Waymo in Dallas(waymo.com) |
Waymo in Dallas(waymo.com) |
People hate human drivers more than they hate the idea of AI drivers
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/business/uber-sexual-assa...
https://www.worldatlas.com/places/the-most-dangerous-highway...
When all I had was debit cards, I couldn't get any of them to work with Lyft or Uber in 2021.
I had plenty of money. I had nothing better to do than to try to make it work while I sat outside of that airport on a steamy July day in south Florida. I could not make it happen.
There were probably other ways to solve the problem, but I eventually got someone else to send me a car so I could get to where I was going.
(These days, I do have some credit cards. But amusingly, Uber won't let me log in at all unless I verify the number of a debit card that I had in 2021 -- a card that they refused to use, and which was associated with a bank that is itself no longer in business. That card is long gone.)
Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.
And then a Waymo dropped teenagers off at the police? I don't care if that was a human, I don't want no snitch car service [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027861
[2] https://www.404media.co/waymo-called-police-on-teens-san-mat...
In reality I think you can get better experiences than a taxi with a rideshare service (which they really haven't been for a very long time), but it's very hit or miss.
So less consistently bad as a taxi service... but far from consistently good.
I don't know who makes them, but the bill acceptors at the camera-driven self-checkouts at the Circle Ks in my ghetto have excellent behavior that is completely unlike the experience of fighting with a Coke machine in 1996.
A person can just put a stack of randomly-oriented, rough bills into the slot and it rapidly takes them off, one by one, and counts them up. I've probably used it a thousand times so far. I've tried to get it to screw up by feeding it bills in various states of decay and it has been perfectly accurate and trouble-free. It's quite a marvel. :)
The coin acceptor is similarly-good: It quickly turns a handful of loose change into a cup of coffee. Just drop it into the chute all at once, it makes some coin-sorter noises, and counts them up.
The combined contrivance is also very good at making change, in bills and coins.
So that part is certainly solvable, and that's good.
But now there's other problems: Those machines are big. That's fine for a convenience store, but it's probably not ideal for a car.
The machines are presumably full of money some of the time, and that can make them targets for thieves. Security is likely part of the reason why the ones at the Circle K are big. They might get emptied regularly, but a thief doesn't know whether they're empty or not until they break into it -- and they don't know if it's easy to break into or not until they make a mess of trying.
If they can make change (it seems like that would be a must-have feature), then they'll always need to have some amount of cash inside.
And then: It comes back to the depot. A worker empties it out and brings the cash inside. Now the depot itself is a target that it would not otherwise be.
And finally: They have to get rid of that cash. A regular person doing this has a big X on their back, so in big corpo world that's often the territory of men with guns and armored cars.
---
Or, you know: Maybe cashless payments are OK. If it would behoove Waymo to accept prepaid debit cards (I don't know if it does or not), then those are easy to buy and load with cash at name-brand convenience stores. This ultimately shifts the expense of the cash-handling burden to the consumer, but I guess that's better than them not getting a ride when they need it.
The rewards are also free to me in the sense that the merchant pays them. If the merchant has priced them in, then the rewards aren’t free, but using cash is throwing away something I’m still paying for.
Example, my landlord specified in my original lease one time pet fee. In my newest year lease no pet fee. I was required to pay the pet fee through some saas dedicated to this. Now that website emailed me to let me know they’ll be charging my annual fee.
What fee? What for? They are providing no ongoing value to anyone as far as I can tell. They refuse to explain or cancel. Well they can explain to Mastercard and I’ll wash my hands of the situation.
Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliver anything you can live in.
So instead, Cities should lease Waymos (or other brands), and provide these vehicles for use by affordable tenants in properties with limited parking.
Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing or you'll end up handing the keys back to the lender and bankrupt on the deal. Instead, if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units, that tenants have first priority to use for free (or an amount subsidized per month) up to reasonable limits, then you'd address the concern "where are people going to park and how to get to work?".
it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
What's it cost per year to lease? $30k? That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily? The cars can be rented to the public on off hours to offset their operating cost.
It's a lot more cost efficient and can be done TODAY, not 5 years after complicated LIHTC financing with 4 layers of other public funding, 3 years of approvals, and 2 years of construction.
> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!)
I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita.
I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus
As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people!
It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus.
I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.
We did that though!
It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss.
Ex. Penn Station's real estate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...
I suspect this will only work in the US if the "rail company" is actually public.
- https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod
- https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.h...
A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an entirely different location for dinner. I think it would be incredibly hard to get that problem right and you would still be fighting an uphill battle that people don’t like to take the public bus.
In the end you waste long enough time to defend it to delay investments in affordable housing and public transit, both. You then funnel that money into road construction and fuel subsidies.
I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble.
All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even.
Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.
Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.
It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.
A bus could serve 40-100 daily. The infrastructure already exists - the same as for cars. It's pretty low cost also - especially electric buses that have lower maintenance costs. The problem is that you have to ride with other people.
Imo, the biggest problem is that of convenience. Convenience (time), cost, comfort, and (perceived) safety are the factors people use to make transportation mode choices.
If buses aren't prioritized in traffic above single occupant vehicles via dedicated bus lanes, signalling, etc. then they'll always be slower than a car because of the additional stops. Frequency is also a consideration that factors into timing, as well as transfers.
If any US city wants to get people onto transit, they need to prioritize transit above less efficient modes, amongst other things.
Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.
That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.
The problem is rush hour. You still will need some kind of minibus that can serve 4-8 people efficiently, and take up way less space. An added benefit is that if you cut peak traffic volume by 3/4th, you can eliminate congestion.
but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.
The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.
I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.
Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.
tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on.
Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.
I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.
So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.
It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.
There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost.
Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time.
And now, it is stuck this way.
This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc.
In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more.
The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains.
The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design).
So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.
... in the US
> Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing
Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world.
> if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units
Or some kind of vehicle that comes by every 15min and connects to a network of other transports that are time interval based.
Or have car share vehicles attached to the property. Something that is routinely done in Europe for decades.
> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.
Except it doesn't last that long and is not that expensive unless you are incompetent and live in a broken society.
Cities in China added 100s of miles of metro since 2010. Making bad excuses and doubling down on car dependency are a big part on why its not happening.
And btw. the US has so many fucking roads already (btw they are also very expensive, but I guess that money doesn't count), if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system. But of course taking a lane away from cars wouldn't be acceptable, better give money to waymo so people can sit in traffic in a Waymo vehicle.
It is not about cost, its about political will and the societal believe that public transit is for the unwashed poor and racially inferiors, spending money on it is charity, not transportation policy, and that any upstanding citizen in a car needs to have unlimited freedom to drive everywhere and never get into trouble.
> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily?
This has been done for many decades with carsharing already, its standard practice in many developments. What exactly does Waymo or self driving change here from an investor perspective? Ok maybe if its really close buy the Waymo can go back when you don't need it anymore. So maybe you need half as many. But of course the Waymo vehicle is also much more expensive and has capacity you don't need.
But of course, even with that carsharing concept, the far better solution that almost everybody in the developed world does, outside the US, is to simply have good public transport, you build it first, and then build the new housing around those transport links. Car sharing is only for very niche situations and that's a good thing, because more cars in cities are bad.
They can subpoena recordings and Waymo will call the cops on you if you commit a crime in one of their cars, but your statement implies Flock-like access which the police simply don't have.
They have become completely normal, and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers. They are very predictable, and will always let you pull in front of them when changing lanes (unlike a lot of other LA drivers).
I have seen a few incidents where they seem 'stuck', and it was a bit annoying and kind of funny, but again, it does not happen nearly as often as for human drivers.
I also like taking them. It is nice to just get in and relax and not have to talk to anyone or worry about who is going to pick you up. You can control the temperature and music from your phone, you can drop the pin exactly where you want to be dropped off and picked up, and the ride is smooth and comfortable.
We can debate all the knock on effects of Waymos, but the user experience is pretty great.
Austin, Houston and San Antonio are hub and spoke cities. They are designed with their downtowns as loci for their metros with suburbs sprawling around them concentricly. Waymo gets you to a lot of places within these cities for that reason.
Dallas is built around and between Dallas and Fort Worth, kind of like LA, but more sparse. Fort Worth is still very attached to their downtown (Sundance Square and University); Dallas is very much not. When I think of Dallas, I think of Addison, Plano, Grapevine/Irving/Las Colinas, Carrollton, Richardson, and the HEB (Hurst/Euless/Bedford) none of whom are represented in this service area.
This will be useful for hanging out in Bishop Arts and Deep Ellum, and the rich SMU grads up in old money Dallas, but I hope they're doing this to train up on highway driving.
(My critique of Waymo's service area also applies to DART, their public transit network. They have trains built around downtown in a way that's meaningless for most folks that want to use it for daily commutes. With most of their non-downtown bus routes running on hourly schedules, it's no surprise that DART posts anemic ridership numbers every year.)
This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean the cars? How are others thinking about this?
Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…
At $200, you might as well add lidar. At $50,000 vision only made more sense.
A trained marksman may be able to hit a clay pigeon with a 22, but it's easier with a shotgun.
So saying a human can do something doesn't mean it's the easiest way.
It will be logic and driving behavior that makes the difference between Waymo/Tesla/others rather than whether the perception accuracy is micron level or not.
Tesla also has a robotaxi service in Dallas, FWIW, in testing.
Even if you don't agree with the advocacy part of it, I think it's still valuable to watch to get the "urban planning professional" perspective on it
I used to be frustrated at their poorly thought-out arguments until I realized none of it matters. The videos are made for a certain demographic to jerk off about their special interests. The real world is going to move on and stuff is going to get implemented. These people and their opinions have no real world impact and don't matter outside of their niche little social groups.
Self driving cars will happen, and not because "billionaires and big companies with lots of money", but because it'll provide increased automation. It'll make it easier for people to get from point A to point B, even if it's not using buses that people like NJB and his ilk are for some reason obsessed with.
> Dallasites
Also, do you have the same issue with the demonyms Manhattanite or Seattleite?
If the car I'm in cause a big damage or kill someone? I guess the damage will be paid by the insurance but whom insurance? Mine or waymos? And what about criminal implications? Insurance doesn't cover thoose for sure.
I imagine Google has enough money that they can self-insure. Particularly since it's a very low accident rate.
PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e71380706dc865d40a6f...
> As of July 23, 2026, we have temporarily removed our safety analysis from this report, as well as relevant references to the analysis throughout the report (denoted in-text by a reference to this section). We were made aware of data discrepancies between City agency data for New York City for-hire vehicle crashes with serious injuries or deaths, as well as City agency data definitions related to such crashes. We are working to resolve these discrepancies and ensure our findings properly represent the data and the driving records of New York City for-hire vehicle drivers and Waymo vehicles. Other than this section, the remainder of our report remains unchanged.
My guess is jdlyga read this report before it was modified.
this reddit thread has excerpts from the report and some comments explaining why the comparison was fraught
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1v1qiz0/waymo_has...
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for > 3 months
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for < 1 month
Inclement weather is likely the differentiator. Blue state California gets Waymo in its biggest cities, which handily do not get much snow. The other Waymo cities are all below the Mason-Dixon Line.
https://www.twu.org/twu-tech-newsletter-waymo-no-mo-in-nyc-f...
There is close to zero chance it gets approval in NYC before 2030. I'd be totally floored if he goes against the union, but the optics are absolutely terrible for cabs.
Does that include the suburbs?
so, no suburbs, only enclaves
Our light changed to green and the Waymo waited until the next red turned green and then proceeded into the intersection in anticipation of the cars ahead moving.
You're hilariously wrong on most of your points because just spend 5 minutes researching how CA fails to build rail. Not even worth responding to further.
$346 million gets you utility improvements and 2 miles of bus lane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit
Building arrangements that would rely on them are mostly illegal anyways.
Allowing driverless cars to serve buildings without parking would be a huge step forward for those reasons alone.
For what it's worth, it's mostly illegal to build a housing that's the only served by buses too.
Last, the US has passed the point where it has the cheap labor and government competency for mass transit. Faster to do something now than wait for a new government or robotics that can replace all the construction workers and designers
Dallas in the United States.
All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing.
Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run.
Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.
The only reason sprawling suburbs can exist is because they are subsidized by inner cities.
Building and maintaining miles of roads and utilities is not cheap and the number of people in these areas makes it impossible for them to cover these costs unless they're astronomically wealthy.
How about if autonomous cars would be bigger, so from same apartment block people could ride-share to same office downtown?
What if those cars would be on rails - imagine how simpler the autonomous part would be? Lower friction and fuel costs savings will be a bonus.
/s on my part obviously.
Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.
If waymo is willing to ban people for shitting or smoking meth in their shared cars, that's purely an advantage over government run transportation
Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then?
I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.
plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.
Ironically the best way to verify this is that when they do cause traffic issues, it becomes national news.
Imagine breaking down and blocking an intersection in Edgewood Georgia, and then getting a call that night from your Uncle in Oregon saying he saw your breakdown on the news...
As a disclaimer, this is neither an anti-Waymo comment or a pro-Tesla comment, I just find in interesting how these small sample size incidents are both covered and perceived in the absence of actual verifiable safety statistics.
I love when HN mentions my state or city, but that's the road and neighborhood one block down from me. I feel seen.
To add something more substantive to this thread, apparently Google's deal with Uber for distribution has become incredibly adversarial in our state. Uber won't explicitly let you book a Waymo or let you know if you're in the Waymo range.
That's really cool but makes sense. Can't wait for them to be available in London. I'd use them instead of Uber even if they cost much more.
On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Which means that self-driving cars need to be a magnitude of order safer than humans.
And even though a self-driving car will never road rage or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets, we'll still tolerate humans driving more than one odd 1-in-a-billion ai-error caused incident.
You are lacking in creativity and vision. With networked autonomous vehicles, all cars can be used as a weapon simultaneously.
Any company that builds self driving cars or operates them should show how reliable they think they are. Not by showing pr material or stats, that's all 'free'.
Make yourself, as the company, legally liable. If you think it's good, put your name on it and own the risk.
When that happens, I'll trust whoever says it's safe.
On the contrary, autonomous vehicles (especially if something like automated package delivery becomes an offered service) allow car bombs without the suicide bomber inside. Instead you just place an explosive in the device and send it to the intended destination - as an organization the primary concern then becomes whether the ride is traceable back to you which might be do-able given how "frictionless" rideapps are as long as you get a burner phone, prepaid credit card and are very careful about making sure the device is clean and can't be tied to your person.
Right now the tech is limited to places where carbombings aren't commonplace, but I think driverless cars open a huge potential issue in other markets. I absolutely agree they're safer than drivers are, but let's not be hyperbolic.
This was the hypothesis. But based on e.g. FSD, it doesn’t seem borne out in reality.
Most self-driving enterprises are trying very hard to ensure their non-driver continues to carry this liability instead of their company.
This helps a them v. us attitude. The company needs to be trusted widescale by the public, and do seem to undercut their own PR efforts on that, repeatedly.
It comes down to accountability, IMO. We tend to be forgiven to humans because we are humans too and we know we, humans, make mistakes, and these can have serious consequences.
When a human makes a mistake, they are immediately accountable, and therefore judged and forgiven (or not). When technology makes a mistake, who's to blame? The CEO? The software developer who wrote the code? The tester? The architect?
Yes, we want technology to be an order of magnitude safer than humans for this reason, because we know that, given the current way our judicial system works, when technology makes a mistake, no one is held accountable.
I completely disagree with this. I don't "give a pass" to humans killing other humans with a car.
Every year that skeptics delay adoption of autonomous driving is another year where tens of thousands of deaths could be prevented.
unless I'm missing something, you meant "order of magnitude"
I can’t wait for broader adoption of self driving cars.
I would not compare the user experience to drivers, or the safety record to private cars. I would compare the user experience and the safety record to human driven taxis, buses, light rail, and metro. I am curious if the rider experience is actually any better then taking the M train from the Castro to SF state or the 49 bus between the Mission and Geary. The latter is certainly cheaper, and orders of magnitude more efficient.
But if where you're going is only served by bus or requires some walking... it really depends on how you feel. Waymo is pretty expensive, but I have had some truly miserable bus rides in SF.
I prefer not to live like that.
That depends on how low they can get the costs. Waymo took delivery of the last Jaguar i-Pace, and are scaling up production of the Zeekr-based EVs, which I assume are significantly cheaper.
I think the math works, using car rental companies as an anchor point: they are (mostly) profitable*; they have relatively lower Cost of Revenue, but Waymo will have much fatter margins.
* There was a blip when Hertz had to write-down its bold bet on EVs didn't quite work out.
Substitute in whatever numbers you think are reasonable.
So yes, I think they will be able to turn a profit by charging more for the experience. Which is a humanless car.
But also I support the critique. Especially of DART, which I don’t see how the rail service ever works in a city designed like this. With residents who hop all over the metroplex on a somewhat random and sporadic basis, covering great distances. I think Waymo/robot is the best path for mass transit until we use it so much we stop buying cars. Then, the city can build rails and hopefully robots can be more efficient with less lanes of road. The Waymo solution gives A to B where a rail requires ABCD, in a metro where first and last mile may be 10+ miles each, that just doesn’t work. Also, rail has a chicken and egg problem. It really needs critical mass to run more frequently and justify the expense but it can’t get much usage at all because of this first and last mile problem. So it is kind of like a zombie of solution, we invest in it to seem modern and whatnot, but in reality it’s mostly a transportation subsidy for lower income people that can’t drive, it supplements the bus system which many car owners would never use and don’t consider an option for their first/last miles (it’s a class thing in Texas, just is, most people will never use a public bus). A small percentage of the population use it more than twice a year.
Idk, just thoughts.
The reason I say Waymo specifically is that I don't think it's well appreciated the tech advantage Waymo has by using Google's unequalled geospatial data. Elon keeps claiming that Teslas will do the same thing much cheaper and everywhere, but there's no actual evidence that that is possible. Grinding out larger and larger service areas in more cities is likely to be the way automated rides expand for the next several years.
Why should Google leave money on the table? They will raise the price until it's just below what people are already paying.
I never thought of this, but I think this is a valid concern. Uber drivers will end up spending in their locality while money that goes to Waymo will be used for further investment that’s probably concentrated in the Bay Area. I will say this though, Uber it self somehow takes > 50% of the cut a driver and makes and once again spends it on engineers in California, so Uber is guilty of this same issue, but Waymo is probably worse at this than Uber.
In general AI is guilty of destroying the demand for normal human labour and accumulating money into companies with highly paid engineers.
Dallards?
It should be Dallan?
"Dallasite" sounds like "parasite". Dallasian/etc. would be better.To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:
* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute
* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles
* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch
* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent
The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.
That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.
If the cybercab was 1/5 the price it would be $14k. It won't be $14k.
I read this as Tesla Cybertruck and was mightily confused for a minute.
Looking it up in Wikipedia I see it has no driver support (steering, pedals, etc). Is that even road-legal?
Being smaller does not help that much much in cost per mile, but has a big cost for functionality.
If you have a large enough battery to deliver sufficient range for an electric taxi (driving around most of the day, hopefully, if it is well-utilized), with 4 wheels for stability... I doubt that you could really get significantly smaller where the smaller size would make a big difference.
The cameras, LIDAR, and sensors are all fixed costs. You need them on even a single-person car. And they’re extremely costly.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic...
Waymo is literally a private company.
> make areas much more walkable and bikeable.
How so? Autonomous car companies have every incentive to continue lobbying for car only infrastructure? Why would they want infrastructure that increases competition?
Cars are way more expensive if we're talking "full prices".
You are simply applying two different standards for road cost and rail costs. Roads are fully tax funded and all land use decisions are made to support them. And then there is insanely huge subsidy in how parking lots work, not to mention tons of other regulation that forces the creation of parking, zoning and so on.
Your statement only makes sense, because what your 'normal' is actually an insanely pro car, anti train normal.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...
Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity: $595281000000.
How big to they have to be before they count as ‘big’ to you? In your ideal world, getting your Google account banned not only means losing all your photos, documents, contacts, conversations, and access to all your other accounts (GMail) but now also means you can't go anywhere besides what you can reach on foot, via whatever anemic local transit exists, or via similarly-expensive Uber/etc. Super cool; sign me up.
There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing.
To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.
Since the BRT lane on Van Ness, taking the 49 is more like taking a more shaky Muni train honestly. Frequent enough that it doesn’t get crowded, and it doesn’t get stuck in traffic, meaning much faster ride. As San Francisco builds more of these bus lanes, the case for the robo-taxis is only going to get weaker.
It's also likely that if a switchover is aggressively pursued it'll cause a massive social backlash and likely evolve into a culture war issue.
I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.
I, and people like me create wealth. Some of that wealth is pooled at an administrative level that makes sense across a town, state, or nation. Its still wealth I created; and I expect it to be used to benefit me, ideally proportionally to the tax taken.
Unemployment can be justified as crime prevention; Disability and healthcare systems limit individual worst-case outcomes (especially if due to chance). Super-commuter subsidies do what?
I want a Ferrari. It would be good for me. Should taxes pay for it?
cities grow in capabilities in direct proportion to the number of people who have access to it and their capabilities. it might be cheaper labour leading to better roads, plumbing etc
We know a lot about how to improve road safety for pedestrians, but its just not valued in some places.
Replacing 100s of millions of cars with smart robot is not safety solution. Actually improving road safety with cheap well proven methods is the solution.
Please state your concerns.
Cambridge Dictionary (UK): "A system of vehicles such as buses and trains that operate at regular times on fixed routes and are used by the public."
Collins Dictionary: "A system of buses, trains, etc., running on fixed routes, on which the public may travel."
Is the city and county provided point-to-point transit for disabled people[0] not "public transit"? Is Line 0[1] not public transit? Most people say yes; the dictionary should be updated to reflect actual usage, not the other way around.
[0] https://www.mta.info/accessibility/access-a-ride
[1] https://fairtiq.com/en/blog/line-zero-the-public-transport-e...
Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.
I jest, but not completely. The US is more dense but more distributed too. You can’t realistically link someone in a rural West Virginia holler up to a regular bus schedule, nor can you build a train between Morgantown and Pittsburgh that gets ridership.
America doesn’t do badly at public transit in places like Florida where private companies can fill the gap and the communities are within a reasonable distance and the geography is flat and simple. See the Brightline trains for proof of concept. But it’s kind of ridiculous to imagine Australia and the US to be comparable in that way.
That said, Waymo is indeed not the right tool for the actual inter-city trips.
Waymo's got the legal go ahead to use freeways, but they're working on some of the subtleties of self-driving on the freeway vs city streets before enabling it for everybody. (Specifically, California car culture is you merge left early instead of staying in the right lane until you have to. Apparently the Waymo driver was staying in the right lane.)
In this situation, you absolutely can (and are encouraged to) press the support button in the car to talk to a human agent. They have the ability to tell the car to go somewhere it normally wouldn't go for any situation that humans can reason about.
> ...they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago
It was for the best; the Kalanick-era company culture wasn't (/isn't?) compatible with the levels of public trust required for successful self driving.
Y’all -> group of people (howdy yall)
All y’all -> everyone (all yall need to listen up!)
All’s yall -> only thing (alls yall need is another beer)
All y’all’s -> singular possessive of everyone’s stuff (put all y’all’s shit away)
All’s y’all’s -> plural possessive of everyone’s stuff (alls y’all’s cars are blocking me in). This one is a bit awkward and most people just use all y’all’s instead
Hmm. Maybe in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris,_Texas?
Cars are the very bottom, by very considerable margin. You need to prove otherwise.
[citation needed]
Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.
Genuinely and not trolling.
Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts.
My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens.
If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM.
Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car.
With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.
Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...
Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)?
As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact.
I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.
That makes the fixed route better than a flexible route. Sure the flexible route is faster in the best case. However it is unpredictable and people have deadlines of when they can arrive: a flexible route cannot meet those consistently enough.
Things like WalkScore show up on real estate listings as a value add.
[Edit] I am serious. Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.
No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park.
Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.
You can have strong anti- "car-culture" views and still be committed to the truth.
Would they have published that result with the same fanfare?
We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.
Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.
Your comparison to Netherlands is rough because you are talking about a country that has a fairly mild climate and older cities that generally have density and not much sprawl. I don’t comprehend these examples.
Also those cities are incredibly tiny with probably a concentration of employment. Keep in mind the Netherlands is about 115 miles wide and maybe 180 north/south diagonally. That’s roughly the size of the Dallas metro area.
Someone who lives in Arlington might commute to downtown Dallas, an office building in Plano or downtown Fort Worth. You multiply that by millions of people and it becomes a very hard problem that a typical city bus cannot handle.
Now I do think there is probably opportunity for a Waymo like solution with 10 seats that could do driverless ride sharing but I don’t see how a city can build a bus system that works, people don’t want to take a bus unless it has zero transfers. The last mile problem is incredibly hard and places like Texas are hot. I asking through a strip mall parking lot is further than most of the cities in the Netherlands in that video.
If the Netherlands is the size of the Dallas metro area, then why isn't the Dallas metro area like the Netherlands? Dallas-Fort Worth has over 8 million people in it, it's not like it's a drastically smaller population than the Netherlands. This argument of "America has a bunch of empty space outside of metro areas" is irrelevant to the conditions inside of those metro areas.
Most Americans by population live in metropolitan areas. They don't live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, some people do, but 80%+ of Americans live in very much urban areas. So we can exclude the <20% of Americans from this "we should have decent public transit" debate if you would like, I am fine with that.
The Netherlands actually built out a lot of car-focused infrastructure in the mid-century just like the US. The difference is that they have since pushed that development mindset out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTSNWDTE888
This idea that America "can't go back" is a farce, because it makes an incorrect assumption that other countries never grew in population and therefore never built any new suburbs after the spread of the automobile.
The Netherlands grew from 11 million people in 1960 to 18 million people today. Do you think the Netherlands never built a new neighborhood in that time period?
This doesn't mean that people in the Netherlands or Japan don't own cars. Far from it. What it does mean is that driving a personally owned car in a one-person-per-car paradigm isn't necessary to survive and thrive in those places. Transit-oriented development means that they have other options.
You are concerned about how difficult the climate is, here is how Singapore stays walkable despite hot and rainy climate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_SJ1NBMrH0
Here is how people use public transit in Yakutsk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0
I will also inform you that buses are indeed air conditioned and have heaters, just like a car. You can think of a bus as a car but much larger and fits more people inside.
Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses? I transfer buses all the time in my city, or transfer from bus to train. That doesn't mean it takes me a long time go get around.
I will tell you why: because demand is induced. There isn't some innate human nature where we all automatically prefer cars and have decided by evolution that anything less than a car is less ideal. No, demand is instead induced: if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.
Induced demand is especially prevalent in the US because personal vehicles are heavily subsidized over other options. The US government engages in forever wars to secure low oil prices, subsidized by federal tax dollars. Gas taxes are underfunded and don't keep up with inflation to ensure driving is offered below the real cost. Society subsidizes traffic deaths as nobody, not even insurance companies, compensate society when a 19 year old dies in a drunk driving crash and all the economic activity they would have generated over their lifespan evaporates.
Personally owned cars at a ratio of one car per person are literally the most expensive way to get around on this planet until you get into stuff like private jets and helicopters. They're even more expensive than buying a plane ticket between many destinations. You say that people in Dallas don't want to take the bus, but if it was available, reliable, had a frequent schedule, and got them to everywhere they needed to be, they probably would be very excited to ditch the $5,000-10,000 annual total cost of vehicle ownership.
And, while public transit in Texas has a long way to go, Dallas Area Rapid Transit has ridership of 52,823,800 annually. If you are saying that people in Dallas don't want to transfer buses, I'd have to ask where those 52 million rides are coming from?
Practically all of those towns have had a focus of building walkable/bikeable spaces with dense mini-downtown areas for at least decades if not longer.
Its not impossible for this to eventually happen to these already built US suburbs, but a lot of these places were explicitly designed around everyone coming and going by car. A lot of these suburbs weren't even planned with the idea of pedestrians ever leaving the neighborhood. They'll have few actual entrances and exits, with those rarely connected to any kind of infrastructure outside other than busy roads.
> fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented
A lot of those fast-growing areas are in cities with zero transit and often don't even neighbor a city with any real transit. Look at places like Princeton, Celina, Melissa, Anna, etc. They border towns like Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, and more which also aren't connected to DART. All of these towns actively shun public transit. A lot of home buyers in these areas just don't care about transit access at all, with many actively opposed to transit. So what, maybe Princeton does decide to make some tranist. Ok, where do I go with that? From one suburban house to another without a car? A bit easier time getting to Little Ceasars, Taco Bell, and Walmart? Its entirely disconnected from practically any other place the people there actually need to go, because its not like many people actually work in Princeton or Celina.
So it'll take a lot of additional development and rethinking of what these places are and how they ultimately function for transit to actually make sense there.
I'm not saying public transit and walkability/bikeability can't possibly happen in North Texas. I like biking around, I ride DART when it makes sense, and I do push for expansion of bike infrastructure and good DART access. But I also see the heat index for today is 105F, it'll be about 110F on Friday. I don't think I'll be riding a bike to get the groceries. I don't think the Netherlands often gets weeks where the heat index is >100F practically every day. And finally, it will take changing a lot of minds about public transit to actually get buy-in from a lot of the population to actually do it.
Cold weather transit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0
Transit is small towns and suburbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas. In 1960, 8 million fewer people lived in the Netherlands, and cars definitely existed and were mainstream back then. This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.
It's never too late to change course. It's not a black and white choice where we must suddenly give up our vehicles and never drive, it's more like a gradual increase in the number of trips that are feasible and enjoyable without a car.
I know people who lived in Cleveland who started using the bus to get to work when the HealthLine BRT line was completed. They still drive basically everywhere else, but that one bus line changed their daily habits dramatically.
I have never lived in Amsterdam but my obeservatiob is that these are older cities already baked in with density. So it’s much easier to switch back to bicycle and share infrastructure.
You can build a new city in Texas with transit in mind but people are still going to be commuting 30mins or more in every direction.
But since you asked in kind of a flippant way: who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.
Non-americans don't. To me, being socially expected to tip for a Taxi feels like a parody from a sketch comedy. ditto for tipping barbers or expecting tips over 10%. The only time I've tipped a Uber was when me and my friends were at risk of losing a train. The driver (unprompted) went pedal to the metal to make it on time, so afterwards I gave him a couple of bucks.
Tip culture is bad for rideshare drivers in aggregate anyways. The apps carefully manage the pay of drivers on each market so necessary supply is guaranteed at minimal cost. If a expectation of tipping exists, the platforms simply pay less. Now drivers also have maximize for tips instead of just driving the goddamn car.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
But when it’s non-car transit suddenly it’s too much money, not profitable, nimby, etc.
When cars enjoy fuel subsidies , (mostly) free roads and endless expansion.
Update: some car brains over the world decided that even bike lanes are an issue. When bike lanes have bigger throughput, costs don’t even make a dent compared to roads, maintenance is negligible, etc.
Generally societies that invest a lot of capex in high capacity transit do quite well.
Also roads have high capex along with operation cost, along with high private cost. Not even mention the additional cost for health and other hidden costs.
If you go by total lift-time cost by capacity then its a fantastic deal.
Okay two, Avenue and the shopping center.
You could not efficiently run a bus service in most US cities at a level of “good service”. Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs but I don’t see that happening yet and Waymo is at least a nice step on the potential direction.
Even with great service it’s an uphill battle to get enough ridership.
Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car. That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.
"As the Waymo approached the double-parked SUV, a child ran out from behind the SUV and into the roadway, directly in front of the Waymo."
Waymo cannae change the laws of physics. Braking distances exist for AI-driven vehicles just as much as human-driven ones.
"The child reported minor injuries and did not require transportation to a hospital. ... Waymo said at the time that the child ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV and that the vehicle braked hard before contact, reducing speed significantly before impact."
Edit: Waymo's blog[2] says it "reduc[ed] speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made", and that "our peer-reviewed model[3] shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph".
[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/new-details-released-in-way...
[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/01/a-commitment-to-transparency-...
Reaction times differ, though, and abilities to blend deceleration and turning and awareness of what else is around.
(Waymo's tendency to be a good defensive driver and bleed a few miles per hour at anything odd help too... though it is worth noting that if Waymo was 1MPH slower, that 6MPH collision wouldn't have happened at all).
I think self driving buses would be awesome. I can imagine having smaller ones that come more regularly too. Add some amenities like a tracker that tells you exactly when to leave to catch the bus, and exactly when you'll reach your destination, and it would probably be an awesome UX.
But I don't know if I agree that it'd be 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars. And the overhead of a car is huge, you need one driver for a maximum of 4 passengers and probably a mode of 1 passenger. The overhead of a bus is smaller, because one driver can carry 30 or 60 people. Arguably, you'd need less of them because busses carry more people, but for some reason the unit economics often doesn't work out like that IRL. It'd make more sense for a neighborhood to have just one xbox that everyone shares when they need it, rather than everyone having their own xbox that's idle 95% of the time, but that's not how it went. (Same for any other computing device.)
My neighborhood is close to the city center. Even so, bus service is very sparse, recently reduced to just twice a day. In addition walking to bus stops is long and difficult, or even impossible, for many elderly or disabled residents.
I envision a Waymo-like car service transporting people to/from destinations or if it's more practical, a transit center. I concur car services wouldn't be the cheapest option but may well be the most effective.
> Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order.
Waymo is no more required to turn over data to the government than you are.
Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?
We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed.
We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.
In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions.
Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them.
So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got.
And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button.
At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.
A lot of old train right of ways still pretty much exist. For many areas it often isn't too outlandish for those lines to be brought back, if there was a will to do so.
Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for
Cars won _and_ and it wasn't a fair fight.
This was almost certainly not an isolated incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
Every city has courier services, including Uber.
Cool, so if you have the numbers or graphs, paste a link
I of course believe you're lying. Probably out of the standard xenophobia.
It wouldn't make sense considering average US household infrastructure vs average EU household infrastructure so I sincerely doubt you're able to prove it, or whoever you're going to cite as proof.
- Dallas is much much hotter than the Netherlands.
- Overall Netherlands population density (including rural areas) is higher than DFW metro.
- For most of the cities in the YouTube video shared they are a few miles by a few miles. The length of a typical Dallas frontage road. It makes sense to walk and bike in those small hamlets.
Going back to density, you are right the Netherlands moved back from a car centric life but that did not change population density before or after. Most cities in the Netherlands are a multiple of DFW so you have this tough argument. What works in the Netherlands is not necessarily a solution for DFW. You would need to rebuild the city to be denser, have more businesses located together and then build out transit while ignoring that it’s too hot for a good portion of the year to ride a bike or walk around outside.
My back of napkin math ended up with 30k sq ft per person in DFW compared to 20k sq ft per person in all of the Netherlands.
I think Waymo is a great step in the right direction.
Density of where people actually choose to live, which you've already alluded to with the things you're saying. Similar population, similar kind of area. But look at both on a satellite image. One actually has a lot of farmland for that area. Where people actually live its often a good bit denser.
Why is it like that? That's what people have voted for, that's what they've supported. Try actually talking to the people who live there and suggest to them they should live in a zero lot line home or a townhouse with shared walls.
> Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses?
I wouldn't mind transferring busses if there was good service. But instead transferring busses around here usually means sitting in the baking hot sun on a concrete bench in >100F heat for a half hour. If the next bus was in like 5 minutes, I probably wouldn't care.
It also often means you're probably taking a very suboptimal route instead of a direct route to the place. So not only do you have an additional wait to change busses, you then also have a much longer path to ride. And you're likely going to end up going a slower average speed, as you're having to stop to pickup/dropoff people along this longer route as opposed to just continuing on. For instance, it'll take me over an hour to go to where the new Dallas Stars arena will be in Plano as I need to make 4-5 bus changes. Its a 15 minute drive although it will probably be way more than that once 20k people try to leave at once.
Now, obviously, busses can change routes. They can get more busses and do more routes. They can get more busses and offer faster service. There's a lot of potential solutions to this. It doesn't have to be that way. But in the end getting people to put more funding into it is pretty challenging.
> if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.
Its often not very comfortable riding a bicycle in 110F heat index when you've got this air-conditioned box you could ride in sitting in your garage.
Robot cars would be the same. Insurance is financially responsible, and if the accident is deemed caused by a flaw, it would be the company that made them that is held responsible for fixing it.
I feel like you could come up with long lists of cases where there is no direct human to blame. Someone may be at fault down the chain, but nobody who was directly controlling the machine. Just like if a mechanic screws up my brakes and I end up crashing, it wasn't directly me who caused the crash, even though I was sitting in the seat.
Unless there’s a very bad and widespread issue. Then you join a class action and get $24 on a visa giftcard you can’t figure out how to redeem and then forget about.
When a robot car makes a mistake, all robot cars learn from the experience. When a human messes up, only that human learns from it.
The company owning and operating the robot?
That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.
Also a common thing I see happening with the Tesla Autopilot for an accident is that it's often not the fault of the autopilot. It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second. Naturally the driver will lie or not even realize they were the problem as they may have had auto pilot active 1 second before the crash. I think it's that natural human instinct when you see something happening to crap the wheel or hit the pedal in that "oh shit" kind of reflex. And that sometimes causes the driver to make a mistake.
I actually was in a crash with a person driving a Tesla vehicle where I think this was the cause. 3 lane highway, they were in the center lane, I was in the left lane, transport truck in the right lane. The transport truck slightly drift towards the edge of their lane and the Tesla driver freaked out and over corrected their steering wheel to the left and came swerving into my lane and was losing control of their car between both lanes until they suddenly slammed on their brakes in front of me. I gotta say, the Tesla brakes combined with the regenerative braking have some impressive stopping power. Unfortunately that also meant they stopped way faster and so suddenly that I hit their rear a bit. I got very lucky that insurance ruled in my favour and had them 100% at fault.
Apologies for the tangent, just trying to illustrate a point via a personal story of how even when the system is working well and keeping the driver safe, they can still make a human-like overreaction which overrides the autopilot and leads to a crash.
I get pretty annoyed when I see news articles with the headlines "Tesla crashed while auto pilot activated", but then there has yet to be an investigation and we actually don't know whether autopilot was in fact active or not yet. It's a clickbait style headline that I think makes people more hesitant about the progress of Waymo and Robotaxi vehicles.
Per The Guardian:
“Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. […]”
“The real surprise came after [Mark Rober’s] experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.”
It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.
This might be news to you, but it doesn't cost $130k to drive an old Toyota Camry around in DFW.
If the average Singaporean could buy a car for $5k and the government mandated their apartment had a parking spot or two, you think they'd all still want to be in the heat all the time?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying transit can't possibly work in hot places. But you're needing to convince people to leave a nice comfortable air-conditioned space to willingly go be outside in the heat. Singapore did that by making cars incredibly expensive to own. I can't imagine making a Toyota Corolla cost $130K to be a popular policy in the US.
Back to the topic, why should I not be allowed a choice of having a subsidized/free waymo that prioritizes me and my neighbors (given I would be participating in this fully out of my own volition)?
If I am allowed to make that choice, do you believe that poors should have access to the same service and be allowed to make the same choices as non-poors in that regard? If no, then why not?
To be honest, if you have a good path to this the $30 m won’t be hard to raise. If I had the skill to do this at 1/1000 cost I would not hesitate to start the company tomorrow.
I think autonomous buses would be terrific. But for a different reason: it removes labor as a cost centre and scheduling constraint, allowing demand responsiveness. Thought so last year too so it’s not like I’m arguing here https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-15/Fully_Autono...
Also, whereas the stock Jaguar I-Pace was $70k, the Waymo one with all its sensors and compute have estimates ranging from $150k to $200k. In a comment made in late 2024, Waymo CEO Dmitri Dolgov mentions that the sensors and compute themselves cost $100k [3].
> The equipment on Waymo’s fifth-generation robot taxis — electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles — costs as much as $100,000, Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s co-chief executive, said on a podcast in February.
That is the same generation as the current I-Pace fleet that makes up the majority of Waymos.
[1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/waymo/waymos-retrofitted-robota...
[2] https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/2073967445509882286?s=20
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/technology/waymo-expansio...
So wouldn't that be the reason the figures would look 2.5x worse than the regular Jaguar? I'm sure there are other factors of course since running the computer systems, lidar and all the other features will also consume more power, so I'm sure from a baseline it will be less efficient anyway, I just think because of the kind of driving it engages in, this will make it also look far less efficient.
The only surprising thing about this is that other states did not require changes in law. It's Good, Actually, that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us.
In any case, there are more than 2-3 "blue" states. We can note that it's also not running in cold "red" states either. The climate angle fits the data best and aligns with what Waymo says, which aligns with what we have known about the tech for at least a decade.
(That note also suggests they are still testing their cold-weather kit and are not quite ready.)
Not if they’re stupid laws!
A government that listens to the people it governs is a good government.
Right now, Tuesday 3pm, Waymo will cost me 13.76 cross town. UberX 10.95, Lyft 11.95. If I don't tip Lyft/Uber they'll be cheaper but I definitely don't tip the Waymo.
It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.
> Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints
I don't feel like pinning down my location in public, but it is sufficient to say that I'm very familiar with a place in Ohio that was once a booming with every kind of rail.
I can walk around and see where things used to be, and sometimes it's very clear.
But mostly, it seems like it has been transformed. Whereas people used to build around the paths of the rails, they've now built atop of where they used to be. It was once a straight shot with an occasional (and very deliberate) bend, but now there's a house and a factory and a substation in the path.
Or, Columbus Ohio again. :) That place used to have a very diverse passenger rail network, with a somewhat grand Union Station right in the middle where it counts. Rail was such a thriving and important thing that at one point they raised the level of the main drag, High Street, to help reduce conflicts between trains, pedestrians, and the various horsemobiles. For some of the old buildings that still remain, what was once the first floor is now the basement.
And in what seems like something that real libertarians would dream about, these railways were built privately and were self-sustaining.
Things changed.
In ~1979, they finally tore down the old Union Station just weeks before it was likely to be ruled a protected historic site and then put a very immobile convention center in its place instead.
Columbus has been expanding pretty rapidly (by Ohio norms) for a couple of decades now. The old rail paths are hard to find at all while walking around or in aerial shots, never existed in newer neighborhoods, and whatever was there has been further decimated by the batshit highway network that is in a continuous process of changing.
It's possible that it could all come back again, but the cost would be intense beyond imagination.
And even if it did come back again, who would ride the things, anyway? They've already got busses that they hate. Folks would still have cars, and they'd still drive them. I guess people might eventually be able to adjust to using trains to get places, if that became practical for them, but I'd also guess that this transition would take multiple generations to really take effect.
FWIW, the real problem isn't tip culture, it is the power imbalance between labor and the company that is using that labor (without employing drivers), but I dunno how much of an audience that kind of argument has on this particular site.
The US will never fix the externalization of salaries until the public refuses to tip at ridiculous percentages and situations. You'll see a 40% tip expectation at restaurants, your local dentist will install a tip screen. Just tip 10% at sitdown places and refuse emotional blackmail. If you feel any guilt, just make the habit to tally the dollar amount of "normal" tips and make monthly donations to your local food bank.
EDIT: My point is that tipping culture is unrelated to worker rights. Many countries with large informal economies (i.e minimum wage isn't enforced for most people) have no expectation of tipping. The reason Norwegians don't tip drivers isn't because they have a wonderful safety net, it's because there's isn't a social pressure to do so.
Mixing charity and payment of services is stupid and a moral hazard. Servers have shit wages in the US by law because people tip and the same is true (via algorithm) with rideshare drivers.
I don't think that's why there is little tip culture in eg east Asia. It's just... the price the business expects you to pay is mostly advertised upfront, it's known to everyone involved, why would you pay more if you got exactly the service you have ordered? It simply does not make sense.
I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there.
Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow.
The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful.
I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses.
I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated?
(Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)
What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category.
You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries.
> to run bus routes
That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing.
Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero.
The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work.
In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.
Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.
And you think I live in fantasy land.
> if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country.
So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.
It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen.
> Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.
This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc.
I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.
It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.
> car[s] are always clean
Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.
The cost threshold should be pretty low. No fuel (only electricity), and no drivers. Those are two of the larger cost factors here.
Hardware gets commodified and cheaper, not services usually. Do you pay less for cable tv now compared to 20 years ago?
It's interesting this hasn't happened with cable I somewhat agree with you there. However you have alternatives that are just as good like Netflix and cost 20 bucks or less if you can live with ads.
- ChatGPT
This does match my earlier observations, where the prices were pretty damn close.
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Work 5 days a week = 10 rides. Plus four rides on the weekend, or not. That's why I used 14.
Where do you get 40 rides per week?
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Even if someone did 40 rides per week at your posited average of $25/ride, that's $4,000, not $1,000. Are you letting an LLM do math for you?
If work happens 5 days per week, each workday requires two rides, and there are 4 weeks in a month, then there are 40 rides per month. If each of those rides costs $25, then:
5 × 2 × 4 × $25 = $1,000, per month
It was clearly a per month calculation.
(Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)
Would you rather have a X% chance of a loved one dying from a human-category mistake? Or a 0.5X% chance of a loved one dying from a ML-category mistake? I would take the latter in a heartbeat. Why waste time optimizing for "categories" when you can optimize for your loved ones not dying
You and I are thinking with a purely logical thought process, but most people don’t reason that way.
A lot of people want to be able to hold someone accountable, and that is more important than the pure probabilities.
They want to be able to blame a person for making a mistake.
Add something that is new/unknown + lack of control, and you will have to clear a very high threshold to be considered 'acceptably safe'. My guess is a minimum of a 0.1x.
Once people get used to taking robotaxis, they won't care. The bar is "safe enough for very few people to have a bad experience." If you take 10 robotaxi rides in a row and they all go flawlessly your subjective interpretation of the risk will be that there isn't any.
I feel confident saying this because if you die in the US to anything other than old age, it was almost certainly a car crash. Despite this, most people don't think twice before getting in a car.
Humans fail chaotically. AVs, at least Waymos, fail safely. In urban environments, there is a case to be made within a few years for banning (or making it massively cumbersome) to manually pilot a private vehicle.
Nobody would make excuses for a rookie driver coming to a stop in a busy interchange. Only someone with the moral character of a career politician would attempt to construe that as anything other than detracting from overall safety. But a computer does it and it's fine?
If a Waymo failed because it missed a stop sign, and then another Waymo failed because it was confused about some strange markings on the road, is that not failing "the same way" in the same sense that a person failing to yield or driving drunk?
People will trust them by familiarity, not by any objective measures. Their trust grow as they see them more often, without bad accidents.
I live East of DTLA and twice I’ve seen people driving them around, presumably to map those areas out. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t use them for my late night commutes yet, but I’m eagerly looking forward to when I can!
So... not so sure. Every AV I've ever been in has driven incredibly cautiously compared to a human driver.
The point is that there's a process, it applies both to Waymo and to you as a rando. The police don't have special access to Waymo cameras.
That is the opposite of reassuring, because here are the stats for those processes as a whole (just ‘requests for user information’, not broken down by data type or Google product). Currently at 84% accepance rate i.e. the ‘process’ is a formality lol: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...
This is not some newfangled shiny thing. If you hold records that are important to a court case you can be forced to give them up by court order. This is true regardless of who "you" happens to be. If police "have access" to a Waymo, it's only because they also "have access" to your phone, your medical records, your car rental history, etc., etc.
Even when you've got your own camera on your own front porch making recordings on your own hard drive using your own isolated network: There is are long-established legal processes by which you can be ordered to hand over [a subset of] those recordings.
Neither Waymo nor you, yourself, are exceptional to these processes.
At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly.
The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe.
So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do.
That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.
Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher.
Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality.
I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization.
But yes, traffic is indeed an impact.
The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended
The overwhelming majority --overwhelming-- of cars, SUV's and trucks on the road have exactly one passenger, including the guy commuting to his office job in an F-250.
This will obviously change in future, once they start a truly mass rollout.
No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's a logistics nightmare that removes most advantages of owning a car.
It's also not clear to me why routing self-driving cars would be more efficient than what Lyft Line did which ended up super slow. The slowness want just the additional route but also other passengers getting in and out and in some cases waiting for them.
Ultimately the argument against lower congestion is even easier. Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion. Now Timmy can go to his activities by himself, so mom goes elsewhere. Again, when we make something cheaper, we increase demand.
> Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion.
That's fine. I did some modeling for that :)
Most of the optional commutes happen outside the rush hour, and the US roads have more than enough capacity for that. The true problem is the congestion due to low occupancy during the rush hour.
And if we want to speculate a bit more, self-driving cars offer an option of more flexible mass transit for truly bottlenecked cities. They can the make transfer from a larger bus into 2-seater local vehicles completely seamless. This is a more distant possibility, as it will require new infrastructure.
Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all.
Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same.
So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.
The sharing the bus with murder hobos argument is only relevant for daily commuters with relevantly decent transit routes that aren’t 3X longer than a car would be. Most people don’t get that far in the argument against transit.
Partially. Shitty people with zero manners usually end up in low-paying jobs (or in finance), so they tend to concentrate in transit that provides subsidized commutes to them. But the majority of people in transit are normal.
The real reason for not using transit is its slowness. Drop two points on a map of a large city randomly and plot the route between them using cars and transit. Transit will end up on average requiring 3-4x the time by car, even during the rush hour. Of course, people tend to optimize their commutes by choosing the workplace accordingly (this results in a toxic density-misery spiral), so on average transit is not _that_ terrible.
But it totally breaks down when you add more constraints. Like having several kids. Try to plot a route using transit between your workplace, a grocery store, a daycare, and a school. You'll find that it's impossible unless you package everything non-work-related into one spot.
> Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?
Transit is WILDLY inefficient. It's amazing how inefficient and polluting it is.
Guess you didn't notice that I quoted him.
I especially liked the part where you quoted "1'000$/month" and got yourself all confused about the intended conclusion anyway!
Good chat, my friend!
The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.
You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??
An autonomous vehicle doing a deadhead drive has a passenger count of 0. 0 < 1. You start tossing in a lot of miles with 0 in there on top of the vast majority of your trips being 1, and suddenly now you're less than the cars you're theoretically replacing.
A lot of these AVs at the moment at least are still roughly minivan/midsize SUV. On top of that, with safe distances adding another foot of the car to a highway scenario really doesn't increase the percentage of the total space that much. You need a lot of follow space ahead/behind the vehicle.
Maybe if they were like single person pods that teleported to their pickups and managed to group tightly together in packs on the road, but until then they're just another SUV on the road driving around sometimes with zero people in the car.
Sure. OP's point is these products and investments are accruing disproportionately to red cities and states. Sinking together isn't a great pitch.
My state (CA) is doing well this. If your state is not, and this is important to you, I suggest you get involved in the process.
Having companies ignore the law is not an alternative to the democratic process.
Yup. And I invest there. I’m pulling back from New York, which is a shame, because I love it and still have interests there.
> Having companies ignore the law is not an alternative to the democratic process
Straw man. Nobody said this. The point is the current system of incumbent worship is not working. If it takes flipping parties to prove that, I guess yeah, but that won’t result in more rule of law.
Is this true at the city level?
> Sinking together isn't a great pitch.
Surely it's a worse pitch to suggest that companies can ignore laws they don't like, and operate above the law?
It’s also worse to murder kittens. That isn’t the choice at hand.
The difference is between states adapting with a regulatory framework and those sticking with economic incumbents.
(Also, when the taxi medallion industry was at its peak, lenders did run roughshod over the law.)
The linguistic ambiguity is always where the creepy extrajudicial shit seeps in.
See also: ‘We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers’ RE: Snowden/PRISM
That process is fine, the best we have.
The problem is having roving surveillance vehicles driving around everywhere. I see a couple of them every day on my walk in a mostly residential area.
The addition of facial recognition is trivial if not already implemented. Can be done after the fact. The tradeoff is catching an occasional criminal while enabling all sorts of abuse from the powers that be.
I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.
1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow.
2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency.
3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable.
4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.
2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet.
3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places.
4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop.
From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.
I guess you don't want to stop more times than needed, so maybe you'd want to cluster the demand somehow into "virtual stops", and you may lack some amenities like shelters.. so maybe the traditional bus route is good enough. Though it feels like it's ripe for optimisation (you know the classic no buses come for 30min then 3 arrive at once, or these buses are all full whilst others are roaming empty)
Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation.
Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.
We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices?
The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them?
Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making.
Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.
I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.
Because from the 70s onward the former industrial northeast and miswest was actively de-urbanized and suburbanized with environmental and zoning law (don't blame this all on the locals, a lot of this rolls downhill from the states). This obviously coincided with de-industrialization. So basically all these former market and mill towns basically wound up underwater because they not only kicked out their economy but wound up in a situation where every stupid sidewalk repaving costs a bajillion bucks because pursuant to state law whatever it needs to be brought up to code which means some BS green space buffer, etc, etc.
Source: Live in one.
At the end of the day you're basically right it's a lie when it comes to some random Dallas suburb.
After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance.
There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested.
The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.
>The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas
So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?
We're not willing to enforce basic safety on buses, let alone other norms. If Waymo is willing to do that, that will make it available to many more people. Even just not having to wait at the bus stop before sunrise can be a game changer.
And remember, the alternative is even worse: buses.
When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.
Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. If they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.
>> that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us
> Not if they’re stupid laws!
States won't adapt to new technologies at the same time, this is embedded in the design of federalism.
…how are you missing this.
I’m saying the states failing to adapt need to do so or have their governments replaced. That all of these states are also facing multi-party insurgencies doesn’t strike me as a coïncidence. Pretending the corruption in e.g. New York around this is fine is just such a weird take.
So people are using public transit in Germany not because they love to but because they are forced to.
And the system is far from perfect, Germans are complaining because public transportation is having a lot of delays. You can't reach every point you need, you have to wait and some times public transportation is dirty and filled with dirty, rude, violent people, drug addicts and drunks. Not a lovely way to travel.
I am pretty pro transit and urbanism but it really annoys me in these discussions when people (not you specifically) just wave their hands and go "add more buses, ez, problem solved", completely disregarding the physical realities of how we have constructed our civilization.
I don't know where your flaws in logic is coming from, but I have seen the numbers enough different places to know there is one someplace.
I'm prepared to be wrong though. The question is, are you?..
Also, governance isn't like manufacturing, it doesn't get easier at scale, it gets so much harder.
Living in a perfectly planned super dense urban utopia where I can quickly walk wherever I want is extremely appealing to me. I would also like living in the wilds where once a week I drive to the general store and back as the full day's task. Suburban living is my least desired outcome. But everywhere there is room for it, it happens, even without a city to latch onto. There are good reasons for that.
You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.
Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.
And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).
So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?
But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.
Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.
So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.
Holy shit, you have to walk a mile from a cul-de-sac just to get to a street with an intersection?
Who the hell designed these streets? (I guess Big Auto?)
Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.
Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?
A larger bus is needed for useful transit.
And I doubt that 4 or 12 is the ideal bus size in that place.
Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.
Can and implemented are often worlds apart.
A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.