Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

(1) Weak Federal Government. The US is more a close collection of small nation states than a single country. The kind of infrastructure you’re talking about takes the kind of planning and funding that only a strong federal government can demand.

(2) Strong respect for property rights. In the US, it takes a lot to take away someone’s private property in order re-allocate it to a public good. By now, all of the cities have vested interests speaking for every square inch of viable property.

(3) Weak labor protections. This is a big one. Labor protections are so weak in the private sector that no one in their right mind would depend on public transport if they could help it. Most Americans are one illness away from being bankrupt, fired, and foreclosed on. To make it in America, by any definition, for a vast majority of Americans (and that includes people not traditionally called Americans, like undocumented immigrants) you must have access to a private vehicle because your work place could change in a heartbeat. You could have to move because your town no longer has any jobs for you. You could have to move into your car because of divorce/eviction/foreclosure etc…

People make fun of the F150 drivers with spotless beds because they’re used as glorified, cramped minivans but the truth is every one of those drivers has made that investment because they’re acutely aware of how precariously close they are having to use that truck to do hard labor.

I also want this, but I grew up in LA and thus realize that there are places where this won't happen.

> I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars.

I would take money invested in self-driving cars over money "invested" in public transit in wildly inefficient ways that's less investment and more waste.

The problem with the position that money should go to transit instead of self-driving cars is that transit is a largely intractable problem because it's a political one, where self-driving cars are very much not an intractable problem because they're a technical one.

40,000+ people die every year in the US in car accidents. Self-driving cars have the potential to stop many of those deaths (and the injuries not counted in that). Investment in public transit, when you consider the practical realities, largely doesn't. I understand why folks prefer public transit as a solution, but self-driving cars will be a lifesaving technology, and on that basis they seem clearly worthy of investment.

And this is all doubly true since this isn't government money - it's VCs and private companies putting their cash towards solving a problem that's beneficial towards society. Why hold up public transit as the alternative to self-driving investment when there is absolutely no chance that these dollars would ever go to public transit?

That adds up very quickly, and when you consider the presence of intersections and traffic lights, you aren't dealing with an isolated roadway where cars just...drive. There are very real limits on how many cars you can stuff in a given stretch of road without radically redesigning roads in a way that makes them entirely unusable for pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. replacing traffic lights with slot-based intersections[0]), meaning there's an upper limit to how much self-driving cars can limit congestion under the most optimistic scenarios.

When self-driving cars eventually manage to take hold, no one reasonably expects car traffic not to increase. Right now, you park your car and do things. There's no real opportunity cost, because you can't be two places at once. When your car can drive around on its own, there's now a real opportunity cost. If it can earn money for you with no human present, there's going to be a massive incentive to let it do so. Stores will use self-driving delivery vehicles--either their own or as part of their own delivery sharing services--for deliveries.

Will there hopefully be big improvements in pedestrian safety and decreased accidents? I think so, though they certainly won't eliminate either. But there will be an incredible amount of increased traffic that goes along with it.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZc3erc_l4