I envisage the manufacturers bypassing third party's entirely. Rather than buying or leasing car, you subscribe to your manufacturer of choices plan for a car as a service. Eg subscribe to Tesla. Quick trip, model 3 appears and drives you there. Longer trip? Model s does the job. Family holiday? Model x picks you all up. At the end of the day the car returns itself to the pool.
Lyft Self-Driving
171–176 of 176 posts
Re: Lyft Self-Driving
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an incomplete view of the problem. Public transportation is used by people from all walks of life. Not just office workers - cooks, nurses, artists, school teachers, police officers, even employees of trade companies... and every citizen benefits from reduced traffic, lower infrastructure costs, and better health. Using car taxes to fund public transportation would not materially impact the carpenter. They'd j…
>> They'd just charge a little more. And so too can the office workers. To charge one group for the benefit of another, based solely on the manner of their employ, is the definition of unfair. This is what progressive taxation is for, not use taxes.
What? You either selectively read my response, or you're being deliberately obtuse with your focus on office workers. Car taxes ensure the market accurately captures negative externalities. There is no discrimination - if a doctor, CEO, and a plumber use cars equally, they are taxed equally. In contrast, low/absent car taxes are discriminatory subsidies.
For businesses that require car usage, the tax is merely an operating cost. There is no impact on profit as operating costs are passed on to the consumer.
Of course, allocating that revenue is still subject to local voters' wishes.
Re: Lyft Self-Driving
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because sleep deprivation is a major ailment. Nothing says good life like the neighbor above having a late night party, the heavy traffic starting about five am or the shrieks of the late night ambulances.
Cramped living. Been there done that, hated it. I love the silence at night. Having a big living room and a little garden. Being able to actually look up the sky and see stars. I do like trains, but they can't get everywhere. I take a bus to work everyday but they don't operate 24h a day and not frequently enough. I'm the most excited about self driving buses. Even in predefined routes on special self driving lanes.…
> "I'm the most excited about self driving buses."
Agreed. Self-driving cars may be a sham "solution" to American's transportation woes....however self-driving busses should be considered as a very practical mass transit alternative to rail since the road infrastructure is already built. I've heard they are testing this out in Las Vegas:
https://blog.caranddriver.com/letting-it-ride-las-vegas-puts...
Re: Lyft Self-Driving
#174I've just read https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid.... Since few years ago, the only thing that made me interested to these autonomous cars is the laws that regulate these cars. I think the government haven't fixed the laws, so it's still an interesting topic to be discussed next year.
Re: Lyft Self-Driving
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is suggesting that there aren't special cases where using a car is the right move. But the vast majority of cases where people take cars, replacing that experience with better public transit is entirely reasonable. Hell, improving public transit would improve your use-case as well; you'd have less traffic to compete with while driving.
Unless the goal is to pay for public transit by making car travel more expensive/painful. Then it is unfair to force all the carpenters to cover the costs for the office workers.
That's a bit disingenuous, trying to invoke a blue vs. white collar dichotomy where none exists. Many office workers have equipment to lug around regularly, and many more types of people than office workers would be taking transit.
Regardless, transit should pay for itself in the same proportion that roads pay for themselves. Transit has per-use or per-distance fees around using it, but are also subsidized by the government. Road travel has per-use or per-distance fees (tolls, gasoline taxes), and are also subsidized by the government. I'm sure we can continue to find a balance for all of those numbers so no one is disproportionately burdened to support their needed mode of transportation.
Re: Lyft Self-Driving
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because sleep deprivation is a major ailment. Nothing says good life like the neighbor above having a late night party, the heavy traffic starting about five am or the shrieks of the late night ambulances.
Cramped living. Been there done that, hated it. I love the silence at night. Having a big living room and a little garden. Being able to actually look up the sky and see stars. I do like trains, but they can't get everywhere. I take a bus to work everyday but they don't operate 24h a day and not frequently enough. I'm the most excited about self driving buses. Even in predefined routes on special self driving lanes.…
Sure, but you've made the choice to live in a place with low enough density that you have a lot of indoor and outdoor space and enough distance from neighbors that you get a lot of quiet.
I live in a place where you don't get any of that that (unless you have $2M+ to spend on a house and land, which still doesn't fix the noise problem), and yet people still object to modest density increases and investment in public transit.
And in this case, I'd expect an increase in density to mean prices will drop, therefore enabling people to own more space at a lower price. This does mean more vertical building, so you lose private outdoor space, but that's really the only downside vs. the status quo.