> Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly?

In SF yes. Even small amounts of driving in certain areas will have multiple daily interactions with these vehicles.

Where can I see videos (in the wild, not corporate) of this? I've never seen one in my life, though I'm in LA.

https://www.youtube.com/@JJRicks has almost 200 videos of his Waymo rides at this point, and has probably captured everything one could hope to see them do.

Well, Waymo is now giving rides in LA as part of a promotional tour. So you might be able to see one sooner than you think.

https://youtu.be/iNlS1LSDjl8?si=Me-zKKD7g0dPo6tH

I see them multiple times per day in the Alamo Square/Divisadero neighborhood in SF.

It is probably an odd thing to find because in SF they really are everywhere. I don't live in SF but visit a few times a year and after the first time I saw one they just sort of became part of the cityscape and not worth filming.

In LA they're currently pretty active in the Santa Monica/Venice area (although rare enough that they get a lot of stares and photos... i felt like a celebrityon my rides). If you want to try it out there's some upcoming events where they'll give out a code for 1 week of free rides

It's rare to go out for a trip (foot, bike, bus, or car) and not see at least one.

After evening rush hour has concluded, they're a plurality of vehicles on the road.

What do you mean by "plurality" here? That term depends on what other categories you're dividing other vehicles into, so what are the categories?

I was pretty sure 'plurality' was a word made extinct from the english language 50+ years ago, with the exception of patent documents, where its use appears to be compulsory.

It is very common to hear in the US at least around elections.

In parts San Francisco you'll see a couple waymo/cruise cars drive by in any 5 minute interval

I easily come across 20-50 of them every day in San Francisco.

Weekly is an understatement, last time I visited SF I would see many per day, and they seem to be doubling every time I visit.

Spend an hour in San Francisco and you'll see multiple.

In the city of San Francisco, yes they're quite common on the street. See a few every time I drive in to SF

There are many of them out on the road in SF, every day.

I only drive to the city about once a week and I typically see 0.5 AVs per trip.

On the most recent drive, I was in the right lane on the freeway and an AV was merging from the on ramp. It was driving extremely slowly and did not react to me (IIUC I have "right of way" and it should either speed up or slow down) so I basically had to change lanes to avoid it merging into me.

They aren’t littered through CA, in CA they are exclusively in SF. In SF they are common and as they seem to drive nonstop, take more road time than a comparable number of normal cars.

They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.

Waymos do stop between fares. They've gotten grief from people who don't like them parked in front of their house.

I really hope if anything that seeing so many occupant-less vehicles on the streets makes us collectively realize how inefficiently these vehicles are using a scarce, congestion-prone resource in a way that wasn’t as visible with Uber/Lyft.

I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.

The city should just start to bill big fleet operators for passenger-less miles.

That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer.

By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.

Not the worst idea I’ve heard.

I feel this way about free parking.

Kinda surprised they stop... When you have a self-driving system that costs $200k+, you want to keep it running and collecting data as much as possible - passenger or no passenger.

The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.

probably more about stretching their battery than anything else. if it roams around between trips it's going to have fewer customers per charge cycle.

But when roaming around at like 10 mph average round the city, it can presumably do a full 18+ hour day on a single charge. Electric cars are super efficient in urban environments.

I never thought about the charging problem. In SF, where do Waymo cars charge themselves?

They have awaymo garage where a human manually plugs them in to charge.

It probably make sense to pre-position them to the spot most likely to reduce time to pick up the next predicted passenger.

It makes sense to me that people wouldn't want a surveillance machine from a hugely powerful adtech company loitering around their property.

In the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area I see Waymo, Nuro, and unmarked-but-we-all-know-it's-Apple autonomous vehicles quite frequently. A few times a week at least.

Cruise specifically operated in SF where I agree they have been a very common sight.

Wait, I thought Apple had given up on it's car project?

Nope

There are some in LA as well, although at a smaller scale.

Why would they keep driving at all times with no passengers? How is that ecologically smart or sensible from a business perspective?

1) collect additional driving data. driving data is the moat for autonomous driving

2) move to a location where you're statistically most likely to pick up your next passenger, to reduce average wait time

That was always the selling point about autonomous cars, i.e. that they could be driven 24/7, almost.

There was no selling point related to the environment backw when the hype about self-driving cars really got going, I'd say 2016-2018-ish, you weren't getting people talking about taking the tram instead of getting driven around by these things.

The whole point of having them on a limited basis is to gather data. No useful data is gathered when they aren't driving.

I expect to see one every few minutes in San Francisco. When I counted in August, 4 of 100 vehicles going past my house were self-driving (https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/16873429948135628... ). I don't recall the exact time period, but believe it was just under half an hour.

It is limited to San Francisco, rather than the whole of California, but they do just drive around the city, especially after 9pm. As a rider, the future is here. Instead of just checking Uber and Lyft for prices to get somewhere, now I check the Cruise and Waymo app for prices too. (Well, not Cruise anymore.) But yes, it's a thing. I call a car, sometimes it doesn't have a driver, and it takes me to where I need to go in the city when I'm unable, or don't want to drive. Or more likely, don't want to deal with parking. I'll take the bus when I'm going that way but the bus doesn't always go in the right direction.

Can't wait for them to be able to take freeways over to Oakland and down to Cupertino.

Those sound like trips where you shouldn't call a car at all, but get on the local transit service. Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.

Self driving cars are useful to replace various maintenance or delivery trucks in cities, and farm transport. However mass transit is better for most things people are thinking about them for.

If the bus had dynamic routing, so it could show up where I am when I’m ready, and take me where I want to go, I’d be a huge fan. I don’t mean this ironically! I think dynamically dispatched, self-driving buses and vans will eventually save public transit. They’ll enable a much higher quality of service than current bus systems. Which drive around mostly-empty stopping every few blocks so it takes forever to get anywhere.

A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) is going to generally beat dispatched self driving cars in terms of convenience. 20 busses per hour is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city and doesn’t need any kind of routings because swapping buses has such a minimal wait time.

However, if you’ve only experienced terrible public transit then it’s far less appealing.

you still have to get to bus stop

So walking 100-200 feet vs waiting longer, entering your destination, paying more even after checking multiple apps for pricing…

I am not in great shape but I know which I prefer.

Any bus that has stops every 100-200 feet is unbearably slow. Even every 1/8 of a mile is too much to be an time efficient mode of transportation unless you have BRT imo.

(On average), for a walk to the stop of 100-200 feet the bus would need to stop every 200-400 feet. 300 ft seems to be roughly 100m, which is probably much too short a distance still. 250m or ~800 ft aligns better to my experience with cities with good transit, and in the worst case scenario you have to walk 125m to your nearest stop.

Almost.

1/8th of a mile is every 660 feet, but the farthest you can be from one is the midpoint so 330 feet. However for every trip starting at the midpoint there’s another at and the bus stop thus the average would be 1/2 that distance again or 165 feet.

Assuming a 1D world, you can beat this in practice.

I’ve said it several times but you average ~165 feet when walking to a stop every 1/8th of a mile. Max is 1/2 the distance because you can walk either direction and average is again 1/2 the max because you start at a random point not the worst possibility. 5280/8/2/2 = 165.

As to unbearably slow, there’s this idea of express busses and buss only lanes etc. The core of cities really isn’t that big, it takes forever because traffic is slow or mass transit is infrequent.

Fair enough. Not familiar with SF bus system but the bus system where I live, which is considered quite good I think, has each bus line 1/2 mile apart from each other. Almost no one lives directly along a route so there's an extra 1/8 mile average walk just to get to the route, not a stop on it. Fine by me but a lot of people don't seem capable of that for whatever reason. Combine that with the bus not actually going to where you're trying to get and I can see why people aren't huge fans.

The reason is usually that they need a car for some journey, once they have paid that fixed cost, they may as well use it for more journeys.

All these calculations are only true if your destination is on the road the bus runs along. Since not every road has a bus line, you also usually have to walk multiple blocks perpendicular _away_ from the bus line in addition to some of the distance between stops.

If your road doesn’t have a bus line then that’s a problem not an inherent limitation.

Ideally you want a grid where bus lines are near intersections so going from North to East means crossing 1 street so you can go anywhere with 2 waits and a street crossing.

Busses around me don't stop at every stop, only if there are people waiting at the stop or someone has requested a stop by pressing a strip along the windows or one of the almost dozen buttons on the bus.

show me an american city where a bus stops every 100-200 feet every 3 mins. Heck show me where it'd even be possible in an american city. That sounds like the most inefficient bus ever.

That’s a bus stop every ~1/8th of a mile not 200 feet.

You cut it in half because you can walk to the closest stop and cut it in half again before you’re starting at a random point not the worst possibility so 5280/8/2/2 = 165 feet. Except we don’t exit buildings or get on busses in the middle of the street so it’s not random.

In September, the rides I took in Cruise required walking farther than multiple bus stops.

In San Francisco the current standard is 800–1,360 ft between bus stops depending on the grade. Street car stops are every 2–3 blocks. The MTA's spent years trying to cull stops because many are much closer than that, so no… walking to a Muni stop in San Francisco is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the city.

Edit: ca. 2008 the policy was 800–1,000 ft for bus stops and 1,000–1,200 ft for street car stops. On grades between 10–15% the standard is 500–600 ft for bus stops, and on grades above 15% the standard is 300–400 ft. Trunk routes have 24x7 service, and (I can't find it now) there are standards about the amount of service on the other routes but it's something along the lines of 80% of residences are supposed to have frequent service ~18 hours a day and reduced service in the wee hours. Currently the tightest headway I can find is 8 minutes for travel during peak hours along the busiest routes.

Muni is often inefficient but it can get you pretty much anywhere in the city (including places you can't walk to like Treasure Island) for most of the day.

Two really popular locations, 3 miles apart, with a direct bus route servicing them and still 40 min travel time. This doesn't work:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dolores+Park,+Dolores+St+%26...

I'd argue that we'll be able to make this much better with driverless cars than with public transit.

Bad public transit doesn’t mean public transit can’t be good. It just means your local transit happens to be bad.

The crazy thing is bad transit needs a larger subsidy because people don’t want to use it. So good systems get better and bad systems get worse.

i think its just easier to make uber style driverless EVs be great than it is to make public transit great

Great for uber is still limited by traffic and is a lot more expensive than great transit which doesn't get stuck in traffic, and thus is much cheaper than uber for better service.

Bad service is much worse on transit though.

The hard part of Uber style driverless EVs being great is having extra roads to handle the extra traffic not actually building the self driving bits.

People in NYC don’t just save money using the metro vs a Taxi they save time.

NYC is the one US city where trains almost make sense, but there are a ton of downsides related to cost, safety, etc. I'd love to see all those dedicated right-of-ways put to more efficient use with self-driving vehicles.

NYC has out of control costs. Look to Vancouver canada for a very different picture.

It's a capacity issue. You just can't transport as many people with cars.

In a completely empty city, the first car handily beats transit. Of course.

In a traffic-laden city, separated PT tends to determine how long it takes to travel instead. 12AM it takes me 25min to get into the centre of the city - at peak hour it's more than an hour. Curiously, the train also happens to take approximately an hour to get into the city.

If public transit exists, it becomes the upper-bound for traffic travel time as if it takes longer than that people start to take the constant-time PT trip instead of the variable car trip.

In a software sense you can usually view decent PT (ie. not busses stuck in traffic) as having a high but constant time cost, whereas cars have a low but increasing cost corresponding to the traffic load (with non-separated transit incurring the same costs but being worse due to traffic stops :()

Fair argument. Public transit caps downside case and upside case. Cars can have downside but have upside too.

I want to have my cake and eat it too and I think we can with driverless cars. Lots of software tricks we can do with a network of driverless EVs + city traffic lights to dramatically increase capacity.

My roadmap for SF would be:

- allow waymo and others to scale driverless cars

- stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)

- give the same per passenger subsidy to riders of driverless cars that current public transit passengers receive per trip

- require that driverless cars in SF should send realtime destination info to the traffic light network

- remove parking spots on high traffic streets effectively creating two more lanes

- allow bus lanes to be exclusively used by driverless cars

- tax driverless car rides based on occupancy+distance+time of day so you can traffic shape

All of these are possible to implement in a really short amount of time (because its mostly software) compared to public transit (10+ years to make a bus lane on van ness)

This is a great line of thinking. Public transit based on Waymo cars could be dramatically more efficient, cheaper, and more flexible.

Your premise is, to put it politely, completely wrong. Even considering how broad the scope was, Van Ness took well longer than it should've. The delays were almost entirely political, driven by one supervisor who was on a mission to preserve the street lights.

Meanwhile the solution you've put forth is almost entirely political and even were there general acceptance of privatizing the roads that sort of project would be mired in just as much NIMBYism. Even then you're talking about, what, refunding federal monies that have already been spent? Levying a new tax (which will require a 2/3 voter approval), subsidizing private corporations, and kneecapping transit? And for what? A system that has a fraction of the capacity of the existing bus and tram infrastructure?

Beyond the gall to suggest privatizing our roads, you're suggesting handing it all over to Google? Really? A corporation with a track record of zero customer or long-term product support is not in a position to run our roads.

Ok I agree I was being a little ambitious :) Let me tackle your points one at a time:

- cities already pay private companies to help manage the traffic infrastructure so it doesn't seem too crazy. Seems hyperbolic to claim that's "privatizing roads"

- subsidizing private corps - ok maybe we shouldn't do this. but we should stop subsidizing public transit. it should have to compete with private alternatives now that we have them. previously there were no alternatives to public transit so we kind of had to subsidize it for equity, but now I think private enterprise (given fair competition) could deliver the same outcome. Instead of subsidizing the method (public transit) we should subsidize the outcome we want (equitable access to transport - which might mean that you need to provide low income rides as a ride share provider)

- on the money spent on the SF subway and bus lane, you're right, we're not getting that back. But we can just stop doing those going forward.

- regarding van ness bus lane, I didn't know it was because of the street lamps. But that actually proves my point. Basically to make any improvement, we just have to steer clear of new physical infrastructure. I'm suggesting no new physical infra, just software.

- regarding the tax on driverless rides, we kind of already have it. SF has a 3.25% tax on all ride sharing rides. We'd just need to update that to price the tax dynamically to help traffic shape. And if we don't get that piece, it's not critical.

- on giving it to Google. Fine... not them then. Whoever can provide the best service for the lowest cost. Perfect for free markets. In fact, if we make the API to traffic system standardized, you could plugin and hot swap different providers. You could even back test new providers on historic data to see what their performance would have been like and swap to new providers as they demonstrate their improvement over the current system

- cars have a fraction of the capacity of buses - yeah only if they are fully utilized and you're not counting getting to and from the bus station nor the loss of productivity waiting for a bus

You skipped a few.

- Build a real time monitoring system of people travelling on these services to allow instant arrests by diverting the vehicles.

- Sell all the data to advertisers and unscrupulous individuals, who may or may not be stalking someone.

- Allow authorities to use the cars as weapons to kill dissidents and other threats to government.

Building something this complex and all-encompassing goes 90% of the way to building a dystopia.

already easier ways for those things to be done

> - stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)

As long as we're throwing out fantasies, I'd like us to spend $2B more, and have the Chinatown subway run all the way out to Fisherman's Wharf and the Marina district, and also expand capabilities west out to the avenues.

I'm amazed we got the Chinatown subway and I'm excited to see the city develop around it!

Wait really? Genuinely curious. Do you think $2B was worth it?

Like I just implicitly assumed that that is way too much money for the value it provides but admittedly I didn't think much about it. Can you quantify how the benefit might be worth that much?

I think Cruise Automation has roughly raised that amount over it's entire lifetime. Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.

Congratulations you just reinvented communism. We don’t want cities making those kinds of investments for hopefully obvious reasons in that context.

Subway lines can pay for themselves across hundreds of years. It’s the best kind of investment for cities because it operates on their timescales and use ultra cheap bonds responsibly and it doesn’t interfere with free markets.

yeah it just takes forever and sometimes ends up not finishing but usually just much worse than expected.

just pick the low hanging fruit first and let driverless cars operate freely with data sharing. then build your pyramids.

and also not sure how private investment funding driverless car companies + having cities mostly just stay out of the way is communism?

People’s willingness to buy very low yield government bonds is independent from people willing to make high risk investments in private companies. Trying to get people in group A to make investments of type B through government action is the kind of central planning you don’t want.

Cities taking advantage of people with ultra low risk tolerance to make infrastructure investments at ultra low rates that only make sense with very long time horizons is dependent on markets.

no need to make anyone make any investments they don't want. private market has already funded many driverless car companies. no communism needed.

> Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.

Ahh, so by ‘we’ you didn’t actually mean a group you are part of but instead other people.

yes sorry that was confusing

> A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people?

It can actually fit 150.

A respectful culture is needed for public transit to properly function, and the Bay Area doesn’t have that.

Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.

And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.

So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.

Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris. So, yeah, okay that kind of behavior drives people to private vehicles… where the anti-social behavior involves shooting at each other or running people off the road.

e.g.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/15-month-old-baby-riding-in-vehicl...

https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/02/man-flashes-gun-drives-bac...

A road rage incident where someone pulls out a gun is notable enough to get a newspaper article. Phone snatching, seeing people smoke meth on BART, encountering disgusting things, etc, etc are daily occurrences. This is not an apples to apples comparison.

I mean, there's a whole stretch of Lake Merritt where people go park and hotbox their cars and the drive away every single day. That doesn't make the news even though the consequences of riding BART while high are much, much lower than the consequences of piloting a car while high. And I'm sure you've seen the videos of people driving up to do what the kids these days call 'bipping' (a.k.a. snatch and grab).

Making the news isn't really a good indicator of risk here.

I find your experience very different from mine. I live in Texas. I would expect a number of open carry handguns in any public place, and if someone started shouting half of those open carrying would put a hand in their gun and look tense.

OTOH, stealing a phone, smoking meth, or disgusting excretory things outside of a bathroom would be unthinkable. I would not worry if I left a cell phone on the seat if my pickup in Waxahachie or Hurst with the window down all day. I did leave my wife's cell phone in the seat of my pickup with the windows down when I ate in a restaurant in Waxahachie a day or two ago. She made fun of me for it, and I replied "It's Waxahachie."

BTW, the last car dealership I passed on the way home (before I stopped for dinner and answered this post) is called "Lifted Trucks." Seriously. You can look them up on Google Maps in Hurst, TX. LOL. This is Texas.

This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.

A small minority do crazy things anywhere. People exaggerate how often it happens.

Transit looks worse just because the people most likely to do that have 'mental issues' (possibly drug caused, but there are other causes) that also mean they can't keep a job and thus can't afford a car. However even then they are a small minority that you see because you are paying attention not because it is very common.

I encourage you to commute daily via BART for 5+ years and come away with the impression that I am "exaggerat[ing] how often it happens".

Yeah, well. It's not that you're exaggerating about how bad BART is (although there is that to some extent), it's that you're downplaying how much nonsense goes on with personal vehicles. Over the past couple decades I've commuted by car, Muni, and BART and while Bay Area transit isn't as bad as the suburbanites claim the drivers are among the worst I've experienced anywhere. At this point post-pandemic it's like a parody of Max Max.

> This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.

True.

> Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris.

When public transit advocates dismiss such inhuman conditions as a non-concern, I can only laugh. The average driver in America will never be shot at in any point in their entire life, but by your own admission inhumane filthy conditions are so common on city buses that you saw all of the above behaviors, excepting only the assault, during a short stay in Paris. I prefer the very infinitesimally small chance of getting into some sort of Mad Max scenario in my car to a 100% chance of encountering disgusting filth on a city bus. Most Americans agree with me. Most people who say they disagree actually have no choice and when they say they prefer the bus they're just coping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

If America had a civil and clean population like Japan, then the situation could be different. Clean city buses would be inoffensive, but that's not the reality we're dealing with. The deranged antisocial population of America is substantial. Maybe you'll say that we should fix that. You bet your ass we should. But until that happens, don't expect people to put up with city buses when they have any other choice. Just because you're okay with wallowing in filth doesn't mean the rest of us should be.

The fact that there are drug addicts and people with mental health problems is a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.

Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems. Fair play but I don't think any public money should ever go to solving problems in this way.

> a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.

Then people will continue to drive, no matter how much you whine about it. If you can't make city buses safe and clean, then people won't use them.

> Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems.

In fact, owning and using a car is an effective way to avoid the filthy of city buses. You seem to think this is a mistaken belief, but you're simply wrong. You will never persuade Americans to give up their cars and use buses instead unless you acknowledge the problem of filth and fix it. You can't gas light people into thinking the filth is fine or their cars aren't an option. Denying the problem and trying to shame people who acknowledge it will never get you to the state you want society to be in.

Ehhh...

Frequent, accessible public transit is the main point. Anything else is more of an excuse, honestly. Nothing puts people off more than the bus being 15 minutes late on a half-hourly schedule. 5, or even 10 minute frequencies are required to get the level of service you need for people to reliably use public transit in a "turn up and go" manner.

Missing a timed transfer and having to wait 15 minutes is awful. Why did I miss my last timed transfer? Police activity on BART (again).

The more common public transit use by the general population the more you dilute the fringes of society with normal people. There’s vastly more normal people than people on the fringes of society but if it’s normal for people to drive then that’s what normal people will do. Lots of normal people also tends to enforce social conformity.

You see the same effect in any pace where the general public visits. Walmart at 6pm is a very different place than Walmart at 3AM not because the store is different but because you’re self selecting for people who don’t need to be asleep at 3AM.

> driving empty vehicles only makes congestion worse.

The number of empty bus seats I see go by is astounding Those buses take up a lot of road space and block arterial traffic when people are boarding.

Buses that look empty generally have 5 people on them, and so are still more efficient use of space. Either that or at the end of the route and will soon turn around and fill up again.

> A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) ... is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city

When living in London a few years ago (clearly a major city), the wait times between buses were pretty short. They might have been about 6-10 minutes for some of the more central areas (rough guess from memory).

I'd be surprised if they were "every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) though".

Meanwhile, in Melbourne and Sydney though (substantial cities, but not London sized) the buses are more like 1/2 hour apart.

In Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia) the buses are 1 hour apart, and seem to stop about 7pm each night.

I'm in London and every 4 minutes isn't far off. I live in suburbia like most people and can walk 10 minutes to a high street where there and multiple routes at 8 min frequency each way, which overlap for large parts of their route, therefore some journeys really do have a bus every 3 minutes. And if it's a journey from central London to central London then there's going to be 2+ routes that serve every journey.

we've had uber pool for a while. if that's your definition of public transit then sure, self driving pooled cars would obviously be good.

Oddly enough they got rid of both Uber Pool and Lyft Shared in most cities. Definitely Boston, but also half a dozen other cities I've visited. It may still exist somewhere.

I wish they hadn't, because my commuter card works with the shared rides. So even if a shared ride was the same price as a normal Uber/Lyft (or even more) I'd do it just to be able to use the commuter card.

Was this a covid thing? I wish they would bring it back.

It was supposed to be for covid I think, but worked after for a while too. The commuter card just verifies that the charge is billed as something under "transportation" (and probably that it's not airfare). It's the Lyft/Uber app that appears to stop you from using the commuter card for non-shared rides.

Honestly (and since this is a hacking forum) I have a theory that if you could hook the Lyft/Uber app with Frida or a modified kernel you could push through payment using a commuter card on regular Lyft/Uber rides.

AVs should in principle liberate public transit from a lot of limitations. Surge capacity should be easier to deploy. Smaller busses on smaller routes should be at less of a cost disadvantage. Pick up and drop off could be more flexible.

I live in a semi-rural area that used to have a trolley line to the next town where one could catch a train into Boston. It's also a challenge to optimize school bus routes in a sparsely populated area, and AVs could help with that.

You don't want dynamic routing. You want frequent predictable routing.

Dynamic means you call and 1-15 minutes later a bus comes. Then it takes you to your destination, but you have no idea when you will get there because sometimes it takes long detours for someone else.

Frequent predictable routing means when you feel like leaving you just walk out the door confident that the bus will be there soon (even if you see it pulling away just as you arrive), and you quickly learn which buses to transfer to, to get where you want to be.

That seems like very 20th century thinking. We should be aspiring to shape public transport to the needs of the riders instead of making the riders learn fixed routes and transfers. Waymo is very likely to be superior to existing public transportation in all dimensions for almost every transit need. There might still be a role for big buses and trains in the peak of rush hour (if that still exists).

The needs of the rider are predictable. You cannot make shared vehicles both flexible and predictable. Fixed routes are predictable and thus easy to plan your life around. When fixed routes are also frequent there is no sacrifice in that.

I don’t think the needs of the riders are predictable. Large upfront costs and static design routes are a major risk (see the Detroit public transit that serves areas no longer of much interest and is often empty). That’s why many politicians favor buses as an example; they’re flexible enough to move with demand.

Public transportation depends on a critical mass of customers with significant overlap in their trips. If you deviate from fixed routes you start to describe a taxi service.

Depends on what you’re trying to optimize for. Flexibility? Sure. Energy utilization, congestion, or GHG emissions? Probably not.

The problem is for the bus to stop near you, it has to stop often. To stop often, it has to move slowly, which means it will take forever to get to your destination. A separation of local and express busses you transfer between could possibly help. But if the theory is that you’re going to take a local, to get to an express, to get to a local near your destination, then you’ve wasted a ton of time on transfers. Good luck getting to your destination in less than an hour.

I’m a fan of public transit and have experienced many good public transit systems. The unfortunate truth is that in any neighborhood with less-than-extreme population density, you have to shape your life around the system by living and working near core transit lines to get reasonable travel times. That works great for people who can do that (I’ve done it myself!), but a better system could aim higher to serve the entire public. The American built environment simply can’t be adequately served by traditional bus networks.

Living in city with frequent stops, the stops do not slow them down so much. IF you add "looking for a parking place" into estimation for a car, going by bus is frequently faster (which is why I frequently pick bus - it is more predictable and faster).

No need to look for parking when you call the robotaxi.

Then of course you wait for robotaxi.

> The problem is for the bus to stop near you, it has to stop often. To stop often, it has to move slowly, which means it will take forever to get to your destination.

Add bus lanes and smart traffic lights (giving busses permanent green waves), this stops being the case. Busses should never be stuck in traffic. That's bad for scheduling and makes them needlessly unattractive.

But the bus is already stopped, its in my garage waiting for me. And I don't need to figure out what bus lines I need to change to or understand their schedules, the route for this bus happens to be exactly where I want to go.

I'm generally pro-transit and continue to vote for it, but in many places and routes a car is often more convenient if one can afford it.

I am not aware of a single city across the world that has such a thing, and yet public transit remains incredibly useful and functional in places not-the-US. An enormous part of Europe, for example, even in towns and cities with far less density than those here.

Can we pretty please stop acting like this is a complete enigma that nobody else has managed to figure out?

Hello from Oxford, UK, where we have the Pick Me Up[0] bus! Far more useful than standard buses, unless you live near a bus stop and need a hub and spoke journey into/out of the centre.

[0] https://www.whatsoninoxford.net/pickmeup

Neat!

It's pure fantasy to think public transit can replace all/most car trips in American cities, even in most of SF.

It's not just a matter of "fix service", it's you need to completely rebuild the city with 5-10x the population density.

well said

Doesn't even need to be 5-10x the population density. The "inner ring" of Paris is similar density to San Francisco and supports a metro system that I think most would agree makes car trips unnecessary. But the "rebuild the city" part might still be somewhat necessary.

" it's you need to completely rebuild the city with 5-10x the population density."

Which..is exactly what is going to happen [1]?

[1] https://www.californiacitynews.org/2021/09/california-says-g...

Living in a European city and relying 100% on public transit and walking, with occasional biking for longer distances, it’s easy. It does not require 5-10x the population density, maybe just 2-3x, at least compared to San Francisco (which is already somewhat dense in parts). It is not a major shift in lifestyle easier. The tallest buildings in some cities in the Netherlands are 2-3 stories, and those cities still have regular buses, trams, and trains.

There are even some suburbs full of single family homes, with yards, which still have buses every 8 minutes all day long, and long-distance commuter train service every 20 minutes.

Yes the US needs more density for this to be feasible. But San Francisco isn’t that far off on the density that it would needs

This is easier said than done. Making the density 2-3x is still a huge undertaking. With suburbs with single-family homes, this means bulldozing half of it and somehow redrawing all the property lines so the lots are 1/2 - 1/3 as large and building new houses within the new lots. You can't just magically take a subdivision full of McMansions and somehow increase density 2-3x, unless all those houses take in boarders.

Also, SF is still pretty unique compared to most American cities. So you might be able to do this stuff in SF, but not so much in places like Houston.

this is satire right?

Are people this incredulous about public transit?

I love autonomous cars, but its not scalable at all. Its obvious to me that public transit is the real future as the population grows.

I think if you were building a city from scratch, it's arguable that self driving individual pods is the way to go for the most convenient AND most efficient door to door transport. Maybe you disagree, but its not important because we're not building cities from scratch.

For existing city infra and politics that we have, I think self driving is def the best way to go. Suggesting that an individual should lobby their gov't to fix public transit seems like lower probability of success than voting with their wallet for longer self driving trips.

Public transit isn't one of those things that can be incrementally fixed. Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better, that's why its so appealing imo.

I mean maybe if you're a small town and want to stay a small town. Large cities, should definitely drive most transportation away from personal vehicles/pods. Its simply a space/first principles issue [1]. The math seems 100x less scalable, simply because you hate being around other humans (in which case what are you doing in a big city anyway).

[1]: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7999510360_8e46299621_z....

I always see that image referenced and it's kind of BS. it assumes the buses are filled to the brim constantly but the cars only ever have 1 person it. It also doesn't take into account the transport to and from your door on both ends. It also doesn't consider the inefficiency in wait time.

The ideal transport would be a cocoon just big enough for you to fit in that picks you up at your door and gets you to your exact destination with minimal energy overhead. I'd argue a self driving car is much closer to that ideal and we can iterate our way much easier to it than public transit.

"It also doesn't take into account the transport to and from your door on both ends."

This type of design is terrible for average health outcomes [1]. We should not be optimizing for this. Walking to the bus stop is a good outcome. We should optimize for better more frequent bus routes, but "door-to-door" is unnecessary and counter-effectual.

The rest (iteration speed, filling a bus to the brim etc.) are just political problems just as intangible as "lets build better roads (public infrastructure) for autonomous cars", so we can put that aside.

[1]: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/us-neighborhood-wa...

we don't have to couple exercise with transport. We don't say planes are bad because it reduces the number of cross country hiking trips people take.

On filling a bus, I think its a fundamental shortcoming of having fixed routes that they'll never be as efficient as point to point transport, especially electrified transport. i'm not really making a political argument.

I agree with the second point but given as 80% of city transports post-covid is back to being fixed commutes along fixed routes, I'm happy optimizing that along transit ways. I don't really care what happens with the remaining 20%.

Right now, nearly 100% of travel is with "personal cocoons", totally unnecessary (other than for political reasons) and creating immense downward pressure on health and social outcomes. In terms of levers the government has on health and social outcomes, transitway design is a big one, and it should use it.

The fact that its done badly in America is a political problem, and if you have any political power it should be expended fixing that, not rolling back public transit.

I think if these cocoons costed $2.50 a trip you might think differently. I think driverless cars + some iteration on the vehicles themselves gets us there (without subsidies!).

People love the equity argument for public transit. Non personally owned, ubiquitous, driverless, cheap, efficient and most importantly convenient cocoons would increase equity a whole hell of a lot more than the traditional definition of public transit imo

For the 80% during peak rush hour? Just based on spatial efficiency that pricing doesn't seem attainable.

Maybe if you were to throw infinitely scalable roads in the way of Boring Tunnels, but now we are off in la-la wish land.

Just seems like a lot of work for what is a solved problem (atleast in the Pareto sense).

What is this solution we already have that you speak of? It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles in SF using public transit, between two popular destination pairs.

Fleets of driverless cars lets you do traffic shaping in time and space. Plus the marginal energy cost is basically nothing. It's basically all fixed cost BUT it's not like a transit project in the sense that you don't have to allocate a bunch of capital ahead of time and wait 10 years and then maybe get what you wanted (or not). Driverless cars are helpful the moment the first $200K car hits the road.

It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles using a car too at most peak times. It’s obviously not fair to compare a perfect autonomous transportation method with the current imperfect state of public transit.

As the population grows the driving times will get worse much faster than in transit because again, spatially, it just doesn’t scale well.

If you take 20-30% of everyone on a BART train and put em in autonomous cars with human drivers in the mix (like in the marginal $200K case tomorrow), what you have is abject chaos on the streets.

Every negative you mention about public transit is a political problem (other first world countries can deliver public transit project in a matter of a 1-2 years and at a fraction of the cost).

no. i literally compared a common route on google maps for bus vs car, no transfers on the bus. car was 20 mins, bus was 40 mins when you factor in walking to the stop and waiting and walknig to your destination. to be fair, didn't consider time to get parking but its still less than 20 mins.

population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? we have very slow population growth and we can scale our way out of it with existing infra. more driverless cars = less parking = two more lanes on most streets. that can double throughput.

yes public transit is a huge political problem - so whats your solution? because the tech for public transit has existed forever so why isnt it better in the US? You cant just blame politics and then do nothing. You also cant say "we just need to advocate!" because, well, if it were that easy it would have already happened. Driverless cars are a good solution precisely because it uses existing infra and I think the political hurdle can be much much lower.

"population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? "

well then you can definitely put away your dreams of a magical $2.50 pod travel. You need people, more people, young people to build all that. And if we're saying flat and low population growth that dream is over, all conversation can stop.

But if we can turn things around on population, public transit is the only way things scale. Personal travel pods/cars are a current stopgap that only kind of works for our current population levels. Please re-measure car travel times at 5:30pm on a Wednesday evening when 80% of all trips happen, like I've mentioned, the remaining 20% are highly inconsequential to overall transportation design.

we already have working driverless pods.

you seem to think there are only 2 worlds: 1) population is exploding and everything has to scale 10x or 2) population isn't growing and apocalypse.

There is a 3rd outcome: slow, moderate growth at 2%/year and things need to scale just a little.

the bus doesn't have to be full to be a more efficient use of space than cars though. A typical (non-articulated) bus is the length two-three cars at most.

It is worth noting that personal vehicles are getting larger, so the amount of ridership required for a bus system to be more efficient than cars is only going down for the foreseeable future, even before getting into second order effects.

yeah but it does have to have enough people for it to be efficient moving around that giant wall of metal

turns out that compared to lugging a living room around for every (average car occupancy of) 1.5 people on the road, a bus system has an extremely low efficiency bar to cross.

buses are roughly equivalent in energy per passenger mile vs cars when you consider average loads for each.

Worse, everyone in a car us tailgating. If you maintain a proper safe following distance cars do a lot worse.

The ideal transport is be a bicycle, or an e-bike for cities with hills. The problem is that bike lanes are still not great. I bike commuted in SF for years. Bikes are ideal "last mile" transport too, for long commutes trains with bike carriages can be added in. Numerous cities in Europe show this works very well. Having said that, it's an ideal which I fear is probably far from reachable for most people given the way cities have been built, and infrastructure priorities in the US do not favour bikes.

I love biking and am excited by the possibility of the roads having more attentive and courteous Waymo cars and fewer speeding and drunk human drivers. (A man on bike was killed by a drunk speeding driver 24 hours ago 300 feet from my home.)

Pods are not the most efficient transport. It is simple geometry. Here is an expert in the field going into more detail. https://humantransit.org/2011/03/how-universal-is-transits-g... (read the rest of this site too - lots of good stuff there)

I don't see anything in that article that actually states efficient transport. It's just a long winded way of saying that there are a lot of factors in network design. kind of a useless article imo

Read it again and apply the geometry lessons to pods.

> Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better

Except for energy consumption. If we were in a world were fossil fuels were unlimited and climate change was not a thing, maybe I would agree with you.

But we are not. We need to get much more efficient with energy, and cars just can't do enough. Better accept it earlier than later and start building public transports wherever it's possible.

for city driving, electric vehicles are crazy efficient. the energy is negligble. basically all the driverless cars are EVs.

That's an interesting claim, but have you got numbers to back it up, compared to bus networks which are also largely electric/hydrogen in most recent deployments?

Google says it costs roughly 4 cents a mile to charge a tesla model 3. Most city rides are a couple of miles so its a really really small fraction of the cost of trip cost (even if you price at public transit prices)

Can we talk about energy, and not price? And compare the consumption of a Tesla Model 3 with the average number of passengers (< 1.5?) versus the consumption of electric public transit?

Why? You can convert energy to cost and back - its all the same energy source for EVs vs public transit. Ultimately cost is what matters anyways.

Who cares if the energy requirement of public transit vs an EV has a huge delta (spoiler: there isn't a huge delta in terms of energy per passenger mile). They are both super low and efficient.

> Ultimately cost is what matters anyways.

To you, now. But the biggest problem of humankind right now is energy. Consequences of our use of energy are climate change and biodiversity loss. But even ignoring those consequences, we are going into a world where we will have dramatically less energy. Not in 100 years, in the next few decades. So you will live in that world.

You do realize that the energy needed to move an object (say a car an its passenger) is related to the mass of the said object, right?

> the energy is negligble

What does that even mean?

yes i understand that. i mean its negligible in terms of cost relative to the cost of a trip (like a public transit fare).

Right. From my point of view, you answered to my comment about energy by saying "it's negligible", but you apparently meant "it's negligible in a metric different than the one of the post I am answering to, but I won't mention it". I think that's why I got confused :-).

Trains near me are very polluting per passenger mile. The trains are empty most of the day and spew out visible clouds of diesel smoke. That doesn't even account for all the huge energy cost of building dedicated railways and hundreds of bridges and crossing signals.

I would suggest comparing electric trains to electric cars. And the solution to your problems sounds like they should improve the trains, not get everyone a car :-).

That sounds like hell. More areas should be walkable and bikeable. Motorized vehicles should be limited to minimal areas so that the rest is quiet, safe and accessible. European cities have it right here - underground transport and quiet walkable surface level.

i like tunnels too. Just put cars in them that can easily transition to surface streets for door to door.

Bikeable/walkable cities are not an argument against quiet, cheap, ubiquitous, efficient driverless EVs.

Can you expand on that a little bit? What are the reasons that you believe that AVs are "not scalable at all?"

This picture makes it clear, for the most part. Public transit is a pareto improvement on personal driving pods in terms of scalability. Especially for fixed commute routes.

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7999510360_8e46299621_z....

Regular cars aren't scalable at all. AVs are not any different than regular cars. In fact AV will increase the amount of cars on the road as more people that can currently not drive, such as children and the elderly, are now more likely to use a relatively low occupancy AV. So we can expect transit to get worse as AVs become prevalent.

The only scenario where AV may scale better than cars is if we're talking about autonomous buses, and that will only perform better if they are given the other features of public transit, such as dedicated lanes, which require set routes, and we're pretty much just talking about public transit in general at this point.

> Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.

Lots of people have been trying to get decent public transit in US cities for decades. There is so much resistance it often seems impossible.

So, yes, obviously public transit would be great. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's just not an option for most people. "Talk to your local politicians about fixing service" sounds delusional to be honest.

A small minority has been trying. A larger number of people (but still a minority) get interested in it, but they don't care about fixing transit. They just care about shoveling money to someone else (unions, contractors, artists...) and transit is one way to do that.

> Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.

Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?

I'll take the bus when the bus route is convenient, which is usually, and I'll take Uber/Cruise/Lyft when I'm in a hurry and it's not. I prefer public transportation but I'm more practical about it. Which includes electric scooters (Spin/Lime), or vespa scooters (Revel).

If you don't make an effort nobody will and the world gets worse '

I agree with you in the abstract. The reality of the US political and administrative system is that it’s not possible to build new public transit, but it is possible to develop self-driving cars.

How does the price of these compare to Uber/Lyft?

More expensive

better driving imo

My experience has been that they are roughly equivalent in most cases. Sometimes they're slightly cheaper, multi-stop routes they tend to be a lot cheaper.

If you tip in Uber/Lyft, Waymo is always more price competitive.

I'm in FiDi right now (weekday afternoon). A Waymo ride to Dolores Park is $18. UberX is $17. Lyft is $19.85.

I find that late night you often will not be able to get an Uber. I think drivers have been ceding ground to Waymo's obvious night driving superiority.

We're an active market in Phoenix for Waymo, and I live in Central Phoenix and see Waymos every single trip I take now; they're nearly ubiquitous. But I've also taken them several times. They're safe, very capable drivers, and I have a lot of confidence in them, to be honest.

Weekly? Now, this is nowhere near SF levels, but I live in South Austin, and I probably see at least 1-2 autonomous cars every single day I go driving in town.

Weekly? I encounter at least one every few blocks.

SF today is as close to Blade Runner that we'll ever get. Every billboard is for some AI company, you ride in a driverless cab across a literal mile of homeless people drugged out of their minds, screaming and pooping on the sidewalk. SF today is so aggressively dystopian that it's sort of hard not to enjoy the experience.

I think this comment is slightly exaggerated. I didn’t see that many ads for AI companies and while I did see some driverless vehicles, they were in the minority and I only saw them on my second full day exploring the city.

There are a large number of homeless people openly doing drugs, and there is some poop, but I find these descriptions to be generally inaccurate.

Don’t get me wrong, the situation is bad, but based on descriptions like this I was expecting far far worse.

That comment is just based on my experience going to SF a few weeks ago.

- Every billboard on the way to the hotel from the airport was for AI (which not the case a few months ago)

- Uber driver interrogated me all the way to the hotel on the value prop of my current project at work

- Went to grab a burger and had to dodge 2 people screaming at me, walked passed a man crying because I believe a friend had just gotten hit by a car.

- almost stepped in human fecies

- On my last night, took a cruise back to my hotel (thanks to a friend). Honestly it was quite fun.

Nothing in my comment was exaggerated, just edited a bit to make it more coherent. The reality was actually more dystopian.

And I do mean that last line seriously, I had a blast!:

> SF today is so aggressively dystopian that it's sort of hard not to enjoy the experience.

Nearly every billboard I've in SF, when I used to live near there 1-7 years ago, was tech. So not AI, but maybe "one app to rule them all" (I forget whose slogan that was).