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Waymo in Dallas

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Re: Waymo in Dallas

#411
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is more until you factor in the tip for Uber. Ive also found that waymo is a lot more correct in estimating time to pickup in SF. Because Uber/lyft drivers can turn you down (presumably) I find that "your Uber can be here in 4 minutes" when I open the app turns into "but it will actually be 20"

Who tips on Uber? One price up front and paid, that is the deal. Anyone tipping on something like that is their own fault.

I dunno. Hard to say "I tip my Uber driver because I understand how little the drivers get paid" if I'm also moving to waymo instead. Hard to find ethical consumption under capitalism.

But since you asked in kind of a flippant way: who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Busses. I rode on a public bus once while visiting Columbus Ohio.

I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there.

Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow.

The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful.

I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses.

I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated?

(Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#413

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.

Waymo is not doing any carpooling optimizations. They're right now a luxury service that is priced above the normal Uber ride prices. This will obviously change in future, once they start a truly mass rollout.

Yeah, all the people who refuse to ride busses to the point they're willing to spend many many thousands of dollars on their own cars are just yearning to carpool in a much more compact vehicle than a bus.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

40 rides a month, not week. I'm not sure you're in a position to accuse folks of not doing math when you don't seem to read very well.

Read what I quoted. He edited his comment after I replied.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#415
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But he didn't state per month. He stated per week, then went back and changed his comment after I replied.

Guess you didn't notice that I quoted him.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#416
post #141

Elon may have been technically correct about 'if humans can do it with vision only then theres no reason why vision-only cannot work' but turned out to be the wrong strategy for learning how to get there. lidar gives you a constant stream of data to check your vision yourself against and interatively learn. Once trained you turn it off. whereas teslas strategy ended up having to rely on human drivers for error feedba…

The other issue is that lidar costs came down 99% in the last decade and self-driving took longer than he had said.

At $200, you might as well add lidar. At $50,000 vision only made more sense.

A trained marksman may be able to hit a clay pigeon with a 22, but it's easier with a shotgun.

So saying a human can do something doesn't mean it's the easiest way.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#417
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But he didn't state per month. He stated per week, then went back and changed his comment after I replied. Guess you didn't notice that I quoted him.

You're so right! That's such a great load-bearing detail!

I especially liked the part where you quoted "1'000$/month" and got yourself all confused about the intended conclusion anyway!

Good chat, my friend!

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 failu…

The US is ten times more dense than Australia. And yet Australian cities tend to have comparable if not better transit than similarly sized American cities. The overall population density of a country is largely irrelevant in this discussion because 99% of day to day travels are contained within the same metro areas.

> comparable if not better transit

Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail. There is no way that traditional forms of public transit could outclass it. This is Waymo's big moneymaker: public contracts. The bus drivers and taxi drivers unions will fight it, but smaller towns looking to build denser housing and make their public spaces more walkable will happ…

> A network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail [citation needed] Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.

Ok but an autonomous bus, or autonomous vehicles designed to fit different numbers of people, would not be better than a one size fits all bus?

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#420
post #58

Surprisingly low hype for a company running perhaps the most advanced consumer-interactive robots. I’m quite fond of these machines and will periodically rescue them when someone has misused them (door not closed, most commonly). Hope they do well. Very good road participants.

I want trains.

I think you'd want them a lot less if you had to pay the full price in fare (often $30+/ride)
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