Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars. 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 posit…
This makes little sense to me? Investing in public transportation is a much more means tested way of reducing traffic accidents. Countries with good public transportation infrastructure have much less traffic deaths per 100k than car focused countries. Why? Well it makes sense. Public transportation is much more safe all around as you are greatly reducing the amount of people in charge of machines capable of easily k…
Selection bias. By definition, you're looking at public transportation that exists. How many traffic accidents have been reduced by the bullet train in CA that has had $80 billion in investment so far? Zero.
> So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it.
In the cases in which money can be efficiently deployed, you are correct. But has the $80 billion (let's say that again - $80,000,000,000) spent on the CA bullet been more efficient than $80 billion of spending on self-driving cars? Clearly not.
The problem is that there are limits to how much money you can deploy towards public transit at any reasonable level of efficiency. This is true because of geography, and it's true because of politics. In those places where you can use money well on transit, I fully support it, but once you've exhausted those, you're still going to be left with five figures of traffic deaths a year that can be saved by self driving cars.
Also, you ignored my last paragraph - the comparison of spending money on transit vs. self-driving is not one that makes sense, because the money comes from two different places. VCs don't invest in public transit. Google doesn't invest in public transit.
Self-driving cars are something that will provide a huge societal benefit at no cost to taxpayers. If you're a member of the general public, spending money on public transit is infinitely more inefficient than spending money on self-driving cars, because that transit money could be used to benefit you in other ways, whereas the private funding to self-driving cars would probably just be returned to shareholders or invested in other tech companies if it weren't spent there.