I think if you were building a city from scratch, it's arguable that self driving individual pods is the way to go for the most convenient AND most efficient door to door transport. Maybe you disagree, but its not important because we're not building cities from scratch.
For existing city infra and politics that we have, I think self driving is def the best way to go. Suggesting that an individual should lobby their gov't to fix public transit seems like lower probability of success than voting with their wallet for longer self driving trips.
Public transit isn't one of those things that can be incrementally fixed. Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better, that's why its so appealing imo.
I mean maybe if you're a small town and want to stay a small town. Large cities, should definitely drive most transportation away from personal vehicles/pods. Its simply a space/first principles issue [1]. The math seems 100x less scalable, simply because you hate being around other humans (in which case what are you doing in a big city anyway).
I always see that image referenced and it's kind of BS. it assumes the buses are filled to the brim constantly but the cars only ever have 1 person it. It also doesn't take into account the transport to and from your door on both ends. It also doesn't consider the inefficiency in wait time.
The ideal transport would be a cocoon just big enough for you to fit in that picks you up at your door and gets you to your exact destination with minimal energy overhead. I'd argue a self driving car is much closer to that ideal and we can iterate our way much easier to it than public transit.
"It also doesn't take into account the transport to and from your door on both ends."
This type of design is terrible for average health outcomes [1]. We should not be optimizing for this. Walking to the bus stop is a good outcome. We should optimize for better more frequent bus routes, but "door-to-door" is unnecessary and counter-effectual.
The rest (iteration speed, filling a bus to the brim etc.) are just political problems just as intangible as "lets build better roads (public infrastructure) for autonomous cars", so we can put that aside.
we don't have to couple exercise with transport. We don't say planes are bad because it reduces the number of cross country hiking trips people take.
On filling a bus, I think its a fundamental shortcoming of having fixed routes that they'll never be as efficient as point to point transport, especially electrified transport. i'm not really making a political argument.
I agree with the second point but given as 80% of city transports post-covid is back to being fixed commutes along fixed routes, I'm happy optimizing that along transit ways. I don't really care what happens with the remaining 20%.
Right now, nearly 100% of travel is with "personal cocoons", totally unnecessary (other than for political reasons) and creating immense downward pressure on health and social outcomes. In terms of levers the government has on health and social outcomes, transitway design is a big one, and it should use it.
The fact that its done badly in America is a political problem, and if you have any political power it should be expended fixing that, not rolling back public transit.
I think if these cocoons costed $2.50 a trip you might think differently. I think driverless cars + some iteration on the vehicles themselves gets us there (without subsidies!).
People love the equity argument for public transit. Non personally owned, ubiquitous, driverless, cheap, efficient and most importantly convenient cocoons would increase equity a whole hell of a lot more than the traditional definition of public transit imo
What is this solution we already have that you speak of? It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles in SF using public transit, between two popular destination pairs.
Fleets of driverless cars lets you do traffic shaping in time and space. Plus the marginal energy cost is basically nothing. It's basically all fixed cost BUT it's not like a transit project in the sense that you don't have to allocate a bunch of capital ahead of time and wait 10 years and then maybe get what you wanted (or not). Driverless cars are helpful the moment the first $200K car hits the road.
It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles using a car too at most peak times. It’s obviously not fair to compare a perfect autonomous transportation method with the current imperfect state of public transit.
As the population grows the driving times will get worse much faster than in transit because again, spatially, it just doesn’t scale well.
If you take 20-30% of everyone on a BART train and put em in autonomous cars with human drivers in the mix (like in the marginal $200K case tomorrow), what you have is abject chaos on the streets.
Every negative you mention about public transit is a political problem (ex: other first world countries can deliver public transit project in a matter of a 1-2 years and at a fraction of the cost).
no. i literally compared a common route on google maps for bus vs car, no transfers on the bus. car was 20 mins, bus was 40 mins when you factor in walking to the stop and waiting and walknig to your destination. to be fair, didn't consider time to get parking but its still less than 20 mins.
population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? we have very slow population growth and we can scale our way out of it with existing infra. more driverless cars = less parking = two more lanes on most streets. that can double throughput.
yes public transit is a huge political problem - so whats your solution? because the tech for public transit has existed forever so why isnt it better in the US? You cant just blame politics and then do nothing. You also cant say "we just need to advocate!" because, well, if it were that easy it would have already happened. Driverless cars are a good solution precisely because it uses existing infra and I think the political hurdle can be much much lower.
"population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? "
well then you can definitely put away your dreams of a magical $2.50 pod travel. You need people, more people, young people to build all that. And if we're saying flat and low population growth that dream is over, all conversation can stop.
But if we can turn things around on population, public transit is the only way things scale. Personal travel pods/cars are a current stopgap that only kind of works for our current population levels. Please re-measure car travel times at 5:30pm on a Wednesday evening when 80% of all trips happen, like I've mentioned, the remaining 20% are highly inconsequential to overall transportation design.
The ideal transport is be a bicycle, or an e-bike for cities with hills. The problem is that bike lanes are still not great. I bike commuted in SF for years. Bikes are ideal "last mile" transport too, for long commutes trains with bike carriages can be added in. Numerous cities in Europe show this works very well.
Having said that, it's an ideal which I fear is probably far from reachable for most people given the way cities have been built, and infrastructure priorities in the US do not favour bikes.
I love biking and am excited by the possibility of the roads having more attentive and courteous Waymo cars and fewer speeding and drunk human drivers. (A man on bike was killed by a drunk speeding driver 24 hours ago 300 feet from my home.)
the bus doesn't have to be full to be a more efficient use of space than cars though. A typical (non-articulated) bus is the length two-three cars at most.
It is worth noting that personal vehicles are getting larger, so the amount of ridership required for a bus system to be more efficient than cars is only going down for the foreseeable future, even before getting into second order effects.
turns out that compared to lugging a living room around for every (average car occupancy of) 1.5 people on the road, a bus system has an extremely low efficiency bar to cross.
I don't see anything in that article that actually states efficient transport. It's just a long winded way of saying that there are a lot of factors in network design. kind of a useless article imo
> Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better
Except for energy consumption. If we were in a world were fossil fuels were unlimited and climate change was not a thing, maybe I would agree with you.
But we are not. We need to get much more efficient with energy, and cars just can't do enough. Better accept it earlier than later and start building public transports wherever it's possible.
Trains near me are very polluting per passenger mile. The trains are empty most of the day and spew out visible clouds of diesel smoke. That doesn't even account for all the huge energy cost of building dedicated railways and hundreds of bridges and crossing signals.
I would suggest comparing electric trains to electric cars. And the solution to your problems sounds like they should improve the trains, not get everyone a car :-).
Right. From my point of view, you answered to my comment about energy by saying "it's negligible", but you apparently meant "it's negligible in a metric different than the one of the post I am answering to, but I won't mention it". I think that's why I got confused :-).
That's an interesting claim, but have you got numbers to back it up, compared to bus networks which are also largely electric/hydrogen in most recent deployments?
Google says it costs roughly 4 cents a mile to charge a tesla model 3. Most city rides are a couple of miles so its a really really small fraction of the cost of trip cost (even if you price at public transit prices)
Can we talk about energy, and not price? And compare the consumption of a Tesla Model 3 with the average number of passengers (< 1.5?) versus the consumption of electric public transit?
Why? You can convert energy to cost and back - its all the same energy source for EVs vs public transit. Ultimately cost is what matters anyways.
Who cares if the energy requirement of public transit vs an EV has a huge delta (spoiler: there isn't a huge delta in terms of energy per passenger mile). They are both super low and efficient.
To you, now. But the biggest problem of humankind right now is energy. Consequences of our use of energy are climate change and biodiversity loss. But even ignoring those consequences, we are going into a world where we will have dramatically less energy. Not in 100 years, in the next few decades. So you will live in that world.
That sounds like hell. More areas should be walkable and bikeable. Motorized vehicles should be limited to minimal areas so that the rest is quiet, safe and accessible. European cities have it right here - underground transport and quiet walkable surface level.
Regular cars aren't scalable at all. AVs are not any different than regular cars. In fact AV will increase the amount of cars on the road as more people that can currently not drive, such as children and the elderly, are now more likely to use a relatively low occupancy AV. So we can expect transit to get worse as AVs become prevalent.
The only scenario where AV may scale better than cars is if we're talking about autonomous buses, and that will only perform better if they are given the other features of public transit, such as dedicated lanes, which require set routes, and we're pretty much just talking about public transit in general at this point.
This picture makes it clear, for the most part. Public transit is a pareto improvement on personal driving pods in terms of scalability. Especially for fixed commute routes.
