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Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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I remain irritated we're spending so much money on self driving cars instead of buses, trains, and improving our living spaces to support them.
Like you could spend billions to try to get self driving cars to work, and get part way there. And you'd still have a car-first dystopia.
Or you could spend billions to deploy buses and make walkable neighborhoods. Well understood, many good side effects.
I hate cars as much as the next rational man. But I'm ironically really into the self driving car hype.
I think of transport like a pyramid.
Walking is at the top followed by micro mobility and cycling. Then at the bottom is trains, with metros/ trams above and buses above that.
The issue comes from two things. The last mile problem. You need to get to the railway station and sometimes it's too far for a walk or a bike, or you need a bike at both ends. The "obvious" solution to that is to drive to the station. But then it just becomes easier to drive the whole way (especially if you need transport at the next station).
So people start driving and then there is less demand for public transport and more cars mean less people want to cycle.
I think self driving cars will be game changing. They solve the last mile problem which means metro and railway usage could very easily increase. Much, much higher usage of ride hailing means more people in each vehicles (might even replace buses with mini buses), those vehicles don't need to park in say a cycle lane or even downtown. This frees up land and opportunity for more walking and cycling. Also people will be more comfortable cycling closer to a self driving car.
I really hope this causes a cultural shift and that shift is well utilised. But it could do absolutely nothing if those car brains foam at the mouth and complain about a new cycle path and bike storage no matter the positives.
With the way cars are now self driving wouldn't solve the problem of people just using cars to get everywhere. Cause people would own their own self driving car and then you get the same exact problem as you mentioned before except now you also get the convenience of not having to actively drive so why use public transit at all if you can just let your car do all the work to take you to where you need to go. The real solution to the last mile problem is to make better walking/biking infrastructure and to have larger transit networks so people don't have to go super far to get access to transit. Also you mention having to bike at both ends of your transit and that's a problem I don't get cause you can just bring your bike with you on the train/bus. Or since you seem to be leaning towards a rental ride sharing model anyway rental bikes also solve that problem perfectly.
Everything you said could have been out in place within the last 50 years and it hasn't been done.
Like yes I agree. But also I just don't see it happening.
In terms of realistic positive impact I think more will be gained in the next 20 years from self driving cars than an increase in taxes and huge government spending.
I just don't see any gains from self driving cars. We already have ride share services that would allow what you're talking about to happen but people don't do it cause it's expensive. I doubt companies like Uber and Lyft are gonna lower their prices when self driving cars become a thing, they're just gonna take the extra profit for themselves. All it's gonna do is encourage more people to drive cause now one of the benefits of public transit, not having to actively drive and being able to do other things while traveling, will now be a benefit of self driving cars too. And on top of that it's gonna encourage more of the bad practices from the software industry to leak over into cars such as subscriptions services which companies have already been trying to push. Overall I don't see self driving cars being a benefit for society other than making driving more convenient and pushing even more towards dangerous car focused infrastructure.
Because it will be cheaper.
That's not how capitalism works as much as this website disagrees. Uber is already a good example of a company that undercut the competition.
Higher density in vehicles alone will make a huge difference.
Except that is how capitalism works time and time again. Companies will lower prices to gain market share then once they have a large control of the market will happily raise prices and keep any gains in productivity for themselves. The only reason Uber is trying to undercut people right now is because the industry is new and they want to try and capture the market for themselves. Once they do or some situation forms like what we have with internet with Comcast and other providers avoiding competing you can expect prices to not ever be lowered again. If anything this is another reason why I favor public transit over self driving cars because public transit investment is owned by the government and therefore the people, it's not gonna try and milk people for profit. Whereas these ride share companies already have shown they're willing to act shitty towards their drivers to drive up their own profits, I imagine these companies would continue to find ways to milk more profit out of the service with self driving cars and with drivers being gone that's gonna come at the expense of the users.
Then competition comes in.
Explain to me how public transport is going to suddenly become this thing that will replace cars when it has had 100 years to achieve that and hasn't?
I mean one example in the US I can look to is a city I lived in for a bit, Seattle. They have been actively expanding their public transit and even when I lived there I didn't use a car to get around and honestly the only problems I had was trips taking a bit longer sometimes and busses running not on time both of which are problems that can be fixed and with the expansions are actively being fixed. If you want an end game for what public transit can look like Europe is a great example. While I don't think America can ever quite reach that level I think we could definitely reach a point where cars are still required but only for people living further out in the country. Heck if you want a good example for public transit in a larger country the high speed rail China has been building is pretty impressive. Don't know the most about it but I've heard fairly good things about it (of course ignoring the other problems with China, but that isn't related to public transit). Overall public transit does work and works well especially in the cities that actively invest in it like Seattle and Portland (both of which I've lived in/near). The problem in America with adoption just comes from a very car centric attitude which at least in the cities I mentioned before has been slowly getting better as people start to realize that public transit benefits everyone, including drivers. Just because we have to fight to show that it benefits everyone and that building bigger roads doesn't help doesn't mean we should just surrender to car infrastructure because it's hard and takes a long time to push for public transit investments.
Oh Lord.
Well we are having two different conversations then. Because I am from Europe and I travelled a lot. Public transport is horrific. Here I was thinking of a future that is better than the crap that is in Europe but you don't even expect to reach that level.
I mean I will admit I don't know a lot about European public transit and it is quite a broad region. I mostly have looked at Amsterdam as that's the big example people use so when I say America won't reach that level I'm more referring to how nice it is there. I have visited the UK once and I have step family there and the public transit/trains were nice there to actually have them as options compared to America which often times just doesn't. When I visited I only visited Newcastle and London so again don't have a ton of knowledge but in general seemed nice. But from my experience not owning a car in America travel within cities is already starting to get pretty good where I've lived and I just wish more cities would invest in it and create high speed rail lines between cities for longer trips.
I'm not going to look too far into it but half of all trips in Netherlands are made by car and 36% in London (which is probably significantly lower than the rest of the country). I don't see either of those figures significantly changing. Netherlands is wayyyy denser than USA so you won't even get close to 50% car trips with the Netherlands system.
That's not to say you should copy what the Dutch do, you should. But it won't solve the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_the_Netherlands
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_London