[User9812]

A bus is possible, but if this was a viable business, it should exist already. The only difference is the cost of the driver, so the automated bus might save passengers $5/day. Is that $5/day extra cost keeping this business non-existent at the moment? I'm a little skeptical.

Keep in mind your taxi service is cheap because it's on the road all the time. A taxi might make $250/day, and pay the driver half of that cost. That means the company is making $125/day per taxi. You're one of 15 or 20 people taking that taxi in a day, so the $15 trip is possible. If everyone was taking an automated car to work, they need to pay the majority of that $125/day price. Split it with 4 people, and that's just over $30/day each. Kind of expensive. Add more people and we're turning into a bus or public transit again.

Work schedules offset would help everything all around. If some people worked 7-3, 8-4, 9-5, 10-6, 11-7, etc, then we could decrease rush hour traffic, and use the cars multiple times to lower the price to $10/day, which starts to become interesting.

I like your idea of buying a car, adding it to a network, and getting money back when you're not using it.

[prawn]

"A bus is possible, but if this was a viable business, it should exist already. The only difference is the cost of the driver, so the automated bus might save passengers $5/day. Is that $5/day extra cost keeping this business non-existent at the moment? I'm a little skeptical."

$5/day could be enough, especially if the parking situation changed for drivers at the other end. Take away street parking (no longer required when most cars are autonomous) near my office and I'd likely catch the bus. Have a bus that took me virtually door to door (rather than walking 3-4 blocks at each end) and I'd likely switch already.

I think lack of imagination might be one thing stopping a service like this existing now, and volume of passengers. If you wanted to start it now, you'd need coverage to justify the advertising campaign to build customers and to make it worthwhile. You'd need a fleet and then to hire and train drivers.

In the future, it will be APIs/software.

Imagine it's almost worth my while to pay $15/trip now. Then take out the driver and make it $10/trip plus pain-free bookings - I could read/work without feeling like I was being rude to the driver. Then imagine my booking app offers me $5/trip if I'm willing to car-pool, with the software automatically picking my ride-mates and most efficient pick-up and drop-off route. I'm pretty likely to do that. In dense areas and with time, manoeuvrable vans could be even more effective and the upgrade could be done with a software update.

Not to mention the bonus of taking cars off the street.

Autonomous vans on demand are going to be incredibly useful for wine tasting trips...

[dzhiurgis]

Everything relating to public transportation will be the major pain point. It is heavily regulated, subsidised, unionised, etc.

London isn't able to replace ticket sellers with machines yet, so you can imagine how long it will take to replace the drivers. Alternatively, they will see this a profit eating activity and resist until the people wouldn't take it anymore.

[jeremyjh]

When I was in London in 2009 I bought metro and surface train tickets from a machine.

[dzhiurgis]

Humans are still an option. And there are few other roles that are redundant, but every two months workers strike to keep them.

[lmm]

> A bus is possible, but if this was a viable business, it should exist already. The only difference is the cost of the driver, so the automated bus might save passengers $5/day. Is that $5/day extra cost keeping this business non-existent at the moment? I'm a little skeptical.

You're already seeing the much-maligned google (and other tech companies) buses in SF and area, so they're just-about-viable for some cases. I've seen a similar business model for hotel-airport shuttle services, and these kind of vehicles are everywhere in denser cities (Hong Kong, Firenze).