Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

What if we had a publicly funded self driving car network?

No more drunk drivers mowing down children, no more gigantic parking lots everywhere (like uber, you wouldn't likely get in the same car that took you there).

It would also almost certainly reduce traffic fatalities to near zero.

In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT spending X hours of your own mental bandwidth and focus worrying about crashing a deadly vehicle. You could spend that time reading/learning, relaxing watching a movie, or any number of activities other than driving your metal coffin around.

Obviously there are a lot of hurdles to get there, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

The rest of the developed world didn't shift back to public transport because they enjoy the company of strangers so much, but out of necessity.

Without domestic production of fuel a transport system is vulnerable to fuel price/availability swings.

What AV addresses is primarily a last-mile problem. Last mile is all about the personal transport solution, and cars are just the largest of those. The physics and geometry of cars means that they are more expensive because they are literally more mass being moved around. Bikes and scooters have become much better personal transport recently because they now have electric assist options, and so are more accessible for more situations and capable of pulling heavy loads. So the problems of cars are already being addressed from one end; bike-friendly infrastructure is lagging behind in much of the world, but it's also one of the cheapest changes you can make to a road, and far cheaper than adding a new metro stop.

Once AV is adopted, the physical economics remain the same, but the economics of rental change; you don't have to go where the fleet is, it shows up at the door. But that doesn't result in everyone riding a personal limo. Smaller is cheaper for personal transport in the last mile, and that does not change just because you replaced the driver. Cost reduction will take place in shared rental fleets. Cost reduction means cars get smaller, so car infrastructure can get smaller, so last-mile alternatives gain space, so transit gains space and ridership. AV is not in conflict with transit, rather, it redefines the bottlenecks of transit modalities. If you need a sit-down vehicle with a cabin for your trip, you still don't need additional empty seats - unless you pay a premium, you will be crammed into the lightest, smallest thing that is roadworthy. Only an enthusiast will bother with lugging a huge vehicle around town if you can rent that size on demand. That goes for the car and it goes for the train. You still want to have transit to cover longer distances along major corridors, but the effective coverage of all stops is bolstered if you can pick up a bike or scooter share at either end of the trip.

All of this conditional on self-driving cars really being actually solved, such that an autonomous car is, say, better than the 75% driver on the road.

I expect the overwhelming majority of long-haul (say, >200 miles) passenger transport to happen via planes and trains, just like today.

I do not expect that commute times will be substantially shorter -- indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if they were mildly longer.

I DO expect that people will be able to use their commute time productively (they could work during it and either increase their productivity or decrease their hours) and/or be able to spend less money on transit, because they're using shared vehicles.

I DO expect that short-haul public transportation would suffer a significant decline in ridership, as it would be outcompeted by driverless carss.

I do NOT expect that short-haul public transportation would be entirely killed, it will still have some advantages, especially in very dense areas.

I am agnostic about how wise the investment in autonomous vehicles will end up being -- it depends on how much additional investment is needed to get to this (hypothetical) mode of full self-driving, and to what extent many actors are able to reach full-self-driving at the same time and drive commoditization of self-driving cars. But who cares? It's not my money, this has overwhelmingly been paid for by private actors.

Do you disagree with any of that?