[slaymaker1907]

I always think it's weird how instead of just improving public transit, we've all become fixated on self driving vehicles. Good transit would mean most people don't need to operate a vehicle while having a plethora of other benefits like combating climate change and more efficient land use (if you live in a suburb, take note of the sheer amount land dedicated to parking; it's often more land than the store for retail).

The problem is kind of similar to people who insist on some overly complicated microservice architecture when a monolith would be a much better fit. I actually hope that self driving technology stagnates, at least until we can start designing cities for people and not just cars.

I live near where the accident occurred and there is definitely sufficient population to support alternatives to driving.

[ideamotor]

To a programmer every problem looks like a software problem. Information technology tends to free ride on public goods, essentially profiting from commons without contributing to them. That’s the feedback loop that is lacking. The negative externality, if you will, that should be brought in.

If, let’s say ubers and taxis paid a tax when they rode around without passengers and that tax specifically went to road upkeep and construction, that would close the gap. But this takes policy change, and engineers not only cannot independently make that fix in a democracy; they think they know better than democracy because they know how to program a car in a simulated road in abstraction.

So, not only is the focus often misplaced towards IT solutions, those IT solutions often accelerate the underlying problem. Whereas there are policy solutions but they require smart young politicians and just flat getting out the vote and encouraging optimism for progress through an imperfect but best available democratic system.

The amazingly fast capabilities of modern IT should not be unfairly compared to the more difficult democratic process; leading us to lose faith in the more equitable practice of democracy. Let’s be humble enough to know when we personally are not subject matter experts.

[juunpp]

This isn't just programmers trying to "solve" a "problem" though, although many are indeed very confused about what constitutes a problem, let alone a solution. There is (or was, at least, prior to covid and the various lay-offs) a huge amount of VC going into self-driving to "disrupt" the transportation system. In other words, the tech bros are hungry for more power and money.

[ideamotor]

Cheers for calling a spade a spade. I think you’ll agree neither is the whole picture. Engineers like to solve problems and nearly everyone wants the tools to solve problems which are power and money. My only hope is that people try to work on something that serves a social good while also getting paid well. I found it with renewable energy.

[juunpp]

Indeed, the problem is the lack of accountability of one coupled with the ingenuity of the other. Some might even go as far as believing that they are doing something positive when in reality they are blind.

Congratulations on balancing your career with social good; that has been the quandary of my life so far.

I also agree 200% on your statement about contributing to the commons, and pretending that the technology somehow "knows" better than democracy. These two irk me personally, just didn't otherwise have much to add.

[ideamotor]

Thanks, I feel at least possibly hypocritical right now because I’m at a turning point in my career so while I’m making these comments, I’m over here calculating that I could retire in x years versus 2.5*x years if I could manage to snag one of these big tech jobs (I have the skills at least).

It can be a challenge being one of, if not the only, programmer/etc at a more domain specific company (gotta hold your ground) - and working at an actual tech company would certainly tool me up for future startups/etc. Or … my cost of living would go up and I’d be forever on that wheel.

I’ve been lucky enough to now really have the option financially, but I do pride myself on when I really didn’t have the option I chose scraping by with barely any money over something not in renewables for years. It helped not having any dependents. And ultimately through some luck it made up for the grunt years. Except now I’m old and rambling on hacker news, so retiring sooner is appealing at the moment.

[lawrenceyan]

Pretty easy to complain in your ivory tower when these engineers are actually trying to do something to fix the problems you’re talking about.

[ideamotor]

My ivory tower? You are definitely going to have to be a lot more specific.

[lawrenceyan]

> But this takes policy change, and engineers not only cannot independently make that fix in a democracy; they think they know better than democracy because they know how to program a car in a simulated road in abstraction.

That came off as abrasive, I apologize. I think the point I'm trying to make is that instead of denigrating engineers trying their best to solve problems, which in my opinion, is largely negative sum / leads to stagnation, we should be cultivating positive sum thinking.

Doing something is always better than doing nothing.

[ideamotor]

I agree insofar that the engineering solutions are not designed to diminish commons or otherwise add to the problem. Also, I find my criticism analogous to yours in that my other main point is how engineers promote their solutions as alternatives to a “broken” system, and this pessimism is negative sum thinking which is highly destructive politically. Finally, I’m an engineer who works on these problems in ways that meet these criteria; not an academic or policy maker.

[majormajor]

Is it weird? I think there's two big things that explain why it's not weird:

1) How expensive and disruptive to build would "good transit" actually be?

2) How much do people appreciate more direct point-to-point transportation?

This incident occured in a town of 51,000 people with a density of 1,700/sq mile, that looks like a suburb of Salt Lake City which itself has 200,000 people with a density of 1,800/sq mile.

What's the cost and timetable for turning that into a transit-friendly city even if everyone wanted to have smaller homes in a presumably-more-dense footprint?

On the other hand, self-driving cars would sit on top of existing infrastructure to enable even more personal privacy and land use. So even if people were 50/50 which way to go, the latter would likely be far cheaper.

If you go back 100 years and prevent cars from ever be mass-produced, yeah, American cities would've grown and suburbanized in a more British, rail-oriented way. But reversing that would be far, far harder.

[_hcuq]

So…… 25 sq miles. Let’s assume a 5 mile x 5 mile grid. Let’s put a bus route every half mile. That’s 20 bus routes. Let’s run a bus on each route every 15 minutes…. The buses run at an average speed of say 20 mph. So each bus takes 20 minutes to traverse the route in one direction. You would need 2 buses per route. That’s 40 buses. Let’s say it costs $100 per hour to run the bus. (Googled it). So that’s $4000/hr to run the entire system. Let’s run the system 16 hours a day. 4000 * 16 = $64000 per day. $23 million dollars a year. The 51,000 population would have 17,000 cars. 17,000 * $5000 = $85 million. So it would be much cheaper to have a bus system….

[mwint]

Where'd this $5000/car(/yr?) number come from? Total cost of ownership for a car is far less than that. You can only really get to $5k/year through very high depreciation, and people buying those kinds of cars won't be riding your busses anyway.

Also, $100/hr to run a bus is probably a fine operating cost number, but you do have to buy the bus (capitalized cost) and take the depreciation hit just like cars.

[_hcuq]

The total cost of ownership includes gasoline, repairs, insurance, road tax as well as depreciation. The $100 per hour includes the cost of buying the bus.

[Karrot_Kream]

Look at [1] and you see it's the average across the US. It's more expensive than that in many states. Unless you're discounting the purchase price/monthly loan payment/lease price.

[1]: https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/#data

[mwint]

Key word there is probably average. Median would be more interesting.

[Karrot_Kream]

New Mexico is sitting at the median (spot 25, so not quite, need to average out the two middles) at $5,063.78.

[Gordonjcp]

I don't think I've paid (the equivalent of) $5000 for every car I've ever owned, in total.

[cozos]

This analysis reeks of confirmation bias. You don't need one personal car for every 3 people if you were to comparing busses with self driving cars. You would have a fleet, just like you do with busses. Here is something posted a couple days ago:

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/19/1111765630/on-demand-shuttles...

15 minivans replaced 6 busses, at a cost of 1.6 million to 1.3 million per year - but with much better coverage than the busses.

Of course this equation will look very different in big cities where economies of scale from mass transit kick in， but hey, small cities need transit too.

[_hcuq]

There are no self driving cars … why would I compare buses to them?

But the minivan link was interesting.

[Karrot_Kream]

Fleets of cars would require additional infrastructure being built (specialized parking structures, staging areas, etc) so would increase costs. At this point we're also talking about the theoretical extension (fleets) of a theoretical concept (self-driving cars) so basing this execution in reality seems fraught.

[ncmncm]

The "self-driving" cars would be piggy-backing on the massive subsidies provided to driver-driving cars and infrastructure demanding them, siphoned away from public transit.

[pawsforthought]

Your analogy to microservices is apt. It’s unchecked technologism at its worst.

We already have the solutions for the future of transport, but they’re not sexy like self-driving cars, and they don’t prop up the auto industry. Walking, bikes, buses, trams, metros, combined with more dense mixed-use zoning everywhere.

[ravenstine]

What are your ideas for improving public transit? Because the way I see it, public transit suffers from issues that are hard to overcome and are exacerbated by globalized societies.

Public transit simply can't take you everywhere. Even when I e lived in areas with dense bus routes, how one would get to a stop was often a question. Buses are relatively slow and impede traffic, especially in larger cities.

More trains would be nice, but they share many issues with buses, including the fact that they become de facto homeless and mental health shelters on wheels. The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell.

Cars and self driving tech will always have an edge over public transit. We might as well not waste too much time on public transit, but make sure it is adequate while making car-driving more sustainable.

In fact, I would rather prioritize making cities bikeable and walkable more expanding bus service. For some cities it's pretty much too late, but for ones that are kind of spread out there is no reason why there can't be dedicated bikeways.

[Panzer04]

"de facto homeless shelters"? wtf? Is that genuinely a concern in some places?

Cars have an edge on transit because orders of magnitude more money is spent on the road system and on the vehicles than is spent on PT. Despite that, PT tends to be faster in cities, where it's simply not possible to jam more cars in (it turns out only carrying one person per car is a truly massive capacity constraint.

Cars will probably always be better in low density areas, as it's not reasonable to serve all areas with reasonable quality of service, but in any kind of reasonable high density environment properly separated PT (ie. not lumped in with car traffic) will have huge capacity and speed advantages.

[decafninja]

Yes - it's a genuine concern in the US.

In fact, looking at many of these public transit vs. car threads on HN, on the topic of safety, I feel transit advocates are not understanding the issue properly.

Most people that dislike using public transit in the US are not afraid that the train or bus will derail or get into an accident. The odds of that happening are definitely tiny.

What they're afraid of is some psycho on the train/bus committing anything from nuisance harassment to outright murder.

It doesn't help that many of the people that most advocate public transit are the ones most resistant to making transit free from being terrorized by such potentially dangerous individuals.

Even outside of that psycho scenario, you also encounter a lot of benign, but otherwise annoying or otherwise less-than-desirable-to-be-around people whether it's someone with horrific body odor or someone blasting loud music or someone coughing their lungs up.

I never felt afraid, anxious, or even annoyed in any way getting on the subway in Seoul, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

I always feel at least some degree anxiety and annoyance, and sometimes outright fear, getting on the subway in NYC.

[foxes]

Every other country in the world can embrace efficient clean public transport, and then America can be a theocratic car filled wasteland filled with dangerously unstable individuals, and completely decayed social structure.

[beepbeepcabbage]

This is a US problem, not a train problem.

[wizofaus]

US problems have an unfortunate tendency to become world problems...

[woodruffw]

> The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell.

You were supposed to describe public transit, not a rest stop on an Interstate Highway in the United States :-)

But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. The only reason you see them less in your car is because the activation energy for them affecting you is much higher (specifically, instances of road rage, DWI, etc. culminating in someone colliding with you). But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.

[decafninja]

The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.

I agree these are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. However I always get the impression that many ardent public transit advocates are the ones who are also resistant to cleaning up public transit so that it is more attractive.

Yes, let's definitely work towards providing mental health solutions, but let's also not let the psycho claim an entire subway car because "he has every right to be there" or "it's inhumane to forcibly remove him" and still expect the general public to delight in giving up their cars and take the subway instead.

[woodruffw]

> The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.

Statistically, he isn't. If drunks stabbed people on subways at the rate that drunks killed people with their cars, around 46 people would be stabbed on the US's subways each day. And that's killed with cars, not "permanently disabled or disfigured"; that rate is even higher.

The problem with the "psycho" example is that it just isn't that common. It's chiefly a perception, a statistically misaligned one, that's been ruthlessly propagated to support economic structures that benefit from as many Americans driving as much as possible. That isn't to say that it doesn't happen, but to use the drunk driving example again: we tolerate orders of magnitude more antisocial behavior on our roads than we do in our public transit systems.

[decafninja]

Unfortunately, you're not going to convince people by laying out statistics, otherwise you'd (you as in transit advocates, not you specifically) would have succeeded already.

What you need to do is address how people feel, and transit advocates have been doing a poor job at that in the US.

People feel safe in their cars. People feel unsafe on transit. I don't know why this perception deviates from reality, but it does. Maybe it's because in a car you have tons of steel surrounding you from the drunk driver, while in transit you have at best your clothes protecting you from the psycho.

Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.

I have nothing against well run transit. I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals. I hate taking the NYC subways because almost every other day I encounter someone I feel wary being in the same car or station with.

You're simply not going to win over hearts and minds by stating the homeless guy in the subway car raving about some lunacy is completely harmless and you should just ignore him and let him be. Even if he is actually harmless beyond just stinking up the air and causing a nuisance.

[Karrot_Kream]

> I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals.

Most Asian cities have horrendous track records on dealing with mentally ill and homeless, that's why. They're frequently driven out, dumped into homeless ghettos, incarcerated, or dumped into the countryside. Western society has higher expectations of their marginalized, for better or for worse. This is why US planners look to Europe for models to emulate instead of Asia.

> Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.

Most advantages surrounding driving cars in the US are based around culture and perception. The mythos of the car in the US is huge and many parts of car culture is based around the mythos. Transit advocates by nature of not buying into the mythos are going to be types that are hard to sway through feelings and perception. I agree that transit has a perception problem that needs to be fixed in US big cities. The reason why this disconnect exists is because transit fans are by nature more driven by data and less driven by mythos or narrative. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.

[pandaman]

Could you explain your statistics a bit? The first link I've found[1] shows 50,930 fatalities in 2019 with estimated 19% involving drunk drivers. So 9676 fatalities per year. Let's assume drunk drivers always kill somebody and survive themselves i.e. no drunk driver ever died in a single car accident. This makes 27 fatalities caused by drunk drivers every day.

Did you mean that approximately twice as many people ride subway than drive in the US? I could not find numbers on subway ridership but considering only few cities have a subway at all it's very hard to believe but I am open to the data.

1. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/drunk-driving-s...

[woodruffw]

I got 47 deaths per day from the roughly 17,000 fatalities that are directly attributed to drunk driving each year[1]. Even if we arbitrarily halve that to account for at-fault deaths at drivers' own hands, that leaves ~23 people dying, each day, because of drunks on our roads.

In contrast, around 300 people died in total on public transportation in 2020[2]. In 2019, 34 million people commuted daily by public transportation[3].

By contrast, around 76% of American commuters drive to work[4]. Assuming that "commutes to work" is the same as "employed," that means 76% of 158 million[5], or around 120 million driving commuters.

In other words: 4 times as many people commute by car than by public transport, but at least 20 times as many die each day just via the canonical example of unsafety on public transport. And the actual ratio is likely far higher, since the best number I could find for public transport fatalities (under 1/day) is not filtered by accident, suicide, crime, natural causes, &c. Thus the claim: the things that people claim to fear about public transport are far more real as dangers when commuting by car.

[1]: https://troopers.ny.gov/impaired-driving

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1295843/number-fatalitie...

[3]: https://www.apta.com/news-publications/public-transportation...

[4]: https://www.statista.com/chart/18208/means-of-transportation...

[5]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

[ravenstine]

> But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation

They both are and they aren't. It is a civic issue that is inherently worse for public transportation, especially those that have nearly no supervision like subways. I totally agree that the issue is a civic one that should be solved, but if we're not going to solve it, then it's a problem that will prevent public transportation from reaching its potential. Would you rather encounter a crazy person out in the open or be trapped in a steel box with them? That's essentially the decision people are making when they board public transit in a major American metro. If a person is smelly out in the open, at least there's a breeze that can blow the odor away, but on a bus or train you are trapped in the recirculating smell cloud. Out in the open, one might have to pass by such things, but being on public transit can mean experiencing them for hours.

> But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.

That's a bit of a false equivalence. While there's indeed some mathematical soundness to what you're saying, I'd argue the vast majority of trouble makers (for lack of a better term) on public transit aren't there out of commuting necessity. They hang out on public transit because it's out of the elements and they are unlikely to be harassed themselves. It's somewhere for them to go. If all public transit closed, they'd just be out on the curb or in front of a gas station.

There is an incentive for city officials to ignore the problem as much as they can get away with. They know that the vast majority of their constituents aren't taking public transit, so what better place to allow the unwanted to be off the streets?

That's why it is a public transit issue. It's a much greater challenge to solve civic problems at a higher level, but cities could actually hire security to be on their trains and actually enforce tickets. No matter what, it's an inferior daily experience to being in one's own car. You can never get rid of smells and the low-level bad behavior. Not without society changing itself.

[ncmncm]

Buses do not impede traffic. Cars impede bus traffic.

[TheChaplain]

> I always think it's weird how instead of just improving public transit, we've all become fixated on self driving vehicles.

I believe that people with this kind of mindset do not understand nor can understand the value of time.

Example, for me going to work using public transit takes ~35 minutes, that is 8 minutes of train then the rest on a bus. (Not including the waiting time for the train/bus to arrive for departure)

Using a car, it takes me roughly 12 minutes.

So.. I save 2*20 minutes per day by not using public transit. How much is that per week? Month?

Some may argue I should move closer to work, but that would mean a way higher mortgage and a crampy apartment vs. my house out in greener areas. I think the choice is fairly simple...

Or that I should switch jobs, but there are no companies around my living area which pays the same, and I really enjoy job and definitely my living standard.

So unless the city put a direct line with no stops between my suburb and the area I work in, a car makes my life less stressful and more efficient.

[wizofaus]

> I believe that people with this kind of mindset do not understand nor can understand the value of time.

Absolutely! An hour on a train where you can do productive work is far better than 30+ minutes in a car where that's not realistic. So sure, self driving cars that do make it realistic to work while commuting are the ideal, but in the mean time, ensuring public transport is sufficently uncrowded and well-connected that travelers can realistically make productive use of their travel time makes a lot of sense.

[SwiftyBug]

Do we really need to spend every commute hour working? To me long commutes, although sometimes tiring, have been a time to catch up on reading, listening to podcasts or just zoning out and thinking about nothing and everything.

Of course, we don't want to waste 2 hours of our day commuting, but this is the case to advocate for better public transportation that could take us quicker and more comfortably rather than believing that self-driving cars are the solution.

[wizofaus]

Reading is productive work, as is zoning out! Driving a car in a gridlock...no so much.

Though I was also thinking that on days you're expected to be in on-site, if the job makes it possible, you can potentially improve your commute by coming in later/leaving earlier while still being available during regular business hours.

[GenerocUsername]

Transit is not a replacement for cars in USA outside of the densest urban cores, and those areas are paradoxically the worst offenders for crime, drugs, and other urban issues which keep many off of transit.

[kbos87]

This is an unpopular opinion but speaking from experience, it’s absolutely true.

[ncmncm]

It is a product of deliberate policy, so of course it's true. The policy was to drive working people out of cities and into cars, and it worked. You are living their policy.

[GenerocUsername]

No, it's the omnibus grouping of transit focused cities combined with 'look the other way' drug and crime enforcement in those same zones. You literally cannot have both, yet one party has grouped them inseperably

[ncmncm]

Policy is policy.

[skybrian]

It doesn't seem like all that many people are all that crazy about self-driving cars? It's a frequent topic of conversation because some companies have invested a lot of money in it. But people express fairly negative sentiments about it.

Meanwhile, huge amounts of money is spent on improving mass transit. It's fairly conventional wisdom that it's a good thing. (The money doesn't seem to go very far though, compared to the need.)

[theplumber]

>> It doesn't seem like all that many people are all that crazy about self-driving cars?

I think that many people(including me) do not belive in self driving cars. I "know" there will be no level 5 self driving car anytime soon so why would I be excited? All the current and "near future" self driving cars seem to have a steering wheel so they are "fake self driving cars" and I'm not interested in that. Why would I use a self driving car if I still have to keep my hands on the steering wheel? I would be more worried that the car could get into an accident by itself and I would be blamed.

Then the more you learn about the tech the more I get worried. The car is supposed to drive itself based on solved captcha or an army of people trying to label everything?? I don't want to be anywhere near a "fake self driving car".

Self driving cars are like those miracle cures for aging or cancer that seem to work only on rats or in lab specific conditions. One day they will work on humans but you never know the day.

So if a miracle happens and "real" self driving cars are developed I think all the people will go crazy after them just like for a miracle drug to reverse aging.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/06/02/health/reverse-aging-life...

[xodjmk]

"The car is supposed to drive itself based on solved captcha or an army of people trying to label everything??"

You're learning is a little bit off. Self driving cars are not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.

[pwinnski]

I love that my current rental car (a Kia K5) has lane-keeping and collision-detection features. If it tried to label those "self-driving," I'd never use them.

I think you're right: companies like Uber and Tesla are pushing self-driving cars, but there isn't really popular support for them.

[ncmncm]

Huge amounts are not (wholly-legal urban tunnel fraud aside) spent on public transit.

Huge amounts are instead siphoned from public transit to shore up car makers' and suburb real estate profits.

[skybrian]

Examples:

In California, $10 billion so far has been spent on high speed rail. The new bus terminal in SF was $2 billion, though admittedly that includes a skyscraper and a park. The Bart extension to Milpitas cost another $2 billion.

In Manhattan the first phase of the second avenue line cost $4.5 billion and the second phase will cost $6 billion.

[ncmncm]

> "(wholly-legal urban tunnel fraud aside)"

As I said. It is usually best to read what you reply to.

[skybrian]

Yes, I ignored that on purpose because it doesn't make sense.

I'm reminded of Abraham Lincoln's joke: "How many legs does a dog have, if you count the tail as a leg?"

The money counts as spending, even if you say it doesn't.

[ncmncm]

It is not spent on transportation, it is spent on something else, and deducted from the transportation budget. If somebody steals your wallet and uses your card to buy an NFT, did you spend that? It came from your account.

[pwinnski]

Public Transit in the USA, truly nationwide public transit, would cost more money than exists, or has ever existed. And that's if you solved the issue of people not wanting public transit!

As I type this I'm in the New Orleans city center, where the noise eight floors up is constant and overwhelming. Like, had to pause the movie last night multiple times because street noise was drowning out dialog. In my suburb back home, things are very, very, very quiet. It is much easier to imagine public transit where I am now than where I normally live, but that wouldn't help me in the suburbs.

In theory, I love urban density. In theory, I hate parking minimums and zoning restrictions. In practice, like most Americans, I'm choosing to live in the land of parking minimums, zoning restrictions, and little to no public transit.

Viable public transit in metro areas is economically a tough sell, but culturally it's even tougher.

I think self-driving vehicles are mostly fraud, and that you'll get your wish about stagnation, but that doesn't mean public transit will step up in the gap. I think it will just mean we continue to sacrifice 35k-45k people every year and keep our cars.

[parkingrift]

Public transport in the US is an absolute impossibility outside of dense urban environments. There is way too much sprawl to ever have a reliable public transport network in the US. Best we could hope for would be high speed rail to connect urban areas and replace short/medium distance air travel.

[juunpp]

As far as I understand it, many such areas were developed as a consequence of car companies lobbying the government back in the day. The car companies are the culprit here; the sprawl is not accidental.

[parkingrift]

It doesn’t matter why. The sprawl exists and will continue to exist.

[silisili]

We could do a hub and spoke model, probably. Basically, move the parking lots out of the businesses and into the exurbs. It's not perfect, but would mean a lot less miles driven for most people.

[parkingrift]

In this model people would still need cars. If people have a car they will prefer to use it. This hub and spoke would only work if you forced people to use it.

[silisili]

True - which is why we also must work to remove parking lots from the city centers and businesses. People aren't going to drive if there's nowhere for them to park!

That said, I'm not advocating for tearing down an entire city and starting over. This would have to be done slowly over many years, which means politically - it will never get done.

[dahdum]

> I always think it's weird how instead of just improving public transit, we've all become fixated on self driving vehicles.

To me self driving EV's appear a much more viable way to "solve" public transit everywhere beyond major metros. They'll drastically drop labor costs and are extremely flexible. No major infrastructure changes are needed compared to adding things like rail. No cities need to be redesigned in one fell swoop.

[_hcuq]

No major infrastructure changes are needed for buses……

[dahdum]

Right, it’s mostly the labor economics that make them poor choices outside of dense urban areas. Self driving EV buses could actually solve that suburban transit problem, with private on demand vehicles being a “premium” option.

Self driving buses or shuttles may actually come first around planned retirement communities. Simple routes, good weather, with flexible demand.

[potatochup]

The most expensive thing in transit service for a lot of smaller cities is paying for the drivers. If you want more shorter headways, longer service hours then you're paying a lot more for additional drivers.

[ncmncm]

Cheap, at any price. Instead we subsidize cars at many, many times that.

You can think of everything you pay for the car you are obliged to maintain as a tax you pay as subsidy for cars. With good public transportation, even massively expanded, you would keep most of that.

[Gordonjcp]

> To me self driving EV's appear a much more viable way to "solve" public transit everywhere beyond major metros.

But it doesn't solve the problem of using something sized for four people carrying one person.

[user_named]

Self driving cars don't exist.

[thehappypm]

I doubt “we” can really fix public transit. The places where it’s great have an immense culture towards it. Here even places where the public transit network is extensive like NYC or Boston still face huge funding shortfalls and a lot of antagonism from their statehouses. Maybe self driving cars is an easier problem.

[juunpp]

The fixation is mostly in the US as far as I can tell. And the answer to your question boils down to power and money.

[kbos87]

I don’t think it’s weird and I unfortunately think public transit is in the beginning of a slow death spiral post-pandemic in the US.

Reason 1: people in the US aren’t judging transit vs car ownership on the axes you mentioned. They largely don’t care about climate change and efficient land use (at least not enough to change their own habits.) They care about comfort, control over their own surroundings and mobility, and yes, signaling status.

Reason 2: The way of life that previously made transit make sense… daily point-to-point travel at peak hours when driving would have been prohibitively expensive… is quickly going by the wayside. Even if I go into my office 1-2 days a week, it’s now more cost effective for me to drive, and climbing aboard a bus or train feels like a relic of the past that I’m no longer accustomed to because I don’t have to.

[josephcsible]

By "efficient land use", do you mean that I shouldn't be allowed to have a yard of my own, and that I should have to share walls with my neighbors? If so, then "don’t care about" is an understatement; I'm actively against it.

[jgwil2]

Such a tedious strawman that somehow keeps getting rolled out every time transit and density come up here... no one is saying you "shouldn't be allowed to have a yard of my own," people are saying that you should have the right to build more densely on your property if you want to, which should have the side effect of creating more efficient land use and less expensive housing. It's about changing zoning requirements to give property owners more rights, not fewer.

[pandaman]

What good is a yard if nothing grows there because it's surrounded by high-rises blocking sun? And not sharing walls is of little comfort when you are adjunct to a 20 unit apartment where 4 units have a party every night and on the weekends - all 20 do. It's not like we have made up zoning just to piss off hipsters. Zoning came up as a solution to the problem of your externalities not stopping on your property line. The only way it goes away is another solution instead of I do what I want, sucks to be you.

[jgwil2]

Firstly, your comment completely ignores the negative externalities created by North American-style suburbs in the first place.

Secondly, this is still a strawman: I've yet to hear of any policy proposal that would abolish zoning completely and allow highrises to go up anywhere. What policies would do is things like let the market determine whether it's more efficient to build a McMansion for one family or a fourplex or lowrise apartment building with eight units, all with the same footprint.

But if you still hate this so much, you can live far enough from the city that it's not economical to build next door to you, or you can own enough land that it won't be an issue.

[josephcsible]

> But if you still hate this so much, you can live far enough from the city that it's not economical to build next door to you, or you can own enough land that it won't be an issue.

So you can avoid the problems by either accepting a commute that's 2 hours each way (and for which public transit is all but guaranteed to be unavailable), or by being rich.

[pandaman]

Curious: in your vision, what are negative externalities that you have in mind and how are they going to disappear with more dense living in the very same suburbs?

[Karrot_Kream]

You buy adjacent property instead of insisting that everyone does the same thing with their property as the homeowner growing things? Invoking "externalities" as if everyone wants to do the same thing (growing things) on their property is exactly how you end up with America's suburban monoculture.

[pandaman]

No, invoking externalities as they exist and affect people around you. If your neighbors don't grow things and don't mind your building a high-rise then they will let you rezone.

I am not sure if you had been outside or only get your information from HN's strongtowns and notjustbikes fans but IME there are apartment complexes and mixed use buildings (apartments and retail) everywhere in the US. Nobody forbids building those on principle.

[throwntoday]

US public transit is pretty good. I haven't been to a small town or big city that isn't serviced well.

It's not trivial to just redesign our suburbs. And the younger generation flock to big cities, not many seem interested to live in a small town that has potential for pedestrian centered design.

What exactly are you proposing?