm just one data point, but for my commute to work, taking public transit is about 30 minutes slower than driving at rush hour.

Just another data point: walking to work takes 15 minutes for me. Same time by metro. Driving is 45-60 minutes.

Sound as if bike-roads are missing, a bike would reduce it to 5 minutes.

> We need high speed rail to connect our cities.

Perhaps we need to slow down a bit, in general?

If the rail isn’t faster than the car then it won’t ever see wide scale adoption. It’s not even remotely difficult to clear this bar when the political will exists. Why slow down when there’s no actual need to?

A car can go faster from Amsterdam to Berlin than the train, yet I still see people on the train.

I've paid more to take longer by train, for greater convenience and comfort.

I agree with your point in general, I'm just quibbling that speed is the decider.

We already have high speed trains connecting our cities. Or are you from the USA?

Future transport is unlikely to be single mode - it’s almost definitely multimodal and will include both cars (why not self driving?) and rail.

Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owned. It's also extremely likely that it requires ride-sharing to be viable, which will substantially reduce traffic as well as car ownership (I suspect there may be enough cost pressure that most self-driving vehicles are more like minibuses than cars, which would also help a lot with pollution and congestion, but this may require regulatory pressure). Every conversation about the transition to EVs should be caveated with 'assuming car ownership stays the same because self-driving doesn't work (and that most of the world still does not manage to provide traditional public transport options good enough to replace cars)'.

(And yes, all of this means that Tesla and most other traditional automotive company's stated commercial strategy for self driving makes little sense)

Autonomous driving is just another safety and convenience feature, like cruise control or anti-lock brakes. It won't fundamentally change anything. I see no reason to give up owning my own cars even if they can drive themselves. The biggest reason is that I use my cars like a rolling storage locker or mobile base of operations when I'm out doing stuff. There's no way I'm going to deal with the hassle of shared vehicles.

You may not want to deal with the hassle but I wouldn’t assume that applies to everyone.

A fully autonomous car (however unrealistic it may be) would be a game changer simply for the economics alone. Not paying full tax, insurance etc for a vehicle while retaining all of the transport possibility would be incredibly tempting to anyone on a budget. Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability.

I’m not saying any of this will happen but fully autonomous cars definitely would open the door to a lot of opportunities.

The economics won't work outside some small niches. Any sort of car sharing service means a business is managing that service and charging high fees for it, in addition to passing on tax and insurance expenses to customers. The taxes and insurance on my own cars are cheap.

Car sharing (short term rental) services already exist and can be a great option for childless young people who live in a dense city and seldom leave it. We don't need autonomous vehicles to make such services work. But they're totally unsuitable for how most Americans actually live. Like am I supposed to summon a shared vehicle every time I need to take one of my children to sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster? The whole concept is just totally impractical regardless of the economics.

What often gets forgotten is that demand is not equally distributed throughout the day, week, month or year.

Everyone needs to go to school or sports practice at about the same time, everyone wants to go out on Friday nights and not Monday nights, everyone needs a car for monthly shopping at around the end of the month and everyone takes their vacation at around the same time each year due to school vacations.

When demand goes up, not only will it cost more, but there is no guarantee that you'll even get a car on time.

Uber and suchlike work currently because almost everyone uses them rarely, not four times a day.

> Car sharing (short term rental) services

I would expect self driving car to have much higher utilization most of the time. In addition you have people who can't/don't want to drive and would be able to use the service.

You're really missing the point. It won't actually be cheaper except for the few customers who rely mostly on public transportation.

Driving children to activities is hardly a "corner case". It's bizarre how disconnected many HN users are from how regular middle class Americans live. Very few married couples with children would be able to manage with one car; they often need to go different places.

I'm sorry, I wanted to quote:

> And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster?

When I said it's a corner case but pasted the wrong sentence.

> You're really missing the point. It won't actually be cheaper except for the few customers who rely mostly on public transportation.

Am I? Why would you not expect it to become cheaper overtime? Uber/etc. needs human drivers who need to be paid and car sharing is inefficient because because most cars end up somewhere where none needs them unless there is continuous bidirectional traffic which is pretty rare. Self driving in theory would solve both these issues.

> Very few married couples with children would be able to manage with one car; they often need to go different places.

Yes well they could in theory get two separate self-driving taxis they don't have to always stay in the same car together.

> Am I? Why would you not expect it to become cheaper overtime?

Ride sharing services are amenable to network affects. I.e. they tend to end in monopoly. And monopolies are not known for reducing costs for the customer. If some effective regulation could counter the network effect, i.e. make it easier and cheaper to switch between different sevices, then a monopoly could be avoided.

> Ride sharing services are amenable to network affects

Are they? Currently it's a low margin business with no real moat. It's hard to maintain high market share without continues subsidies.

> make it easier and cheaper to switch between different sevices

What barriers and/or costs are there for consumers which would make it difficult for them to switch between different services?

> Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability.

This is a purely political decision that does not depend on the availability of autonomous vehicles. It won't happen because it would reduce property prices.

Wait what, garages are required by low in US houses?! Doesn’t that piss off people that don’t own one? Do they cheat, like building without the garage but saying my daughter room is the reconverted garage?

It already happens. Tons of houses and apartments don't have garages, I'm living in one lmao

How far off median income are you

Autonomous driving would reduce car ownership but it almost would certainly make traffic worse. The cost to get driven around or have things delivered would be less while demand would stay the same.

Many traffic jams occur for no other reason than human behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qy6MrDcukk

Autopilots immediately get rid of that so I would disagree and argue the less humans the better. Have fun playing around with the "politeness" lever for example:

https://traffic-simulation.de/

3x as many cars using infrastructure not made for that type of increase in demand will cause traffic jams. No matter what the auto-pilot friendly meter is set at.

Traffic lights are a bitch, changing lanes is inevitable, incidents are inevitable.

Sure, but that's just one part of the traffic congestion problem. Add more cars, and whatever efficiency gains you gained from eliminating weird and inefficient human behavior rippling outward and causing random traffic jams will be more than outweighed by the presence of additional cars. Each additional car takes up ~15 feet plus the distance to the next car.

That adds up very quickly, and when you consider the presence of intersections and traffic lights, you aren't dealing with an isolated roadway where cars just...drive. There are very real limits on how many cars you can stuff in a given stretch of road without radically redesigning roads in a way that makes them entirely unusable for pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. replacing traffic lights with slot-based intersections[0]), meaning there's an upper limit to how much self-driving cars can limit congestion under the most optimistic scenarios.

When self-driving cars eventually manage to take hold, no one reasonably expects car traffic not to increase. Right now, you park your car and do things. There's no real opportunity cost, because you can't be two places at once. When your car can drive around on its own, there's now a real opportunity cost. If it can earn money for you with no human present, there's going to be a massive incentive to let it do so. Stores will use self-driving delivery vehicles--either their own or as part of their own delivery sharing services--for deliveries.

Will there hopefully be big improvements in pedestrian safety and decreased accidents? I think so, though they certainly won't eliminate either. But there will be an incredible amount of increased traffic that goes along with it.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZc3erc_l4

"The cost to get driven around or have things delivered would be less while demand would stay the same."

Demand might also go up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Self driving fleets will be driving around to avoid parking while staying in the high use areas, and contributing a lot to traffic, perhaps more than if everyone just had their own car.

This isn’t a weird thing if you live in a place with lots of taxis. Beijing, for example, 25% of the cars are taxis, and if it isn’t really busy, you’ll be able to get one just by raising your hand on a minorly busy street.

Taxis are too expensive in most of the developed world to be that ubiquitous. But they aren’t uncommon in countries where labor is cheaper, which makes me wonder if robo-taxis in the developed world will be as common as human taxis in the developing world.

Yes, there are a some things that will push towards higher traffic, including induced demand as it becomes cheaper and easier to move around. This would need to be offset by ride-sharing (and perhaps to some extend by the reduced demand for parking, though I don't think this can really increase throughput much). Like I said, I think ride-sharing, especially with higher capacity vehicles, can offset this significantly, but it may require regulatory pressure to get everyone to play ball on it.

Ride-sharing isn't going to solve these problems. At most, you fit up to five people in a single car. Most will carry fewer people, perhaps only one or two.

If you try to scale up ride sharing vehicles so they carry more people, you now have to build specialized vehicles that make multi-stop trips where you pick up multiple parties on-demand and drop them off at their individual locations. You've now eliminated the advantages of ride-sharing or taxis--they pick you up where you want and take you directly where you want to go--and managed to recreate a smaller bus. Let's call it a small, self-driving minibus that's not a bus system but a ride share system.

Only it's much worse than a bus, because bus routes are optimized in a way that vehicles picking up and dropping off passengers at what amounts to random locations on-demand never can be. Plus, you're adding even more vehicles to the road in addition to all the other self-driving cars that are running around making deliveries, looking for parking or running off to the outskirts of the city to kill some time as they wait for their human passenger to summon them again, or hustling to try to pick up passengers to make some money for their owners.

Heck, you can't even have them drive on access-limited busways or bus lanes because, by their very nature, they can't stick to dedicated routes.

Consider this: the Siemens S700 streetcar carries over two-hundred people in its usual configuration[0] with a length of just under 95 feet, or the equivalent of around ~6 cars that are almost bumper-to-bumper and trams can be built to be autonomous.

Self-driving cars have their benefits, but they're not an alternative to actual public transport solutions no matter how we try to dress them up. In the end, and as others have pointed out elsewhere in recent years, every new transit idea eventually boils down to a train. Or, in this case, an actual bus.

0. https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3ce5a...

"Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owened"

I've only seen this as a 'just so' greenwash pr story from the automotive industry to offset the projected 300% increase in total road miles driven anually. Please explain why peole would be compelled to ditch their multidude of private cars just because they now come with a 24/7 free driver included?

Indeed, that's the elephant in the room. Self driving cars by virtue of being self driving can be sent on trips by themselves without requiring the driver to be present. The presence of a driver is a limiting factor, once that one drops away there will be many more trips. Suddenly kids can use the car and all kinds of pick up and delivery jobs become cost effective in a way that they are not today.

Can’t wait for those human-less boxes rolling downtown carefree… what a fun time we’re gonna have painting and blasting their sensors.

Ah yes! Would love to know how the crowd that protests better public transit, pedestrian paths and bike lanes as “taking away space from cars” will respond to roads being further clogged with… empty cars?

We’re really going to spend billions and billions on further car infrastructure, more reduction in space-constrained cities towards pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and even the displacement of existing homes and communities for… empty cars?! If it weren’t so depressing, it’s a perfect indictment of the US’s car culture taken full circle.

To be fair, the current cars on the road are, on average, almost empty.

Don't know why you're being dv, I back this up:

- regarding my city (Paris) most sides are literally full of parked empty cars. I don't have the data but anywhere you go - apart the biggest boulevards and walkable very-inner-center - you'll see way more parked cars than driving ones. Indeed, 50% of space is allocated to cars while they represent 13% of the commutes [1].

- Vehicle occupancy was 1.5 in 2019 and is declining (US) [0].

0 https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/perso...

1 (fr) https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2016/11/30/a-pa...

> roads being further clogged with… empty cars

Presumably the car is going to pick someone up. That means it isn't parked being useless. If this starts working at scale, supply and demand will pull ridesharing costs down in a way that reduces ownership.

It might go somewhere to pick up a package.

The problem everybody is ignoring with self-driving cars is that roads already are too expensive to maintain. Self driving cars will require tighter upkeep because they have lower margins for error, ballooning already ludicrous budgets to maintain the six million mile roadway network. Humans can drive drunk on wet gravel in the dark, but a computer needs full GPS, lidar, radar, and motion sensing cameras just to follow well painted paved roads. When there is no downtime and roads are constantly being used they will wear down faster and the computers will cause more crashes. Drains and manholes sink, paint fades, shoulders crumble, curbs deform, and bridges crack. Accelerate this by three, maybe four times and the entire nation will go bankrupt within a decade trying to pay to keep everything running just so autonomous cars can stay the default.

Because owning a car is expensive. And owning a self-driving car is likely to be even more expensive. If you can still get the same convenience for a far lower cost by just using a taxi, why would you continue to own a car? (Also, this is something the automotive industry does not want, as it will reduce their sales substantially. This is something that is claimed by self-driving companies which are not also automotive companies, and most people who analyse the economics of self-driving, especially looking at which technologies which are more likely to succeed).

rcxdude 22 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in Cali...

"Because owning a car is expensive."

That hasn't stopped families from getting multiple cars thus far, so why should that change?

"And owning a self-driving car is likely to be even more expensive."

I sincerely doubt that. Just think of all the potential for selling services and preload deals on what is basically a rolling networked computer with the user literally captured inside. You might have to pay more if you want the non-add supported version or the one without the bundled subscriptions.

I can think of two reasons on the top of my head:

1. Renting a car will become much more convenient. I can summon a car instead of having to search one 3 blocks away.

2. Selling a car with an L5-autopilot will have to include a manufacturer warranty/insurance in cases of crashes resulting from a fault of the autopilot. Tesla is already charging 10k (or 15k?) for their shitty self-driving-gimmick without a warranty. I expect L5-autopilots to cost much more and even come at a yearly subscription (which basically offsets the insurance and the required continued development). I don't expect the average person will (be able to) pay that subscription, when the far more reasonable solution is to rent a car.

This isn't what we need. I don't want to depend on the government for my primary means of travel or be limited by it.

Who builds and maintains the roads for your car?

Not quite the same because they don't control as easily who drives on the roads. They can easily stop you from getting on the train though.

"They" routinely close or cordon off the roads & sections. They also suspend license privilege (obviously as allowed under laws & regulations).

This would be no different than cancelling the whole train or train route; & stopping or cancelling one's entrance pass to train station.

If the government ceased to exist, the roads would still exist. I doubt the train would continue to run

The roads would continue to exist in a road usable by modern cars for only about 10-15 years. Have you been to any failed state? :-)

Good thing all those roads aren’t planned, built, and maintained by the government!

The "Libertarians are like house cats" meme comes to mind

What about a taxi? What about a private bus company? I'd argue that even if you don't like or trust your government there are environmental, economic, and infrastructure issues affecting the whole world that result from an overreliance on private cars. Surely you can find a way to maintain your liberty without having a car sitting in your driveway all day.

Hope you are digging your own fuel

I’d rather destroy the cities. No more need for high speed rail or factory farming. They are the focal point for every tragedy of the commons problem. Their energy demands will be the death of the planet either due to pollution or the wars necessary to protect their energy sources.

Cities are much more energy efficient than anything else with the same standard of living.

Perhaps that we do not need the same standard of living

Sure, you give up your fridge and your washing machine first and I'll do it next.

What's that? Silence?

I do not use a washing machine, but that's not the point. Do I need to have some sort of primitive lifestyle to dare say a lot of what we have shouldn't be a guarantee? Don't understand why you need to get aggressive.

I didn't even mention these which are likely far from the priority or realistic, what about one day shipping?

Sorry cities are much more efficient than any other form of human living [0]. It is suburbs and rural sprawl that creates the energy waste. Population drift towards the latter may cause the hollowing of cities which lead to crime and transport inefficiency.

[0] https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-the-worst-for-ca...

"Cities are more efficient, suburbs and rural sprawl are inefficient and bad" depends on: A: the design of the suburb B: the underlying economy they're built in C: cultural factors.

When the US contained major manufacturing, it was efficient to have large suburban sprawl - you could build spread out industrial hubs on the outskirts of town.

When the cities were not safe, it did not matter what you said - people left.

"Efficiency" is not a magic word, it has to apply to a particular resource, and does have to consider all costs. Cities are in fact, more efficient in terms of transit costs (of all types).

It doesn't matter if you use half as much energy per capita if the thing you created results in 50x more people. When I say destroy the cities I mean to include the populations in them. Through policy you make their lives so miserable that they are not replaced generationally. A similar thing was done to rural areas, their people were systematically destroyed through policy.

Most of the people on HN seem to be city-dwelling pro centralization and centralized control. It seems to be jarring for them to see their own policies of openly promoting the destruction of others lives and way of living directed back at them.

> When I say destroy the cities I mean to include the populations in them

Pol pot? Is that you?

> It seems to be jarring for them to see their own policies of openly promoting the destruction of others lives

Says someone who just proposed mass extermination of billions of people?

I explicitly stated we'd create government policies which would result in cratering their population just like we did in rural areas. Are you imagining rural areas in the US were "mass exterminated?"

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't know what battle you're trying to fight but HN is not the place for it. The flamebait you repeatedly posted in this thread was beyond the pale. If you keep posting this sort of comment, we'll end up having to ban you. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing many times before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030092 (May 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030081 (May 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25573631 (Dec 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24145979 (Aug 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274402 (June 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16938001 (April 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16737173 (April 2018)

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Do you realize that the denser something is, the more efficient it is? Same is true of transistors and cities, and for the same reason: space unused is wasted.

Space unused by humans is not wasted. When I say destroy the cities I mean destroy the populations in them too, exactly the same way rural towns were destroyed. You just systematically dismantle them through policy and over time the people die off. There's a brief period of them living in miserable poverty, but I don't care any more about them than they cared about rural people they destroyed.

It may be true that city life is more efficient per capita, but the total population increase overcomes those efficiencies.

If you think their lives are resource and energy efficient now, wait until they don't even exist anymore.

Okay so you're just advocating for mass murder...

I don't think there's a productive conversation here anymore, clearly you have some personal vendetta against cities based on some rural experiences you've had.

Are you imagining rural towns were the victims of mass murder?

People talk about the goal of destroying rural and suburban life through policy all the time. If you found it jarring for someone to openly advocate for the destruction of your way of living, maybe take that into consideration.

What policies "destroy[ed] rural and suburban life?" Do you think people moved away from rural areas into cities because of some policy to destroy them, rather than wanting to find work through jobs located in cities? Without specific examples I really find it difficult to understand your philosophy.

> If you found it jarring for someone to openly promote the destruction of your way of living, maybe take that into consideration.

No because you are advocating for an equivalence which, to my knowledge, does not exist.

Dismantle public transportation, create trade policy which destroys their jobs, force their children into schools which promote lifestyles they abhor and promote childlessness, subsidize voluntary sterilization and market it to the kids in the schools, etc. These are all corollaries to what was done in rural areas.

How could you possibly imagine the average city resident uses more energy when dwellings are smaller, newer on average (more energy efficient), and residents are less likely to own a car?

Doesn't matter if they use half as much energy per capita if there's 50x as many of them.

As someone who feels the same way, I’ve lost all hope for the US in this regard. SUV/truck sales have continued increasing with absolutely zero mainstream discussion about preventing pedestrian deaths. It’s legal to have push bars and tow hitches (thus inhibiting crumple zones) with no purpose other than “protecting” your vehicle at the expense of lives.

Even ostensibly pedestrian friendly cities don’t have sufficient political willpower to hand street space over to other modes of transit at anything resembling a fast enough rate. Everything needs to sit in a “pilot” for two years before action is taken.

Excuse me, tow hitches are commonly used for practical purposes. I'm really interested in the case for making tow hitches illegal.

I think they mean hitches that people leave on their vehicles when not towing. I agree that people should stow their hitches if not actively towing for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, I’m not referring to useful ones being actively used for towing. I’m referring to people that leave them in while driving around not towing anything. Some are designed to extend upward as well with no practical towing purpose. Look up pictures of collisions after someone has a tow hitch in and you’ll see what I mean.

This ship sailed like 60 years ago (blame your parents, speaking of consequence). At this point, autonomous driving is the best we can do in places like Los Angeles or San Diego.

> At this point, autonomous driving is the best we can do in places like Los Angeles or San Diego.

“The best we can do”? Autonomous driving does nothing to help anything in any way at all.

What are you even talking about?

The ship hasn't sailed, it will just take a very long time to come back to port

If it's not out sailing, why are we waiting for the ship to return to port?

In the 70's, the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands was renovated from car central to bike central. That only took a few years, bike paths aren't that expensive.

I've been traveling around visiting US cities.

Cities like San Antonio, TX with its Riverwalk and Atlanta with its Beltline not only show every other city a path towards walkable and sustainable future but also how a city can invest tens of millions in walkable infrastructure that yields billions in economic investment and development.

Also, I don't have a car so I've been taking bus, train, plane, and occasional car rental to travel between towns and cities. Recently I've started taking buses. What I've discovered is that I can get on the bus in the morning, plug in my phone and laptop to AC power, and using my mobile hot spot work all day while on the bus. The buses travel on interstate highways which have excellent continuous mobile service. Amtrak trains are awful for working because lack of stable internet connection.

San Antonio barely has a functional downtown, there's a grim shell of tourist oriented restaurants and hotels immediately around the river walk but really struggles to be a center of business. There are few condo buildings downtown. Unlike Dallas and Austin San Antonio hasn't really seen a resurgence of it's downtown region.

Furthermore the river walk was built in the 1930s as a way to improve property values, and remodeled a handful of times over the decades, that's not a recent innovation

The San Antonio river walk has been extended 15 miles along the San Antonio river north and south of the downtown area. It has spurred billions in investment along its banks. This is exactly what my point is, there isn't a resurgence in the downtown region because new development is happening north and south along the river.

For the ship to come back to port, someone has to want it to come back to port.

I guess you don't know anyone that makes under $50k/yr. in the US. I'm guessing you probably just associate with other high-paid techies who can't understand why commoners just can't "eat cake". Trust me: when a bus route is shut down because rich people sniffle at a 0.2% tax for something they'd be too embarrassed to use, thousands suffer. If you've never had to switch from a 30 minute bus ride to a 1hr bus ride because of this, you will not understand any of this debate or its consequences, as I stated.

I was merely saying that for public transportation to be viable again in these cities, someone has to act - either by lobbying loudly and/or by putting their money where their mouth is.

Proposing that autonomous driving is the only way forward sounds pretty sad to me as it doesn't solve the main issue with cars: their environmental impact.

I didn't mean it would be easy to do, nor that it is decently doable to use public transportation in these cities' current state. Sorry if it came out that way.

You're certainly doing a great job making public transportation sound appealing to us "techies".

The ship hasn't sailed at all, very few things in life are really set in stone (for example fossils).

Doesn't mean a transition is easy or cheap. Nor will it be quick. After spending years and years both in the US and Western Europe, I wish for a healthy mix of cars and public transport. As it stands, this means significantly and heavily reducing cars in high density settlements where public transport is already sufficient or generally viable in the future.

I absolutely love cars and driving but I despise them in city centers. So much property could be regained to improve the daily lives of millions of people in various ways. There is a multitude of projects which have shown how successful this approach is.

One such project is the ban of cars from the Jungfernstieg area in Hamburg. 5 years ago you would walk along Jungernstieg and hundreds of cars would pass by, especially young men showing off their shitty, loud, tuned Mercedes CLAs to everyone. Then the city reduced access for cars there upon popular request and repurposed some lanes for plants and bicycles.

It took a while until people understood [1] but eventually they did. All sources in German.

Before (4-lane road): https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/verkehr-in-hamburg-fahrverbot-au...

After (intermediate car-reduced): https://www.hamburg.de/pressearchiv-fhh/14369764/2020-09-30-...

Future (cars banned): https://www.hamburg.de/bvm/medien/17154924/2023-05-30-bvm-ju...

[1] https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/autoverkehr-am-jungfernstieg-das...

The housing stock of a city rebuilds itself over a 30-60 year timeframe though. So starting now doesn't preclude us getting ahead of things for the future. We need some gutsy Robert Moses type figures, utilizing modern knowledge and less racism.

Throwing up your hands whining "Its to haaaaarrd" is very un-tech-bro of you.

You should look at Dutch cities, for example Utrecht got rid of a huge chunk of hideous highway in the center of the city and in its stead is now a beautiful canal with one the busiest bike-traffic streets in all of Europe.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov...

Yanks could do the same if they wanted to, but unfortunately they've been brainwashed into thinking walking is the devil

Just off the cuff saying things like this makes it seem you are the one that doesn’t understand consequences. The American economy is unfortunately driven by car ownership. So unless you also have a way to change almost every facet of American life in the next 20 years, you’re just blowing smoke.

That being said, I would love it if car reliance was drastically reduced. But it’s not going to happen.

If the US wanted to become less car dependent and a world leader in public transport, it could and would. It won’t be easy, it will take decades, but it can certainly happen.

And without a doubt the economy would be just fine in the long run.

It’s survived a depression, WW2, bailing out Europe, Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11, Afghanistan and the 2008 crash after all.

Sure, not arguing that, but it would take an overhaul of almost everything, that will not happen in a span of 20 years. But at the end of the day, the US doesn’t want this, at either the policy or the civilian level. We like going into 60k of debt to drive our big SUVs just a little too much.

Well sure. We can’t get high speed rail in the country or even in California. I’ve heard the arguments & it is all weak sauce.

The major industrial countries have it. Here is is automakers who fight this, nowadays it is Elon Musk, who distracts with BS single file tunnels (Boring Company pushing Teslas in a tunnel) or hyperloop nonsense.

This needs to be a federal infrastructure along the lines of the federal highway system.

This country lacks the national drive and will, which is impeded by Corporate & affiliates like NADA your local 1% in every county in the US.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/rich-republicans...

> I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars. I think the US should strive to reduce car ownership by 75% over the next 20 years, at least in cities over a certain population size.

Do you want to limit the cars people own or do you want to limit how much cars are used?

I could reduce the number of my cars to 1 and wouldn't be driving any less. Or I could buy more cars and still would not be driving more than I do today (but might be able to choose a smaller more efficient one for a trip).

Both, hopefully? Manufacturing cars comes with a lot of environmental impact, too.

I'm not sure you really do.

I live in the UK and public transport is actually very unreliable. Cancellations and delays are frequent, strikes happen a dozen times a year, many services have an hour between trains... public transport will take you much linger to get anywhere and you'll be able to transport much less. The car has been a blessing when shopping.

This seems more a problem in how this specific public transport is run, than with public transport in general.

I think it's more general, trains have lots of single points of failure while there are normally many roads that can be used to get to a destination.

My experience in Germany is that the trains there are even worse. Every single one was delayed by up to half an hour.

> I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars.

I also want this, but I grew up in LA and thus realize that there are places where this won't happen.

> I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars.

I would take money invested in self-driving cars over money "invested" in public transit in wildly inefficient ways that's less investment and more waste.

The problem with the position that money should go to transit instead of self-driving cars is that transit is a largely intractable problem because it's a political one, where self-driving cars are very much not an intractable problem because they're a technical one.

40,000+ people die every year in the US in car accidents. Self-driving cars have the potential to stop many of those deaths (and the injuries not counted in that). Investment in public transit, when you consider the practical realities, largely doesn't. I understand why folks prefer public transit as a solution, but self-driving cars will be a lifesaving technology, and on that basis they seem clearly worthy of investment.

And this is all doubly true since this isn't government money - it's VCs and private companies putting their cash towards solving a problem that's beneficial towards society. Why hold up public transit as the alternative to self-driving investment when there is absolutely no chance that these dollars would ever go to public transit?

This makes little sense to me?

Investing in public transportation is a much more means tested way of reducing traffic accidents. Countries with good public transportation infrastructure have much less traffic deaths per 100k than car focused countries.

Why? Well it makes sense. Public transportation is much more safe all around as you are greatly reducing the amount of people in charge of machines capable of easily killing others.

So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it. Funny that you would consider public transportation a waste of money when looking at the actual data shows it's the most efficient way of moving people.

> Investing in public transportation is a much more means tested way of reducing traffic accidents.

Selection bias. By definition, you're looking at public transportation that exists. How many traffic accidents have been reduced by the bullet train in CA that has had $80 billion in investment so far? Zero.

> So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it.

In the cases in which money can be efficiently deployed, you are correct. But has the $80 billion (let's say that again - $80,000,000,000) spent on the CA bullet been more efficient than $80 billion of spending on self-driving cars? Clearly not.

The problem is that there are limits to how much money you can deploy towards public transit at any reasonable level of efficiency. This is true because of geography, and it's true because of politics. In those places where you can use money well on transit, I fully support it, but once you've exhausted those, you're still going to be left with five figures of traffic deaths a year that can be saved by self driving cars.

Also, you ignored my last paragraph - the comparison of spending money on transit vs. self-driving is not one that makes sense, because the money comes from two different places. VCs don't invest in public transit. Google doesn't invest in public transit.

Self-driving cars are something that will provide a huge societal benefit at no cost to taxpayers. If you're a member of the general public, spending money on public transit is infinitely more inefficient than spending money on self-driving cars, because that transit money could be used to benefit you in other ways, whereas the private funding to self-driving cars would probably just be returned to shareholders or invested in other tech companies if it weren't spent there.

Personally, I don't even think the two are in conflict. Many of the comments on this article vastly underestimate self-driving's impact. Self-driving creates motives to use transit because it allows the economics of automobile fleets to consolidate around shared use instead of ownership - the pull of "the robotaxi service is cheap", which can be pulled off with a regular, modest YoY cost reduction, will ultimately make people give up the car, and if they give up the car, they will then save a few more pennies by using the bus on occasion - the bus will be more frequent if it goes self-driving too, because it's the labor cost of drivers that determines a lot of the operational economics of transit fleets. Take out that cost and you can run a lot of tiny vehicles as well as huge trains, meaning transit, deliveries and taxis will blur together as modalities, no longer needing to provision for what pencils out with a human driver or to adopt an ownership model where the user has to buy for their largest use-case and eat the associated cost. They can go smaller without much issue and rent larger as needed. It's a different vocabulary of "what transit is" once you add that dynamic.

The political element follows directly from that: if you aren't a car owner, but you are a bus and taxi user, you stop caring about parking and the specifics of your commute route. The robocar service will lobby the city for their own efficiency in your place - and what benefits their efficiency also benefits the users. So in one stroke you end up with an urban population that is aligned to empty out huge swathes of road space and garages for other uses such as bus lanes, bike parking, etc. People will feel safer on a bike because the cars will drive safely, and this is found in studies to be the main bottleneck to bicycle usage, so investment in dedicated bike infra could flatline in a self-driving environment, and bike usage will still rise!

It's hard to find an angle where there is truly a downside - the doomer response is kneejerk.