The whole thing with self-driving cars is that it feels like the story of NASA's space pen. All this money being poured into a technology that would not be needed if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure.
The NASA space pen story as you call it is a nice quip. It's also a complete lie. The Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets. Pencil cores are made of graphite, when you write with it, small bits of graphite break off. On land it just falls down, but in space it floats around and attaches to things. Graphite conducts electricity and it caused countless shorts in electronics, as well as fires, all while in space. If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat.
I live in Switzerland which has a reputation for having good public transport. Still own a car because in many cases you can't beat convenience. Can't wait for Waymo to come here.
Self driving vehicles, with current technology, are unrealistic outside major cities. Major cities are the places where you least need a personal car.
Google Maps still thinks the speed limit on a nearby highway is 35 mph. We spent several months without lane markers on the highway. Any vehicle driving around here based on the current self-driving architecture, requiring central mapping/planning and good infrastructure, would be ridiculously unsafe.
Not to mention how lost they would be the moment they turned off the highway.
> Self driving vehicles, with current technology, are unrealistic outside major cities
Why? My Subaru can practically drive itself on most Wyoming roads, including in whiteout conditions. It’s easier to drive with fewer cars around. It’s just not as profitable to field a fleet in suburban and rural America.
My Waymo ride went through a construction zone without trouble. I don’t know how much mapping it needs or how they keep it current but it’s not constrained to ideal conditions.
As an example of an urban legend/facile pop science take being treated as fact [1]?
> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure
Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?
Depends on your population density. Tokyo does pretty well with purely public transport. There’s still cars of course, but you don’t use them for travel into the city proper if you don’t hate yourself.
> Tokyo does pretty well with purely public transport. There’s still cars of course, but you don’t use them for travel into the city proper if you don’t hate yourself
Japan has .67 vehicles per person, almost 80% America's .85 [1] and above many European countries. They travel about a fifth as many miles per capita as America [2]. But again, four fifths and a fifth. Nowhere close to zero.
There isn't a developed economy that wouldn't see a significant quality-of-life improvement from self-driving cars.
Hence why I’m talking about Tokyo. Not Japan. Living in the countryside basically requires a car by definition. People also often have a car, but don’t use it that much. Maybe you’ll get more interesting numbers if you compare miles traveled per person?
> Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?
You do not even need to restrict it to developed economies. Every city (even not very large ones) I have been to around the world, developed or not, has streets lots of cars: London, Manchester, Paris, Nairobi, Colombo, Madras, Bangalore, Sydney, Singapore..... and smaller towns and rural areas in those countries too. Those cover a pretty wide range of quality of public transport too.
Way to miss the point. Yes, it is known that the "NASA space pen" was not really funded by NASA, but but its development still took millions of dollars in R&D.
> Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?
For the 127th time: car dependency is not the same as car usage.
> its development still took millions of dollars in R&D
$1mm at the time, $10mm today. They sold for the equivalent of $30 each in today's money and saved manned spaceflight from having to deal with graphite shards in the air and electrical.
> car dependency is not the same as car usage
"If the richest country in the world" got "rid of its car dependency," we'd still want safer cars.
With the technology controlled by a handful of corporations? At an development cost that will force them to create any and every opportunity to seek rent on your mobility?
Many cities in Europe still have their Roman era street plans. The street layout of a city is incredible sticky. Once you have a city built around cars and all the private property and infrastructure that goes with it, you are basically stuck with it for 1000 years. And American city layouts are horrible for public transit and walking.
We can look at international cities with longing and jealousy, but LA, Houston, Miami, and so on will never have useable public transit. You’d have to bulldoze the whole city and start again. So great for Paris and London and yes I would rather live there, but we are stuck finding solutions that work inside the mess we made.
I agree with you in part - we do have 100 years of development patterns baked into concrete and steel, but they were not originally built just for cars.
LA was built around interurbans, the idea that I should drive my car all the way from San Bernardino (or frankly even from Pasadena) to Los Angeles would be foreign to the original planners and builders in Southern California. Consider that every major freeway in LA is basically in whole or in part paralleling a former PE line, and suddenly my assertion doesnt seem so odd.
LA is not the only place where the sprawled layout was created by interurbans, Arguably to a greater or lesser extent - Detroit, Dallas, Cleveland, Cincinatti, and there are others whose early development was deeply influenced by the interurban exist.
Wait, what? Paris streets are a mess, even after Haussmann. That does not prevent outstanding transit. Even before the latest obsessive aggressive agenda-driven nonsense. The two things that Paris has are (1) inhabitant and workplace density and (2) the will to pursue public transit decade after decade.
After that, there are lots of streets with a single lane of traffic - and buses go through them just fine. And there are lots of too narrow streets but they are isolated here and there - in between streets that are okay for buses. Equally there are lots of very wide avenues for several lanes of traffic and that's fine for pedestrians and transit even though it makes subway stations sometimes very wide. And there are lots of randomly angled streets. There are steep hills. There are rivers and canals and giant mining voids which make building subway tunnels interesting. There are lots of train track rights of way which sometimes block pedestrian traffic but are covered and crossed reasonably often (sometimes still not optimally so). There is snow, ice, floods, hot weather. You name it it's there.
Both of these are essential. "Decade after decade" is essential. Both density and building that infrastructure are impossible to build at the stroke of a pen. So an advantage of Paris compared to San Francisco is that it had decent inhabitant and workplace density from the infancy of public transit when it was private animal pulled carriages.
So what's missing in US cities: decade after decade of density followed by decade after decade of public intent. SF could do it - but for sure you wouldn't see the result tomorrow - but NIMBY so no, SF can't do it. Not before getting rid of NIMBY. LA is much more willing to build anything anywhere so it would have much more of a chance. But it's huge and people often live far from their place of work. Smaller areas with LA would have a better chance. Perhaps Glendale plus the entertainment industry north-south corridor? That might be manageable.
Yet still more "even then", ride Paris transit at rush hours in summer and you won't feel that it's all that good: it's sweaty, packed, and there are lots of timetable incidents. You will regret having chosen rush hour. You car would have been nicely air conditionned and comfortable (but depending on your trajectory would have been stuck in traffic for a while.)
For trips shorter than 2 miles, I can bet you that it's faster for me to hop on my bike (or to find an electric scooter) and get to my destination than it is to drive. And let's not even talk about the time to find parking.
The grocery store is 1.3 miles from here but it’s a 300’ climb and it’s 42f and raining right now. Even with my e-bike that’s not pleasant. On a conventional bike that’s unrealistic for all but the most hardcore cyclists.
There’s a bus that serves that route but the stop is uncovered and service is unreliable because it’s immediately after a rest stop where the human drivers take care of their biological needs.
A robo-bus would be more predictable and enable more frequent service.
And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure? Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience" (at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure) when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?
> And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure?
It has occurred to me.
> Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience"
Not sure where you got this idea. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m still excited for self driving vehicles to compliment the existing system.
> at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure
Why would a self driving car need to park? The ability to always be in use is one of the advantages.
As I said there’s no requirement that the self driving vehicle be a car form factor. A self-driving bus could improve access and reliability.
> when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?
How?
I choose to live in a city with good (for America) transit. I vote for every transit measure available to me. I ride the bus.
I commute by bike when I can. I don’t own a car.
> Why would a self driving car need to park? The ability to always be in use is one of the advantages.
They are not going to be always in use. Unless you got a perfectly uniform distribution of demand over time, eventually most of these cars will have to be parked somewhere.
> They don’t need the same parking infrastructure we have now.
The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist. People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.
> Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance
Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.
> Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.
Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.
> The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist.
Why would the existing infrastructure not continue to change? We are redeveloping parking lots today. Car and ride shares did reduce parking needs.
> People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.
Building codes for parking spaces are constantly changing here and consider transit availability and car ownership. If self-driving vehicles (including expanded public transit) are available that will further reduce the requirements.
Self-driving vehicles (even cars) put downward pressure on parking needs.
> Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.
Why are you so obsessed with the car form factor? I don’t see how a robotaxi needs any more parking than a taxi. A self-driving bus needs as much space as a conventional bus today.
> Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.
That’s not how busses, taxis or Ubers work. Ubers are not dispatched from a hub on every call. Demand is predicted and capacity is dispatched accordingly. As demand goes up dispatched capacity utilization goes up. More vehicles can be dispatched when demand approaches dispatched capacity.
This problem is the same no matter what form the driver takes. Taxis, ride shares, and busses already do capacity planning. Robot drivers just remove the human driver complexity from the equation.
Robotaxis (like busses and taxis) can use denser parking structures in their depots because they don’t have to deal with the limitations of the public, or even humans.
I routinely walk considerably further than that for groceries, in less time. On a route including a steep hill.
Short trips made any way but walking have considerable overhead. Bad urban planning makes it worse. How many times do you have to stop a car on that route?
> I routinely walk considerably further than that for groceries, in less time. On a route including a steep hill.
Not everyone has or wants to spend that kind of time. Especially when it’s not necessary and the weather is bad.
I’m hosting a party this evening so I need to run up there and get snacks and beer. The hour of time the e-bike saves lets me do that between work and guests arriving. I don’t have time to walk that distance and still eat dinner.
> Short trips made any way but walking have considerable overhead. Bad urban planning makes it worse. How many times do you have to stop a car on that route?
I don’t own a car. I ride my e-bike. There’s two lights and a stop sign on that route. It has a bike lane which is nice. Takes 10 minutes including time to put on my helmet and gloves and lock/unlock the bike.
If we both left my couch at the same time I’d be home on my bike before you even arrived at the store on foot.
That would be a more reasonable trajectory for US cities: more frequent, faster main line transit plus a flood of local inexpensive automated electric vehicles. That would be compatible with the current low density.
Yes, the last mile is walked. That’s the problem. It’s not practical to put a train station or bus stop at every corner. This is why cars exist everywhere. If those cars can be automated they can be shared even more efficiently than Ubers and allow more efficient bus and train routes.
> It’s not practical to put a train station or bus stop at every corner.
Tell that to Dublin Bus. Some routes are more or less unusable due to ridiculously high numbers of stops; there’s one in particular near me which has 37 stops over about 4km.
There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.
> Tell that to Dublin Bus. Some routes are more or less unusable due to ridiculously high numbers of stops; there’s one in particular near me which has 37 stops over about 4km.
Sounds impractical.
> There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.
> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply
- There is nothing simple about it.
- There is nothing inevitable to this appearance of "not enough money". For example very little of self-driving cars development has been on public funds. For example, there is plenty of money in California govt. And plenty of money in US federal govt.
- One doesn't prevent the other. You can't seriously argue that better transit would remove all needs for automated driving.
With self-driving tech, buses could be made a lot smaller and more frequent. They are large and infrequent because of fixed per-vehicle costs (mostly the driver).
EDIT: Small size then enables personalized routing: a multi-passenger taxi taking a set of people to similar destinations.
That makes a lot of sense, I never thought of the labor as the limiting factor on bus route (clearly I just never thought very hard about it) but boy would it be nice if there was a 9 passenger van every 5 minutes to replace a full size bus every 30.
Really the lack of stops and parking places is, and would be even worse for self driving vehicles deployed in numbers. Unless it's self driving motor bikes or such small personal transportation.
How much are you willing to bet that the price of a Waymo ride will converge to be within 10% of the price of an Uber ride today?
(Also, followup question: how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi service, now that Uber has stopped subsidizing most of their trips?)
> regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it
Sort of. The cost of labor is the cost floor of the competition. So long as Waymo et al are smaller than the competition, i.e. so long as they don’t need to compete on price, they should tack under their direction. They aren’t setting the market price.
The moment they need to compete, they can tank the price or increase service quality. (They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition.)
Internet companies compete on price out the gate because we have low marginal costs. A company like Waymo has hardware costs that make competing on price out the gate prohibitive. So in a sense, their costs don’t have to do with labour. But that’s sort of true for any automation tech.
> They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition.
And believing that this is likely to happen is the problem I have with the whole proposition. I don't see any real player with capital, data and tech know-how to get into this in a way to turn it into a proper competition.
I'm saying that we shouldn't be so enthusiastic about the idea of giving more power to one of the largest corporations in the world, and that the idea is only worth pursuing if we have better ways to put them under check. To call this "advocating for blowing everything up" is just weasel wording and really disgusting rhetoric.
And just like the NASA space pen story, the private sector is developing them on their own at their own risk, with maybe some indirect grants or subsidies, but not a direct contract specifically for the government to be a beneficiary.
Way more money is being wasted on the grifts surrounding developing public transit infrastructure. LA County for example is 88 different municipalities and it will never get resolved.
> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure.
Then have the dignitaries and environmental policymakers give their uparmored gas guzzling cars up first, leading by example.
What are you talking about? Many politicians catch public transport around the world. I remember a few years back a mini nothingburger controversy about a politician 'caught' drinking a canned cocktail on the train in London https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/20/diane-abbot...
No amount of public transport can accomodate the personal whims and demands of anyone let alone everyone. Even Japan, famous for its public transport infrastructure, still has a healthy population of drivers both in metro and rural areas.
I am not saying to get rid of cars altogether. I am saying that it would be better (and cheaper) for everyone if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first. Reduce the amount of yearly trips that are done by car. Provide alternatives.
The important thing about Japan or Europe is not "they don't have cars", but "people make 3-4x less trips by car compared with the alternative modes of transportation". If you want to have safer roads (in a way that doesn't give even more power to tech companies) the best way to do it is by simply reducing the amount of trips taken.
>That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3].
Bakersfield to Merced is 171 miles of intercity high-speed rail. It's unclear to me why Californians need to make such trips with any significant frequency, and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit".
22 years ago in Toronto, the Sheppard line (3.4 mi, underground) was built for less than $1b CAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_Sheppard). From what I can tell, costs in NYC are mainly a NYC problem.
Chicago is extending an existing above ground train line along an existing freeway (no right of way issues, not a subway, etc) 5.6 miles. It’s four stops and a new rail yard. 3.6B.
Something may have changed more recently. The first stage of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line in Toronto looks like it will come in at around (converting currency and distances) 9B for 12 miles. Locals generally don't seem to think this represents a success. (Despite being light rail, about 2/3 of this first stage will run underground.)
>Because they’re both between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
This explains exactly nothing to me. There are many cities between Toronto and Montreal (the two largest CMAs in Canada, and about 88% of that driving distance) and I can't imagine why anyone would regularly travel between those two, either. Nor can I imagine why someone would make regular trips between Belleville and Ottawa (very close to the Bakersfield-Merced distance, and two of the larger cities in between).
>If not trains between cities what do you consider public transit?
Subways, light rail, streetcars and buses, all operating within a city. And, yes, trains operating within a CMA. (GO Transit trains from Toronto can get you as far as Kitchener, but as far as I know it's a vastly less popular route than the main Lakeshore lines. From Hamilton to Oshawa is definitely not solid built-up area, but it's pretty dense.)
I can't understand why this would be non-obvious. Maybe there's a cultural difference. Are Americans really so dedicated to urban sprawl that residents of a metropolis with an 7- or even 8-digit population might still require regular intercity travel to go about their lives?
> can't understand why this would be non-obvious. Maybe there's a cultural difference
Yes. Many Americans take it for granted that we have quick access to a variety of cities and landscapes. (Particularly on the coasts.)
Keep in mind that America is about a third richer, on a GDP per capita basis, than Canada. Even with stark income inequality, that produces a large disposable-income gap. Add to that the population gap and you have about the population of Canada travelling intercity many times a year.
Try using a unit per person. It starts to look much less rosy for Waymo and also do not forget roads are still public infrastructure that has to be paid for and maintained.
What, you think Waymo will be able to weasel out of road tax or drive without roads?
>OP argued we should devote self-driving resources to public transit.
Yes, because it would allow moving people more cost-effectively (among other things) - which is measured per person per unit distance traveled. (I'm not OP, but nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself.)
> because it would allow moving people more cost-effectively (among other things)
Add last-mile and model for the real American population distribution. Not an imagined America where everyone lives on Manhattan.
Not all miles travelled are equal. In value, urgency or desirability and thus price willing to be paid. Complaining about self driving cars is asinine. The scales are wrong. The problems are wrong. The places are wrong.
> nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself
I mean, exactly. We’re urbanising without commensurate increases in public transit. Deployment or use. Perhaps that hints at a change being in order.
Self-driving cars are public transit depending on the terms of use; but I assume we're really talking about mass transit here.
When I was in Germany 25 years ago, a district of about 25k people (less than 1k per square mile) had multiple bus routes (4 IIRC) connecting the main town to other settlements, running through farmland. It was not unduly expensive and the locals certainly seemed to think it made sense. Children would take it to school in lieu of a dedicated school-owned service.
You are starting to seem dishonest when you resort to outliers and present them as the baseline.
> To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency
We can not. This logic is stupid. This logic will take you to the idea that the best thing to do is to get everyone a helicopter because helipads are cheap to build and it costs zero dollars to "build roads in the sky".
Yeah, you are right. These things are not competing. Yes, you are also right that proper infrastructure (re)development in North America will take a lot more money than what Big Tech has invested in self-driving cars.
The upsetting part is to see even supposedly smart people buying into the idea that American Exceptionalism is a real thing, and that you can keep holding on to the hope to find a shortcut away of your problems. Self-driving cars or not, the US is still going to be an expensive, inefficient country that can boast about its amazing economy, yet most people living there are at third-world country levels of development.
> Self-driving cars or not, the US is still going to be an expensive, inefficient country that can boast about its amazing economy, yet most people living there are at third-world country levels of development
For fuck’s sake, the world’s largest rail system and navigable waterways say hello.
I’ve advocated for public transit. But it’s turning into zealotry when an $11bn project showing actual gains is turned into a soapbox for decrying a pet project.
If Waymo/Google/Alphabet really cares about people's safety and this is nothing but a pet project where the amount raised ($11bn) in 15 years is ~3% of their whole revenue in 2023, they wouldn't mind open sourcing their whole system, including for other commercial ventures.
Until then, the whole thing is nothing but a Trojan horse to let encroach themselves even more into another aspect of our lives.
> they wouldn't mind open sourcing their whole system, including for other commercial ventures
You seem to just not like that this is done by Google. (Or by any private entity.) That is fine. I, like, hate this one restaurant in New York. But be honest about your motivations and check your biases.
This isn’t self-driving cars vs public transit debate because there isn’t one. If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.
> world's largest freight rail system
The world’s largest rail system, period. It’s also the largest freight rail system. But passenger and freight are types of rail systems.
I despise this way of arguing. Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever. Such a crude metric is entirely insufficient to back up an argument about how great American railways supposedly are.
What's the ticket cost for the passengers compared to other countries? Average train delay? Cancellation rate? Speed? Death rate? The argument is not looking so hot anymore, right? Then stop it with the irrelevant statistics of rail track length.
>Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever.
It actually is. Japan's new maglev shinkansen line is stalling because they can't get land rights to lay rail through.[1]
An even more blasphemous example is California's high speed rail project which never accomplishes anything, but I'm pretty sure that also suffers from a severe case of legalized money laundering.
This is not a matter of who is doing it, but (a) why and (b) second-order effects.
> If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.
It depends on (a) why and (b) second-order effects.
Are they doing it, e.g, because they want to build a new campus in a lower-cost-of-living area, and they want to make the idea of living in Tuscaloosa, AL more palatable by having it connected to Atlanta, GA with train service that does not take 6(!!!!) hours as Amtrak currently does? Amazing, go Google!
Oh, they want to make it so that everyone can use it at reasonable prices, but Google employees can do it for free and get priority boarding? Fine, if that's what it takes to get private enterprises investing in infrastructure, I'm okay with it.
Oh, they want to do it because they are going to use it as a test-bed for some revolutionary transportation technology that they pinky-promise will eventually work as some Futurama-style tube network where anyone can go door-to-door as fast as possible? And they are offering the whole thing for free (or heavily subsidized) for everyone that enrolls in their beta program? Then please Google go fuck itself, because we all know how this is just bait.
>technology that would not be needed if... developed proper public transit infrastructure
NYC and London have had 'proper' public transit for over a century. It's handy but not that great. I was on a 52 year old Bakerloo line tube train the other day and they are much like modern tube trains, if grubbier. It's not going to suddenly turn wonderful and solve everything. (typed on a London bus)
Also while I'm not sure any technology is really needed, as in we could get by without it, there are about 1 million road deaths a year globally. A 90% reduction would save 900,000 lives which is a nice to have. And more meaningful than a space pen.
