Comment by ElijahLynn
15 hours ago
Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited.
But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.
> the last mile it's pretty limited.
Where is that last mile exactly? In many metropolitan areas, you typically have available a broad selection of trains, subways, trams and/or buses of different sizes that takes you last mile. Some places even have special buses, like the "Neighbourhood Bus" we have here (https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-...) for narrow and steep neighborhoods up on mountains.
It's certainly doable, if you wanted to have last mile public transport.
Another consideration that needs to be made before tossing out private transit because "public transit is better" is not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
If it is 2am and you need to get home as a woman, it would be a no brainer to get in an autonomous vehicle while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
If you have sensory difficulties that make public transit uncomfortable, private transit is always the better option.
The list goes on for many reasons and people that having only public transit would harm. The idea we can get rid of or otherwise push out private transit marginalizes everyone who isn't prototypical nor should we hand-wave that they can just rely on runs-on-other-people's-time disabled specific transports to get them into city centers because private transport isn't allowed in.
> not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment.
> while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've never had any issues beyond annoying drunk people. You're making this up.
> If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
Making sure that public transit is wheelchair-accessible is vitally important, I'm glad we agree on that. How do cars do in that regard? They don't work at all unless you can afford a chauffeur. Your argument here is essentially "public transit is sometimes bad, so it's not worth it to make it better", which is nonsensical.
> only public transit
> private transport isn't allowed in
Ridiculous strawman. Nobody is arguing for the abolition of the private vehicle, just the ways in which we design our cities to prioritize only private vehicles at the expense of everything else. Plenty of people in transit-friendly cities own cars. Replacing a large majority of private car trips would save lives, help the environment, make things more accessible, and make cities more pleasant to be in.
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You said both "tram" and "neighbourhood" so I'm assuming you aren't in the US. I truly mean no offense, but it's hard to express how spread out even the most metropolitan areas are in the US.
Sure, NYC is one thing. But check out the ~10th largest city, Austin, where Waymo and other autonomous vehicles are (I think) in their largest deployment. Just on a map, or by density numbers, or whatever metric you want.
I'm in Austin, and Waymos rule. I walk most places, bike others, and rarely drive. I very, very rarely get a rideshare (and often get Waymo by way of Uber lottery). Autonomous vehicles exist, are real, and serve an actual need in this very low density city that most people on HN have heard of. I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second. I would even pay for that to happen.
If you're arguing about some idealistic society, that's one thing. In reality these things are way better than our public transit, and fixing public transit in a place this (not) dense is not as easy as you might think. The last mile is real, and people are coming from every direction and going every other direction and not willing to wait and transfers when these autonomous vehicles already solve the problems door to door so inexpensively.
US cities are spread out due to policies enacted only 50–60 years ago to improve connectivity by car. New policies can (and will) reshape them again in the next couple of decades. For example, building transit creates environments where people's trips are well served by transit.
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> I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second.
Uh, what?
Since many commenters do not understand that "the last mile" is a term of art and not simply 5,280 feet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)#Usa...
Trains and subways, by definition, are not serving you in that "last mile". The "last mile" is where you disembark from the closest rapid/public transport, but you still need to travel to your destination.
Every time you make someone switch modes of transportation to complete their commute, the suffering increases exponentially in my personal experience. I much prefer going door to door and getting the benefit of resting my mind and body.
I live in Switzerland. Public transit goes _everywhere_, even remote villages and mountains. This is by design, such that one can only use public transit to go almost everywhere in the country.
Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we have a lot of money to spend. But many people, even if they own a car, will sometimes use public transit, because it is convenient, safe and comfortable.
There are places in Switzerland where if you need to take a taxi or an Uber, you will have to wait more than 30 minutes before one gets there. At this point, it is more convenient to take the regional bus that goes every 30 minutes. Even if the public transit frequency is every hour, I can plan my journey to arrive on the correct time (also, public transit is synchronised in the whole country to avoid waiting times).
I can see autonomous rideshares displacing taxi service and such. I think automonous rideshares still need density to be profitable. So if you need to subsidise rideshare to cover the whole country, why not properly invest in public transit?
Good for your country but also your country is quite small. I think a better analog is taking a trip from Zurich to Madrid. You could do it via train but it is probably going to be filled with lots of transfers and take 20 hours or you could take a 2 hour flight.
Fun fact: you can do Zürich Madrid with 3 transfers and 14 hours. The car will take 16 hours. Obviously, nobody is going to do that, and the plane is a better alternative. Your example does not get solved by autonomous cars, I am quite certain nobody is going to do this in a rideshare either.
Most people commute to the nearest city, move within a city, or go see friends in a neighboring city. Yes, US is much bigger, but I am quite certain that most people don't do more than 75km on a daily basis. The US still has plenty of medium and high density, where good public transit would make a lot of sense, but it is seriously lacking. It is a political decision, not a inevitable fact of life that the US has poor transit compared to other countries.
The correct question to answer would be: how do you move people efficiently in a 75km radius? Are there trips that could be solved with a good train, tram or bus? Do you provide streets with bike lanes such that people feel safe riding the bike? What about pedestrians? Are autonomous cars really solving the congestion problem? Most of these cars still need to be parked during the night when demand is lower, exactly like a railyard. However, the space taken by one person in one car is much higher than any other forms of transit.
My point here is: autonomous rideshares may displace taxi services and Uber. But most importantly, good street and city design, which is hard but not impossible, matters much more than solving the autonomous car problem.
> when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited.
That's like a 15 minute walk. And with sufficient infrastructure investments this can be 5 minutes.
And when folks are given that option or driving they will always take driving.
Obviously that's not true, but moreover it's meaningless – what counts as an option?
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This is where I've always assumed things were going. People talk about one day owning a self-driving car but I look forward to the promise of not owning a car, never needing to buy, maintain, register, insure, or drive one. Not having to buy into a depreciating compromise, do I prioritize economy or seating or cargo or...? Gas, hybrid, electric? Not having to hunt or pay for parking.
Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space.
We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.
Sure just ping Tesla Connect. You dont even need to use the app or scan a QR code. It just reads your neuralink.
Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.
>Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience.
Not so great for family trips, shopping around, etc.
Those (rare) occasions are when you rent a car. You can do it many times per year before it becomes a financially worse option.
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Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.
Regulation kills the value proposition. You are basically describing a "neighborhood electric vehicle", but US law limits them to 25 mph, and it is not legal to drive them on many arterials, so they are only really useful inside communities which were designed for them.
They really should just open up letting you have a small vehicle everywhere in the country. Sometimes you visit some city or little rural area where they let you drive golf carts or atvs or snow mobiles on the roads, grocery store lots are more full of those instead of bigger vehicles as a result, and the sky doesn't seem to fall down either.
>air conditioned bubbles on wheels.
You say it like its a bad thing.
I get it if you live in a dense metro. A car is not worth it in NYC, SF, etc. Other than that it's pretty abnormal for people not to want a car. It's usually some weird anxiety about driving. Not to mention - heaven forbid - you have a family.
They are very popular in china, such as the Wuling ev. In America, they are afraid of them because they are small. They want big cars to have a large crumple area in a crash.
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That’s the smart car
> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
Because they are completely unsafe against a twice-the-height, multi-ton Ford pickup truck.
Let me guess… you live somewhere warm and mostly dry? Probably on the younger side and don’t have any kids.
I'm in a 200 inhabitants village in eastern Europe, we have 3 bus stops in the village (so at most you're 10min away from a stop), the bus goes to the closest city every hour from 4:30 to 22:30 except on Sunday (every two hours from 6 to 21), from there you can take a train to every major city in the country, my neighbor is a 76 year old widow who goes to the city by bus regularly and who bikes around a lot. Half of the kids go to school via this bus, many people go to work with it. It's free for kids and retired people too.
When public transportation is designed properly it works fine for the extreme vast majority of people, and taking a taxi for the last mile if you're disabled, obese, lazy, etc. will cost you less than owning and maintaining a car.
I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
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Seattle, late middle age. Kid just started high school. My wife has a large e-bike with a passenger seat, but replaced it with a cargo basket a couple years ago after the kiddo outgrew it.
I didn't say that scooters were a solution for everyone, you may note. I don't think there ought to be one solution for everyone, but given the option of micromobility, I really have no use for autonomous vehicles.
The famously warm and dry countries of Norway[1] and Finland[2]!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCedclz03uI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
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I can walk a mile. Rarely have to in the city.
I think you need to re-read the parent comment, specifically this part:
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
You're almost certainly an American, and you probably have no idea what public transit is like in countries that have been investing in it for decades instead of focusing 95% of their resources on infrastructure for cars.