Exactly. I don’t mind AVs, but we don’t need them clogging up the core of our cities. Cars have their place. But let’s build real transit in our cities.
I also worry about a future in which we can’t own cars, but public transit has been mostly done away with in favor of privately owned AV companies.
In the present, here in Austin Cruise is regularly blocking streets at night. The tech works great…until it doesn’t. I wish they’d stop alpha testing at our expense.
People prefer invidual vehicles because they are much more convenient and comfortable.
People use mass transit because it's cheaper or because the circumstances make individual vehicles very inconvenient (e.g. not parking space and terrible traffic), not because they prefer it.
Not sure. I would prefer not to spend $30K on an individual vehicle that requires gas, insurance, registration ... but no reasonable public transportation exists instead (west Omaha, Nebraska, FWIW).
Now if I lived in Tokyo I would be so hot to ditch the car!
I suspect individual vehicles is inherently inconvenient. The parking lot for Disneyland is an example, the traffic jams of any city with over 50k people in it are examples. Individual vehicles do not scale very well, and through extreme expense the US has built infrastructure to make individual vehicles as convenient as can be.
> not because they prefer it.
I would like to see data behind this. Driving for a commute is generally not enjoyable, it's time a person will not get back and meanwhile they have done very little productive other than perhaps listen to a podcast. OTOH when on a bus, someone else is worrying about the roads and plenty of people get significant work done, reading done, generally relax. I suspect most would prefer mass transit if it were more time efficient. Driving yourself is still a pretty killer option in most of the US as it's an extreme reduction in commute time due to lack of density and frequency in the mass transit network.
*To clarify, the typical bus experience in the US can vary quite a bit. I commuted into Seattle for several years on the bus system. That is my experience, those trips were 99.9% fine experiences, it was quiet and essentially everyone was just messing around on their smart phones. The only really unpleasant part of the bus experience was there were not enough of them running such that the bus could be crowded and was a long wait between buses. That is a different experience for sure from the buses that run within downtown and riding those buses around 2pm when there are no commuters on them.
My claim is that a well funded bus system is intrinsically more enjoyable for the same reason an AV is - because you can do something other than 'driving' while traveling.
in my short 4 month internship in Seattle I have had two bad experiences (among others)
1. Some woman starts yelling at me saying I am a foreigner (I am, but I am more Canadian than anything else). She gets louder and louder and tells me that I am probably a visa student and that I’ll be deported when my studies are done. She went around the entire bus making derogatory comments about them (I.e. what are you doing with that white bitch to an interracial couple)
2. A woman accuses me of being a North Korean spy on the bus (she says I have the nose of a North Korean). I exit the bus because she is increasingly hostile. I get off the bus. She follows me 4 blocks to my apartment, trying to get the red blooded Americans to catch the North Korean spy.
> Can you see how some folks would prefer to drive?
Very much so, yes. I agree with the reply comment that you should not have been subjected to that experience. As a 215lbs white male - I don't have those experiences.
I was making fundamentally two points: (1) single occupancy vehicles are a non-scalable transportation solution and (2) I would suspect most people intrinsically would prefer to spend their time while traveling doing something other than driving. It's one of the major selling points for AI cars, that you can do something else while travelling.
As someone who falls in the anti car camp, I'm really sorry you had those experiences. Seattle definitely has problems with insane people, it can be encountered on the streets or on public transit.
I can imagine that most people who take public transit daily (I hope) probably never experience the things that I have experienced.
Maybe because I am visibly Asian (therefore easier to be perceived as non-American), some folks are more daring in picking on me? Unfortunately I cannot a/b test it because I can't look any less Asian than I do now.
> A car feels much better and is more convenient as well.
That is unsurprising. Though, when you are stuck in gridlock, do you think to yourself, "this is exactly where I want to be?"
The car commutes I had in Seattle were 90% gridlock, very common to spend about 30 minutes to travel 7 miles. I went into office one night and it took 14 minutes total. One evening trying to get home during rush hour it took 45 minutes just to get down the on-ramp onto the actual highway! In total that was a two hour commute to travel 12 miles. The 2 hours was atypical, but spending 60-90 minutes to get home was typical.
> So you never have to wait for a vehicle and all of your routes are direct with no stops? I doubt that.
If I am riding the metro at peak hours then I wait a minute or two.
If off-peak then I leave the house at the appropriate time so as not to have to wait.
There are stops, but they are predictable and short. Nothing at all like the experience of being in a car.
> You been on US public transit?
Yes, and in my experience, my insurance company does not raise my rates if someone damages a metro car.
> You pay for public transit while you're not using it.
In the same way that I pay for car infrastructure when I'm not using it, except that I pay a lot more for car infrastructure I don't use than people who don't ride the metro pay for that.
> And we need to de-personal-vehicle-ize. It's already killing us.
That's never going to happen. We've had personal transport ever since we tamed horses. And we can't really go back to horses.
We just need to prioritise small personal vehicles powered by pedals and/or batteries, particularly in urban environments. We need to make more roads safer for them, and solve the storage/theft problems.
The US is too lo-density for human driven buses to be better for the environment. AVs will enable a transit fleet of right-sized vehicles that respond to demand and can surge without a big labor force working split shifts.
There are plenty of area that could support mass transit, especially in cities.
Even suburbia can be made more walkable.
For example, walking to my local gas station isn't really that practical due to a lack of continuous sidewalks. It isn't that far but the path to the gas station can get pretty muddy at time.
I once tried to get food at a fast food joint by walking, the lack of sidewalks is even more acute. Crossing several lanes of road felt pretty unsafe even when the traffic light is red.
That's one ideal, sure. I don't see it though -- who's going to keep all these individual driving pods clean? How is access going to be gated to them? SF is a dense city, only New York has higher population density. Its BART and muni and bus service isn't bad, either -- and partly because it's such a pain to drive downtown, it gets used, and being used keeps it safe.
This is a story about San Francisco. SF has plenty of density for human driven buses to be better for the environment.
AVs are not currently competing with human drivers in the use-case you say they'd be best at, they're clogging already dense cities with even more cars.
I have ridden commuter rail, aubways, and busses in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Amsterdam, London, Vienna and other places.
While you have a point that "lo-density" is an oversimplification, only New York has the kind of density and frequency of service that make public transit really usable. Boston commuter rail sucks pretty bad, with a too-sparse schedule. BART from SFO to the city is OK but around town there are too few lines and stops. This all could be fixed, but the fact is they suck compared to cities like Amsterdam where cycling has the infrastructure and the critical mass to be safe (unlike London, for example).
