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Waymo in Dallas

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Re: Waymo in Dallas

#281

Post by ajmurmann »

cyberax wrote: post #252
eagleinparadise wrote: post #232

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

Self-driving cars will kill off your kind of real estate developers once and for all. Because there is no such thing as "affordable housing". All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing. Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run. Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will el…

How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#282

Post by strulovich »

eagleinparadise wrote: post #232

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

Aren’t Waymo prices above Uber’s? That’s what I’ve seen in SF.

That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#283

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #236
eagleinparadise wrote: post #232

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.

[deleted]

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#284

Post by runarberg »

SoftTalker wrote: post #266
eagleinparadise wrote: post #232

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

I'd go further and say that in most smaller cities that try to run a bus service but just don't have the ridership to support adequate service they would be better off just subsidizing Ubers or Waymos or whatever is available. Pare down the bus service to only the heavily used routes and run them way more often.

This is already the case. A lot of transit agencies have a vanpools, rideshares, and ridehales for their low frequency areas. I used one recently in Tacoma because my ferry was late and the bus from the ferry arrives only ones an hour.

I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.

So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#285

Post by Barbing »

Fogest wrote: post #213
jackp96 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm under the impression (worth a check) that we do have verifiable safety statistics and that Waymos are significantly safer than Teslas at this point? That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.

Not really a fair comparison between Tesla's autopilot and Waymo though. You'd have to compare Tesla's Robotaxi but I believe they have been running for a far shorter period and I'm not sure how much data is out yet or how reliable it would be at this stage. The Robotaxi runs I believe a different version of autopilot meant to not have a human driver and has a lot more work that goes into making sure it's highly test…

> It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second.

Per The Guardian:

  “Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. […]”

  “The real surprise came after [Mark Rober’s] experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/05/the-vehic...

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#286

Post by dinobones »

eagleinparadise wrote: post #232

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

Here's another idea:

The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.

I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.

Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#287

Post by s1artibartfast »

panick21_ wrote: post #248
eagleinparadise wrote: post #232

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

> Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing ... in the US > Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world. > if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units O…

People don't car share in the US, and don't want to.

Building arrangements that would rely on them are mostly illegal anyways.

Allowing driverless cars to serve buildings without parking would be a huge step forward for those reasons alone.

For what it's worth, it's mostly illegal to build a housing that's the only served by buses too.

Last, the US has passed the point where it has the cheap labor and government competency for mass transit. Faster to do something now than wait for a new government or robotics that can replace all the construction workers and designers

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#288

Post by lokar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #226
lokar wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then. There is value in uniform rule of law.

> There is value in uniform rule of law Sure. OP's point is these products and investments are accruing disproportionately to red cities and states. Sinking together isn't a great pitch.

I think elected state leaders should move to understand theses issues, hear from experts and the public, and craft good laws for these services.

My state (CA) is doing well this. If your state is not, and this is important to you, I suggest you get involved in the process.

Having companies ignore the law is not an alternative to the democratic process.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#289

Post by jdm2212 »

strulovich wrote: post #282
eagleinparadise wrote: post #232

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

Aren’t Waymo prices above Uber’s? That’s what I’ve seen in SF. That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.

Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#290

Post by robomartin »

ajmurmann wrote: post #281
cyberax wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving cars will kill off your kind of real estate developers once and for all. Because there is no such thing as "affordable housing". All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing. Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run. Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will el…

How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas

> How do self-driving cars reduce congestion?

At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly.

The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe.

So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do.

That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.

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