Comment by Spivak
3 years ago
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.