> Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.
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.)
Google only spent $1.1B for the first six years of Waymo. At 1/1000 the price you’re spending about $1.1M over that period or about $200k/year. That’s cheap enough that you should just do it.
I’m not “only counting the first 6 years”. I’m saying you can get to 6 years on $1.2 m if you can do it at a thousandth the cost. I’m sure if you have some success by then, the $30 m over the next decade won’t be too hard.
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...
Honestly I think this is the only real advantage of a self-driving bus. Driving a bus is hard work and it doesn't pay well. Getting drivers to cover all the routes every day is an ongoing challenge.
I would honestly be nervous to ride a self-driving bus much of the time. Drivers limit the level of shenanigans that can happen. The subway has emergency intercoms and staff at every single station, but a bus could take you miles away from the nearest transit cop.
Bus drivers don't make much money, at least not here in the United States. I was shocked when I learned how low the average salary is, considering you might be tasked with navigating a massive vehicle carrying dozens of people through narrow streets during rush hour. And I'm not even considering the customer service aspects and public safety aspects of what they do.
All that to say, we are far from the point where a self-driving bus is cheaper than buying a regular bus and paying a driver.
You're probably right about comparative costs. But the problem of getting to an autonomous bus will remain a significant barrier to public transportation use.
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.
Nope. Fixed routes have chaos. You would have the same problem, converging on fsd. It’s the same reason Waymo isn’t deployed everywhere now. Not to mention buses are a couple orders of magnitude more expensive than a car and would be slower for any given median occupant compared to a car.
