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by thereisnospork 48 days ago
Assuming an average fare of 2.47$ per to make the math even, that's 6.00$/ride total cost.

When a company / government gets the cost per mile to run a fleet of autonomous EV's down to ~60cents/mile or so, which is a plausible enough number, then a lot of those transit rides are going to look real silly from a cost effectiveness POV.
1 comments
jrflowers 48 days ago
Yes. If the government were able to provide transit more cheaply in the future by using new vehicles then the transit that the government provides would be cheaper than it is today.
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thereisnospork 48 days ago
And the meaning of the truism you so adoitly picked up on is that at reasonable projections trimet and similar public transit will be uncompetitive in price (and service) relative to self driving EVs. Ergo it is correct to deprioritize their funding.

This of course is in refutation to the various points made up the thread that self driving EVs are not cost competitive and glorified taxis -- not viable public transit for the masses.

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jrflowers 47 days ago
To put your point another way, “If you make transit unusable or get rid of it entirely, then the robot cars could get better than the system you eliminated or intentionally broke”

Like you admit that Waymo can’t compete with transit unless you hobble transit.

Waymo raised $16 billon in February. If they really need $500mm to build a transit competitor in Portland, the only reason why they would reach into the taxpayer’s pocket instead of their own would be to undermine a genuinely more useful and capable system that they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of competing with.

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