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.
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).