Comment by sheept
17 hours ago
Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design. They're still cars, so they still contribute to traffic and increased pavement wear, and I cannot imagine they'd be cheaper at scale than buses for storage/maintenance/cleaning.
I spent ten years in the trenches of American urban design policy. The best we could do was lose very slightly less quickly. It's not changing. Trains are great, we should build more, and we probably should replace a lot of bus routes by subsidizing rides on Waymo and its ilk. It'll be cheaper and provide better service.
>Trains are great
I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?
Yesh go to literally any other industrialized part of the world and see how ** backwards the US is on trains
I’ve become quite radicalized on trains after visiting Japan and Switzerland myself.
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Bus Rapid Transit is another option that could be amazing (while being much cheaper to implement), but it falls short for the same reason as trains: they require dedicated infrastructure that complicates driving, and complicating driving is political suicide.
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None. Why would you think that? My guess is you're an American living nowhere near an urban rail system but I thought most people here would at least be passing familiar with modern trains. Even some American cities have them.
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Also just like... looking at a train and noticing it can carry a ton more people than a car, has no concept of traffic, and can theoretically go as fast as possible.
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What makes you say that? I'd only propose them in very high density corridors (or in corridors where building a train would be paired with allowing high density).
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A well run public transit system should obviously be cheaper at scale than robotaxis, but the incentives for Waymo (or Uber, or Lyft, etc.) are very different than the city's incentives. It's very possible that in practice private companies can operate more cheaply at scale than buses because they have much higher incentives to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
It's not a bandaid because American urban design isn't going to change substantially. I don't see American cities changing their mind on how they build and where they build.
“Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design.”
That might be an unintentionally excellent analogy, because like a Band-Aid, self self driving cars have the potential to heal the urban environment. The widespread adoption of self driving cars doesn’t take cars off the road, but it does reduce the reliance on destination parking. Entire city car parks could be replaced with medium density residential, substantially increasing density and paving the way to walkable cities.
They won't be better for maintenance but unless Portland can build the state capacity to fund public transport properly this is better than nothing. Plenty of developing countries rely on buses, jitneys, and low footprint vehicles like mopeds for traffic flow because they don't have the state capacity to enforce an urban framework conducive to public transit. Honestly many US states are the same.
> increased pavement wear
That's buses. Even more with electric buses. They are insanely subsidized by public. Robot taxis are vastly cheaper for everyone.