Comment by Lutger
3 years ago
Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
3 years ago
Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
I'll be blunt about this.
Most of this research is funded in the US and the hyper individualistic Americans as a group don't believe in public transport.
That’s really not true. Americans love good public transportation where it’s available and works well. Most US cities have lots of buses, and many have light rail. But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.
American corporations perhaps aren’t as interested in public transportation, because there is no money to be made. And that is who is largely funding this self-driving vehicle research.
> Americans love good public transportation […] Most US cities have lots of buses
So… Apparently not…
The USA is probably the worst place in the world for 1) high speed trains 2) buses. And the only place I know where the train _waits_ for cars to go through.
If only they could see by themselves how bad it is during their next trip to Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, London, Paris (even France in general) and many many other countries and cities that have a functional network of high speed trains, metro, tramway and regional lines…
I hope you’re not ready to die on that hill.
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From everything I am learning about the US on Youtube by transport people, they universally despise bus service in North America cities.
Some have light rail but at a far smaller rate then cities in Europe.
There are tiny cities in Europe that have more light rail then cities 10x the size in North America.
My tiny town of less then 100k people literally has more extensive bus and train connection then most cities in the US that have million+ people.
> But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.
Compare for example Switzerland (lots of maintains, rivers, hills and so on), with a equally sized metro area like Torronto, Dalles and so on.
The reality is many of your metro areas are the literal exact opposite of spread out, they are just badly designed.
Zürich for example is a city that has only like 600k people, with maybe 1.5M in the larger metro area and Zürich has more trains and trams going then whole Texas city triangle.
So please stop with the excuse about how everything is so spread out in the US. Its not spread out, its just badly designed.
> But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.
This is oft-repeated, but it doesn't really survive a moment's scrutiny. You might as well say it's pointless to build a path from your back door to your shed, because the county is just too big.
The built up areas of the US have almost the same population density as the EU ones.
Nobody cares about the Rockies or farm fields or Death Valley.
Self driving tech could and will be applied to public transportation too. With self-driving mini-buses we can serve more destination much more efficiently, fine-tuning commute supply to better fit the exact demand.
This is probably a good model for the future of public transit. We use large buses because of the high cost of drivers. For less popular routes and times it currently doesn’t make sense but self-driving mini-buses would.
At least in SF there has been little discussion due to the influence of the unlicensed transit unions. The idea of eliminating drivers can’t even be discussed.
While this is somewhat true, in the overall problem of transit, this is a tiny problem dwarfed by far larger problems. For this argument to make sense, there are about 5000 ways to improve current US cities in terms of transport that don't require this amazing technology.
Its not technology that is limiting good transit, but will.
If San Francisco repealed Prop 13 the city could afford to hire drivers for a fleet of small buses.
Then again if you want a reason to hate Feinstein she's the one that got rid of the gypsy cabs in San Francisco.
Yes, as a hyper individualistic American fuck public transport. I don’t want to travel with other people, I don’t want to live in dense cities and I don’t want to go to like the 10 places with public transport. I love national parks, camping, hiking, road-tripping etc.
I also like the benefits of invidualistic cultures, but there's a cost to it too.
The US got this way because it was super-charged between pre-WWII and the dotcom boom. Both economically and culturally. The post-WWII high wages allowed the rise of suburbia, the Cold War induced WW3 scare led to the highway system, and so on.
The low-efficiency of it is taking its toll. (Sitting in traffic for hours each day, pollution, etc.)
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You can have both. You can have fewer cars and excellent public transportation.
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Then stay out of the cities, and live in the country. If this is how you want to live, then your opinion doesn't matter for how cities are run.
Is this a parody?
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My commuter train be packed though.
Where? And is it filled with people coming from the local P&R?
This is all private money. If these companies didn't spend the $100B developing autonomous vehicles, it wouldn't suddenly be available for building public transit.
Beyond that, $100B doesn't go as far toward building transit as you might expect. For example, San Diego recently spent $2.3 billion on a light rail extension that's projected to have 34,700 daily trips by 2030. If you assume most of these are round-trips, it's serving fewer than 18,000 people. Spending $100B at this rate would serve around 750,000 people (0.2% of the U.S. population).
The most cost-effective form of public transit in most places is busses because they can reuse existing road infrastructure, and in the U.S., labor accounts for around 70% of the cost of operating busses. As a result, autonomous driving technology should be helpful in scaling public transit systems as well.
Do you mean the La Jolla trolley line? It seems like a nice idea (I’ve lived next to several trolley stops) but the virtually nonexistent ticket validation tends to make the trolley a magnet for negativity, and keeps me in my car.
The budget for just the MTA in NYC is 18 billion / year and that’s really only for the ongoing costs. A 100 billion investment in public transportation over the entire US over 10 years once wouldn’t have done shit.
A fleet of self driving cars are realistically the only scalable public transportation because the costs increase with the number of people not the area to be served. Do people just forget how unbelievably spread out everything but the densest cities are? 24/7 bus service to within 0.5 miles of every house in my city is already impossible even if you allowed them to be on the every 4 hour. To replace cars people would realistically need them on the hour and want on the 20 minutes. Bet you my shirt at that point it would just be cheaper for the city to just run a free taxi service.
This pretty much. Building public infrastructure is insanely expensive and there are capacity limits that can't easily be solved. We need to add public transport to the mix that 1) doesn't require heavy additional investment in infrastructure and 2) solves convenience concerns that make buses unappealing and 3) can reliably replace privately owned vehicles.
You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it. Any bus-like thing would need far too many stops to be practical to be able to get people to a reasonable walking distance of where they want to go. That's why in basically every city where they've been added (distinct from being created due to organic demand), pretty much nobody who can afford any alternatives rides them, no matter how much money is dumped into them.
To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians. Which is pretty much a non-starter, and even if you wanted to try would cost many orders of magnitude more than all of the self-driving car projects.
> You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it.
Its not about 'snapping your finger'. Neither Netherlands or Switzerland built their systems from 1 day to the other.
You need to make decision to change and then consistently and incrementally work on it. Put it in your standards and invest ever $ you have for new roads to that instead.
You need to change your tax policy so that horrible inefficient land uses like parking lots cost a lot more. You need to enable mixed use development so these parking lots can be built on.
> To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians.
I'm sorry that is complete and utter nonsense. Like seriously, completely insane.
If you look into some urbanist and city planning literature you will see that lots of places where there used to be total car shitshows, are now beautiful. Often you would never have guessed that just 10-20 years earlier it was horrible road and a parking lot.
Again, small and incremental steps. Here are some really basic steps you can take:
- Remove parking requirements
- Slow speed of cars
- Don't allow turn right on red
- Make the lanes thinner
- Make the sidewalk broader, maybe add some trees
- Take one of the existing lanes and add painted bike lanes, later add protection for those lanes
- Rezone for mixed use (specially existing commercial zones)
- Change property tax policy to discourage sub-optimal land use
I could literally keep going on and on. Non of this, requires you to demolish anything.
Specifically for the US, there is whole movement about incrementally improving your city, see Strong Towns (https://www.strongtowns.org/). They have lots of podcasts and books. Specially: 'Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity'.
They also point out in detail with real data how these changes make your city safer and economically much better (They have some seriously amazing visualization of city finances that shows how such chances can improve cities).
And this is not some hippy organization, these are coming from a somewhat conservative small towns perspective.
Honestly your attitude of 'we are stuck with this' is horrible. I can understand frustration and bleak outlook, about the situation. But put your hope into incremental low cost change, not some techno futurism and you will be less disappointed.
What's wrong with "turn right on red"? It'd be a big problem in that exact form in Australia, but as a cyclist especially I'd rather we had the equivalent "turn left on red" law, and to be honest, cyclists can generally get away with it anyway. But I can't see why it would really be a huge issue if it was allowed for cars, unless they were persistently ignoring pedestrians/cyclists and turning into their path as they crossed in front of you.
The big one for me is traffic lights - cyclists/pedestrians should be able to trigger traffic/pedestrian lights to turn green instantly in most cases (with some reasonable lower limit on the amount of time they've been red for, although ideally all traffic lights in urban areas would be hooked up to sensors able to determine if there was any traffic approaching), and ideally approaching cyclists should be able to trigger them without even stopping to press a button - I gather they have something like this in Copenhagen. There's realistically no way to set up traffic light sequences so that they suit all modes of travel, but they're often especially bad for cyclists, and the act of having to stop and start all the time is far more onerous (and even dangerous, esp. if you're clipped in) for cyclists than it is for cars.
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I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between - basically driverless, electric ueber.
As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.
Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.
This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues.
If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.
If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to delays.
This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-research individual self-driving we have today.
But really most people shouldn't be commuting anyway. WFH should be much more of a thing, even if it's not full-time.
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I guess it's just a question of capacity. If you can cram a lot of travelers into a subway train during rush hour, you could just as well imagine an uber pool type function where clever route finding combines riders into a single car during rush hour.
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> As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.
Great so you have constantly cars driving form the city center to outside of the city, that for sure will cause no traffic at all.
Will be fun when people proposes new elevated highways out of the city so the self driving car can go outside of town to the coal power plant to charge.
The only thing worse then having vehicles driving around with 1-preson, is vehicles with 0-people. Its literally the most inefficient use of space ever.
It makes traffic worse, not better and it makes the city worse, not better.
How about this, a city optimized for walking and biking, where different parts of the city are connected threw buses, trams, subways or regional trains.
> Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.
Turns out that cities where people can, walk, bike and take trains they don't own cars. Shocking.
I too rather like rainbows, unicorns, chocolate waterfalls and free happiness growing on trees as a solution to all problems.
I feel that this one is a rather realistic solution. It uses existing technology (cars), existing infrastructure (streets) and existing data infrastructure (cloud providers) to solve a massive problem. The "only" thing that's missing is the self driving part (the only being in very large quotes of course).
This means its much less of a stretch to get this scenario working than proposals like Hyperloop, Flying Taxis or other things that require a lot more innovation and infrastructure work before they become feasable.
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Well, why not then create bigger cars, or smaller buses? Between 5 people in a car or a 100 people in a bus, an optimal solution should be able to converge slowly, to 20 people in a vehicle. It would be different for every city, or region or country.
Most cars spend most of their time, being stationary in a parking lot or a garage, 93 percent of the time to be more specific, or 23 hours/day. Buses spend a lot less time being stationary. The trade off here is the speed of driving. Cars offer an unlimited amount of speed, while buses do not. An optimal economic solution should exist in which the economic actors, i.e. people will figure it out after a lot of trial n error.
A crucial factor in self driving cars no one mentioned, is the data the machine uses to drive should be incorruptible. A blockchain which supports billions of tps, offer a solution to that.
Additionally road variables change over time, and data should change as well. Economic actors, not just people should feed the machines with updated data every day. That means that a marketplace of information is required, in which the most efficient economic actors with the best accuracy and the best reputation are rewarded, and the worst economic actors, who's data aggregation cause a lot of crashes, fall off the market.
A marketplace of information, doesn't exist for the time being, so there is no chance for self driving cars to be safe and effective.
20 people minibuses already exist. Examples include Mercedes-Benz Sprinter.
I'm about as big of a fan of mass transit as you can get, but this is completely overblown.
That's $1Bn for the hundred largest cities in the world.
Assuming even 40% of that went to the US, that's $1Bn for the top 40 cities. That leaves out 22 entire states [0], and like 75% of the population...
Look to NYC, LA, and SF for what $1Bn gets you... It's about 1 mile of subway [1]. And it takes close to 15 years to build.
We wouldn't all be riding around on space elevators with materially better lives if this money was invested in subways or trains.
If you spent $40Bn on busses - you'd have to spend another $250Bn to pay people to ride them...
Self-driving cars will eventually change cities. I think there's evidence it's already starting to happen.
I don't think this money would've been better spent on trains, and definitely not busses.
What else are you thinking of?
I'd be interested in a better cost breakdown of bike lanes and how much it would cost to get a significant percentage of people in cities biking & scootering around - but I'm skeptical, and also, it's not mass transit!
NYC installed 29.5 miles of protected bike lanes last year [2]. I can't find the cost, but next year they're asking for $3.1Bn to build 500 miles of protected bike lanes, among many other things [3]. I know it costs less than $1M to pave a two-lane road one mile [4] - so a protected bike lane should be well under $1M - but then everything costs way more in the city...
If protected bike lanes cost substantially less than $5M per mile in the city (like $0.5M) - $40Bn could get you pretty far!
That's 80k miles of protected bike lanes! That's about 4x the amount of total bike lanes we have now.
Bike commute rates in NYC are decent (by US standards). I'd love to see a study on how much bike commute rates increased after these new lanes were completed.
Copenhagen has only 240 miles of bike lanes and 600 miles of paths for 70 square miles and 750k people [4]. That's enough to get 62% of people commuting by bike [5]!
For the top 40 cities, you'd be looking at like 80k miles of protected bike lanes for 4000 square miles and 81M people. That's better than Copenhagen!
That could potentially get you close to 62% of people biking instead of driving - just depends on if that many people live within 5 miles of work / school / going out. 5 miles being the average commute distance in Copenhagen [6].
62% of cars off the road in the top 40 US cities would DEFINITELY change my life for the better - but I'd be surprised if we could even get 15%. Still, it's something you could do in a couple of years - and for $40Bn - would definitely be worth it. But it's decidedly not mass transit.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/vividmaps.com/map-of-largest-me...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyre...
[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/cyclingintheci...
[3] https://www.6sqft.com/council-wants-additional-3-1b-to-build...
[4] https://homeguide.com/costs/asphalt-driveway-cost#:~:text=Co....
[5] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-07/copenh...
[6] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-07/copenh....)
I don't think you're refuting the parent post so much as lamenting the difficulty of doing anything "infrastructure" in today's America.
There are lots of places all over the world where $1B would make a big difference in many, many people's lives -- and where people eagerly ride the busses they actually have, which are often not that nice.
Do we need things to work in the USA for them to be worth doing?
How far has the $100bn spent on self-driving cars moved the needle?
It's not government money for the most part, these companies would not have put it into public transportation if they didn't work on self driving cars
But you could say that about a lot of things. Instead of going to Starbucks you could have fed a starving African for a week.
Instead of wasting research money on computer networking, you could spend it on stamps and envelopes.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But you don't know what's going to come out of that research before hand.
According to the UN, it's enough to save over 40million lives (for almost two years)
We have our priorities all twisted.
And what after those 2 years?
Same question applies to self-driving research.
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Try taking 2-3 young children on crowded public transport. What works for you can be pretty exclusive.
It wasn't your money.
It's a non-trivial amount of our society's wealth, doesn't really matter who owns it in regards to talking about it's use. Just like we can talk about how spending a billion hours on reality TV is probably not an amazing use of time. It's not our time, do what you want, but you can still talk about it.
Having been the victim of public transport for the first 30 years of my life: nope. You just can’t polish a turd. (Maybe other countries can but here in Germany it’s a lost cause and you can’t make individual mobility expensive enough for me to ever take public transport again).
As a counter-anecdote, I’ve been using public transport exclusively for 35 years (since first grade) in Helsinki, London and New York, and never felt like I’m a “victim” of anything.
I only ever take a car for trips outside the city.
Indeed, and I think you’re quietly pointing at the nub of the problem: if you like in a major city or sufficiently close to one of its public transport ‘spokes’, and you want to travel to somewhere also covered in a similar manner (be that short- or long-distance) public transport is usually somewhere between great and acceptable. As soon as you fall outside that usability window, it often becomes close to unusable.
(One exception: local countryside bud services can sometimes be really valuable for local travel; but they often don’t link well with other public transport modalities, IME.)
In Minneapolis, our billion dollar tram has become a rolling homeless shelter.