Trains are all very well but they've been around nearly 200 years and have yet to bring on a traffic free utopia.
The question is how shitty it would be if they also had everyone on them who's currently on public transit.
So basically, it is a traffic-free panacea for everyone who chooses to use it. It's not a goal of trains to eliminate traffic for everyone who insists on driving.
https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/indu...
Neither roads or train tracks solve the traffic problem. They solve the density problem.
For another example, can you imagine trains replacing school buses in a large, rural school district? Sometimes (not always), buses are better than trains.
See also: LA
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2...
Now imagine if all those commuters were in cars.
This is a silly expectation to have. As long as there are roads for cars people will put cars on them.
Trains solve traffic for the people who get on them, not for drivers. The more people taking the train, the fewer people impacted by the traffic.
(Zermatt pics https://www.traveladventuregurus.com/zermatt)
The total number of permits seems to be around 500 in a town of 5k permanent residents. And the population grows to 30k or 40k during the peak tourist season.
One day, cheap automated electric self driving taxis will cover cities, thats unavoidable I think, but we are not there yet.
If public transportation just encourages people to move to the suburbs and commute in every day you've actually just displaced the problem.
Cars will always have a purpose. But if you go to somewhere like The Netherlands, they are much less relied upon - it's more about delivery vans than getting individuals to places.
When you live and work in a city, they're much less practical.
This is the most "tell me you live in America without telling me you live in America" thing I've seen in a long time...
America basically the only place in the world where in its cities, trains and other public transport aren't a major part of people's lives. In other places (Seoul, Tokyo, many European cities, etc.), even people who own a car will sometimes commute via train due to the convenience.
Rail and other public transport in pretty much everywhere in the world are designed to serve commute first, tourist stuff second or third.
Public transport isn't just having some trains, or having only trains between major cities. It is designing whole commute routes from various urban and suburban areas to workplace. There needs to be regional and suburban links that arrive to metro and tram stations. Metro and tram have to operate very frequently to handle commuters. The frequency of the trains should adapt to the commuters in the morning and evening. They need to be convenient, clean and safe too.
Cities around the world are also much better balanced than NA ones. The workplaces and living areas are almost always mixed rather than having a "downtown" area where every office worker travels to. My area has many buildings with a supermarket, apartments and small offices in the same building. There are two car factories in the city next to one of the biggest urban parks.
I agree that European trains work very well for commuting to and from the center of big cities. That's where the jobs and tourist attractions are.
But to go between arbitrary places A and B is usually quite painful. Often the best way is to go to the center, and then from there to your destination.
When I moved to the US and got a car, it was an unreal feeling! I could quickly travel anywhere at anytime!! Practically it felt like my comfortable travel radius increased from 10km to 50km.
Would a Waymo that you don't have to store, park, fuel, or maintain have been restrictive?
So yes, they would be obnoxious at any significant quantity and also not really help with getting across the city since transit is pretty good
I'd easily take extra self-driving vehicles if it reduced human driven ones.
My contention is that in US cities the high cost of existing rail makes it uncompetitive for most uses, and there is no justification for building new rail.
I like Waymo a lot, but the USA desperately needs both transport modes. Don’t think it’s an either/or.
Trains to cover the longer distance and micro mobility options to get to exactly where you need to go
If you feel that way about transit you may not have tried a good transit option like Hong Kong MTR with 90 second headways and travel from and to substantially everywhere you want to be.
You see a robot driving around in a pile of trash.
I see a robot with nobody micromanaging him telling him how to live his life, etc, etc.
<we are not the same meme dot jpeg>
So when I have the option I'd rather take the train - of course I also drive a lot of places.
Oh the horror, you might have to walk a couple of minutes (probably less time wasted than circling around to find a parking spot, and then walking from it to your destination).
> at a time that is probably not exactly when you wanted to arrive
Yeah, no. Trains in properly developed networks are extremely frequent. At the off-peakest of off-peak (Sunday late evening), the RER near me is every 15 minutes. During peak hours it's every 5 mins.
Because of decades to centuries of investment, holistic planning and expertise, we have one of the best networks in terms of quality, punctuality and density.
It's a plant the trees for future generations kind of deal, especially in Switzerland, because large, "flashy" projects are rare compared to to the more continuous and steady improvements, due to how funding and planning are set up.
And with that you can build a system where most places, including 50 people mountain villages are well connected.
I can go from Genf to a tiny village deep in the Eastern mountains with 4-6h. I can make that journey with no planning ahead what so ever.
Cars are actually restrictive. What if you want to have a drink? What if you are in a place that is different from your car? What if you are old or disabled? What if you are a tourist? What if you are not allowed to drive because of a traffic violation? And there are also these people called 'kids'. When I was 15 I went from Switzerland to Czechia with the train, no problem.
True freedom is to have a good public transit and potentially car as an option.
Well, I'm in Europe and it ain't here. Waymo can't get here fast enough.
Self driving cars might not solve traffic problems but they could greatly reduce them. Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.
> Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.
How would that make those problems go away? It could probably slightly alleviate them in marginal cases, but any given road has a finite throughput limitation, and once it is reached, it wouldn't matter even if every robo-driver were perfectly synchronized.
This has not been my experience since moving to Manhattan last January. Subways, alone, close the gap between regional rail and most destinations astoundingly well. I haven't yet needed to use a bus (but they seem abundant, too), and I haven't even thought of taking a taxi yet.
Here, robust transit has solved the last mile problem for most people.
Here, robust transit has solved the last mile problem for most people.
https://cwhong.carto.com/viz/6dfca01c-47e5-11e6-9fd3-0ee66e2...
Weasel words are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There is a persistent last mile issue even in NYC, even in Manhattan. You're right that in Manhattan most people can use the subway as a last mile solution. However that map hasn't changed much in quite a while. The subway deserts that exist (in Manhattan and the other boroughs) aren't going away anytime soon because building new subways is eyewateringly expensive.
The inflexibility means that even when the subway is a viable last mile solution it may not be the appropriate one. For instance I had to go from Ridgewood to JFK a few years back. I was maybe a five minute walk from the subway. But were I to take the subway from one end of Queens to the other I would've had to go all the way to Midtown and transfer to LIRR.
Hell I've generally had to rely on buses for last mile connectivity even in London which certainly doesn't suffer from a lack of subway service.
Self-driving cars may help with the actual weakness of transit, which is the long tail of trips. Trips on routes with too few passengers to justify good transit service, and with the trips too long for the last-mile solutions.
I'm not saying self driving cars are the solution, but they are a piece of the solution.
With furniture, you usually pay for delivery. Especially because the furniture store probably doesn't have the items you bought on site anyway.
Cars are a piece of the transportation puzzle, but groceries and babies aren't why they're needed.
If people aren’t spending $12k a year[1] to own a car, paying $50-150 to have a large piece of furniture delivered isn’t a big deal.
When there is well maintained, pedestrian friendly infrastructure, instead of a tiny uneven sidewalk inches away from 45 mph traffic, pushing your baby stroller home is not an issue.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-cost-owning-and-operatin...
And how do you get to the train when it's too far to walk and you're not a cyclist?
Slightly more realistic: enough people can and do cycle or walk to the train that pressure is relieved on the roads for those who cannot cycle or walk.
You get the bus, or you cycle, which is a life skill any able-bodied adult should have, not limited to cyclists. Of course not everyone is capable of cycling, but not everyone is capable of driving either.
It’s certainly not a replacement for mass transit. US is sparsely populated compared to Europe and mass transit don’t work as well in the suburbia. That said, I do see many transit oriented development in SF Bay Area where high density buildings are being built near transit stations.
1) Being driven around is the best transportation mode for most of the US. It's very comfortable, private, fast, and point-to-point. It stops working well at very high density, but that level of density is only seen in a few places in the US. I'd like more people to live in dense areas but for the foreseeable future self-driving vehicles are going to be the best solution for most trips in the US.
2) At very high densities it's true that cars can move fewer people per hour per 10-foot lane than other modes and so you run into congestion. But that's measured with the current vehicle fleet and human drivers. With high autonomous vehicle penetration you could implement congestion pricing that encourages high throughput vehicle design. That means private vehicles that are much much smaller (think Isetta-like design) that can follow at very short distances. Along with the elimination of on-street parking we could see a many-fold increase in road throughput.
3) At even higher density levels the same congestion pricing mechanism would encourage people to use microbuses that would operate similarly to Uber Pool. Compared to today's busses they would have equal or greater throughput, be point-to-point or nearly point-to-point, dynamically routed, cheaper to operate and faster.
4) At the very highest density levels it's true that nothing can match the throughput of the subway. As others have mentioned, AVs are a great way to connect people to the subway. Many trips intersect with the highest density urban core for only a fraction of the journey. More people would take the subway if they knew they could get to and from the stations easily and quickly. AVs let you mix-and-match transport modes more easily.
Cities should start engaging with vehicle manufacturers to start getting these high density vehicle designs worked on and figure out the congestion pricing mechanism to properly incentive their rollout.
As someone who took the N across San Francisco every day for 5+ years: Yes, you would. Imagine a 5 mile journey taking 50 minutes. Even if you can nap or listen to a podcast, it's still a waste of time.
If you can restrict certain roads to autonomous cars (or heavily limit the number of non-autonomous cars) then you don't need to build as much bicycle infrastructure (a buffered lane is probably all you need, as opposed to bollards or true grade separation) and I can guarantee you more folks will feel comfortable riding bikes. This is aside from how frequently human-driven cars end up colliding with, damaging, or blocking non-grade-separated forms of transit.
> It's just boring because self-driving is much easier when you build the road to support it instead of removing all constraints and adding GPUs, lidar sensors, cameras and an army of fall-back operators in overseas call centers.
I do bike advocacy so this kind of rhetorical gotcha can make me feel good and hit the upvote button but in reality city councils and other elected officials are mostly people skeptical of the benefits of bicycling, worried that buses/trains would place too high a tax burden on their constituents, or deep down convinced in their lizard brain that Americans are too carpilled to ever do anything else. If you can change this by running for your local council, do it!
Don't get me wrong, we need more bike infrastructure and we needed it yesterday. But anything helps. I'd love to see certain corridors of SF be restricted to transit, autonomous vehicle, and cyclist usage only. Market is already only for transit and cyclists so there's precedent.
I live in Switzerland, the place for trains, efficiency and its small and dense, an ideal situation right. Tons of people use trains every day, tons of people also bike for closer distances in good warmish weather but still highways are chock full and getting fuller every year. Public transport for out-of-city commuters is simply slower, often much slower.
This morning I was considering taking a motorbike to a train station that is 5km away, then 40 mins trains and 10 minute walk to work. I took the car instead for a change, I was faster despite having to cross the very center of bottlenecked and car-hostile big city (Geneva) in top rush hour. 65 mins door-to-door via public transport vs 45 in car. That's one way, meaning 40 minutes of my private life daily saved that I can spend ie with my kids and not staring in the phone or out of window.
Normally I take the motorbike if weather permits, if not I take the public bus to the train, adding additional 15 minutes each way. That sucks pretty badly. I doubt other countries have this figured out better, and not everybody can or wants to live in city centers, especially when raising small kids. We did it for 10 years, had a work commute of 5mins via escooter, but I rather have current commute and live and raise kids in small commune next to wild forest and vineyards than that.
All above is usually much worse in many parts of US.
Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B using a self driving car service, will reduce the number of people who own a car and thus the number of car trips.
So people will be willing to drive further for cheaper rent, or the self driving car might add a couple extra miles to park somewhere cheaper, so overall congestion would get worse.
But this assumes the need for a car, but cars are one form of transport. A more wholistic look at transportation with be “Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B.” If you have more services within walking distance, it reduces your need for a car. If there is lots of bike infrastructure, it reduces your need for a car. If there are reliable frequent trains, it reduces your need for a car. If there are reliable frequent bus services and bus lanes to get around traffic, it reduces your need for a car.
On the other hand, if there are more cars then you need, at minimum if we imagine self-driving cars, more road capacity. But realistically more roads and more parking. More space for roads is less space for the actual places people want to go, pushing those things farther apart. Being farther apart reduces the number of places you can get to by walking or biking, which means you are more likely to need a car, which means more cars, which means more roads, which means less space for the actual places people want to go, repeat. Cars are basically the worst option in terms of infrastructure cost, land usage per person, personal cost to use/operate, deaths and injuries, etc.
If you need a car on at least a weekly basis, you're probably going to have your own car either way (unless the self driving car services are really good and cheap).
But even if all everyday trips don't require a car, it's very likely there will be some exceptions. And those can make or break this. If getting a car for that occasion requires hours of overhead (e.g. getting to a pick up/drop off point), is sufficiently inflexible (cars not reliably available on short notice), or prohibitively expensive (e.g. per-km charges on car sharing cars that make a couple longer day trips per year more expensive than just getting a cheap car), people who otherwise could do without a car will consider getting one.
OTOH, if the alternative is really good, people who occasionally need a car might use a service rather than owning a car, which means usage-based cost i.e. a much bigger incentive to pick alternatives. If they have been pushed to own a car, the fixed costs are a sunk cost and the marginal cost of taking car can easily be cheaper than public transit.
40% of US households have two cars, and more than 20% have three or more [1]. As a two-car household that was able to go down to one after moving to where I could bike to work, I would say your assumption is too binary.
[1] https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
There's a risk that robotaxis could become too cheap and people use them for point-to-point transportation because it's faster. This could be mitigated through taxes on robotaxis (with incentives to connect people to transit) and/or car usage in general, or maybe using robo-buses to provide a middle ground between personal convenience and system efficiency.
A robot cook, however, __would__ solve a practical problem for me.
Anyway, this whole approach is not even solving first-world problems (many families struggle to pay for a car), but it's solving the upper-1% of first-world problems, maybe. Except those people can afford to pay drivers who are now out of a job. So yes, what is this even solving??
Cars as a shared service (shuttles, Uber, Waymo) absolutely solve traffic compared to personal vehicles. Shared cars have much higher utilization and require a lot less space.
I agree that trains are a fantastic way to move large groups of people, but a world with more shared cars (which may be brought about faster with Waymo) is a good thing for most cities.
- The trains often aren't running (and there may not be the volume of passengers to justify running them)
- The road are empty so traffic isn't really an issue
Moia (Volkswagen) in Hamburg https://www.moia.io/en
Mercedes autonomous driving https://group.mercedes-benz.com/innovations/product-innovati...
There's some self driving tech being developed in Europe, but AFAIK nothing is at the current deployment level of Zoox or Aurora, let alone Waymo.
Im happy to let Americans be the beta testers
In terms of having the industry? Absolutely. How many other areas of "tech" has Europe basically punted on and ceded to Americans? Currently there's some gnashing of teeth across the pond for how there's no real European equivalent to the big US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).
MobilEye and Mercedes works on self-driving, so does BMW. It's probably not Waymo quality, but just because there aren't cars on the (wide and car friendly) roads doesn't mean nothing is happening.
Meanwhile Europe has solid infrastructure for electricity (esp France), ASML has no competition, Carl Zeizz is world leading in optics, there's probably a Leica LIDAR in the Waymo cars... I mean while we're throwing pies and bringing up other markets..
My old boss was working on a project with Leica where he was working with some partner on self-driving industrial machines, they we're using Leica gear for collosion avoidance and such.
Europe doesn't need self-driving cars, we have alternative modes of transportation. Where it's needed (mines and industry) it's already there. And whatever modern car you're driving here has ADAS which helps make driving comforable.
Yes, it's fine to give up the lead in any one subsector, but Europe is so far behind in tech industries in general. It's not just cloud services or self driving cars, look at SpaceX and Starlink: Europe has no equivalent to either, and is many years from gaining one (I'm aware of some plans, but they're far away from being able to actually launch, and some are dubious besides).
Both major smartphones OSes? Run by American companies. Major desktop OSes? Two by American companies, one originally started by a Finn, who still manages it...and he moved to Oregon.
But you don't have to take an American's word for it, just read Mario Draghi's report. The man loves Europe, deeply understands the European economy, and has a whole lot to say: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draghi_report
There's no denying America has done good in some industries, but when it comes at the cost of societies weak I can't help but think it doesn't matter.
SpaceX and Starklink aren't very important to me, I don't know who they're important for except Ukraine, boat and RV owners.
The report says we must invest in electricity infrastructure, well sure so the dude compares against China and USA at the same time? Crumbling infrastructure is the definition of USA 2025.
The cope is American Exceptionalism, we're doing just fine even though we're fighting a unprofitable proxy-war and missed all those b2c investments to leech off humanity.
There's no desktop OS from Finland, that's a kernel and yes he's now American as you guys usually were better at finding ways to turn good into profit.
We are not doing just fine. We have low economic growth. We are unable to beat off Russia's attack on Ukraine without American help. Germany has crumbling infrastructure just as much or more than America. We have not contributed seriously to any important innovation wave since before... 2000? The invention of the PC?
EU aren't able to fend off Russia because other countries can't participate properly in the war.
EU contributes significantly to very many important innovations, though you seem to have made up your mind.
I can't defend Germany for refusing nuclear in favor of Russian gas, but at the time it seemed to some like a good idea to strengthen relationships through trade and encourage democratization.
It's a damn shame that we're buying Russian gas, it's hilarious that I keep hearing about this from Americans but not Ukrainians.
Considering tourism and people living just outside service areas who see them but don't get to use them (which includes me sadly) I would not be surprised if 10% of population had seen at least one.
Surely you're describing metro areas? There's no way those five cities add up to 34 million people within city limits, given that none of them have 6 million people.
The MSAs added up to 27 million based on the 2020 census, so "close enough". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
That said, Waymo's service areas are nowhere close to covering the full MSAs: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en
- SF doesn't cover East Bay (two thirds of the MSA by population).
- Silicon Valley doesn't cover San Jose, and barely reaches into Sunnyvale (basically just covering the Google Moffett Park office buildings).
- The Phoenix area is missing most of the densest parts of Phoenix itself, as well as anything north / west of the city.
- Los Angeles doesn't even come close to covering the city, much less the rest of LA County or any of Orange County. (Maybe 2-3 million out of 13, from just eyeballing the region.)
On Uber (https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16011725?hl=en) there's also Atlanta (which looks like it actually has very nice coverage, other than the western half of the city) and Austin (again focused on downtown / commercial districts) which help drive up the numbers.
The population that's had opportunity to see Waymo in the wild is probably higher because they're testing in quite a few cities now (a sibling commenter mentions NYC, for instance).
I think you’ll see American and Chinese self-driving kit in Europe once it matures. It’s just easier to iterate at home, so while the technology advances that’s where it will be.
Europe could do the same but they have other priorities.
>pilots of self-driving taxi- and bus-like services will be brought forward by a year to spring 2026, attracting investment and making the UK one of the world leaders in this technology
Also a lot of UK driving requires communication with other drivers (letting people out, etc.) in a way that US roads don't. I'm not sure how driverless cars can handle that.
I really wish we could get them, because they're great. But I'd say we're talking 10 years behind the US simply because of the extra engineering challenge.
Are they also planning on completely overhauling their economy and tax system to attract the engineers required to make this happen?
I don't know about other countries, but Spain will probably be one of the last ones to get it, thanks to the Uber-powerful (heh) taxi driver lobby
Waymo (though a technical marvel) is a bandaid over our inability to build and maintain public infrastructure. Be sure to cherish what you’ve got.
You must realize that, at some point, self-driving cars will be ubiquitous. Maybe not for 50 years, but they will be.
What you’re actually saying is “I’m virtue-signaling with Europe because that’s what the cool kids do”
I think self-driving cars may eventually become common in areas where cars are currently common. I think public transit will continue to dominate in parts of the world where it currently dominates, because it is simply a superior user experience for the majority of people when the government cares to invest in it. (Not to mention far cheaper and more egalitarian.)
I am conveying my lived experience in most European cities I've been to.
A superior user experience is going exactly from where I am to where I want to be safely, quickly, and affordably. Self-driving cars are looking really good for those criteria.
In London, Paris, or St. Petersburg, I pay a few bucks to hop on a train that runs every few minutes and rapidly end up across town, roughly in the area I need to be. It's literally the cheapest and fastest way to get from point A to point B, not to mention tested at scale and thoroughly battle-hardened over the course of a century.
Not every city has this privilege, of course, but surface trams are 80% of the way there, especially if they have right-of-way. And they don't make pedestrians' lives a living hell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw
In the US, the unsubsidized price of a ticket is close to this amount.
> Waiting 10m+ for your ride and slowly sifting through traffic is quick?
In my city, it's difficult to pick any 2 points that are faster to get between by public transit vs. taxi.
Every city is different, but trains rarely make sense in the US (outside of NYC).
Right of way is the huge advantage of trains, it would be great if self-driving vehicles could have that same advantage.
This is why self-driving cars appeal to this crowd. You and i seem to be from a world where public infrastructure like clean, affordable transit is the goal. This raises the floor for everyone. Many here would rather think solely of their own comfort, which is fine, but despite repeatedly being told that they are short-sighted, they refuse to change.
See, it’s super easy to be a jerk.
And the exact number wasn't the point. The percent of consumer vehicles on the road that are carrying a significant payload to/from home is pretty small. Especially areas where transit even halfway makes sense. What's your best estimate?
From Costco trips to babies to wagons, strollers, wheel chairs, hardware stores, bigger box purchases like a TV, out of town trips to visit friends, pet grooming, airport trips with luggage, it's hard for me to imagine a life without a car.
I know you can just say that I'm a product of my circumstances and culture and you don't need a car for any of that, or there are other ways to accomplish my goals, but I could say the same back to you. And the arrow of time seems to point to people everywhere moving in the direction of wanting personal mobility whether horses, bikes, or cars.
It's not all or nothing, but it seems to make sense to me to build around cars as a first class concern, in addition to other forms of transit. Some places in Europe obviously can't, for historical reasons, but I don't see that as a benefit per se, so much as something to have to work around.
Edit: I should add, I did live car free in Boston for 10 years and loved it and didn't really perceive any shortcomings at the time, and even hated having to buy a car when I moved. But now in my 40s with two young kids and a house and an elderly mother, it's an entirely different situation and I can't see how it would work. I would suggest if you're totally anti-car but only in your 20s or early 30s, your opinion might change as your circumstances do. I also lived for a year without a car in Singapore and that was tolerable in a way that wouldn't have been in most places, since it has some of the best public transit in the world, but even there cars are considered luxuries and it would have made things a little easier.
If you do that once a week, then you can use transit the other 90% of the time. If people use transit 90% of the time, then we can build smaller roads and de-prioritize cars. That's the argument here, that transit can dominate in co-existence with self-driving cars, not that we'd need to get rid of cars. And especially in the context of waymo there's no effect of "I'm already paying a ton of money to own and insure a car, I might as well use it every trip".
(And again, this is in moderately dense areas where transit works and you actually care about how many cars are on the road to begin with. And it doesn't have to be 90% in particular.)
This caveat destroys the rest of your points, as logical as they may seem.
Remember the original argument was "I think public transit will continue to dominate in parts of the world where it currently dominates" I'm taking that and strengthening it to a significant expansion of transit, but obviously not everywhere can do transit.
If the lanes on the road can fill up, you have enough traffic to sustain some busses.
In emptier areas that's a pretty different discussion, but importantly you still wouldn't need to design around cars. Slap in a very basic road and it'll handle all the cars fine.
No one was suggesting that.
> I can carry many items in its trunk, making it worthwhile to make multiple stops on my journey. Public transit is not meeting my use-cases.
Well the guy I was talking to was only worried about one or few trips per month, and we only need most people to use transit for the scenario to work.
Ergo, it's no surprise that people want to use them as often as possible. They want to recoup value from those fixed costs. It's simple economics.
> in the context of waymo there's no effect of "I'm already paying a ton of money to own and insure a car, I might as well use it every trip"
And Home Depot says otherwise. They have reported record profits year over year for the past two decades. Just because you don't use sod in your condo doesn't mean suburbanites don't need it for their homes.
In many regions of the U.S. people live too far apart, shops and businesses are zoned apart into wide spread business areas. Public transport won't provide a good experience.
In a notable part of European cities people live in denser quarters, where a "third place" is reachable in walking distance, some degree of shipping, doctor visits, work are close by. There public transport can fill the gaps for the remaining trips in an (space) efficient way. Self driving cars however would clog the area.
Adapting US settlement structure to allow public transport won't happen. However a self-driving car can turn the dial for individuals to move out of the urban European area into more rural areas. Question is how big that group is.
Subways don’t solve last-mile problems or trucking.
And it's not just the EU. I'm sure that e.g. China and Japan will continue to invest in their excellent public transit infrastructure even when there are more self-driving cars on the road.
Americans have this idea that transit is for poor people, which translates to "it's not important for transit to make money", which translates to "we need to make it illegal for transit to possibly try to make money", so there aren't even vending machines at the platforms. Whereas in Asia they do profitable land development at the transit stations.
Japan's private transit infrastructure is only private in high-very high density environments (inner-city) and subsidized in low-density environments (rural, cross-country). Ultimately private group transit requires population density above a certain threshold to be viable.
We don't have a last mile problem, we have legs for that.
Public infrastructure has high overhead costs, and low population density means there isn't enough ridership to make it viable.
And in any case, there's no reason that public transit needs to be self-funded. We don't expect the same of most of our other public services.
This is demonstrating my point about population density and transit.
There are many urban areas in the US with population density of 3,000/km2 or higher that do not have any public transit at all.
The US does not have many metro areas with population densities above 3,000/km2. And those that do, like Washington D.C, NYC, Boston, Chicago, do have metro systems.
American cities low density is a direct result of designing for car infrastructure over all else. And car infrastructure is far more expensive than other transportation, and since increased car infrastructure lowers density, it directly makes all other transportation more expensive and less viable.
Since cars are the most dangerous form of transport, for other drives but more so for cycles and pedestrians, it makes it less feasible to use them for your first-last mile. Then you add in that, as the roads grow and distances multiply, speeds are increased to attempt to compensate, multiplying the danger to anyone not in a car.
Oh wait, you thought those would be in the middle of nowhere? Nope.
https://www.karmactive.com/waymo-charging-noise-blasts-112-d...
These backup warning systems operate at approximately 1,000 Hz, producing sound levels between 97 and 112 decibels.
Santa Monica’s municipal code adds another layer of complexity, prescribing exterior noise limits of approximately 50 decibels during the day and 40 decibels at night.
The continuous operation—with vehicles reversing dozens of times hourly, including during late-night hours—continues to challenge community peace.
So, constant car screaming BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP I'M BACKING UP HERE right outside your residential window. Kinda sucks. A whole lot.
I suppose regulations don't care if you can see no one is behind you.
Because they are.
Across Europe you can randomly encounter a major town with a taxi cartel still blocking rideshares, as if its 2012
It's not just driverless cars either - delivery drones (e.g. in China), a lot of health tech (as they have more check-ups in the USA), Starlink, Neuralink, a space programme, etc.
But I guess in SF they can take a taxi that might be a little cheaper because the company operating it is fine with losing 100s of millions a year.
My personal use of a car has declined pretty dramatically the past few years. Trains are pretty good here in the UK.
I’d really like to see either a Waymo competitor emerge in Europe, or even Waymo themselves operating here. The regulatory environment is obviously more complex, but it’d be great if we didn’t end up years behind on something this transformative.