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 :-).