[sahara]

Having lived in California for 30 years—in arguably every major city in the state (LA, SF, San Diego, San Jose), multiple times in multiple neighborhoods of each—fully autonomous point-to-point car sharing networks honestly sound less pie-in-the-sky to me than a mass transit system that is efficient OR well funded.

But we did just spend twenty billion dollars on a bullet train from Bakersfield to Merced, so there's that, I guess.

[wahern]

Public transit in SF sucks. It takes 45 minutes on the so-called "rapid" bus to go 5 miles. The Geary corridor is one of the busiest in the country, approaching (EDIT: well over!) 100k passengers per day if you include the 4 parallel bus lines running 1 block away from each other. It desperately needs a subway. But we're still 5 years away from even a BRT line, which will still take a minimum of 35 minutes.

I think it's a fair bet that autonomous cars will come before Geary BRT is completed, and it's a certainty that they'll come before Geary gets a subway. And while Geary is one of the worst, there are a half dozen similar bus corridors in the city. Also, most of the rail is above ground and similarly slow and crowded.

While I generally think rail and autonomous cars can be symbiotic, autonomous cars are likely to kill buses. Middle-income people ride the bus only out of necessity. High-income people never ride the bus, though they will ride a decent subway system. Once autonomous cars and autonomous shuttles come out, middle-income riders will flock to them, the only people riding busses will be the poor and working class, and the system will collapse, sooner in most other places, but it'll also happen in San Francisco.

Because San Francisco doesn't have a real subway network, SF MTA is in for some rough times in the not too distant future. I wouldn't be surprised if San Francisco bans or heavily taxes private autonomous systems. If they were smart they'd be digging tunnels as fast as possible. Some cities, like Madrid, seemed to have learned to do it cheaply, and the savings aren't just because of geology.

[LeanderK]

i don't understand why nobody sees them as a symbiosis. We haven't solved anything if driverless cars are clogging up the highway, but they can solve one of the biggest problems for mass transit, the last/first kilometres. I don't know anything specific about the bullet train, but most of the time the problem is getting to/from the bullet-train. If it shortens your travel by one hour, but you have to wait 2 hours for a bus to get to the station it's not going to work.