Comment by jokteur
3 hours ago
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.