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Waymo in Dallas

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Re: Waymo in Dallas

#551

Post by cucumber3732842 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #105
overgard wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make. IE, humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations. I think the "fail to respond to no…

> humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations Humans fail chaotically. AVs, at least Waymos, fail safely. In urban environments, there is a case to be made within a few years for banning (or making it massively cumbersome) to manually pilot a private vehicle.

Failing in ways that confuse the crap out of all the humans around (including pedestrians and cyclists) and demand their time and attention and thereby detract from the safety of the overall system is not "failing safely".

Nobody would make excuses for a rookie driver coming to a stop in a busy interchange. Only someone with the moral character of a career politician would attempt to construe that as anything other than detracting from overall safety. But a computer does it and it's fine?

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#552

Post by trymas »

servo_sausage wrote: post #543
trymas wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't get the Waymo "solution" in this thread. Genuinely and not trolling. Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts. My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning…

Because people are not nearly as rigid about a 9-5 as you are imagining in aggregate; enough people commute off hours to increase the number of round trips per car significantly. Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...

Fair and I concur.

Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)?

As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact.

I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#553

Post by servo_sausage »

yreg wrote: post #492
missedthecue wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because you can't fill the buses! 1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow. 2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency. 3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus ope…

1. I promise you that a bus can get through winding narrow loops just fine. All medieval old towns are like that. 2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet. 3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places. 4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins drivin…

What happens, is your underserved bus has to increase stops per loop for viability.

You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.

Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.

And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).

So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?

But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.

Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.

So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#554

Post by fireflash38 »

missedthecue wrote: post #441
Grombobulous wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I find it a rather offensive that the suburbs don't have walking/bike path cut-throughs. They're cheap. They can cut down on non-car travel by a ton. They're just damn nice.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#555

Post by servo_sausage »

master-lincoln wrote: post #542
servo_sausage wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Autonomous cars can park wherever...

But they take up much more space than busses/trains per passenger.

So what? It's a genuinely irrelevant detail...

We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#556

Post by trymas »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #340
m_a_g wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Look at this article and it's graphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_per_hour_per_direct...

Cars are the very bottom, by very considerable margin. You need to prove otherwise.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#557

Post by Yizahi »

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…

This is like building your business on the FAANG monster corpo's API and then getting shut down a few years down the line, but with your life and housing instead of the business. After Waymo will shut down or "do strategy shift and pivot" or just raises prices beyond your affordability, a homeowner in such a place will "suddenly" discover that he or she is completely stranded now and there are neither cars nor public transport available. Yay for our benevolent corporate overlords, I guess...

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#558

Post by pid-1 »

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…

You can even buy some paint and build dedicated bus lanes. Some alien technology shit.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#559

Post by Yizahi »

missedthecue wrote: post #475
Teever wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the public transport solution involved policies like taxing the existing suburbs in a way that ensures a break-even on infrastructure upkeep and operating costs so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society? We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users…

From a municipal finance perspective, most Dallas-Fort Worth suburban municipalities are far and away outperforming urban Dallas (the City of Dallas proper). That's not opinion, you can see the finances as they are all public. Ask the LLM of your choice to make research easy. I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with…

I wouldn't dispute Dallas numbers and I may be wrong. But in general this feels wrong at a first approach. Denser low rise apartment blocks with more commercial square are per inhabitant and fewer expensive infrastructure per inhabitant (road area, length of water/sewers/electricity/data lines, amount of common things like lamp posts, signs, security (police/fire/medical etc.)) just logically should be better financially performing than single family home suburbs. In any part of the world at any age or local variation. And in fact in most countries that's true so far.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#560

Post by SloppyDrive »

bitpush wrote: post #300
eagleinparadise wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should a tax payer in Dallas pay for your [affordable] transportation from the outskirts of Houston or OK to commute to Dallas? tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on. Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.

Perhaps I'm understanding things wrong, but isnt the idea of taxes for public good and some / all of it might never reach you? I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.

Ive never liked this framing; "the public good" is too nebulous an idea to justify how tax should be spent.

I, and people like me create wealth. Some of that wealth is pooled at an administrative level that makes sense across a town, state, or nation. Its still wealth I created; and I expect it to be used to benefit me, ideally proportionally to the tax taken.

Unemployment can be justified as crime prevention; Disability and healthcare systems limit individual worst-case outcomes (especially if due to chance). Super-commuter subsidies do what?

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