These could be a solve for the taxi’s geometry problem. They ride on predictable routes, which I imagine would be a benefit for model training (and may help reduce the bad weather problem for robo operation). With lower operating costs, transit providers could provide much more service, improving ridership with a positive feedback loop. With planning and infrastructure investment, this seems doable and perhaps even easier than broad robotaxi deployment.
A great question and one I wish were addressed more often! One very major blocker for expansion of the regional bus system where I live is that it's very hard to hire bus drivers -- operating costs are as larger or larger than capital costs.
You would have to take the savings from not hiring drivers and plow it straight into hiring security if you don’t want them to turn in to roving homeless shelters. Fundamentally the reason robotaxis can work autonomously is that they can lock people out of the fleet for misbehaving.
But that would be a dramatically better experience, and better cost wise? Bus/train drivers today are explicitly NOT security guards: if someone sketch gets on the vehicle, they ignore it in all but the most egregious cases. So you replace an expensive employee (driver) with a relatively cheaper one (guard), and get a better (safer, more consistent) experience for less cost. Seems like a huge win for the bus system.
Roaming bus shelters are to me a non-issue as the buses will have cameras inside and could be rerouted to police stations for eviction. The immediate security question is really no different than that for trains which have the same issues, but unlike trains you could reroute buses with bad actors to points with a police presence. Also, locking people out of a robotaxi fleet does you no good when credentials can be stolen/faked. Are we going to lock out foreign nationals and their non-compatible documentation from taking robotaxis?
Unions in cities would never allow it. That said, the economics of a shadow system run by a private company could pencil maybe and make public transportation irrelevant.
You could (theoretically) just say, "We're not hiring any more bus drivers, but we also won't fire any existing ones. We'll continue to pay their salaries and just buy robobuses as they retire or quit. Anyone who retires X years early still gets their pension. Anyone who asks can be transferred to another role and get an $X0k bonus." This would still save money and improve service.
Also: in a world where robobuses are viable, *the transit authorities don't need to care what the unions think."
I love the idea. But I still think unions oppose it on the premise that it would make the union irrelevant over time, and most of them seek first to perpetuate themselves even over the interests of their members.
I understand politically why this is important, but that seems like it could be overcome by getting ahead of it. Go to the public with the message "We're going to increase bus service 4x over 10 years with no added cost and without firing anyone or cutting pay or cutting pensions."
Right. We don't even have driverless trains in US cities yet, despite that being a MUCH easier technical problem, and one that's been solved for 15 years.
I believe that Vancouver has been running driverless trains since the 1980s, as have many airports. But it relies on being a completely separated system with no way for people or vehicles to get onto the tracks.
Yes. There are many automated rail systems around the world. Lots of airport trams, but also busy, heavy rail systems in Singapore, Sydney, China and others. The technology is very much here - political will to replace drivers in the US (and maybe Canada, not sure) is not. Doesn't bode well for the prospect of automating busses regardless of tech capabilities.
as a progression, especially as congestion pricing makes pure taxis more expensive
However, I worry that cities are going to be too anti-privatization to let this happen. Also, I think being able to platform-ban people is key to making these systems work, and that's going to quickly become a huge political issue
Robobuses would be ideal to recreate the best parts of a streetcar system.The problem with old-fashioned streetcars, since they're on tracks, is they don't mix with other vehicle traffic and trying to allow both clogs up traffic. But I don't think there's yet been a better method of getting around central cities than a good streetcar system, at least for the large number of American cities that were originally built and laid out as streetcar cities.
So why aren't more city bus systems designed in a more user-friendly way to replicate the ease of use of the streetcar systems they often replaced? With a good streetcar system, because streetcars follow the streets, you just need to know the layout of the city streets. The streetcar system functions on city streets like those horizontal escalator systems airports have, that you can step onto and double or triple the speed of your walking, without worrying it's going to take you somewhere you weren't expecting.
To use a streetcar, you don't really need to know any more than you need to get X blocks down this street and this streetcar is going in your direction down the street you need to go down. That makes it easy to hop on any streetcar on a major arterial street (which are usually at regular intervals) and not have to look up or memorize a complicated bus route schedule that zig-zags unpredictably across streets and you can't just get on one unless you already happen to know where it will end up.
Some city should try to build a robo-streetcar shuttle system, where automated robo-streetcars are programmed to do nothing more than go up and down the same thoroughfare street all day long, functioning as pedestrian accelerators.
I'd guess this is driven by the different ratios of capex versus opex between operating a car based services compared to a bus based service.
If a car costs $50k and a bus costs $500k, the opex cost from the driver is a much less significant part of total costs in the case of a bus. That makes it less essential to optimize away in the case of a bus compared to a car.
It’s actually basically the opposite, city busses last for longer than regular cars and they spend much less time parked. So the cost of running bus service is overwhelmingly drivers, with the next biggest portion being fuel.
I'd expect utilization rates to be about the same for both, since we're talking about robotaxis, not private cars that sit parked all day.
Also, maybe I've got this wrong, but some quick googling shows 12 years or 250k miles as the typical service life for a bus. This seems roughly similar to the typical useful life of a car. I'm sure in both cases that could be extended, but at the cost of significantly higher maintenance expenditures.
I think you should look again at Class A motorhome prices, and quality. The ones in that range tend to be much shoddier construction that would be acceptable on a city bus.
Low production volume, probably a specialized chassis, definitely specialized body and accessories, probably specific regulations and compliance for public transit vehicles....
$500k is on the low side too. I used to work with New Flyer. Their 40' CNG buses were closer to $700k and their battery electric ones are probably $900k now. Shoot, the Flender gearbox on the CNG buses was like $20k alone.
LaDOT bought 130 buses from BYD for $84M or 644k per so definitely not a fraction of the price. But yeah, my understanding is BYD beat New Flyer for that contract so NF has some work to do if they want to win more share.
This is an area where federal policy could have a huge impact. The federal government provides a *lot* of funding for bus acquisition -- as much as 80% of the cost of a new bus (or higher, for low-pollution/green buses). Perhaps the incoming, er, Democratic administration could push robobuses through their grants.
Re the geometry problem, I think it's exciting to think outside the box a little bit. You could have for example a variety of vehicle sizes, everything from small passenger cars to larger minivans to small shuttle buses to large buses. Moreover, if you introduced the concept of transfers, you could stitch these together in an optimal way. E.g. maybe your route consists of a small one-person vehicle picking you up at your friend's house, dropping you off at a bus stop on a main thoroughfare, then exiting and getting picked up again by a minivan that takes you and a couple of other passengers on an ad hoc route to your individual homes.
If the service worked reliably, and you never have to do the cognitive work of figuring out your route, I think it could be kind of revolutionary.
Everyone hates being in a van full of people though. It's a serious problem, there being only bad choices between large scale and car sized transportation.
We will have robobuses eventually. You can tell Waymo is thinking about this, because in their marketing materials they describe their technology as the “Waymo driver”, implying that it can drive many vehicles, rather than a “robotaxi”.
It’s just a matter of time - the taxi services are still not profitable, once you consider the ongoing R&D expenses, so they probably just aren’t ready to add a second product line. Ford built the Model T before building trucks.
With a dedicated right-of-way, autonomous busses or trains could travel safely and cheaply 24/7. It really seems like the whole robotaxi phenomenon is private business doing a second-best job where public transport has completely fumbled the ball.
What's missing in any bus system is the ability for each person to improvise their own unique route and schedule (along with the company they keep). The difference is qualitative; it's a matter of personal autonomy. Unfortunately, some busybodies have a problem with that.
If there’s a bus route down every street every five minutes, then yes, anyone who can improvise as they walk can improvise as they ride the bus as well. If you don’t believe that this sort of frequent bus system is freedom then it sounds like you don’t believe pedestrians have freedom.
If I don't want to have to worry about missing the last bus at night, or whether a particular route (or "connections") will take me where I want to travel (or if I want to alter my plans mid-route), my freedom is indeed limited, compared with being in the driver's seat or with specifying my instructions (on the fly) to an AV.
You run into the same sort of lack of freedom when you fly on an airline: It doesn't leave when you want to, it doesn't go where you want to, you can't change your mind mid-flight, and sometimes you miss the last flight of the day.
But tons of people still use airlines. And it's a good thing they do, because if everyone took a private jet everywhere with just them (or maybe themselves and a few family members) it would have terrible consequences for congestion, the climate, as well as being extremely costly.
There are pretty vastly different price points involved, but buses versus cars/taxis is really the same tradeoff as airliners versus flying private.
Why would you have to worry about missing the last bus at night, or whether a particular route will take you where you want to travel, or if you want to alter your plans mid-route, if there’s a bus every five minutes on every major street?
You are imagining a world where buses are limited, not a world where buses are doing what they can do best.
Yes — you seem to be imagining that every possible world is exactly the same as the real world today . . . and that's fine, except why participate in a policy discussion if your unshakeable premise is that nothing can ever change?
The tradeoff is that have the freedom to get out of the bus anytime, anywhere, without being constrained by availability of parking. You also have the ability to get out of the bus, walk somewhere, and board the bus at a different stop for the return trip. You can't do either of these things in a car.
In a car, I can chart my own course, and I'm not constrained by where a bus goes or where it stops (or to sitting -- or standing -- on a bus while it makes other arbitrary stops along the way). On balance, I'm more in control.
I took buses for years, until I was finally able to get a car -- and when I did, it felt incredibly liberating. It was also nice to be able to offer rides to friends who would otherwise have had to take a bus (or two or three). I'll gladly deal with parking as a tradeoff!
That has to be a lot of wasted bus space though - every street every 5 minutes?
Mass Ave in Cambridge had a bus like that because it was a busy street and it was reasonable to start walking and just take the first bus you roughly coincided with (assuming you didn't _want_ to keep walking). But even without the driver issue that feels like a lot of wasted tires to keep those running so much.
A bus every five minutes is less wasted space than a car with three empty seats every second. The main reason we don’t run a bus every five minutes is because drivers are expensive - the maintenance on the vehicles is much less significant.
That's true, depending on your definition of "every street". Certainly if you mean "every street that currently has a car go down it every 10 seconds" then you'll get pretty good bus coverage that way, and people just have to walk the last quarter mile. (With again, exceptions for handicapped - I know Austin Capital Metro has vans to help people like that out)
I don't think it's just the drivers. My understanding is that the total cost to operate a public transit bus is around $200/hour these days, even though the bus driver may only be making around $35/hour, if that. The rest of the cost is partially maintenance, but the bigger component is probably periodic replacement of buses every few years, as they wear out. And, since buses get driven far more miles per year than the average car, they wear out fast, even though they're built to last over 500,000 miles.
To this day, though no longer private, those NY subway lines are referred to the BMT and IRT.
There are many other examples, such as the Somerset Traction Company that acquired some lakeside property in northern Maine, built some bungalows and a theater on it, and constructed an electric railway from the property to the railhead in the county seat of Skowhegan, some 12 miles away.
I'm "only" 53 and I've lived in NYC for "only" about 20 years but somewhere along the way I started referring to "the Lex," "the 7th Avenue line," and so on... not exclusively, but often enough... perhaps I have a penchant for old-timey language! (Try it, it's fun!)
"I'm wondering if in the next 20 years we see the development of private mass transit."
Private mass transit systems in the U.S. used to be quite common. They mostly either (1) went out of business or (2) were converted to public ownership (or at least protected public utility monopoly status) by the early to mid-20th Century due to profitability issues.
I mean, it would probably answer with all routes over value X. The issue is that there are externality benefits from public transportation where we'd really like all routes over value (X-Y).
The private sector is probably better incentivized to accurately find the routes over the target value, but they'd have a higher target value and even if you subsidize to help them aim for X-Y, the private sector would much prefer to fail "high" rather than "low". In this case failing a little "low" might be better.
The private sector doesn't figure out the routes that add the most economic benefit - they figure out the routes that add the most *internalizable* economic benefit.
If the transit system owns the land, then they can internalize the benefit of improving access to land (I think this is how things work in Hong Kong). But if you don't have an integrated monopoly owning both the transit system and the land, then the transit system will systematically underserve spaces where much of the surplus flows to the landowners who don't pay. (Surplus to riders can be siphoned off through fares, but surplus to landowners can't, unless you have taxing authority or you are the landowner.)
It doesn't bother me to tax robotaxis, but this part did bother me:
"Transit and bike infrastructure would become an even tougher sell, as people take more car trips over longer distances. Already, opponents of transit referenda in Austin and Nashville have pointed to robotaxis as a justification not to invest in new light rail systems."
Here's the thing. A lot of people don't want to ride transit, or ride a bike, or walk. They want comfort. They don't want to be sexually harassed on the subway. Maybe they have a disability and don't want to navigate the maze of stairs and platforms and ramps and elevators. Maybe they don't want to stand on the bus.
And there's no way to not count that as a massive benefit not only of robotaxis, but also of Uber and Lyft. How many women have been not raped because Uber, Lyft, and now robotaxis have been available? (Yes I know there are sexual assault stories involving Uber drivers. They also get caught, and prosecuted, because they are so closely monitored, which is a massive deterrent.)
Transit is great and we should have more of it. But there's very much an eat your spinach attitude here where anyone who doesn't want to ride a bus or a bike is a bad person. It's totally legitimate for people to want comfort and especially isolation from potentially dangerous people. This is especially true for the vulnerable. And when we are costing out these things, the benefit of people NOT having to use public transit if they don't want to is a MASSIVE benefit that needs to be very much weighed in the robotaxis' favor.
It's fair to say that comfort is important to people, but I don't think we should just accept sexual assault on public transit as an unchangeable fact of life. Let's make public transit more safe and comfortable!
I don't think a free society should be trying to force people into modes of transit where they reasonably fear assaults. Of course we should be doing more to stop assaults on public transit (sexual and non-sexual assaults both happen all the time) and if we do a good job some more people will switch over, but it is totally legitimate for someone- especially a vulnerable person- to say "I don't want to be stuffed into a subway car with people I do not trust". And Ubers and Lyfts and now robotaxis have been a godsend for people who want transit without the danger posed by being packed in with strangers.
When people have a reasonable fear of assault, that's a real problem and needs to be dealt with. But it's a mistake to compound that problem by also allowing it to compromise the design of a good transportation system. Then you've got two problems instead of one, because you didn't actually address the problem of assault in public places, but just papered over it.
There are many much more direct solutions to the problem of random assault, such as putting cameras everywhere on public streets so that nothing that happens on the street is not recorded. Until those much more direct solutions have been tried and failed, there's not a good justification for allowing that problem to bleed over into other areas and create new problems in those areas.
I want the public to have choices. They shouldn't have to rely on your panopticon. They should be able to say "I don't want to be around strangers". If you want to tax them for that, fine, but that option should be available. This is one group of people trying to force their own lifestyle choices and values onto another.
Yes but we're talking about urban transit here, i.e., moving people around within dense cities. Cities are inherently social places, whose whole value is social interaction and bringing people into contact with other people. Without that, what's the point of a city? If you really don't want to come into contact with other people, don't live in a city! And if you do choose to, don't immediately set about trying to turn the city into a noncity; instead focus your efforts on making it work *as a city*, an urban community. That's a choice.
I love cities, for exactly the reasons you're talking about, but "you should accept whatever social interactions a city throws at you" is not how anyone operates.
"Cities are inherently social places, whose whole value is social interaction and bringing people into contact with other people. Without that, what's the point of a city?"
Particularly with the advent of automotive travel (and with electronic communication, much more so), traditional cities are artifacts; in that regard, they're like theme parks.
(As for "social interaction," please note that the creative scenes of Silicon Valley and Laurel Canyon arose in suburbia.)
One goes to a theme park for the amusements and exhibits -- not to interact with the crowds.
It's fair enough for people to have a preference for 'not being around strangers', but normally the best place for people like that to live is in the suburbs or the countryside, rather than in dense, busy urban areas. It will just always be harder to accommodate people with a preference for not encountering other members of the public in the most densely-populated and busiest parts of the country.
I definitely did not get that from the article. It seemed much more that it recognized that cars bring externalities and limits and we should develop alternatives so that we aren't completely constrained by those externalities and limits.
It ignores the single biggest benefit of robotaxis, which is that people get to travel alone, which is great! (Because the author does not think that is great.)
But your solution allocates safety from assault to those who can afford the "comfort and isolation" of hired cars, rather than providing it as a public good. When resources in the urban environment are constantly shifted toward the preferences of the wealthy, the less well-off get fewer options, worse service AND less safety. I will not pretend that I don't encourage (and pay for) my Brooklyn-based daughter to take an Uber whenever she feels she needs to. But it's hard not to think about the fathers and daughters who can't afford to do that, and harder still not to think that the state should be doing more to make public transit the safest places in the city.
Of note, harassment is not assault thankfully. Crime rates on the subway in nyc seem by all indications lower than general existence in the city itself.
Ditto. It's incredibly depressing. Sure, it's "rare" in the sense that it doesn't happen with a high frequency (it's not like my female friends are saying that every time they ride the metro something terrible happens), but it's certainly common enough for me to conclude that women in particular have a reasonable fear of riding public transit, especially when alone or in small groups and during off-peak hours.
But the robotaxi issue is precisely at peak and during the day not at night.
And street harassment as it were is not limited to transit. The same argument basically exists against walking which these cities really can’t function without. I know people who have been harassed on the sidewalks, in parks, in line for coffee ect. Transit I don’t think has an special “be harassed more often” feature compared to any other public space.
A just society would make public transit safer and more comfortable even if that didn't lead to a single additional white collar business commuter using that service.
Where are the robobuses?
These could be a solve for the taxi’s geometry problem. They ride on predictable routes, which I imagine would be a benefit for model training (and may help reduce the bad weather problem for robo operation). With lower operating costs, transit providers could provide much more service, improving ridership with a positive feedback loop. With planning and infrastructure investment, this seems doable and perhaps even easier than broad robotaxi deployment.
What am I missing?
A great question and one I wish were addressed more often! One very major blocker for expansion of the regional bus system where I live is that it's very hard to hire bus drivers -- operating costs are as larger or larger than capital costs.
You would have to take the savings from not hiring drivers and plow it straight into hiring security if you don’t want them to turn in to roving homeless shelters. Fundamentally the reason robotaxis can work autonomously is that they can lock people out of the fleet for misbehaving.
But that would be a dramatically better experience, and better cost wise? Bus/train drivers today are explicitly NOT security guards: if someone sketch gets on the vehicle, they ignore it in all but the most egregious cases. So you replace an expensive employee (driver) with a relatively cheaper one (guard), and get a better (safer, more consistent) experience for less cost. Seems like a huge win for the bus system.
Roaming bus shelters are to me a non-issue as the buses will have cameras inside and could be rerouted to police stations for eviction. The immediate security question is really no different than that for trains which have the same issues, but unlike trains you could reroute buses with bad actors to points with a police presence. Also, locking people out of a robotaxi fleet does you no good when credentials can be stolen/faked. Are we going to lock out foreign nationals and their non-compatible documentation from taking robotaxis?
Unions in cities would never allow it. That said, the economics of a shadow system run by a private company could pencil maybe and make public transportation irrelevant.
You could (theoretically) just say, "We're not hiring any more bus drivers, but we also won't fire any existing ones. We'll continue to pay their salaries and just buy robobuses as they retire or quit. Anyone who retires X years early still gets their pension. Anyone who asks can be transferred to another role and get an $X0k bonus." This would still save money and improve service.
Also: in a world where robobuses are viable, *the transit authorities don't need to care what the unions think."
I love the idea. But I still think unions oppose it on the premise that it would make the union irrelevant over time, and most of them seek first to perpetuate themselves even over the interests of their members.
And?
I understand politically why this is important, but that seems like it could be overcome by getting ahead of it. Go to the public with the message "We're going to increase bus service 4x over 10 years with no added cost and without firing anyone or cutting pay or cutting pensions."
Still more principal agent problems: the city officials are funded by union money, so they have a disincentive to piss any of them off.
The main point of union though is to funnel money to politicians
This fails that test
Right. We don't even have driverless trains in US cities yet, despite that being a MUCH easier technical problem, and one that's been solved for 15 years.
I believe that Vancouver has been running driverless trains since the 1980s, as have many airports. But it relies on being a completely separated system with no way for people or vehicles to get onto the tracks.
Yes. There are many automated rail systems around the world. Lots of airport trams, but also busy, heavy rail systems in Singapore, Sydney, China and others. The technology is very much here - political will to replace drivers in the US (and maybe Canada, not sure) is not. Doesn't bode well for the prospect of automating busses regardless of tech capabilities.
There are cities on this planet without unions. Why can't you try it in one of them?
They may oppose it, but once China, Japan, Europe, etc or whomever adopt it and cut bus prices in half that might make opposition tough.
I can totally imagine:
robotaxi -> robovan (uber share equiv) -> robo-bus
as a progression, especially as congestion pricing makes pure taxis more expensive
However, I worry that cities are going to be too anti-privatization to let this happen. Also, I think being able to platform-ban people is key to making these systems work, and that's going to quickly become a huge political issue
Robobuses would be ideal to recreate the best parts of a streetcar system.The problem with old-fashioned streetcars, since they're on tracks, is they don't mix with other vehicle traffic and trying to allow both clogs up traffic. But I don't think there's yet been a better method of getting around central cities than a good streetcar system, at least for the large number of American cities that were originally built and laid out as streetcar cities.
So why aren't more city bus systems designed in a more user-friendly way to replicate the ease of use of the streetcar systems they often replaced? With a good streetcar system, because streetcars follow the streets, you just need to know the layout of the city streets. The streetcar system functions on city streets like those horizontal escalator systems airports have, that you can step onto and double or triple the speed of your walking, without worrying it's going to take you somewhere you weren't expecting.
To use a streetcar, you don't really need to know any more than you need to get X blocks down this street and this streetcar is going in your direction down the street you need to go down. That makes it easy to hop on any streetcar on a major arterial street (which are usually at regular intervals) and not have to look up or memorize a complicated bus route schedule that zig-zags unpredictably across streets and you can't just get on one unless you already happen to know where it will end up.
Some city should try to build a robo-streetcar shuttle system, where automated robo-streetcars are programmed to do nothing more than go up and down the same thoroughfare street all day long, functioning as pedestrian accelerators.
Just put a plow on the front and collect all the illegally double parked Altimas along the way. Bam.
Does the presence of a human driver help provide any security for passengers from other passengers? How important is that?
Actually the opposite (kind of). In Los Angeles, there's a huge crisis with *drivers* being attacked. E.g., https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/la-metro-angered-bus-driver-attacked-downtown-los-angeles/3421905/
A very small proportion of passengers are responsible for violence, so platform bans should be perfectly effective as a measure here.
I'd guess this is driven by the different ratios of capex versus opex between operating a car based services compared to a bus based service.
If a car costs $50k and a bus costs $500k, the opex cost from the driver is a much less significant part of total costs in the case of a bus. That makes it less essential to optimize away in the case of a bus compared to a car.
It’s actually basically the opposite, city busses last for longer than regular cars and they spend much less time parked. So the cost of running bus service is overwhelmingly drivers, with the next biggest portion being fuel.
I'd expect utilization rates to be about the same for both, since we're talking about robotaxis, not private cars that sit parked all day.
Also, maybe I've got this wrong, but some quick googling shows 12 years or 250k miles as the typical service life for a bus. This seems roughly similar to the typical useful life of a car. I'm sure in both cases that could be extended, but at the cost of significantly higher maintenance expenditures.
Similar useful life but much lower passenger-miles for a car v. a bus.
I was shocked that a bus costs $500,000 when a semi-truck is 70k-160k. A big Winnebago is like $200k on their website. Bus prices seem very high.....
I think you should look again at Class A motorhome prices, and quality. The ones in that range tend to be much shoddier construction that would be acceptable on a city bus.
Low production volume, probably a specialized chassis, definitely specialized body and accessories, probably specific regulations and compliance for public transit vehicles....
$500k is on the low side too. I used to work with New Flyer. Their 40' CNG buses were closer to $700k and their battery electric ones are probably $900k now. Shoot, the Flender gearbox on the CNG buses was like $20k alone.
I bet Chinese buses are a fraction of the price.
LaDOT bought 130 buses from BYD for $84M or 644k per so definitely not a fraction of the price. But yeah, my understanding is BYD beat New Flyer for that contract so NF has some work to do if they want to win more share.
https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2023/23-0717_misc_6-27-23.pdf
https://en.byd.com/news/byd-receives-largest-battery-electric-bus-order-in-u-s-history/
This is an area where federal policy could have a huge impact. The federal government provides a *lot* of funding for bus acquisition -- as much as 80% of the cost of a new bus (or higher, for low-pollution/green buses). Perhaps the incoming, er, Democratic administration could push robobuses through their grants.
https://www.transit.dot.gov/bus-program#:~:text=Therefore%2C%20the%20Federal%20share%20of,of%20the%20net%20project%20cost.
Re the geometry problem, I think it's exciting to think outside the box a little bit. You could have for example a variety of vehicle sizes, everything from small passenger cars to larger minivans to small shuttle buses to large buses. Moreover, if you introduced the concept of transfers, you could stitch these together in an optimal way. E.g. maybe your route consists of a small one-person vehicle picking you up at your friend's house, dropping you off at a bus stop on a main thoroughfare, then exiting and getting picked up again by a minivan that takes you and a couple of other passengers on an ad hoc route to your individual homes.
If the service worked reliably, and you never have to do the cognitive work of figuring out your route, I think it could be kind of revolutionary.
Everyone hates being in a van full of people though. It's a serious problem, there being only bad choices between large scale and car sized transportation.
We will have robobuses eventually. You can tell Waymo is thinking about this, because in their marketing materials they describe their technology as the “Waymo driver”, implying that it can drive many vehicles, rather than a “robotaxi”.
It’s just a matter of time - the taxi services are still not profitable, once you consider the ongoing R&D expenses, so they probably just aren’t ready to add a second product line. Ford built the Model T before building trucks.
With a dedicated right-of-way, autonomous busses or trains could travel safely and cheaply 24/7. It really seems like the whole robotaxi phenomenon is private business doing a second-best job where public transport has completely fumbled the ball.
It’s not public transport that dropped the ball - it’s the private car drivers that banned dedicated rights-of-way.
Potato potahto. I guess it's more correct to say that US governments have dropped the ball of actually being able to build things.
What's missing in any bus system is the ability for each person to improvise their own unique route and schedule (along with the company they keep). The difference is qualitative; it's a matter of personal autonomy. Unfortunately, some busybodies have a problem with that.
If there’s a bus route down every street every five minutes, then yes, anyone who can improvise as they walk can improvise as they ride the bus as well. If you don’t believe that this sort of frequent bus system is freedom then it sounds like you don’t believe pedestrians have freedom.
If I don't want to have to worry about missing the last bus at night, or whether a particular route (or "connections") will take me where I want to travel (or if I want to alter my plans mid-route), my freedom is indeed limited, compared with being in the driver's seat or with specifying my instructions (on the fly) to an AV.
You run into the same sort of lack of freedom when you fly on an airline: It doesn't leave when you want to, it doesn't go where you want to, you can't change your mind mid-flight, and sometimes you miss the last flight of the day.
But tons of people still use airlines. And it's a good thing they do, because if everyone took a private jet everywhere with just them (or maybe themselves and a few family members) it would have terrible consequences for congestion, the climate, as well as being extremely costly.
There are pretty vastly different price points involved, but buses versus cars/taxis is really the same tradeoff as airliners versus flying private.
FWIW, I've taken flights all over the world, but I hate being confined on a plane. When my flight reaches its destination, I often rent a car. :-)
Why would you have to worry about missing the last bus at night, or whether a particular route will take you where you want to travel, or if you want to alter your plans mid-route, if there’s a bus every five minutes on every major street?
You are imagining a world where buses are limited, not a world where buses are doing what they can do best.
I'M "imagining a world"? Hahaha!
Yes — you seem to be imagining that every possible world is exactly the same as the real world today . . . and that's fine, except why participate in a policy discussion if your unshakeable premise is that nothing can ever change?
The tradeoff is that have the freedom to get out of the bus anytime, anywhere, without being constrained by availability of parking. You also have the ability to get out of the bus, walk somewhere, and board the bus at a different stop for the return trip. You can't do either of these things in a car.
In a car, I can chart my own course, and I'm not constrained by where a bus goes or where it stops (or to sitting -- or standing -- on a bus while it makes other arbitrary stops along the way). On balance, I'm more in control.
I took buses for years, until I was finally able to get a car -- and when I did, it felt incredibly liberating. It was also nice to be able to offer rides to friends who would otherwise have had to take a bus (or two or three). I'll gladly deal with parking as a tradeoff!
But you could with robotaxis which I think was the initial comparison to robobusses
That has to be a lot of wasted bus space though - every street every 5 minutes?
Mass Ave in Cambridge had a bus like that because it was a busy street and it was reasonable to start walking and just take the first bus you roughly coincided with (assuming you didn't _want_ to keep walking). But even without the driver issue that feels like a lot of wasted tires to keep those running so much.
A bus every five minutes is less wasted space than a car with three empty seats every second. The main reason we don’t run a bus every five minutes is because drivers are expensive - the maintenance on the vehicles is much less significant.
That's true, depending on your definition of "every street". Certainly if you mean "every street that currently has a car go down it every 10 seconds" then you'll get pretty good bus coverage that way, and people just have to walk the last quarter mile. (With again, exceptions for handicapped - I know Austin Capital Metro has vans to help people like that out)
I don't think it's just the drivers. My understanding is that the total cost to operate a public transit bus is around $200/hour these days, even though the bus driver may only be making around $35/hour, if that. The rest of the cost is partially maintenance, but the bigger component is probably periodic replacement of buses every few years, as they wear out. And, since buses get driven far more miles per year than the average car, they wear out fast, even though they're built to last over 500,000 miles.
You are missing unions and politics.
“I'm wondering if in the next 20 years we see the development of private mass transit”
Underlining synerson’s comment, the NY subway system started as private firms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn%E2%80%93Manhattan_Transit_Corporation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Rapid_Transit_Company
To this day, though no longer private, those NY subway lines are referred to the BMT and IRT.
There are many other examples, such as the Somerset Traction Company that acquired some lakeside property in northern Maine, built some bungalows and a theater on it, and constructed an electric railway from the property to the railhead in the county seat of Skowhegan, some 12 miles away.
https://www.mainememory.net/record/59811
No one calls the individual lines anything other than “the 9 train” or “E train” or whatever.
I'm "only" 53 and I've lived in NYC for "only" about 20 years but somewhere along the way I started referring to "the Lex," "the 7th Avenue line," and so on... not exclusively, but often enough... perhaps I have a penchant for old-timey language! (Try it, it's fun!)
What, then, does one say if they're taking the 9? Or, in Manhattan the 1/9? Or whatever?
"I'm wondering if in the next 20 years we see the development of private mass transit."
Private mass transit systems in the U.S. used to be quite common. They mostly either (1) went out of business or (2) were converted to public ownership (or at least protected public utility monopoly status) by the early to mid-20th Century due to profitability issues.
I don’t see how a private system would answer those questions. It would just ask them privately and have less information about how to answer them.
I mean, it would probably answer with all routes over value X. The issue is that there are externality benefits from public transportation where we'd really like all routes over value (X-Y).
The private sector is probably better incentivized to accurately find the routes over the target value, but they'd have a higher target value and even if you subsidize to help them aim for X-Y, the private sector would much prefer to fail "high" rather than "low". In this case failing a little "low" might be better.
The first two (fewer vehicles - thus making everyone who still drives better off, reduced emissions) are what I had in mind.
The private sector doesn't figure out the routes that add the most economic benefit - they figure out the routes that add the most *internalizable* economic benefit.
If the transit system owns the land, then they can internalize the benefit of improving access to land (I think this is how things work in Hong Kong). But if you don't have an integrated monopoly owning both the transit system and the land, then the transit system will systematically underserve spaces where much of the surplus flows to the landowners who don't pay. (Surplus to riders can be siphoned off through fares, but surplus to landowners can't, unless you have taxing authority or you are the landowner.)
It doesn't bother me to tax robotaxis, but this part did bother me:
"Transit and bike infrastructure would become an even tougher sell, as people take more car trips over longer distances. Already, opponents of transit referenda in Austin and Nashville have pointed to robotaxis as a justification not to invest in new light rail systems."
Here's the thing. A lot of people don't want to ride transit, or ride a bike, or walk. They want comfort. They don't want to be sexually harassed on the subway. Maybe they have a disability and don't want to navigate the maze of stairs and platforms and ramps and elevators. Maybe they don't want to stand on the bus.
And there's no way to not count that as a massive benefit not only of robotaxis, but also of Uber and Lyft. How many women have been not raped because Uber, Lyft, and now robotaxis have been available? (Yes I know there are sexual assault stories involving Uber drivers. They also get caught, and prosecuted, because they are so closely monitored, which is a massive deterrent.)
Transit is great and we should have more of it. But there's very much an eat your spinach attitude here where anyone who doesn't want to ride a bus or a bike is a bad person. It's totally legitimate for people to want comfort and especially isolation from potentially dangerous people. This is especially true for the vulnerable. And when we are costing out these things, the benefit of people NOT having to use public transit if they don't want to is a MASSIVE benefit that needs to be very much weighed in the robotaxis' favor.
It's fair to say that comfort is important to people, but I don't think we should just accept sexual assault on public transit as an unchangeable fact of life. Let's make public transit more safe and comfortable!
I don't think a free society should be trying to force people into modes of transit where they reasonably fear assaults. Of course we should be doing more to stop assaults on public transit (sexual and non-sexual assaults both happen all the time) and if we do a good job some more people will switch over, but it is totally legitimate for someone- especially a vulnerable person- to say "I don't want to be stuffed into a subway car with people I do not trust". And Ubers and Lyfts and now robotaxis have been a godsend for people who want transit without the danger posed by being packed in with strangers.
When people have a reasonable fear of assault, that's a real problem and needs to be dealt with. But it's a mistake to compound that problem by also allowing it to compromise the design of a good transportation system. Then you've got two problems instead of one, because you didn't actually address the problem of assault in public places, but just papered over it.
There are many much more direct solutions to the problem of random assault, such as putting cameras everywhere on public streets so that nothing that happens on the street is not recorded. Until those much more direct solutions have been tried and failed, there's not a good justification for allowing that problem to bleed over into other areas and create new problems in those areas.
I want the public to have choices. They shouldn't have to rely on your panopticon. They should be able to say "I don't want to be around strangers". If you want to tax them for that, fine, but that option should be available. This is one group of people trying to force their own lifestyle choices and values onto another.
Other countries have and use mass transit more than we do. Do they have higher rates of sexual assault and other violent crime because of it?
Yes but we're talking about urban transit here, i.e., moving people around within dense cities. Cities are inherently social places, whose whole value is social interaction and bringing people into contact with other people. Without that, what's the point of a city? If you really don't want to come into contact with other people, don't live in a city! And if you do choose to, don't immediately set about trying to turn the city into a noncity; instead focus your efforts on making it work *as a city*, an urban community. That's a choice.
I love cities, for exactly the reasons you're talking about, but "you should accept whatever social interactions a city throws at you" is not how anyone operates.
"Cities are inherently social places, whose whole value is social interaction and bringing people into contact with other people. Without that, what's the point of a city?"
Particularly with the advent of automotive travel (and with electronic communication, much more so), traditional cities are artifacts; in that regard, they're like theme parks.
(As for "social interaction," please note that the creative scenes of Silicon Valley and Laurel Canyon arose in suburbia.)
One goes to a theme park for the amusements and exhibits -- not to interact with the crowds.
It's fair enough for people to have a preference for 'not being around strangers', but normally the best place for people like that to live is in the suburbs or the countryside, rather than in dense, busy urban areas. It will just always be harder to accommodate people with a preference for not encountering other members of the public in the most densely-populated and busiest parts of the country.
I definitely did not get that from the article. It seemed much more that it recognized that cars bring externalities and limits and we should develop alternatives so that we aren't completely constrained by those externalities and limits.
It ignores the single biggest benefit of robotaxis, which is that people get to travel alone, which is great! (Because the author does not think that is great.)
But your solution allocates safety from assault to those who can afford the "comfort and isolation" of hired cars, rather than providing it as a public good. When resources in the urban environment are constantly shifted toward the preferences of the wealthy, the less well-off get fewer options, worse service AND less safety. I will not pretend that I don't encourage (and pay for) my Brooklyn-based daughter to take an Uber whenever she feels she needs to. But it's hard not to think about the fathers and daughters who can't afford to do that, and harder still not to think that the state should be doing more to make public transit the safest places in the city.
Seems like the error here is to believe you have a reasonable fear of assault on a subway? That doesn’t seem true at all in nyc or Washington?
Every one of my female friends has a story about a guy who acted extremely creepy to them on transit
Of note, harassment is not assault thankfully. Crime rates on the subway in nyc seem by all indications lower than general existence in the city itself.
Of note, harassment will drive people to not use transit, which is the point of this whole thread.
Ditto. It's incredibly depressing. Sure, it's "rare" in the sense that it doesn't happen with a high frequency (it's not like my female friends are saying that every time they ride the metro something terrible happens), but it's certainly common enough for me to conclude that women in particular have a reasonable fear of riding public transit, especially when alone or in small groups and during off-peak hours.
But the robotaxi issue is precisely at peak and during the day not at night.
And street harassment as it were is not limited to transit. The same argument basically exists against walking which these cities really can’t function without. I know people who have been harassed on the sidewalks, in parks, in line for coffee ect. Transit I don’t think has an special “be harassed more often” feature compared to any other public space.
Taking a car is more dangerous than taking a subway. Road rage, incidents, etc
A just society would make public transit safer and more comfortable even if that didn't lead to a single additional white collar business commuter using that service.
Our local government and police forces historically have shown approx zero interest in doing this. How does that change?