I wouldn't be planning any fixes infrastructure transit programs that didn't have an ROI in the next 7 years. It will be hard for anything to compete with the efficiency of Waymo.
Single passenger cars still have a problem with density even if there's no need for a driver. Combining multiple people into one trip can help, but also lessons the utility of Waymo if riders have to go out of their way to pick up additional passengers.
Getting 1000 people downtown could be up to 2,000 Waymo trips (one trip to drop off the worker, another trip for the car to go back out to pick up another passenger). While one of these 56 passenger very light rail cars can do it in 18 trips. A light rail vehicle like the Siemens trains used in San Francisco can carry up to 200 people at crush loads, so that's 5 trips.
You mean it's very difficult to compete with a company that is massively subsidised by public infrastructure? That's what really killed freight rail in most of Europe, make the train companies pay for track maintance (often the rail companies even want this because it keeps competition out as well), while trucks atpapy very little of the cost they impose on the public (i.e. much higher road usage, causing most of the traffic issues).
The big AV transit efficiency gains* can only happen when nearly all human drivers are removed from the road. Alas, that's at least 20 years ahead of now**, or more (e.g. if tech stalls for some reason, though I consider it unlikely). Otherwise they'd be limited by having to account for human drivers and that limits speed and throughput enough so other solutions are a must.
* Think having much higher speed limits (as far as humans are concerned, nonexistent), or mass coordinating movement over the entire traffic.
** We can reasonably estimate the minimum without bothering to ask how fast the tech will improve: Even if the tech were available now, think about fleet replacement costs which no one group would be too eager to pay. Best case, it's the typical 'make a concentrated pressure group lose for societal benefit' and we know how that politics goes. It will happen, but slowly.
*** Another thing to account for is that there's no good reason to design an AV car like a normal car, and there'll be some iteration time over that too.
True, but this can be compensated for. Current vehicle design is based on human-operated gas vehicles - so it better be aerodynamic (to save gas), and a human needs to be in the front (to see) with only a glass to separate, and it needs a particular stopping action (again a consequence of carrying humans without enough separation). This has unfortunate implications for noise and stopping distance. Electric-powered AV can have creative designs to enable much quicker (yet safe) stopping action, an action which AV would also make rarer.
Autonomous vehicles can have faster reaction time, but once they hit the brakes, stopping distance will still increase with speed because it's limited by the friction between tires and pavement. Unless you put parachutes or rockets on these vehicles, or thrust spikes into the pavement...
There's no reason a car should have only 4 wheels, we can even have special wheels deployed only when the breaks are hit at high speed. The AI will be disciplined enough to always use them when necessary (or maybe use an automatic system based on speed alone?).
Or you can have a different wheel count and arrangement normally, as the AI can be trained for this. We don't have to standardize AV cars as much as we have to standardize cars for humans.
Isn't friction a function of surface area? You can increase surface area that way, and the extra wheels can be made to have more friction than usual if the design is such they are not used normally.
If this were true, cities would have abandoned mass transit for taxi system decades ago. The requirement for there to be a warm body driving a taxi isn't among the prime causes of its inefficiency.
This is an estimation for the self-driving hardware cost (computers, LIDAR, sensors). It does not include the base car price, as it can be easily optimized down to almost nothing (sub $10k).
The price is somewhat of a guess, several years ago, the hardware in Waymo was priced at $130k by Munro&Associates. But since then the cost of the LIDAR sensors fell by 90% or so, reducing the main expense.
And Baidu has cars on the road that cost $30k for the _entire_ car. So presumably, so even a couple of pricier sensors won't affect the estimate too much.
> The price is somewhat of a guess, several years ago, the hardware in Waymo was priced at $130k by Munro&Associates
10 years ago they had even more sensors dotting the car, instead of one honeycomb on each corner they had 2, so I find $130k hard to believe given what we know about the sensor kit today.
> But since then the cost of the LIDAR sensors fell by 90% or so, reducing the main expense.
I do not know of any lidar that has done that, and Waymo makes their own and we know their price(-ish) (and quantity). I think they’ve actually gone up in price (but also capability - honeycomb 1 vs gen 2).
Are you talking about raw material costs? Or is that one of these extrapolations of if we scale everything to millions of cars and realise no inefficiencies and nobody making any money in the supply chain?
I'm talking about the current cost of the self-driving system, that is already produced by companies that charge a significant markup. With volume, it will go down more.
I'm not including the base vehicle in the cost. It's highly variable, and can be as low as $10k for small personal intra-city taxis.
Why does it blow away any other public transit? That can't be true because if you put the same self driving tech into a bus, you already am an order of magnitude cheaper per passenger (likely more). Moreover let's assume robotaxis are cornering the market and make all other forms of transport non viable. Why would the public then maintain the roads? So at that point at least costs are suddenly going to explode.
Sigh. People are WAAAY too accepting of urbanist propaganda.
Buses are _barely_ more effective than cars. A regular passenger car with 4 people is more efficient than a city bus. An EV needs 2.5 people (these numbers are for the US).
The explanation is simple:
1. Buses have to drive _all_ _the_ _time_, even when there are few passengers. As a result, the average bus load tends to be around 10-20 people. And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical.
2. Buses have INCREDIBLY polluting components: 2-3 drivers for each bus needed to provide the service. They are by far the dirtiest part of the bus. This part can be removed with the self-driving hardware, but...
A full self-driving bus also makes no sense. It defeats the main advantage of self-driving: door-to-door transportation.
That being said, self-driving mini-buses seating 6-10 people are a good idea for rush hour transit.
> Sigh. People are WAAAY too accepting of urbanist propaganda.
>
> Buses are _barely_ more effective than cars. A regular passenger car with 4 people is more efficient than a city bus. An EV needs 2.5 people (these numbers are for the US).
>
> The explanation is simple:
>
> 1. Buses have to drive _all_ _the_ _time_, even when there are few passengers. As a result, the average bus load tends to be around 10-20 people. And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical.
>
> 2. Buses have INCREDIBLY polluting components: 2-3 drivers for each bus needed to provide the service. They are by far the dirtiest part of the bus. This part can be removed with the self-driving hardware, but...
>
> A full self-driving bus also makes no sense. It defeats the main advantage of self-driving: door-to-door transportation.
Even if you focus only on emissions this completely ignores the cost of congestion, which is huge.
Your complaint about self driving buses makes no sense either. If the most polluting part of the bus is the driver then removing the driver makes the bus far, far less polluting.
When your arguments don't even make sense on their own terms it suggests that you're making them from an emotional position instead of a rational one. That's ok: if you don't like buses just say so, but be honest about it instead of making spurious arguments.
> Even if you focus only on emissions this completely ignores the cost of congestion, which is huge.
Congestion should be fixed by removing buses, de-densifying city cores, and forcing companies to build offices in a distributed fashion.
Meanwhile, replacing buses with shared taxi-style vehicles will do most of the job, while _reducing_ congestion. It's a bit complicated, but it's entirely possible.
The reason is simple, there is an unavoidable tension between the density of bus stops and the average speed. As a result of frequent stops, in most cities buses move at an average speed of less than 20 km/h.
For example, in Seattle it's 15 km/h. This is just 3 times faster than a rapid walk!
If we reduce the number of cars by 2x by adding mild car-pooling during the rush hour, then we'll have more than enough throughput to eliminate congestion _and_ buses in Seattle. This does not generalize to all cities in the US (e.g. Manhattan needs a serious demolishing to become sane) but usually, it's in the same ballpark.
> Your complaint about self driving buses makes no sense either. If the most polluting part of the bus is the driver then removing the driver makes the bus far, far less polluting.
Sure. But why stop there? Buses have an INCREDIBLE impact in the number of lifetimes wasted during commutes.
> When your arguments don't even make sense on their own terms it suggests that you're making them from an emotional position instead of a rational one. That's ok: if you don't like buses just say so, but be honest about it instead of making spurious arguments.
Nope. There are no rational arguments _for_ urbanism. It's a failed obsolete ideology, and it's leading to the downfall of democracty and the rise of populism.
> Congestion should be fixed by removing buses, de-densifying city cores, and forcing companies to build offices in a distributed fashion.
Yes, let's solve congestion by forcing urban sprawl. Forget any efficiency gains by using denser infrastructure, just make everyone drive 10x as far so there's 10x as much road and therefore 1/10th the congestion!
We already do this. You just described the city of Houston. I've been there, it's ass. And the 14 lane Katy highway does it no favors.
Bus stops are often set too close by municipalities, but that’s driven by the lack of density in US housing. Density drives efficiency.
> Manhattan needs a serious demolishing to become sane
Ah yes, lets demolish one of the most economically productive regions of the USA, both in GDP / capita and GDP / km^2 in order to make it easier for people to drive through it.
> Bus stops are often set too close by municipalities, but that’s driven by the lack of density in US housing. Density drives efficiency.
Doesn't matter, dense cities start having their own issues. Instead of taking "the bus", you'll need to wait for the correct bus to arrive. Also, density drives up misery and nothing else. Proven by the birth rate.
> Ah yes, lets demolish one of the most economically productive regions of the USA, both in GDP / capita and GDP / km^2 in order to make it easier for people to drive through it.
Yup, exactly. There's no freaking reason so much GDP has to be crammed into several square miles of space, sucking the life from everywhere else.
> Sigh. People are WAAAY too accepting of urbanist propaganda.
>
Sigh people just like to make statements without evidence to back them up.
> Buses are _barely_ more effective than cars. A regular passenger car with 4 people is more efficient than a city bus. An EV needs 2.5 people (these numbers are for the US).
>
Evidence? Moreover you know that average occupancy rates of cars are around 1.5 [1], for short trips like commuting it's more like 1.1 [1] so that's a factor 2 off from your 2.5. So even if we believe your numbers you have to explain how you're going to increase occupancy rate by a factor of 1.5 to 2 before they become just better (not even blowing out of the water).
[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/ENVISSUENo12/page029....
Note I could not find numbers on buses, but trains in the above source have occupancy rates of 50%.
> The explanation is simple:
>
> 1. Buses have to drive _all_ _the_ _time_, even when there are few passengers. As a result, the average bus load tends to be around 10-20 people. And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical.
>
And robotaxis have to drive empty to and from the person they are picking up.
> 2. Buses have INCREDIBLY polluting components: 2-3 drivers for each bus needed to provide the service. They are by far the dirtiest part of the bus. This part can be removed with the self-driving hardware, but...
>
Not sure how we should account for bus drivers, considering that even if they are not working as bus driver the person is still around (also should we include the emissions from all the engineers working on self driving tech at the moment then) . However your statement is also false in most western countries, at least green house gas emissions of private households are dominated by transport (i.e. Cars).
> A full self-driving bus also makes no sense. It defeats the main advantage of self-driving: door-to-door transportation.
>
You're contradicting yourself. If the bus driver is the most polluting part of the bus (according to your statement above), then it would definitely make sense to get rid of them.
It would be great if your statement was true and robotaxis are the most efficient thing ever. I'd love to see well laid out evidence for this, but from what I just found your statement is not supported by reality.
Others have largely dealt with your arguments, but to this:
> > And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical.
Most transit systems DO operate different intervals during rush hour. Most places I've lived there's been anywhere from 3-5 different intervals at different times of day: At a minimum a night schedule which might be once an hour or not at all, a rush hour schedule, and 1+ day-time non rush-hour schedule.
I do agree that mini-buses would be an advantage though, once you don't need drivers, and that'd further reduce the advantage of small self-driving cars by allowing for far more routes.
The libertarian answer is yes highways should. Most self proclaimed libertarians refuse to go that far - if you allow for highways to not make money then transit shouldn't be held to the higher bar.
I always find this a dumb idea. Transportation networks enable things to happen that comes back as taxes, that is. Same for education, or other public services.
Fair, but how unprofitable should they be? -$5/passenger-mike? -$12/passenger-mile? I think we can do a lot better than the current US mass transit status quo.
In 2022, the NYC Subway budgeted about $0.75 per passenger-mile (and that was during Covid, when ridership was very low) [1]. You’re really overestimating how much public transit costs to run. Private vehicles are an extremely inefficient way to move people around, hence the cost of Uber/Lyft/taxis.
NYC is special in that it's one of the few places that subways make sense in America. That said, operating costs are common but extremely misleading way to measure transit costs when new tunnel costs $2.2B/mile.
The proper way to recoup the capital cost is through the increase to land values that arise from building the railway. You buy land around the future stations and put a shopping mall or business center on top.
> NYC is special in that it's one of the few places that subways make sense in America.
The built environment is not fixed or exogenous. NYC is great for the subway because it was built around the Subway. If America followed international best practices, it could go a long ways towards steering other places' built environments too.
NYC is special in that it's on of the few places that subways make sense in America. That said, operating costs are common but extremely misleading way to measure transit costs when new tunnel costs $2.2B/mile.
