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Waymo in Dallas

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Re: Waymo in Dallas

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mean the rewards. You can get some % cash back with no annual fee. Effectively my credit card costs me nothing, comes from the same bank as my checking and savings, and gives me cash back.

the other end of this is that all of those rewards are paid for through merchant fees, which lead to higher prices at the register. it's not free money. it's a fraction of a percentage of the profit credit card companies receive in fees paid by the places you shop. i would not be surprised to learn that even with rewards points we spend more money now that those programs are commonplace.

Still worth it so I can chargeback shitty merchants.

Example, my landlord specified in my original lease one time pet fee. In my newest year lease no pet fee. I was required to pay the pet fee through some saas dedicated to this. Now that website emailed me to let me know they’ll be charging my annual fee.

What fee? What for? They are providing no ongoing value to anyone as far as I can tell. They refuse to explain or cancel. Well they can explain to Mastercard and I’ll wash my hands of the situation.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

The average passenger capacity per mile of a Waymo is 1. Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.

You're not factoring in the unused capacity of a regular car parked on the street or in a garage versus being in service of delivering transportation value..

The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher.

Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality.

I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization.

But yes, traffic is indeed an impact.

The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#323
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc. In the real world, once…

You say it can't be done, but it's literally happened several times before. The most recent being when we built all these urban highways.

It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be the same as for any public transport: it's the service operator's responsibility to run the system. The rider doesn't need insurance. I imagine Google has enough money that they can self-insure. Particularly since it's a very low accident rate.

What about criminal implications? PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.

If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to run a red light, who is liable? Humans can get persuaded to do illegal things by criminals just as well.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average passenger capacity per mile of a Waymo is 1. Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.

You're not factoring in the unused capacity of a regular car parked on the street or in a garage versus being in service of delivering transportation value.. The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher. Most people still will need a car to get around…

An unused car parked isn't causing traffic jams on the highway. It's irrelevant to my comment that AVs increase traffic, not decrease traffic. I agree reducing parking needs is a benefit to AVs, but arguing it will reduce congestion is ignoring extremely basic traffic concepts.

You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#327
post #313

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…

God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport

One thing about private car ownership in the US is that it is a VERY BIG country and sparsely populated so who will pay for the public transport connecting every nook and corner because in the US it's so sparsely populated. Even in India I see metro train being very successful in places which are densely populated but in states like Rajasthan which are very big and sparsely populated there public transport is a failure because who will pay for the fuel when people are not enough. Walking and public transport are good options in Europe because European countries are small and are more densely populated

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you going 20 times per month, twice, that's 40 rides. At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.

Aren't you going 20 times per week, twice, that's 40 rides. Work 5 days a week = 10 rides. Plus four rides on the weekend, or not. That's why I used 14. Where do you get 40 rides per week? At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber. Even if someone did 40 rides per week at your posited average of $25/ride, that's $4,000, not $1,000. Are you letting an LLM do math for you?

They showed their work and named their units. Their math is fine.

If work happens 5 days per week, each workday requires two rides, and there are 4 weeks in a month, then there are 40 rides per month. If each of those rides costs $25, then:

5 × 2 × 4 × $25 = $1,000, per month

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the product vs an Uber? Genuine question.

Drives better, isn't distracted, doesn't get lost, care are always clean, will always take you where you want to go day or night, and yeah, no human.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#330
post #313

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…

God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport

Sarcastic and self-satisfied comments like this are uninteresting IMO. The GP comment is talking about reducing parking requirements for new development, and parking requirements are probably some of the least efficient use of land imaginable. But he shouldn't talk about that because it'd be better if every city all across america suddenly had public transit tomorrow? It's like if a city in europe was talking about setting up a cooling station in a town square during a heat wave, and someone condescendingly commented "god, I love how europeans will do anything but install air conditioning." It's just not that easy and one doesn't preclude the other
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