[zk]

This is incredible news. In the next 10 years more and more transportation will shift to self driving and save thousands of lives and prevent many more injuries. Already in San Francisco waymo's are and feel much safer than human driven rideshare.

[1970-01-01]

I made a similar observation just yesterday. SAE level 5 will reset our current understanding of parenting to where it was 30 years ago. Groups of children will be able to safely travel around town without adult supervision.

[matsemann]

While autonomous driving helps a bit on safety, that's just one of the many issues with the car dependence in our society. It might even expand the issues, if it ends up with less people using public transport and relying on these kinds of things.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Waymo is public transport, but you mean mass transit.

People don't use mass transit because it sucks, blaming other modes of public transit doesn't cut it. The design and implementation of it is what keeps people from using it.

The good news is automated vehicles will add flexible options for new types of public transport that are between single-trip taxies and mass transit and will lower costs to all kinds of public transit.

[accurrent]

European and Asian nations tend to have perfectly usable mass transit (including developing countries). Sure there are some us cases for cars, but for daily commute its not needed.

To add to it mass transit is generally heavuly subsidized that means that less well off people can get to work/school at low costs. It reduces poverty and income inequality.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Mass transit is great when it's available, which means in places of high density, which is why you list Asia and Europe. It's right there in the name.

I live in Europe in a village of about 1500 people are there is no usable public transport (2 buses a day).

Relative to total area, mass transit is almost nowhere. That's also true for for total road kilometers.

I agree with your last sentence, but for those who live outside of cities or other places of high density, public transport is unusable or unavailable. Governments roundly ignore people who live in these places (due to expense and political irrelevance) so there is always a fairly decent percentage of the population that is "public transport poor".

[johnnyanmac]

>I live in Europe in a village of about 1500 people are there is no usable public transport (2 buses a day).

and how would waymo fix this? Waymo is still a private business and needs to weigh the costs of deploying to a smaller town vs. simply not supporting that range. It's the same issue as government.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Automated vehicles will enable smaller buses that drive themselves and make serving these places profitable to service. Automated taxi services like Waymo also ultimately be cheaper too.

[wilg]

Most trips in Europe are by car. 80% of passenger-km. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/e...

[jltsiren]

Subsidizing public transit to make it affordable is a terrible idea. If you want good public transit with stable funding, you must build it primarily for the middle class. For people who pay more taxes than they receive benefits and who could choose to drive instead.

Driving has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. If you have a car anyway, using it for yet another trip is cheap. If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes. But why would you do that? Because once a city grows large enough and dense enough, public transit becomes cheaper than car infrastructure. Because it requires less subsidies than driving.

[johnnyanmac]

>For people who pay more taxes than they receive benefits and who could choose to drive instead.

that doesn't make sense. You just described the issue: they can choose to drive. And many do in the US.

Government subsidizes transport to get more people into the city hubs, which bolsters the economy of business as more people can reach downtown, which gives the town/city more money in taxes. These business have fixed costs so it's not like a rich person is going to be proportionately better to business than a poor person buying the bare necessities.

It makes a lot more sense to target people who are taken out of the economy pool otherwise without such transportation. Especially if we're talking about a large city like LA.

----

and while it's a cliche, it needs to be asked in this context: what even is "middle class" here?

>If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes.

I argue that such a "low enough bar" for a state like California will never outdo the convenience of a car. You're right in the long term that less cars => lower road maintenance => less road subsidies => more money to go around to other parts of the state. But we're not starting from scratch here.

[jltsiren]

Public services used by people who can afford the alternatives are universally better than those intended for the poor. If you don't use the service yourself, you don't care that much about the quality, and you are more likely to support funding cuts. Because the poor are a minority, most people don't really care about services used by them.

[GeneralMayhem]

Waymo is not public transport in the sense that most people mean it, which describes only state entities, as opposed to the private sector. Public transit exists to serve the public good, doesn't need to turn a profit, and is accountable to government (ideally elected) officials. Waymo is a for-profit entity that can do more or less whatever it wants within the bounds set by CPUC. I think it's a net good, but it's still private industry.

[barbazoo]

> Waymo is public transport

Is it? Doesn't "public transit" at least somewhat imply that it's a business that has to operate under the rules of some democratically elected institution?

Waymo will ban you, price you differently based on who/where/when you are, etc. I wouldn't expect any of that from "public transit".

[tialaramex]

Yes, it's public transit. Public doesn't mean "there aren't any rules" it just means public. You can't light barbecues in my local public park, and the bloke who tried to knife a bus driver isn't allowed to ride the public buses here.

[johnnyanmac]

>Public transportation service means the operation of a vehicle that provides general or special service to the public on a regular and continuing basis consistent with 49 U.S.C. Chapter 53.

From the FTA. and for those who really want to dive into the law of it: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/subtitle-III/chap..., whose own definition is:

>(A) means regular, continuing shared-ride surface transportation services that are open to the general public or open to a segment of the general public defined by age, disability, or low income; and

in a legal sense, Waymo doesn't seem to meet even these high level definitions. So it's likely classified as private transportation unless I'm missing something.

[gretch]

>price you differently based on who/where/when you are, etc

public transit already does this

https://www.bart.gov/tickets/discounts

-Seniors 65 and over get 62.5% off -Youth 5-18 years old get 50% off

[vlovich123]

Muni is free for seniors and youth.

That's a different kind of price segmentation than the kind of price discrimination that these companies can do. Also even without discounts public transit is substantially cheaper than taxi services (like 1/10th the cost). Some arguments I've seen is that the city should just make public transit free as you can offset the hit by getting rid of fare enforcement / fare machines.

[barbazoo]

I was thinking more of individual pricing

[OkayPhysicist]

People can (and should) be banned from public transit, too.

[barbazoo]

I’ve never seen that happen and I disagree that it should. Not saying it doesn’t happen.

[hiddencost]

It sucks because we don't fund it. Europe does fine.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I hate the comparisons to Europe, because they're apples to oranges. I've been in European cities and I totally agree, it's a joy to be able to take public transit and/or walk everywhere. But most European cities were built long before the car.

Older US cities (Boston, NY) have great public transit/walking options, though I agree deferred maintenance is taking its toll. But if you look at cities designed around the car, for many of them it's just prohibitively expensive to add things like light rail or subways now. Austin TX will be adding more light rail, but the price tag keeps exploding and the route keeps getting shorter.

I'd be curious if anyone could point to any city that was built around the car where they subsequently made substantial public transit improvements that carry more than, say, 10% of commuters.

[BadHumans]

Amsterdam and Paris used to be both be very car dependent. Here is a video about Amsterdam before they shunned cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI5pbDFDZyI

[coalteddy]

US cities love their cars. Not even in city centers do they prioritize pedestrians over cars. That has nothing to do with apples or oranges. It's a priority thing and not costs. There is no reason to need cars in city centers. Makes cities ugly, loud and dangerous compared to europe or asia.

[Aloisius]

Europe doesn't really do fine. Outside a handful of cities, cars are the dominant form of transit there too.

[renewiltord]

Almost everything where people ask for "more funding", that service is junk and adding money just means you go from getting junk for cheap to getting junk for expensive. I've seen zero cases of it going from junk to even mediocre. I've seen numerous examples of junk going from cheap junk to expensive junk, especially in US public services.

The "more funding" is always allocated towards existing rent-seekers.

And my opinion with getting junk is that if I'm getting it, I want to be paying as little for it as possible.

As a quick test for what you feel, try this. You read a headline that says "This city school received the most government funding of any school in the US". Do you think that school is "great" / "mediocre" / "crap"? My personal immediate inclination is that the school is probably shit.

[wilg]

Unfortunately self-driving seems to be an easier problem to solve than improving public transit policy anywhere in the U.S.

[LordDragonfang]

It's not an either-or situation, one helps the others.

AVs more or less solve the last-mile problem with public transportation - if you don't live on a transit route, or the one you live near is infrequent, taking it can be infeasible.

But also, it directly helps one of the major pain points of transit logistics - you cannot effectively respond to demand by scaling up/down the size and quantity of busses when you have human drivers that expect to have regular routes and regular hours. In contrast, you can have a whole fleet of electric short/medium/large busses which spend most of their time idling at the charge stations (which reduces maintenance costs) and go in and out of service as the daily traffic demands it, even pre-emptively going to a destination hub during off-peak times to await peak one-way demand (e.g. busses going to loiter downtown at 3/4ish to wait for all the businesspeople going back to the suburbs)

[skybrian]

For longer travel, a convenient way to get to the bus or train station might make public transit more popular.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ya, smaller door to transit center transportation is something we can even begin to consider once autonomous driving works. Like how old retired PLA soldiers used to drive tuktuks from Beijing subway stations to your apartment in the 1990s for a 5 mao or one kuai.

[madeofpalk]

My biggest objection with cars is parking them. It's wasting space dedicated to inefficiency.

Self driving cars have much less use for parking garages in the middle of the city, so I think it's a net-positive.

[konschubert]

Maybe one day, when the last human driver is banned, I’ll be able to ride my bike without fear.