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.
I generally agree with you about people being able to make their own choices, but my general takeaway is that in very dense urban environments, there is simply not enough road to provide everyone with car based transit and so some type of rationing (usually price) and alternative method is needed. Cities will be better served to tax car based transit and provide buses, train, etc. That won't preclude robotaxis for people who need/want them, but will provide the alternative so that people who can't afford them still have an option.
You shouldn’t be driving inside buildings or on sidewalks or in bus lanes or in bike lanes or on train tracks or in any other space that is needed for a better use. That is all that is being said in don’t see how you get you shouldn’t be driving at all from that, unless you assume that these spaces really should be dedicated to cars, even when other modes would make far more efficient use of the space.
And I read it as "we should provide at least a percentage of the level of support for pedestrians and bikes as we do for cars."
I walk a lot. Believe me, it will be a very, very, very long time and take lots of infrastructure changes before cars will lose their place as transportation king.
I don't need car-free streets, but I would like some adjustments to the streets to accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists.
I am curious about the stats related to sexual assault on transit vs other places. Anecdotally, from my own life and that of people I know, I am not sure that transit is as dangerous as you are making it out.
I am a women in my 50s. I have taken public transit most of my life in US cities of all sizes (Boston, DC, NYC, New Orleans, Twin Cities, Albany/Schenectady, Chicago, Syracuse - from this list I note that I don't spend much time in the western part of the country). People hassle you, ask for money, act erratically, etc., and that can be frightening. But is it more frightening or dangerous than a parking lot or garage? I don't know. The people I know who have been sexually assaulted had it happen in a medical office, an academic office, a shopping plaza, a bar, and at parties. No one is suggesting we stop any of those things - rather that we stop the behavior and more diligently watch out for it.
I think the issue the author is getting at with robotaxis is similar to an issue that can come up when the cost of receiving healthcare goes to zero, in that theres a potential scenario where people who don't urgently need the resource prevent those that do from accessing it. Taxation based on congestion should be one part of the strategy that prevents that, but if robotaxies are used to hollow out/prevent the buildup of alternative transit, then lots of people now have to rely more on the system that's more sensitive to congestion (a bad thing).
(not connected to above):
I agree, it's great that these services provide an alternative to vulnerable people. I don't see why we can't make our public transit systems with the same level of accessibility and monitoring. I think it's sad that we currently live in a society in which large numbers of people (including me!) have a real fear of going outside without having a literal safety bubble around them at almost all times. It is an isolating and suffocating existence, and we can do better. I want to feel safe going outside, I don't just want a more accessible bubble.
I think it is impossible to make a public transit system that will ever be as safe as a robotaxi is for a vulnerable person-- assaults will always occur on public transit. I further think that it is especially impossible given the same factions that advocate for transit also tend to hate law enforcement and also want public transit to be specifically very accessible for fairbox jumpers and homeless people using it as shelter rather than transit. It's not like there's a big "lets do more transit but take strong policing actions to get rid of all the people who shouldn't be on the subway" caucus.
At any rate, your last point is just not a call you get to make for other people. Indeed, I happen to think it's wrong on the merits (that there's actually nothing wrong with not wanting to deal with strangers, especially if one has fears of them) but even if it were right on the merits, other people have the right to disagree and shouldn't be forced into interactions because you and others might think they are good for them. That's fundamental to any notion of a free society. And our transit system should serve the people who don't want to be around others when they commute just as it should serve those who want ample public transit.
This comment does not pencil out; you are letting your personal preferences skew the analysis pretty badly.
Look: there just isn't a way to price out not having to use public transit as a "massive," wait, all-caps, "MASSIVE" benefit.
It's great for people to get the things they want, and we as a society should definitely prioritize getting them the things they need. There are, however, a lot of ways to get stuff. Just to take one example from your comment, protecting people from sexual assault is a thing you do by investing in law enforcement. Trying to achieve it by subsidizing robotaxi services is, at a minimum, a very bank-shot way to achieve that end, which is to say that it is almost certainly an incredibly inefficient use of public funds.
And let's be clear: public funding and public policy and the impact of those funds and policies on the health and growth of cities are exactly what is under discussion in this column.
People get to like what they like. There is no shame in you not liking public transit. But don't kid yourself that, for example, robotaxi service is an efficient way to handle the needs of the majority of disabled riders; it just isn't, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious to you if you sit down and think about it for a moment.
I think the challenge of getting people to use public transit is easy to overcome if we just turn the clock back one hundred years and design our major (and future!) cities around public transit.
Yes, the author seems to present transit and bike infrastructure as an end unto itself, rather than a means to an end. This too:
> Already, opponents of transit referenda in Austin and Nashville have pointed to robotaxis as a justification not to invest in new light rail systems.
....so what? Do they have a case that robotaxis actually do obviate the need for light rail? If so, why is that bad?
It's nice to see a discussion of problems created by an industry come with pragmatic solutions instead of demands for bans and/or character attacks on the service providers.
I mean is it praiseworthy? Why is the default response to new technology “ban it” esp if it provides a clear benefit?
The first half of the piece was solid but the second half on what-to-do-now shows a similar short sighted, closed-mindedness of the urban planning movement.
You can solve the congestion problem by doing automation of everything above ground — bus, cars, e-bike + dedicated lanes are basically the same — and then simply ban human drivers in downtown cores. Transit and driving restricted to city periphery, but significant investment in the above ground transit would totally revolutionize city travel.
Full automation means traffic lights could cease to exist as rules between cars/buses would be stronger signals than a simple light fixture. Dedicated lanes fully protected from sidewalks means transit times are both personalized and can be extremely fast, way faster than slogging through traffic today. Dedicated brick&mortar side entrance opening only when automated cars/busses pull up, and the main sidewalk entrance is now unencumbered from thousands of Uber drop offs.
There are so many more possibilities when automation gets introduced fully into a system. This idea that we will accept new technology only on old terms - and those terms aren’t themselves challenged with the advent of new tech - is a bad one imo.
> Why is the default response to new technology “ban it” esp if it provides a clear benefit?
To play devil's advocate: because there is a long, long, long history of the creators of new technologies spending literally zero effort thinking about the downsides. This isn't because they are evil (usually) but because there are no incentives for them to actually provide clear cost-benefit explanations to us. So ALL we see (in the beginning) are the clear benefits. Meanwhile the costs come to light down the road. With the result that they make billions of dollars of profit while eventually society is left with cleaning up their mess.
Leaded gasoline, leaded paint, PFAS, margarine, social media, CFCs, talcum powder, asbestos, polybutylene pipes, Fen-Phen, opioids, "clean diesel", ... you can probably add more of your own.
It's not hard to see why (some) people have grown hesitant over accepting "but there's a clear benefit" as the end of the discussion.
Until you can show harm you cannot operate on an assumption of harm. That’s beyond ridiculous. The issue with opioids and pfas etc were lies. The regulatory regime failed in understanding the data. Here it’s the exact opposite where these cars have been tested for years with umpteen amounts of data backing their success.
At this point it’s the urban planners acting like big pharma protecting their turf than bureaucrats interested in urban modernization. By your standard we’d never do anything at all because it MIGHT be bad and MIGHT be done with underhanded tactics. Cowards way to regulate that ignores the responsibility of bureaucratic agencies have to citizens beyond just “ban stuff that could be bad”
If public transit was more efficient and effectively run, particularly in NYC, it would compete better for passengers. How much of an indictment is it that ride hailing has continued to flourish in NYC despite the worsening congestion it is supposedly causing? Shouldn't public transit be able to save you time with worsening traffic, particularly the subway? Yet people continue to avoid it.
It competes better than you think! There are about 700k ridehailing app trips per day in NYC, plus about 115k yellow taxi trips. In comparison, there are about 3.1 million subway trips per day, plus about 1.15 million bus trips. (And that's just MTA transit, NYC also has PATH, LIRR, Metro North, etc.)
Ride hailing is great at 1 in the morning when subway service is infrequent and the roads are empty. It's terrible at rush hour when traffic is crawling along and there's a subway train every 8 minutes.
This is all correct but I think it's worth pointing out that "every 8 minutes" is a shamefully low frequency for a gigantic city during rush hour! Go to any large European/Chinese/Japanese city with a subway system and you're getting trains every 5 minutes in _off peak hours_.
This is a bit of a tangent, but MTA is indeed horribly run and could compete significantly better against other modes of transit if it was up to international standards in terms of frequency, reliability, and train speed.
Would echo this. Living in Singapore now where subway runs every 2 mins peak, 5-6 mins off peak. Even though rideshare is cheap (compared to NYC), and congestion is low (due to extreme car taxation) - I still take subway 95% of the time. In NY I took the subway reasonably often, but not as often as I should have because of the low frequency (and unpredictability - delays etc), where congestion on the subway carriage adds now to the delays to my transit (both in terms of worse comfort and in terms of having to skip a train or two before one is empty enough to ride).
The MTA definitely could do a better job, no argument here. But the 8 minutes was a throwaway number. I think it might be representative on something like the C, but the subway gets up to like 15 tph on lines like the 6. The long headways on B division trains are partly due to their abnormally large sizes, too, whereas most other systems run smaller trains more frequently.
Probably worth noting too that there were 500k taxi trips per day pre-Uber so the 2x growth (700k + 115k vs. 500k) seems to me more about finally meeting market demand and the prior inefficiency of taxis vs. some smoking gun against the public transit inefficiency.
In NYC, public transit is frequently considerably faster than ride-hailing and also dramatically cheaper, so unsurprisingly it has much higher ridership (as Flooey notes below.) As a carless NYC resident, I generally use Uber or Lyft in just three situations:
A: Late at night when service is infrequent and traffic is much less dense
B: When traveling between two places that are geographically close together but don’t have a direct subway link (eg: getting to Williamsburg or Green Point from some other parts of Brooklyn)
C: When I have some sort of burden that would be especially difficult or inconvenient to carry on transit.
I don’t think the state could actually address issues A, B, and C in a cost effective way, so for me, ride share a complement to transit use.
Ride hailing flourishing despite it worsening congestion is an indictment of the way that we price congestion - the price is entirely borne by others, while the individuals causing it don’t pay anything (other than the price in time imposed on them by others for their separate contributions).
But I thought Uber and Lyft are estimating total trip time - including traffic / congestion - and pricing accordingly. Certainly, the farebox on legacy taxis is / was always running so ... aren't individuals making pricing tradeoffs at peak times?
Right. When you pay for your ride, you are paying for the delays that other people have imposed on you. But you are also imposing an extra second of delay on hundreds of other people by going at this congested time, and you aren’t paying for that - you are making *them* pay.
But what am I missing in your argument. If the fare is $25 without traffic based on distance and at peak times it's $50 and you still have that willingness to pay - then the market is rational. Everybody is paying more collectively.
The issue is who is paying for which trip. The trips that bring about the congestion are not the same as the trips that are stuck in the congestion. (Particularly since there's a phase transition at a certain point, where a bunch of uncongested trips bring the system just below the margin where one more trip causes congestion, and then decreases the total capacity, until demand gets low enough for the congestion clear and capacity increases again.)
There are a bunch of people paying $25 just before the congestion triggers, many of whom are only taking trips that are worth $26 to them, who then cause capacity to drop and later trips to cost $50, dissuading a bunch of $30 and $40 value trips.
Even before the system enters the congested phase, you want to start increasing the price of individual trips, to dissuade people whose trips are only worth just over $25, to preserve capacity for people whose trips are worth just under $50.
If robotaxis were ubiquitous, we could reduce or eliminate on street parking. And introduce small (say 20 seats) robo-buses that covered more area (ie, not just the most primary streets), and provided much more frequent service.
We once got in an Uber Pool (wife and I), and then an elderly couple got picked up. The woman couldn't sit up straight. She leaned about 30 degrees into me the whole ride. It was kinda funny. The husband kept saying his address to the driver while the driver kept saying, "I know. I have to drop them first and they're only one block out of the way anyway"
Thank you for mentioning the ‘scourge of double-parking’—it’s so pervasive here in Boston, especially on blocks with restaurants where presumably due to food delivery drivers stopping to pick up food the right hand lane becomes borderline unusable. In addition to VMT and congestion pricing, if robotaxis allowed cities to charge a real market price for parking that would be a big deal.
I always say, either enforce the law or get rid of it. I think it's time for Boston to legalize double parking, paint some allowed double parking zones on the road, and specify the times when you're allowed to do it. A lot of the DoorDash rush happens at 8 PM when traffic is calm, and I'm generally fine with it.
One underappreciated part of the robotaxi revolution is that they'll in theory be much easier to enforce regulation on. Most cities ban double parking while doing pickups in theory, but enforcement is so difficult that it is allowed in all but the most egregious cases, and even then only caught when a cop happens to be nearby. Robotaxis having copious cameras and detailed logging would make this sort of thing easy to catch, and a few providers rather than tens of thousands of Uber drivers creates a few predictable enforcement points (just pull the logs from the companies every month). Obviously big players mean more potential for corruption, lobbying, and capture of regulations, but it's hard to imagine it being worse than today's situation where bad behavior is basically unregulated. It kind of dovetails nicely with Matt's general point about the goal of ex: traffic cameras being citations that are small, almost certain, and automatically verified, as opposed to large, onerous, and case-specific. The former situation is a much better and more fair deterrent mechanism.
Please help me understand why I need to emit a single crocodile tear over job loss from ride share drivers who have only been a thing for 10 years and whom just replaced taxi drivers.
These are good all around. They are electric, they are far safer than human drivers, they don’t rape passengers, they don’t care if you’re black, they don’t rate you poorly … none of the rating stuff at all, and should become less expensive.
All things being equal, most people prefer their own space over sharing space on a crowded bus or train. That said, no reason this tech could not be extended to public bus systems to lower the cost of those dramatically. The only obstacle, as usual, is public sector unions. But even that could be overcome with an Uber pool like service that runs fully autonomously.
Yeah, I suppose that true, but easier to avoid those things versus just things like "I didn't like that the passenger rated me bad, so I rated them bad back" or "I don't like that the passenger didn't like my route I took" kind of petty thing.
The paragraph about how robotaxis pose fewer technical challenges than cars was fascinating. I would have preferred more elaboration about that to urbanism hand wringing over whether there will be too
many cars. I’m also wondering if suburban ride sharing is a viable business model, it’s must easier to drive in the burbs than in San Francisco. Is that also true for AVs?
The fact that your article didn’t even address these issues is disappointing (saying that there’s potential competition on the issue of “comfort” doesn’t count).
There’s a difference between what people *say* is the reason they aren’t using the system, and what is *actually* the reason they’re not using the system.
They're absolutely right that that's a feature they don't like. But in a good number cases, if you get rid of the crack smokers and keep the system otherwise the same the people still won't use the system, while if you keep the number of crack smokers and increase the frequency and convenience of the system then people will start using it.
Maybe they're right that the system is already plenty frequent and convenient for what they want, and the only thing they care about is the crack users. But most of the time, when people express these claims, they're misleading themselves about what it is that actually stops themselves from using the system.
With respect, Dr. Easwaran, Facebook Messenger opening up in a small box is a "feature they don't like". Being robbed and being surrounded by crack smokers is a little more than a "feature they don't like".
You have people's stated preferences *and* their revealed preferences (public transit use is down). I think that the burden of proof is on you to rebut that.
However, in any event, this issue was completely ignored in the guest article. At least you are engaging with it.
Transit usage in various cities doesn't particularly strongly correlate with the presence or absence of crack smokers. It does particularly strongly correlate with the frequency and convenience of the system for getting to various places.
"Comfort" counts, too! It's a continuum -- all of it involving the quality and nature of the experience! NONE of this should be so flippantly dismissed!
"Comfort" is very important! But before we get to the comfort conversation, very minimal thresholds like 'don't be full of people smoking crack and robbing you' need to be met.
This does not actually seem to be about robotaxis at all. Maybe the one real point would be to charge robotaxis for the congestion they participate in as they are already monitored and precise charging would be easy.
> US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx claimed that by 2021, “we will see autonomous vehicles in operation across the country.” But 2021 came and went, and instead of driverless cars, the mea culpas started rolling in.
Given that COVID intervened, this was a Delphic-grade prediction. "Across the country" is a stretch, but that's among the most accurate decade-out technological forecasts I've ever seen.
Point to Foxx! (Point number two for his extremely amusing middle name, "Renard", from the vulpine hero of medieval folklore.)
I saw a very interesting video the other day. An AZ police officer pulled over a Waymo car for driving in the wrong direction against traffic, and had to be remotely connected to customer service instead of talking to and ticketing the driver.
If that car kills someone, who gets the charge, and if your answer is 'I dunno', isn't that a horrible perverse incentive against safety?
Waymo gets the charge. Cruise got in a world of trouble for its recent indiscretions, virtually their entire top leadership team paid with their jobs for it.
Autonomous vehicle safety will be managed like airplane travel safety, a corporate safety process. Airplanes are a hell of a lot safer than cars despite Boeing's recent difficulties.
“ Double edit: someone should go to jail for deaths.”
That not how it works. Especially with cars - if you kill someone with your car as long as you’re not drunk and don’t leave the scene you almost never get any jail time.
Also workplace fatalities rarely if ever result in jail time. Accidents and mistakes aren’t generally jailable offenses. You’ll be civilly liable of course.
That's interesting. I unfortunately know of two separate instances where distracted/negligent drivers killed people I know, and both of them went to jail for at least 6 months. This might be a regional thing.
It's about how (obviously human) drivers killed about 150 pedestrians a year in NYC (2014 data), and in the vast majority of cases, the driver isn’t arrested or charged with anything substantial.
A lot of that depends on demonstrating negligence or recklessness, which can be difficult. I think NYC is probably an outlier in and of that they have a huge amount of cases to prosecute and not as many resources to devote into these cases.
In the case of my friend being killed, the driver of the other car admitted to police that she was putting on makeup and not really watching the road as her car crossed the centerline. That was enough to put her in jail.
I think admitting that you know your autonomous vehicle sometimes crosses the line, and deploying it anyway, constitutes an admission that you are reckless or negligent.
Probably more than in other cultures, in the Anglosphere the level of intent behind the cause of a death plays a huge role in our punishments - all the way from "I planned to kill this person for weeks" down to "this self driving car I improperly designed killed someone". If we punished the latter anywhere close to the former, it would just mean the best and the brightest would avoid any career where there was a remote possibility of a death resulting from any decisions made.
Sending people to jail for deaths should be considered if it reduces deaths. For individual human drivers, I don’t think the potential punishment is that large a factor in how hard they try to avoid causing deaths. For corporate robo-drivers, I suspect systematic big dollar fines will be even more effective at getting them to avoid deaths than any threat of jail.
I think that if I commit the crime as an individual and could go to jail, then someone in the CSuite of every corporation should be liable in the same way for crimes committed by the organization.
Maybe that is or isn't right from a retributivist standpoint. I really don't care. What I care about is whatever range of responses minimizes the number of victims.
Is making a mistake a crime (the answer is of course "it depends")?
Furthermore, are all traffic deaths avoidable? Should a CSuite at waymo go to jail if a car kills a passenger in a scenario that a human driver would likely also not have avoided?
It's way too complicated to just suggest that we jail everyone anytime this happens.
Negligent homicide is certainly a crime. Reckless endangerment is a crime. Operating a vehicle in incoming traffic is at least a very serious infraction, and if you kill someone while doing it I expect you would be arrested and tried. If I operate an RC car into incoming traffic, I would certainly be at fault. I don't see why releasing an autonomous vehicle into the wild is any different?
If my car has an unforeseen mechanical malfunction, or if I have a medical event, those are extenuating circumstances. If I knowingly drive an unsafe car, that is my fault, and I'm civilly and criminally liable.
Is an autonomous vehicle that drives into incoming traffic unsafe? I would say so. If Ford knowingly released a normal car that was demonstrated to fail in such a way as to lose control like this, we wouldn't say “oh well people lose control anyway sometimes, so it's acceptable”. There would, at minimum be recalls, and it would be a huge scandal.
I, obviously, think that if preventable deaths occured, that the CSuite should suffer for it in both cases (Waymo and Ford, in my examples) with the same penalties as if I knew that my personal car was unsafe, drove it anyway, and caused a crash as a private citizen.
I saw a talk by the head of medical IT at Stanford Hospitals, and he said that these sorts of corporate liability concerns with medical AI were way overblown, that the system is what's being gone after anyway most of the time for medical liability and not individual practitioners. He did not think medical liability would be what held medical AI back, rather cost was a major factor.
>> "Because cars — including autonomous and electric cars — are so inefficient at moving lots of people at the same time, a robotaxi-dominated transportation system would have a relatively low ceiling on the number of people it could transport. "
Curious if there are any road use efficiency studies that evaluate robotaxis instead of human operated cars.
In the studies I've seen on space efficiency, parking was the main contributor to the space inefficiency of cars. I think parking needs are around 5 or 10 times the space needed for roads. So parking need really dominated the studies on space efficiency of cars versus public transit.
In addition to saving space with parking, I'd guess robotaxis use roads much more efficiently than human operated cars because there's no distracted driving and fewer mistakes so their overall throughput on roads could be considerably higher.
One possible alternative structure for general AV deployment rather than robotaxis only is that it would be more feasible (and depending on charge structure, potentially much cheaper) to store one’s personal car outside the urban area and summon it to one’s door in advance of a trip.
The throughput on roads is only going to be an advantage on limited access expressways. In city streets, it’s hard to do much better than one or two vehicles per second per lane at intersections, where pedestrians need to be able to cross the street, and everything is within a block of an intersection.
How about "Biden should go to the designated pickup zone, pay the congestion charge (no tip needed) and ride his robotaxi to the airport of retirement."
I think robotaxis will favor walkable/public transport centered cities all on their own. The robotaxis will finally truly enable people to not own cars -- even with Uber and Lyft things like vet appointments or big grocery/shopping trips are awkward to impossible not to mention all the times you really don't want to deal with a stranger (sick kid or sick you to doc).
And switching a service from mostly upfront fixed costs with small hidden marginal costs (extra miles may add maintenance costs or hurt resale but it's not salient) to a system with larger marginal costs that directly take dollars out of your bank account has an absolutely huge effect. This is why pay per article and micropayments never took off online -- people have a barrier to spending money.
Once people start thinking "ohh do I really want to spend $15 so I don't have to take the bus" they'll start taking the bus way more. Indeed, I think it's critical not to impose taxes on them to make it affordable to go car free.
I suppose it mostly is going to come down to how much cheaper a robo taxi ride can be sold than a regular Uber/Lyft. It seems like there should be an economy of scale at which they are significantly less expensive since they're replacing a driving that has to be paid continually with some tech they buy once and then just have to maintain. But, it's also a completely different business model. Uber grew so quickly because they fobbed off the actual acquisition, operation and maintenance of the physical vehicles on independent drivers. Robo taxi companies obviously can't do this, they will have to operate the entire fleet, and it's very a much an open question how to do that profitably. Much will depend on the tax and regulatory environment that emerges as well.
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?
Slowly, with persistent effort 🤷
Cops cost a lot of money.
I generally agree with you about people being able to make their own choices, but my general takeaway is that in very dense urban environments, there is simply not enough road to provide everyone with car based transit and so some type of rationing (usually price) and alternative method is needed. Cities will be better served to tax car based transit and provide buses, train, etc. That won't preclude robotaxis for people who need/want them, but will provide the alternative so that people who can't afford them still have an option.
Taxation is fine, as I indicated in OP.
Yeah, I just didn't read the "people shouldn't take cars" vibe that you picked up and got more "we need other options as well" vibe.
You didn't read the "people shouldn't take cars" vibe?
How about, "Now is the time to carve out bus lanes and bike lanes and car free streets"? Sounds like "people shouldn't take cars" to me!
You shouldn’t be driving inside buildings or on sidewalks or in bus lanes or in bike lanes or on train tracks or in any other space that is needed for a better use. That is all that is being said in don’t see how you get you shouldn’t be driving at all from that, unless you assume that these spaces really should be dedicated to cars, even when other modes would make far more efficient use of the space.
That's a motte-and bailey argument! Where did I use the words "at all"?
Who are you to demand "a more efficient use of space," refusing to accommodate the numbers of people who prefer to drive?
And I read it as "we should provide at least a percentage of the level of support for pedestrians and bikes as we do for cars."
I walk a lot. Believe me, it will be a very, very, very long time and take lots of infrastructure changes before cars will lose their place as transportation king.
I don't need car-free streets, but I would like some adjustments to the streets to accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists.
I focused on the first two which seem fine, but agree that car free streets are in most cases a poor choice.
...but with those first two options, people taking cars are still the ones being "carved out."
I am curious about the stats related to sexual assault on transit vs other places. Anecdotally, from my own life and that of people I know, I am not sure that transit is as dangerous as you are making it out.
I am a women in my 50s. I have taken public transit most of my life in US cities of all sizes (Boston, DC, NYC, New Orleans, Twin Cities, Albany/Schenectady, Chicago, Syracuse - from this list I note that I don't spend much time in the western part of the country). People hassle you, ask for money, act erratically, etc., and that can be frightening. But is it more frightening or dangerous than a parking lot or garage? I don't know. The people I know who have been sexually assaulted had it happen in a medical office, an academic office, a shopping plaza, a bar, and at parties. No one is suggesting we stop any of those things - rather that we stop the behavior and more diligently watch out for it.
I think the issue the author is getting at with robotaxis is similar to an issue that can come up when the cost of receiving healthcare goes to zero, in that theres a potential scenario where people who don't urgently need the resource prevent those that do from accessing it. Taxation based on congestion should be one part of the strategy that prevents that, but if robotaxies are used to hollow out/prevent the buildup of alternative transit, then lots of people now have to rely more on the system that's more sensitive to congestion (a bad thing).
(not connected to above):
I agree, it's great that these services provide an alternative to vulnerable people. I don't see why we can't make our public transit systems with the same level of accessibility and monitoring. I think it's sad that we currently live in a society in which large numbers of people (including me!) have a real fear of going outside without having a literal safety bubble around them at almost all times. It is an isolating and suffocating existence, and we can do better. I want to feel safe going outside, I don't just want a more accessible bubble.
I think it is impossible to make a public transit system that will ever be as safe as a robotaxi is for a vulnerable person-- assaults will always occur on public transit. I further think that it is especially impossible given the same factions that advocate for transit also tend to hate law enforcement and also want public transit to be specifically very accessible for fairbox jumpers and homeless people using it as shelter rather than transit. It's not like there's a big "lets do more transit but take strong policing actions to get rid of all the people who shouldn't be on the subway" caucus.
At any rate, your last point is just not a call you get to make for other people. Indeed, I happen to think it's wrong on the merits (that there's actually nothing wrong with not wanting to deal with strangers, especially if one has fears of them) but even if it were right on the merits, other people have the right to disagree and shouldn't be forced into interactions because you and others might think they are good for them. That's fundamental to any notion of a free society. And our transit system should serve the people who don't want to be around others when they commute just as it should serve those who want ample public transit.
You don’t have a right to not be around strangers. It is a privilege in a dense city and should be priced accordingly.
How do you solve the problem for pedestrians? Or do you just assume that vulnerable people will never be out in public at all?
This comment does not pencil out; you are letting your personal preferences skew the analysis pretty badly.
Look: there just isn't a way to price out not having to use public transit as a "massive," wait, all-caps, "MASSIVE" benefit.
It's great for people to get the things they want, and we as a society should definitely prioritize getting them the things they need. There are, however, a lot of ways to get stuff. Just to take one example from your comment, protecting people from sexual assault is a thing you do by investing in law enforcement. Trying to achieve it by subsidizing robotaxi services is, at a minimum, a very bank-shot way to achieve that end, which is to say that it is almost certainly an incredibly inefficient use of public funds.
And let's be clear: public funding and public policy and the impact of those funds and policies on the health and growth of cities are exactly what is under discussion in this column.
People get to like what they like. There is no shame in you not liking public transit. But don't kid yourself that, for example, robotaxi service is an efficient way to handle the needs of the majority of disabled riders; it just isn't, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious to you if you sit down and think about it for a moment.
I think the challenge of getting people to use public transit is easy to overcome if we just turn the clock back one hundred years and design our major (and future!) cities around public transit.
Yes, the author seems to present transit and bike infrastructure as an end unto itself, rather than a means to an end. This too:
> Already, opponents of transit referenda in Austin and Nashville have pointed to robotaxis as a justification not to invest in new light rail systems.
....so what? Do they have a case that robotaxis actually do obviate the need for light rail? If so, why is that bad?
It’s at least potentially bad because of the negative externalities of car use, chiefly pollution, traffic, wear and tear on the roads, and accidents.
It's nice to see a discussion of problems created by an industry come with pragmatic solutions instead of demands for bans and/or character attacks on the service providers.
I mean is it praiseworthy? Why is the default response to new technology “ban it” esp if it provides a clear benefit?
The first half of the piece was solid but the second half on what-to-do-now shows a similar short sighted, closed-mindedness of the urban planning movement.
You can solve the congestion problem by doing automation of everything above ground — bus, cars, e-bike + dedicated lanes are basically the same — and then simply ban human drivers in downtown cores. Transit and driving restricted to city periphery, but significant investment in the above ground transit would totally revolutionize city travel.
Full automation means traffic lights could cease to exist as rules between cars/buses would be stronger signals than a simple light fixture. Dedicated lanes fully protected from sidewalks means transit times are both personalized and can be extremely fast, way faster than slogging through traffic today. Dedicated brick&mortar side entrance opening only when automated cars/busses pull up, and the main sidewalk entrance is now unencumbered from thousands of Uber drop offs.
There are so many more possibilities when automation gets introduced fully into a system. This idea that we will accept new technology only on old terms - and those terms aren’t themselves challenged with the advent of new tech - is a bad one imo.
> Why is the default response to new technology “ban it” esp if it provides a clear benefit?
To play devil's advocate: because there is a long, long, long history of the creators of new technologies spending literally zero effort thinking about the downsides. This isn't because they are evil (usually) but because there are no incentives for them to actually provide clear cost-benefit explanations to us. So ALL we see (in the beginning) are the clear benefits. Meanwhile the costs come to light down the road. With the result that they make billions of dollars of profit while eventually society is left with cleaning up their mess.
Leaded gasoline, leaded paint, PFAS, margarine, social media, CFCs, talcum powder, asbestos, polybutylene pipes, Fen-Phen, opioids, "clean diesel", ... you can probably add more of your own.
It's not hard to see why (some) people have grown hesitant over accepting "but there's a clear benefit" as the end of the discussion.
Until you can show harm you cannot operate on an assumption of harm. That’s beyond ridiculous. The issue with opioids and pfas etc were lies. The regulatory regime failed in understanding the data. Here it’s the exact opposite where these cars have been tested for years with umpteen amounts of data backing their success.
At this point it’s the urban planners acting like big pharma protecting their turf than bureaucrats interested in urban modernization. By your standard we’d never do anything at all because it MIGHT be bad and MIGHT be done with underhanded tactics. Cowards way to regulate that ignores the responsibility of bureaucratic agencies have to citizens beyond just “ban stuff that could be bad”
If public transit was more efficient and effectively run, particularly in NYC, it would compete better for passengers. How much of an indictment is it that ride hailing has continued to flourish in NYC despite the worsening congestion it is supposedly causing? Shouldn't public transit be able to save you time with worsening traffic, particularly the subway? Yet people continue to avoid it.
It competes better than you think! There are about 700k ridehailing app trips per day in NYC, plus about 115k yellow taxi trips. In comparison, there are about 3.1 million subway trips per day, plus about 1.15 million bus trips. (And that's just MTA transit, NYC also has PATH, LIRR, Metro North, etc.)
Ride hailing is great at 1 in the morning when subway service is infrequent and the roads are empty. It's terrible at rush hour when traffic is crawling along and there's a subway train every 8 minutes.
This is all correct but I think it's worth pointing out that "every 8 minutes" is a shamefully low frequency for a gigantic city during rush hour! Go to any large European/Chinese/Japanese city with a subway system and you're getting trains every 5 minutes in _off peak hours_.
This is a bit of a tangent, but MTA is indeed horribly run and could compete significantly better against other modes of transit if it was up to international standards in terms of frequency, reliability, and train speed.
Would echo this. Living in Singapore now where subway runs every 2 mins peak, 5-6 mins off peak. Even though rideshare is cheap (compared to NYC), and congestion is low (due to extreme car taxation) - I still take subway 95% of the time. In NY I took the subway reasonably often, but not as often as I should have because of the low frequency (and unpredictability - delays etc), where congestion on the subway carriage adds now to the delays to my transit (both in terms of worse comfort and in terms of having to skip a train or two before one is empty enough to ride).
The MTA definitely could do a better job, no argument here. But the 8 minutes was a throwaway number. I think it might be representative on something like the C, but the subway gets up to like 15 tph on lines like the 6. The long headways on B division trains are partly due to their abnormally large sizes, too, whereas most other systems run smaller trains more frequently.
Probably worth noting too that there were 500k taxi trips per day pre-Uber so the 2x growth (700k + 115k vs. 500k) seems to me more about finally meeting market demand and the prior inefficiency of taxis vs. some smoking gun against the public transit inefficiency.
In NYC, public transit is frequently considerably faster than ride-hailing and also dramatically cheaper, so unsurprisingly it has much higher ridership (as Flooey notes below.) As a carless NYC resident, I generally use Uber or Lyft in just three situations:
A: Late at night when service is infrequent and traffic is much less dense
B: When traveling between two places that are geographically close together but don’t have a direct subway link (eg: getting to Williamsburg or Green Point from some other parts of Brooklyn)
C: When I have some sort of burden that would be especially difficult or inconvenient to carry on transit.
I don’t think the state could actually address issues A, B, and C in a cost effective way, so for me, ride share a complement to transit use.
Yeah, when I lived in DC, there were many instances where I took Uber home after a night out solely because the Metro was a dumpster fire
Ride hailing flourishing despite it worsening congestion is an indictment of the way that we price congestion - the price is entirely borne by others, while the individuals causing it don’t pay anything (other than the price in time imposed on them by others for their separate contributions).
But I thought Uber and Lyft are estimating total trip time - including traffic / congestion - and pricing accordingly. Certainly, the farebox on legacy taxis is / was always running so ... aren't individuals making pricing tradeoffs at peak times?
Right. When you pay for your ride, you are paying for the delays that other people have imposed on you. But you are also imposing an extra second of delay on hundreds of other people by going at this congested time, and you aren’t paying for that - you are making *them* pay.
But what am I missing in your argument. If the fare is $25 without traffic based on distance and at peak times it's $50 and you still have that willingness to pay - then the market is rational. Everybody is paying more collectively.
The issue is who is paying for which trip. The trips that bring about the congestion are not the same as the trips that are stuck in the congestion. (Particularly since there's a phase transition at a certain point, where a bunch of uncongested trips bring the system just below the margin where one more trip causes congestion, and then decreases the total capacity, until demand gets low enough for the congestion clear and capacity increases again.)
There are a bunch of people paying $25 just before the congestion triggers, many of whom are only taking trips that are worth $26 to them, who then cause capacity to drop and later trips to cost $50, dissuading a bunch of $30 and $40 value trips.
Even before the system enters the congested phase, you want to start increasing the price of individual trips, to dissuade people whose trips are only worth just over $25, to preserve capacity for people whose trips are worth just under $50.
If robotaxis were ubiquitous, we could reduce or eliminate on street parking. And introduce small (say 20 seats) robo-buses that covered more area (ie, not just the most primary streets), and provided much more frequent service.
I miss the days of riding Uber Pool and never having anyone join me.
We once got in an Uber Pool (wife and I), and then an elderly couple got picked up. The woman couldn't sit up straight. She leaned about 30 degrees into me the whole ride. It was kinda funny. The husband kept saying his address to the driver while the driver kept saying, "I know. I have to drop them first and they're only one block out of the way anyway"
Thank you for mentioning the ‘scourge of double-parking’—it’s so pervasive here in Boston, especially on blocks with restaurants where presumably due to food delivery drivers stopping to pick up food the right hand lane becomes borderline unusable. In addition to VMT and congestion pricing, if robotaxis allowed cities to charge a real market price for parking that would be a big deal.
I always say, either enforce the law or get rid of it. I think it's time for Boston to legalize double parking, paint some allowed double parking zones on the road, and specify the times when you're allowed to do it. A lot of the DoorDash rush happens at 8 PM when traffic is calm, and I'm generally fine with it.
It's even worse when they park in the bike lanes.
One underappreciated part of the robotaxi revolution is that they'll in theory be much easier to enforce regulation on. Most cities ban double parking while doing pickups in theory, but enforcement is so difficult that it is allowed in all but the most egregious cases, and even then only caught when a cop happens to be nearby. Robotaxis having copious cameras and detailed logging would make this sort of thing easy to catch, and a few providers rather than tens of thousands of Uber drivers creates a few predictable enforcement points (just pull the logs from the companies every month). Obviously big players mean more potential for corruption, lobbying, and capture of regulations, but it's hard to imagine it being worse than today's situation where bad behavior is basically unregulated. It kind of dovetails nicely with Matt's general point about the goal of ex: traffic cameras being citations that are small, almost certain, and automatically verified, as opposed to large, onerous, and case-specific. The former situation is a much better and more fair deterrent mechanism.
I am glad this isn’t just a Baltimore thing. I once saw the meter maid ticket two of them. We need more parking enforcers and boot crews.
Please help me understand why I need to emit a single crocodile tear over job loss from ride share drivers who have only been a thing for 10 years and whom just replaced taxi drivers.
These are good all around. They are electric, they are far safer than human drivers, they don’t rape passengers, they don’t care if you’re black, they don’t rate you poorly … none of the rating stuff at all, and should become less expensive.
All things being equal, most people prefer their own space over sharing space on a crowded bus or train. That said, no reason this tech could not be extended to public bus systems to lower the cost of those dramatically. The only obstacle, as usual, is public sector unions. But even that could be overcome with an Uber pool like service that runs fully autonomously.
> they don’t rate you poorly … none of the rating stuff at all
I don’t think that’s true. If you smoke or puke in the back of the car you’re going to get dinged and eventually kicked off the platform.
Yeah, I suppose that true, but easier to avoid those things versus just things like "I didn't like that the passenger rated me bad, so I rated them bad back" or "I don't like that the passenger didn't like my route I took" kind of petty thing.
The paragraph about how robotaxis pose fewer technical challenges than cars was fascinating. I would have preferred more elaboration about that to urbanism hand wringing over whether there will be too
many cars. I’m also wondering if suburban ride sharing is a viable business model, it’s must easier to drive in the burbs than in San Francisco. Is that also true for AVs?
“Public transit is a reasonable option for many trips”
Here’s an article about San Francisco’s transit system: “BART commuters say crime, open drug use keeping people away from the transit system”
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/sanfrancisco/news/bart-commuters-say-several-factors-could-be-keeping-people-away-from-the-transit-system/
The fact that your article didn’t even address these issues is disappointing (saying that there’s potential competition on the issue of “comfort” doesn’t count).
There’s a difference between what people *say* is the reason they aren’t using the system, and what is *actually* the reason they’re not using the system.
Not sure what you mean, are you saying that people are lying about not liking people smoking crack around them and robbing them?
They're absolutely right that that's a feature they don't like. But in a good number cases, if you get rid of the crack smokers and keep the system otherwise the same the people still won't use the system, while if you keep the number of crack smokers and increase the frequency and convenience of the system then people will start using it.
Maybe they're right that the system is already plenty frequent and convenient for what they want, and the only thing they care about is the crack users. But most of the time, when people express these claims, they're misleading themselves about what it is that actually stops themselves from using the system.
With respect, Dr. Easwaran, Facebook Messenger opening up in a small box is a "feature they don't like". Being robbed and being surrounded by crack smokers is a little more than a "feature they don't like".
You have people's stated preferences *and* their revealed preferences (public transit use is down). I think that the burden of proof is on you to rebut that.
However, in any event, this issue was completely ignored in the guest article. At least you are engaging with it.
Transit usage in various cities doesn't particularly strongly correlate with the presence or absence of crack smokers. It does particularly strongly correlate with the frequency and convenience of the system for getting to various places.
I mostly don’t use Bart because it doesn’t cover the vast share of the city. I’m a spokes European but still.
"Comfort" counts, too! It's a continuum -- all of it involving the quality and nature of the experience! NONE of this should be so flippantly dismissed!
"Comfort" is very important! But before we get to the comfort conversation, very minimal thresholds like 'don't be full of people smoking crack and robbing you' need to be met.
This does not actually seem to be about robotaxis at all. Maybe the one real point would be to charge robotaxis for the congestion they participate in as they are already monitored and precise charging would be easy.
> US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx claimed that by 2021, “we will see autonomous vehicles in operation across the country.” But 2021 came and went, and instead of driverless cars, the mea culpas started rolling in.
Given that COVID intervened, this was a Delphic-grade prediction. "Across the country" is a stretch, but that's among the most accurate decade-out technological forecasts I've ever seen.
Point to Foxx! (Point number two for his extremely amusing middle name, "Renard", from the vulpine hero of medieval folklore.)
Wait. Not only does he have an extraneous x in his last name, but his middle name means the same as his last name?
This is one meta guy.
I don't like to jump to conclusions, but this is pretty strong evidence we're living in a simulation.
I saw a very interesting video the other day. An AZ police officer pulled over a Waymo car for driving in the wrong direction against traffic, and had to be remotely connected to customer service instead of talking to and ticketing the driver.
If that car kills someone, who gets the charge, and if your answer is 'I dunno', isn't that a horrible perverse incentive against safety?
Waymo gets the charge. Cruise got in a world of trouble for its recent indiscretions, virtually their entire top leadership team paid with their jobs for it.
Autonomous vehicle safety will be managed like airplane travel safety, a corporate safety process. Airplanes are a hell of a lot safer than cars despite Boeing's recent difficulties.
Yeah but isn't air travel safe because of a huge federally controlled network of ATC, inspectors, and highly trained pilots?
ETA thank you for the answer to the question though. Appreciate it.
Double edit: someone should go to jail for deaths. Losing a job is pretty weak sauce.
“ Double edit: someone should go to jail for deaths.”
That not how it works. Especially with cars - if you kill someone with your car as long as you’re not drunk and don’t leave the scene you almost never get any jail time.
Also workplace fatalities rarely if ever result in jail time. Accidents and mistakes aren’t generally jailable offenses. You’ll be civilly liable of course.
That's interesting. I unfortunately know of two separate instances where distracted/negligent drivers killed people I know, and both of them went to jail for at least 6 months. This might be a regional thing.
Freakonomics did a whole episode on this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime-2/
It's about how (obviously human) drivers killed about 150 pedestrians a year in NYC (2014 data), and in the vast majority of cases, the driver isn’t arrested or charged with anything substantial.
A lot of that depends on demonstrating negligence or recklessness, which can be difficult. I think NYC is probably an outlier in and of that they have a huge amount of cases to prosecute and not as many resources to devote into these cases.
In the case of my friend being killed, the driver of the other car admitted to police that she was putting on makeup and not really watching the road as her car crossed the centerline. That was enough to put her in jail.
I think admitting that you know your autonomous vehicle sometimes crosses the line, and deploying it anyway, constitutes an admission that you are reckless or negligent.
Yeah, happened near me and the guy got three years.
Probably more than in other cultures, in the Anglosphere the level of intent behind the cause of a death plays a huge role in our punishments - all the way from "I planned to kill this person for weeks" down to "this self driving car I improperly designed killed someone". If we punished the latter anywhere close to the former, it would just mean the best and the brightest would avoid any career where there was a remote possibility of a death resulting from any decisions made.
Sending people to jail for deaths should be considered if it reduces deaths. For individual human drivers, I don’t think the potential punishment is that large a factor in how hard they try to avoid causing deaths. For corporate robo-drivers, I suspect systematic big dollar fines will be even more effective at getting them to avoid deaths than any threat of jail.
I think that if I commit the crime as an individual and could go to jail, then someone in the CSuite of every corporation should be liable in the same way for crimes committed by the organization.
Maybe that is or isn't right from a retributivist standpoint. I really don't care. What I care about is whatever range of responses minimizes the number of victims.
Is making a mistake a crime (the answer is of course "it depends")?
Furthermore, are all traffic deaths avoidable? Should a CSuite at waymo go to jail if a car kills a passenger in a scenario that a human driver would likely also not have avoided?
It's way too complicated to just suggest that we jail everyone anytime this happens.
Negligent homicide is certainly a crime. Reckless endangerment is a crime. Operating a vehicle in incoming traffic is at least a very serious infraction, and if you kill someone while doing it I expect you would be arrested and tried. If I operate an RC car into incoming traffic, I would certainly be at fault. I don't see why releasing an autonomous vehicle into the wild is any different?
If my car has an unforeseen mechanical malfunction, or if I have a medical event, those are extenuating circumstances. If I knowingly drive an unsafe car, that is my fault, and I'm civilly and criminally liable.
Is an autonomous vehicle that drives into incoming traffic unsafe? I would say so. If Ford knowingly released a normal car that was demonstrated to fail in such a way as to lose control like this, we wouldn't say “oh well people lose control anyway sometimes, so it's acceptable”. There would, at minimum be recalls, and it would be a huge scandal.
I, obviously, think that if preventable deaths occured, that the CSuite should suffer for it in both cases (Waymo and Ford, in my examples) with the same penalties as if I knew that my personal car was unsafe, drove it anyway, and caused a crash as a private citizen.
Or one generally accepted figure is $10 million per death
I saw a talk by the head of medical IT at Stanford Hospitals, and he said that these sorts of corporate liability concerns with medical AI were way overblown, that the system is what's being gone after anyway most of the time for medical liability and not individual practitioners. He did not think medical liability would be what held medical AI back, rather cost was a major factor.
>> "Because cars — including autonomous and electric cars — are so inefficient at moving lots of people at the same time, a robotaxi-dominated transportation system would have a relatively low ceiling on the number of people it could transport. "
Curious if there are any road use efficiency studies that evaluate robotaxis instead of human operated cars.
In the studies I've seen on space efficiency, parking was the main contributor to the space inefficiency of cars. I think parking needs are around 5 or 10 times the space needed for roads. So parking need really dominated the studies on space efficiency of cars versus public transit.
In addition to saving space with parking, I'd guess robotaxis use roads much more efficiently than human operated cars because there's no distracted driving and fewer mistakes so their overall throughput on roads could be considerably higher.
One possible alternative structure for general AV deployment rather than robotaxis only is that it would be more feasible (and depending on charge structure, potentially much cheaper) to store one’s personal car outside the urban area and summon it to one’s door in advance of a trip.
The throughput on roads is only going to be an advantage on limited access expressways. In city streets, it’s hard to do much better than one or two vehicles per second per lane at intersections, where pedestrians need to be able to cross the street, and everything is within a block of an intersection.
Fuck Joe Biden.
Save it for the post later today!
How about "Biden should go to the designated pickup zone, pay the congestion charge (no tip needed) and ride his robotaxi to the airport of retirement."
Any idea when it will hit?
couple of hours!
ok.
I think robotaxis will favor walkable/public transport centered cities all on their own. The robotaxis will finally truly enable people to not own cars -- even with Uber and Lyft things like vet appointments or big grocery/shopping trips are awkward to impossible not to mention all the times you really don't want to deal with a stranger (sick kid or sick you to doc).
And switching a service from mostly upfront fixed costs with small hidden marginal costs (extra miles may add maintenance costs or hurt resale but it's not salient) to a system with larger marginal costs that directly take dollars out of your bank account has an absolutely huge effect. This is why pay per article and micropayments never took off online -- people have a barrier to spending money.
Once people start thinking "ohh do I really want to spend $15 so I don't have to take the bus" they'll start taking the bus way more. Indeed, I think it's critical not to impose taxes on them to make it affordable to go car free.
I suppose it mostly is going to come down to how much cheaper a robo taxi ride can be sold than a regular Uber/Lyft. It seems like there should be an economy of scale at which they are significantly less expensive since they're replacing a driving that has to be paid continually with some tech they buy once and then just have to maintain. But, it's also a completely different business model. Uber grew so quickly because they fobbed off the actual acquisition, operation and maintenance of the physical vehicles on independent drivers. Robo taxi companies obviously can't do this, they will have to operate the entire fleet, and it's very a much an open question how to do that profitably. Much will depend on the tax and regulatory environment that emerges as well.