Public transport cannot do everything cars can do, especially outside big cities. Better public transport can reduce the need for car ownership - I did not own a car for much of my life for that reason. However, it does not eliminate it.
> Sure cars are helpful for transporting stuff. But most car rides is one dude sitting alone in a 1.5 ton machine moving his lazy ass around town.
I do not know about lazy. I find it a lot easier to use public transport myself. I would like to see numbers for "most" especially outside the US. Very few of my car trips are by myself without something to carry.
> Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.
Where has public transport eliminated cars? Not anywhere I have been in Europe. You can significantly reduce car usage, but not eliminate it, so any safety improvements are still very important.
Another problem outside big cities is that some buses and trains, especially at quieter times, also run pretty empty. There were about four or five people in the bus my daughter got into this morning (on a weekday morning!) and its close to the end of a journey between two reasonably large towns. The next bus gets very full though.
One of the features of public transit--certainly the commuter rail relatively near my house (although I still need to drive to the station)--is that it's often very empty in off-hours but if you don't run (an insufficient number of) those near-empty trains, a lot of people are going to say screw it and drive. I won't take commuter rail into the city for an evening event in part because because I really need to time the return journey--and it takes quite a bit longer.
> Where has public transport eliminated cars? Not anywhere I have been in Europe. You can significantly reduce car usage, but not eliminate it, so any safety improvements are still very important.
Sure, not eliminated. There will always be cars. But reduced, as you said. I guess my main point was that one should not falsely believe that the existence of driverless buses and trains will somehow magically and significantly improve the public transportation situation in a given country.
Right now I have to walk 12 minutes to a bus stop because the one literally in front of my house was closed due to a lack of drivers. Then I wait 3-10 minutes for a bus that takes 20 minutes to get to the bus hub in my neighborhood. It takes 8 minutes to drive there. If my neighborhood bus route was replaced or supplemented with self driving shuttle busses feeding that hub then a 1 hour door-to-door trip could be 30 minutes.
Sure. I'm not saying that there no use cases. But I don't see the US turning into a public transportation utopia just because there are self-driving buses available. Because the reason public transportation sucks in countries where it sucks is not because drivers are expensive.
But it does suck because drivers are expensive. Seattle is struggling to find drivers. It's a constant battle to identify the most used routes and keep them staffed but that's why there's not a critical mass of riders to pay enough fares to hire drivers.
Doing the rare things that actually require a car, does not entail a need to own one. (And it's perfectly possible to have a fulfilling life without those rare things.)
Self-driving cars help get us past the path dependence and move toward better public transit.
I tried using the train for my commute. However, I had to maintain a car at each end and I could only use the 7AM train as the parking at my origin would be filled at any later time.
Self-driving cars break my dependence on a car at destination and allow me to pick an origin train independent of parking.
You're conflating two tangential things, automatic driving is automatic driving whether it's a car or a bus.
The biggest issue that automatic driving needs to overcome is that it's sharing the road with manually driven cars. We've already had the technology for a long time to have perfect automatic driving if the environment was fully automatic; computers are unparalleled at accurately sharing and processing data with each other.
This isn't to say that the solution is to get rid of human drivers, because driving a car has been one of the most empowering paradigm shifts for the commons. Being able to travel yourself timely anywhere anytime for any reason is a level of power that pre-automobile commons simply did not have. Subjugating your power to travel to a computer is surrendering that incredible power.
If (and likely when) we can figure out how to better share human data with computers and vice versa computer data with humans, everyone on the road will be better off.
GoA 4 (no trained personnel onboard) is only practical for entirely grade separated (ie it's almost impossible for anything else to be there, no cars, no bicycles, no pedestrians) routes.
Even GoA 3 is fraught without this constraint, and for GoA 2 you're still paying for a driver because although the machine does most of the work the human has to handle the inevitable deviations from the model.
GoA 4 railways exist, if you're putting a metro in tunnels or elevating it obviously this is grade separated, and in principle you can do it for long distance rail if you're willing to eliminate at grade crossings (expensive). But they are nothing like a city bus route for example.
>driving a car has been one of the most empowering paradigm shifts for the commons. Being able to travel yourself timely anywhere anytime for any reason
Everywhere that the roads go, sure.
The more other commoners are trying to do this, and the more useful places that the roads will allow it, the slower it gets. But not only that, it's very unevenly paced - and therefore inefficient and less safe.
The problems are compounded by North American road and intersection design. Many urban areas in Europe manage to get by with far fewer streetlights and stop signs (often by using roundabouts). But cars in North American cities routinely get to speeds that would be dangerous in a collision (which would be much less of a problem if this could be confined to routes where they're isolated from pedestrians - but this often doesn't happen), only to have to stop and wait for a minute or more at a time, an embarrassingly short distance thereafter. And then buses have to deal with the car traffic and the lights, make additional stops, and take extra safety precautions due to their size.
Everyone thinks of taking the bus as slow. If there were no cars, the roads could be designed for buses, and streets for pedestrians. But we don't even properly distinguish streets from roads around here.
There's a future, not in the short-term, where 99% of folks don't need to or want to own a car. You hail a ride, and a vehicle shows up, perhaps with 3 of people in the vehicle in their own bubble internally designed into the car. You get in, it drops offs others in the vehicle, and then finally drops you off. The vehicle exhausts its entire electric charge, recharges, and then gets back on the road. The number of vehicles on the road is down 50%.
Same for trains. I wouldn’t take the LIRR to JFK or Caltrain to SFO if I had to bike with my luggage or whatever. And I’m not adding an hour to my trip for the bus.
You'll be able to pay more to take a single dedicated vehicle the whole way, or less that includes a self-driving bus or two for most of the middle segment of your journey.
But the bus "routes" will be totally dynamic based on demand, and will only stop occasionally, and you won't have to wait long.
It's going to be a complete revolution in public transit.
I doubt that the reason public transport is not as prevalent e.g. in the US as in some European countries is the cost of the driver. The fixed costs of operating a train or a bus must be many many times more.
It's a great technical feat, but it's not ever going to be efficient as public transportation. The form factor of the car works against it.