It is obviously a much easier problem to solve due to its constraints.
What is interesting to me is that we have completely altered our transport networks to fit the new paradigm of cars +100 years ago, widening roads, asphalting roads, building motorways, parking lots, etc.
But somehow anything that comes after must be backwards compatible with this 1950's US Detroit vision of the car centric world.
1. because they brought major improvements to most peoples everyday live, much more then self driving will
2. it fit's the wide landscape of the us perfectly
2. it was pushed (lobbied) by much much more money then any of the self driving car or public transportation movements today (not just Oil and Car industry but also e.g. military for Tanks)
3. it fit the American dream perfectly, everyone can go everywhere, by themself, everyone gets their own house (which in turn is often noticeable far away from city centers so a car is needed) etc.
4. it aligned with a society which moved more from compacter communities to wide spread individualism
5. the US was growing a lot, this meant a lot of potential for changes
7. it aligned with (also in EU) very wide views about what a good future would be and how to get there, e.g. EU cities which grew a ton around 1950 often have (or had) similar problems
8. people where not dependent on walking, switching to cars was viable
9. it was a powerful tool to shape society in many ways, including for suppressing successful minorities by intentionally routing highways right through the middle of them
Today the US isn't growing like that anymore nor can people at all in anyway agree anymore in which direction it should be heading wrt. urban planing. A lot of the grate ideas and shows of wealth and prosperity of the 50th have turned into liabilities. People are so dependent on being able to use cars that it has become a liability for the US where they need to make sure the huge majority of their population can at least somehow somewhat afford a car and gasoline for it, not doing so it not an option. But this leads to a chicken egg problem where for solving some problem you need to change how cars a treated but for changing that you need to first fix the problem. So the only option is to slowly do many small changes but at the same time this makes it much easier for Oil and Car lobbies to hinder the most essential changes.
I understand people want a faster solution! But mixing autonomous vehicles with human drivers isn't the way.
Moreover, these companies commit statistical fallacies discussing safety. Human drivers have driven more, as the article suggests, and in a myriad of environments. Many variables are at play, and it's disingenuous to compare this way.
The Catholics used to build churches that took 300yrs to construct, long after the death of the original designer.
It is not difficult to imagine 1950s roads turning into the cyberpunk cities, full of autonomous vehicles.
That doesn't create enough value for shareholders.
EU cities have mostly been built to be dense around train & bus stations. US cities (besides NY) are extremely large, flat, and spread out. Even if you had public transportation, it would be practically impossible to get from A to B because there are no hotspots besides the downtown/city center.
The concept of a "car city" is real. It's a vicious cycle that the US entered at some point, and besides rebuilding the cities entirely there's not much hope for public transport.
Also: the big car mania spilling over from the US to Europe makes driving in European cities/roads more and more difficult, as formerly bidirectional parts are now choke points where only a single oversized SUV can fit through at a time.
(I don't have a better alternative to democracy; just stating that's where the flaw is. Well, that and zero incentive to do things well/efficiently outside of political kudos).
> At the start of the 20th century, bikes far outnumbered cars in Dutch cities and the bicycle was considered a respectable mode of transport for men and women. But when the Dutch economy began to boom in the post-war era, more and more people were able to afford cars
Amsterdam also has 50% higher population density than Los Angeles, despite housing much fewer people.
These two goals are incompatible. If the idea is that self driving cars don't need to park, they can just drive around in circles until needed(which is an absolutely insane idea for a whole number of reasons, but let's stick with it for a second), then that will only increase not decrease traffic.
>>I could see them make the way to Europe too
I've love to see a Waymo navigate some narrow British roads where there is no road signage and there is no defined priority.
Like, this is a real situation encountered on a road here by myself just few months ago, skip to 1:30 to see the interesting bit - I'd love to hear proponents of self driving cars explain to me exactly what the car would do in this case. Hand over to a remote operator? There is no signal there, sorry.
You can park them further away from their destination, this increases traffic massively driving to the parking.
As well, if the ride is comfortable then people will be willing to plan longer commutes. An induced demand which increases the number of miles driven and hence traffic. Watching TV in the car is a major appeal of self driving.
I'm also convinced that the peak share of vehicles in use is less than 60% at any time of the day and year, but happy to be proven wrong.
Loads and loads and loads - at least here in the UK, nearly every city centre is converting to be pedestrian only, with cars being pushed further and further out, with councils emphasising that you should really park your car at one of the massive park&ride car parks outside of the city centre then just take a metro or bus in. That's a good thing in my opinion. It's really shocking to look at pictures taken from the city centre just 30 years ago and see that cars basically were prioritized everywhere, the main shopping street in Newcastle for instance used to be a normal road with cars parked on either side - it hasn't been like that for a long time and the city manages just fine.
Atlanta has interstate interchanges that can fit the entire Vatican in them. Every major city in the west is packed with boulevards 6 lanes across. The US didn’t just accommodate cars, it optimized for them as it was building out. Making that walkable again isn’t a matter of converting a 6 lane road into a pedestrian walkway…
The US has huge areas where each lot must be single family, at least 50% yard, etc. As well as huge parking lots around businesses. Therefore putting the residents much further from the places they need to be. Meaning busses and bikes would need to travel further. They still need to stop at an interval of say, 10 minutes walk, and therefore they're slower. Even if you gave them a dedicated lane this would not help.
As well, in London I can take a bus and usually access dozens of services at my destination, like food, entertainment, shopping, etc. In the US, a destination might just have one service, and just a few random businesses in walking distance. Again increasing the number of miles travelled.
It's like that cartoon with the swing. "I just wanted someone to paint a line on the road"
https://fisher.osu.edu/blogs/gradlife/2011/11/16/a-simple-sw...
But really I think they’re the future of the city.
A perfect "this is why we can't have nice things."
I for one don’t want to ride a bus, every time I’ve been on one there’s been some drugged out maniac sketching everyone out. They’re also usually gross like public bathrooms and building more, forcing everyone to use them, isn’t going away to change that.
I'd never been on a bus until I moved out of the US, and I've never run into that problem.
> you people who are obsessed with trains and busses
I'm not obsessed, I grew up in the US. I drove a car every day since I was 16.5 years old, well into my 30s. I also drove fuel trucks, tractors, boats, and so much more during my life in the US. It wasn't until I moved out of the US that I saw a different way of living. Does it have issues? Yep. Does it mean I can live without a car payment, insurance, and maintenance costs? Hell yeah, and that is a lot of money.
Do I miss having a car? Yes! I actually do. However, when I need one, I can usually rent an electric BMW one for a few hours for ~50 USD an hour, or ~100 for a day. But realistically, on average, I only need a car for a day, every few months.
It would be nice if the city added more BART coverage but it seems unlikely one will ever be added within 10min walk of my house. There is already one 10min e-bike ride, but I’m not comfortable locking my e-bike there.
To bus to the BART station is 10min walk + 3min wait avg then 10min on bus.
Uber/Lyft/Waymo will always be part of my commuting solution for where I live. I just happen to find Waymo the more pleasant experience.
I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying.
Yeah, it would be great if we all had amazing public transit instead of self-driving cars. But self-driving cars are making big advances, and transit isn't. In ten or twenty years, self-driving cars might be everywhere, and transit will probably be roughly as bad as it is today. That's why people are excited about one and not the other.
It doesn’t make sense because the traffic jam problem with cars comes not from human drivers but the physics of the car itself, but it is a persistent talking point nevertheless.
Meanwhile the actual future of transport, absent public investment in transit systems, is electric micromobility devices.
1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion.
2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in confined space with other people, and a variety of cultural factors make that more unpleasant than it is in other countries. There is no culture of shame here so people on public transit are commonly extremely annoying and there's no law enforcement in many large cities so you just have to deal with it.
3. Most americans live in suburbia where robust public transit just isn't possible. It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway.
4. We already have all the road infrustrure needed for transportation
5. Even in the best of circumstances public transit is more of a hassle than just driving directly from point a to point b
Fun fact / example: My hometown started as a logging town next to train tracks, but grew outwards in one direction, so the train is now off towards the edge of town and it would take most residents around an hour to walk there. Just about everyone who takes the train drives there and uses its parking lot.
To answer the bullet points you made:
>1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion.
Yes, a lot of public projects are allowed to be overblown in budgeting. This has many causes and they need to be addressed, but it is not a reason for halting all infrastructure improvement. It is simply a problem orthogonal to the one being discussed. But on the subject of cost, public transit can definitely be way cheaper than car ownership for the individual. (Yes I know fares are subsidized but so are roads and other car infrastructure, so that all needs to be balanced before claiming public transit is just the upstanding taxpayer paying for the poor and filthy).
>2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in confined space with other people, and a variety of cultural factors make that more unpleasant than it is in other countries. There is no culture of shame here so people on public transit are commonly extremely annoying and there's no law enforcement in many large cities so you just have to deal with it.
That sounds like another problem that needs to be dealt with entirely separately, but there obviously are a lot of US cities with massively used public transport without there being more crime there than elsewhere in the city/region.
>3. Most americans live in suburbia where robust public transit just isn't possible. It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway.
Even if they do, that still goes a long way towards solving the traffic jam problem, because it's the physics of the car itself that creates the jam. There just can not be enough cars on the road for everyone because there simply isn't space. Those that absolutely need or want to use it should be able to, and that is made easier when more people use transit.
>4. We already have all the road infrustrure needed for transportation
See point 3, no we don't. We can not because there isn't space for all the cars at the rush hour times.
>5. Even in the best of circumstances public transit is more of a hassle than just driving directly from point a to point b
That's perfectly fine. If I can save myself the cost of a car I am happy to walk a bit. Not all will make that cost/benefit calculation and that's fine too. But really, the exact time when it is a complete pain to drive (rush hour) is the time where good transit beats the car anytime, and also the exact time when every single transit passenger is one less car on the road, being in the way of all the other cars. Lastly, the micro-mobility devices of recent years really do solve the problem of this for many or most. It takes me very little time and is quite enjoyable, to rent a scooter in the morning to get to the best bus stop to get to work. When there I can walk to work or if I need to go further I rent another scooter.
All this to say, good and robust public transit is a win-win for every person in the town/city. Except perhaps the car dealership owner.
I really just think you either don't know or aren't thinking about how most people live with this statement. Micro mobility is great in urban areas, but for the vast majority of americans it is a complete non starter. No one wants to use a scooter on a 4 lane road where everyone is going 50, and that's the reality for almost every american. I live in an urban area, never owned a car. I would love to see more public transit, but it's just so obvious that it can't work in non urban areas and even many urban areas built post car unless you tear everything down and start from scratch. And as much as we may want that it's never going to happen.
Scooters also blow in the winter in all the cities where people would consider using them since the warm cities are all concrete hellscapes where scootering is legitimately dangerous.
Similar things hold for regional transit, trains are better than cars (for reducing traffic jams and road wear) and then depending on the particular circumstances one would pick the best option for last mile.
And like I added, this is where self driving taxis could really shine.
Re scooters and snow: build bike paths and service them in the winter. Easy enough and done in many places.
It is all about adding more options for people so they are more free to organise their lives as they want and lighten the traffic load on the roads.
There are people who will only want a car and there are places where mostly only cars (and possibly bikes) make sense and that’s just fine.
Driving also takes effort and can be stressful in traffic. Not to mention gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.
Here there's an almost palpable attitude of disgust towards using the bus. Almost a me versus the plebs attitude. The car represents the people's private island.
It would be slightly improved if people moved from tank-like SUVs to smaller cars, even better improved by embracing 1/2 seat cars (which will never happen because the design isn't conformist, see the Smart Car), and most improved by people putting their ego aside and taking the bus.
For a country hitting 2/3 of adults being overweight and obese, it may be a perk that public transport doesn't provide A-to-B delivery and instead people get a 5 minute walk somewhere in their day.
Instead it looks like self-driving cars will win out due to people's behaviour.
The lack of comparable investment in northern cities is of course not really the fault of the cities in question (London centric institutions, political culture, and voting base power).
Annoyingly, the time when I would like to get public transport most is when it rains. And this is also when the public transport becomes slowest and least reliable.
I've been commuting to school or work by public transport since I was 16 and in 4 different European cities. Getting any seat is uncommon, let alone one where pulling out a laptop and getting work done was even an option. The only public transport option where I can conceivably see getting work done are the intercity trains, and then only if you get on at one of the very early stops before the train fills up.
Personally, 'can I get to the office by foot or bike' is one of the most important questions I ask myself when looking for a new job (or house). Commuting by car and public transport are both suboptimal.
Most people, throughout history have had a fixed time budget to get to work. They move if the trip takes more than half an hour. They will not take jobs (or will move) if it is farther away. We see this across civilizations, from hunter gathers following herds to modern people. There are exceptions but they are exceptions.
I can’t park my car near my office in town, it’s just too expensive. I mostly cycle the 8km trip, except when the weather is awful.
I’m hoping what we actually get are self driving, smaller, more frequent busses !
I've lived in Porto, and Malmö. Both have done considerable efforts in making certain roads or lanes exclusive to public transportation.
In Porto, for example, these lanes are exclusive to a very interesting set of vehicles: buses, taxis, and motorcycles. It makes a lot of sense, this way you make riding a motorcycle safer (less vehicles), while preventing bus lanes from blocking all other manners of transport.
5 minute? It’s 4 miles to the nearest Caltrain stop from where I live.
How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved.
The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollution, noise, road violence, global warming, microplastic, urban disruption… It’s orders of magnitude more expensive for people around drivers than for drivers.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Beijing+metro
and it sounds like it got a lot better than car transport during the same period.
The Netherlands also has both amazing public transit and amazing highways.
The US would rather argue over slashing the already meager social safety net and buy some more fighter jets, nuclear aircraft carriers, and modernize the obsolete ICBM force than invest in infrastructure these days.
None of that still fixes the last mile problem of suburbia, and buses aren’t a solution. They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.
Uh, make them more frequent, more comfortable and faster?
I spend the last 15 minutes of my commute on a bus. Driving vs. bus + train = 3 minutes. I can drive, probably get stuck in traffic, get pissed at angry drivers ... or just chill on a bus and train for 45 minutes.
The only time it is worth driving is when I need to-the-minute exactness of when to arrive, which is rarely ever. IOW, I show up 10 minutes early to work (and also leave 10 minutes early) to be on the public transportation schedule.
Trains come every 10 minutes, busses every 15. I've never had any issues. Sure, I walk a whole 300 meters (1000ft) from the bus to my house, and again from the bus to work. But that is probably good for me since I don't get enough exercise as it is.
Chairs in our bus stops are designed to be uncomfy to make sure people don't sleep in them, especially not when laying down.
There were too many drunk people sleeping in them, making things messy. The bus company gave up and decided low-comfort chairs were better than puke-filled chairs.
This is a spot-on description of self-driving cars.
The reason why China and other Asian nations have amazing public transit isn’t financial or technical. It’s cultural and social. And by that, I don’t mean anything to do with cars - I’m referring to just a public willingness (or enforcement) to enshre nice public things stay nice, which is often lacking in the US.
Since, well, everything could be much better and it's still fairly unclear who makes substantial progress on one of these problems, I am fairly happy to let various playbooks play out and see where progress can be made.
The last time I took a train there, my train was so late that the next train on the same route (scheduled for 1 hour after) arrived first. Normally since it was not my train I wasn't allowed to board according to the announcement on PA. I played the confused foreigner card and boarded...
I have always understood this double think in two ways:
1. The problem needs to make sense to the people who are working on the tech and people who might buy the tech, but it only needs to be and is preferable to be only adjacent to the real value proposition of the tech. This provides opportunities to incrementally capitalize (“businesses don’t make products they make money”) without providing too much value for “too little” money.
2. The “I want x” vs “I need x” is a chasm easily bridged by “this is entertaining to me”. Life is small experiences summed together, providing a blank canvas on which people can extrapolate is engaging but mostly wasted time except for a small number of people who can actually change the direction of the tech. It’s fun for people to dream.
Check my profile and reach out.
Yes, as an engineer, it is absolutely more “efficient” if everyone lived in small government subsidized boxes, in centrally planned cities, taking centrally planned transport to only the places you’ve decided they should go.
However, central planning and praying at the god of efficiency has its downsides. Namely a total lack of innovation or people having children. It turns out having 2 crying babies in your tiny 2 bedroom apartment and taking 2 trains and a bus to the pediatrician kind of sucks.
If you are talking about US users of HN who upvote such news I would venture I guess that they know that any new public transportation that could be built in California would have following deal-breakers for them:
1. It will (maybe) start operation in 10-20 years, long after they have sold they RSUs and moved to another state.
2. Will be huge money sink, potentially leading to tax increases.
3. Even if they live in alternative fairy tale timeline where is is built on time and on budget (and connects actual places where SDEs live, not Bakersfield!) they still won't use it because it would be full of homeless people and thieves snatching their latest iPhones and running away. Saying that last part out loud in Cali would just get you attacked as privileged rich SDE who is antihomeless Trump-supporting Rand-reading nazi or something.
PS I also live in a place with good public transport and have never owned a car.
this lead to a situation where a lot of well meant public transport projects had very underwhelming results
worse if how in many areas trains just don't integrate well with the surrounding in the US. For public transportation to be usable it needs to be reachable. This means reliable and save walkways and/or bicycle ways to the next bus/train station (and having the schedule of trains and busses synced up even if they are from different providers). It also means you shouldn't have a massive parking lot directly in the front of the train station (don't mean there can't be a parking lot, just not in front) and similar
Another problem is the approach to housing the US has, for public transportation to work well (especially wrt. cost) you need to have reasonable compact housing. For example in many EU citices where public transportation is the main transport factors the main used housing unit is a apartment block often something like 2-4 apartments per floor and 3-5 floors where even in the more rural close by city areas houses often have 2 or 3 apartments or if not are in general much smaller then housing in the US (but in many rural areas in the EU cars are the main transport mean, often followed by bicycles for "short trips to "close by" neighbors, restaurants etc.).
If you combine that with the fact or how convenient privileged cars are in the US it really strongly favors self driving cars in many places (except some of the quite compact city centers, where cars of any form are a curse and self driving cars won't fix that).
Is this place completely car free? Because otherwise, replacing the remaining cars with self-driving cars would have significant benefits:
* Less space needed for parking.
* Pedestrians and cyclists can move safely because cars follow the traffic rules.
* Less cost for police, first responders and medical care because of fewer traffic accidents.
If my city replaced all human-driven cars with self-driving cars today, I would actually cycle and walk more. Because I would feel safer to do so.
And I am surely not the only one.
As do I, but if driverless taxis at even close to the price of public transport became a thing, I would never take a bus ever again.
Which means it's probably will be the case for the US as most of the us is either has a less sustainable, too low (e.g. "typical" US metro area, and well the endless rural areas(1)) or too high (e.g. city center) density.
(1): Through very rural areas might not be substainable for any self driving car service either, so people there will most most likely still have their own car. And for reasons of serviceability much more likely a non self driving car.
Technology won't be enough, this is a political problem.
This does not explain why there is no good trains in highly populated corridors like Quebec City–Windsor Corridor tho.
They could have plopped more tubes on rails that require nowhere close to this level of software and hardware difficulty and decongested roads at the same time.
The invention of the personal automobile was largely a mistake and this just continues to double down.
We should be moving away from cities designed for cars, not further toward it.
Even the cities with great public transport are full of cars. There is a reason.
At this point you can sit back and wait for driverless cars to improve without doing anything extra (public and private companies will continue doing all the work). You cannot sit back and expect public transport to fix itself - investments are needed, political push is required, risks need to be taken.
Another big thing is demand for properly functioning public transportation - is it really there for US? No demand usually means no political effort or even attention invested into changing things.
The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain.
I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.