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Waymo in Dallas

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Re: Waymo in Dallas

#441

Post by missedthecue »

Grombobulous wrote: post #427
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…

With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read. > it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just u…

the simple fact of the matter is the Waymo is a better public transport solution for Dallas than the bus. The bus doesn't work very well in endless cul-de-sac suburbia, and that's what the Dallas/Fort Worth area (and indeed most of America) is. Like, you have to understand that most of Dallas isn't even commuting into downtown Dallas every day to work. They are just commuting to other suburbs and then back to their suburb. If your public transport solution is step 1. nuke the place and start over, it's not really a solution.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#442

Post by [deleted] »

Grombobulous wrote: post #427
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…

With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read. > it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just u…

[deleted]

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#443

Post by jimjimjim »

pfooti wrote: post #411
satvikpendem wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not a sociopath but I believe the concept of tipping to be terrible. Everything should be in the price. up front. what's advertised should be what leaves your account. If you get bad service, don't use them again or leave a bad review. Get good service then thank them and leave a good review. The rest of the world works this way and it is simpler and less stressful.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#444

Post by pfooti »

SepiaSapient wrote: post #435
pfooti wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say. Non-americans don't. To me, being socially expected to tip for a Taxi feels like a parody from a sketch comedy. ditto for tipping barbers or expecting tips over 10%. The only time I've tipped a Uber was when me and my friends were at risk of losing a train. The driver (unprompted) went pedal to the metal to make it on time, so afterwards I gave him a couple of…

Fair enough- outside of the US, workers may get paid fairly. In the US, many service workers are in a system where the employer has externalized the cost to pay those employees to the customers. The system is awful, but I'm also not going to not tip if I can afford it.

FWIW, the real problem isn't tip culture, it is the power imbalance between labor and the company that is using that labor (without employing drivers), but I dunno how much of an audience that kind of argument has on this particular site.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#445

Post by vel0city »

robomartin wrote: post #433
vel0city wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category. You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries. > to run bus…

> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports.

And you think I live in fantasy land.

> if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country.

So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.

It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen.

> Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.

This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc.

I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#446

Post by jdm2212 »

pfooti wrote: post #364
strulovich wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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"

I think Uber just lies about estimated pickup times and Waymo doesn't. Partly because I've never had an Uber arrive faster than their estimated time, whereas Waymo arrives early pretty routinely. And also several times now I've had Waymo say "it'll be 20 minutes" so I book Uber because it claims a much shorter wait time, and then Uber winds up being about Waymo's estimate anyway.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#447

Post by ssl-3 »

turdprincess wrote: post #436
ssl-3 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 websi…

Boulder Colorado has a public airport bus route that is pretty widely used - it takes one hour and is well liked by the general public.

It seems that Columbus has one today, but they didn't back when I needed it in 2021 or so.

(Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#448

Post by vel0city »

robomartin wrote: post #434
vel0city wrote: post #314

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.

> Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic. The overwhelming majority --overwhelming-- of cars, SUV's and trucks on the road have exactly one passenger, including the guy commuting to his office job in an F-250.

You're right, but that still puts the minimum at 1. Even with the many, many vehicles with single passengers as 1, the average is still always higher than 1.

An autonomous vehicle doing a deadhead drive has a passenger count of 0. 0 A lot of these AVs at the moment at least are still roughly minivan/midsize SUV. On top of that, with safe distances adding another foot of the car to a highway scenario really doesn't increase the percentage of the total space that much. You need a lot of follow space ahead/behind the vehicle.

Maybe if they were like single person pods that teleported to their pickups and managed to group tightly together in packs on the road, but until then they're just another SUV on the road driving around sometimes with zero people in the car.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#449

Post by jdale27 »

toddmorey wrote: post #367
jdale27 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is already working, on roads today, for less time and money than it took to build zero miles of high speed rail in California.

You can’t do inter-city Waymo trips. These are different animals.

You can’t do intercity trips on California high speed rail either.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#450

Post by nunez »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #320
catchnear4321 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No human in the car?

This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product). Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their…

My extremely social not-tech nerd wife that hardly uses FSD in her car got HOOKED on Waymo after the first ride. Same with my parents.
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