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Waymo in Dallas

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Re: Waymo in Dallas

#681

Post by bluGill »

jeltz wrote: post #575
soco wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." Henry Ford, about the resistance to a paradigm change.

So you are pro-bus? Because Waymo is the faster horse for someone in Dallas while a working public transit would be the paradigm shift.

For the average person in Dallas the car they already own is faster than waymo: it is sitting in their driveway where they left it (or in the parking spot where they left it - while cars are stolen that is rare enough to ignore). They don't need to summon it and wait for it to show up - which saves a lot of time. Those who drive used cars (which is most people) the car is cheaper than waymo as well.

My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that.

Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#682

Post by xnx »

nunez wrote: post #362

I'm happy that Waymo's finally lighting up Dallas, but they need to expand its service area quickly for it to be useful there, IMO. Austin, Houston and San Antonio are hub and spoke cities. They are designed with their downtowns as loci for their metros with suburbs sprawling around them concentricly. Waymo gets you to a lot of places within these cities for that reason. Dallas is built around and between Dallas and…

Definitely. Waymo is aiming for 1 million rides/week by the end of the year, and their last publicly shared number was 500,000/week. They're consistently expanding on all fronts: more cities, more territory, more vehicles, more riders, more road types.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#683

Post by infecto »

bluGill wrote: post #680
infecto wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you think it works? Let’s say you have a community of 100 people in Dallas. That neighborhood is going to be commuting in all sorts of directions, sure you might be able to transport some groups going the same direction but there is a complete lack of central offices so how does the last mile work? Lots of transfers would be required and that’s a nonstarter

Your community should be more like 500 people. Each house will have more than two people (most people live with a romantic partner, and kids are still common enough) and there are more than 100 houses in the neighborhood.

And now what? You now have 500 people going in every different direction still sure some overlap but in a metro like DFW you probably don’t see anything meaningful until the thousands and DFW does not have that kind of density.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#684

Post by xnx »

conductr wrote: post #431
nunez wrote: post #362

I'm happy that Waymo's finally lighting up Dallas, but they need to expand its service area quickly for it to be useful there, IMO. Austin, Houston and San Antonio are hub and spoke cities. They are designed with their downtowns as loci for their metros with suburbs sprawling around them concentricly. Waymo gets you to a lot of places within these cities for that reason. Dallas is built around and between Dallas and…

I live just north of the service area in Dallas and cross into it daily, it’s been pretty great to see the traction it seems to be getting here. The service area is a great way to launch. It’s the fashionable part of town, covers most night life for young people, it’s created a buzz and a lot of people will jump onto it just as soon as they widen the service area. I’m sure it’s all a phased thing, Waymo overall has b…

Hopefully the positive buzz will spread to other cities where Uber and train-transit special interests are blocking it and everyday citizens will demand the cool service the experienced in another city.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#685

Post by bluGill »

irowe wrote: post #588
1123581321 wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What leads you to say that? Capex is typically budgeted.

If it's anything like my municipality, all that stuff is balanced in the budget by issuing bonds. My accounting knowledge is weak, but as I understand it, even though a city's credit rating and the prospective interest on its bonds are a feedback mechanism to help moderate the spending, it's still tempting for a city to overbuild without a plan to fund the bonds plus the incurred cost ongoing maintenance without endi…

The other thing people often get wrong is these things are funded by 20 year bonds, but they last for much longer. If you make the incorrect assumption that something must be replaced when the bond is paid off the suburb cannot support itself. However pipes last a lot more than 20 years in most cases. Even if the road surface only lasts 20 years (which is true in some extreme cases but not in general), the right of way is a one time expensive, and the ground work below the surface is generally one and done so the replacement costs are much less than the first time new road costs.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#686

Post by infecto »

bluGill wrote: post #652
infecto wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry no you are ignoring the most important fact. Unless you can get door to door service, people in a place like Dallas are not going to use a bus. You tell me it’s not feasible to do a rideshare small bus? Well then it’s definitely not feasible to run bus networks. I think the narrative is conflicting within itself. - if you give someone the option of a bus with a transfer or taking a car they will almost always t…

> I am trying to point out that a great bus service in a place like Dallas is not economically feasible. I disagree. It is not politically feasible and so we won't get there, but the economics work out: a great transit network even in a place like Dallas could get enough riders to sustain itself. Problem is we need 50% of the families in Dallas Fort Worth to pay $200/month to pay for it, and nobody will stand for tha…

DFW is simply not dense enough. I don’t know why politics come into play. absolutely cities preference does but at the end of the day most US cities are not dense enough that buses and other forms of public transit work well.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#687

Post by bluGill »

Grombobulous wrote: post #585
infecto wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to say “with respect” don’t say it at all. You can share your ideas without calling names. A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an…

Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs? Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-gr…

> Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs?

To give a clear answer that others have beat around: it is the network. Transit works when you can get places. When you can get many places it doesn't work.

The real question is how can Dallas get there - which is a hard problem is you need a massive network investment before it becomes useful to many people and so there is a lot of upfront investment needed first.

The US has a poor history with getting a good return on investment for transit. In general even where the investment does get good ridership, the amount spent was way out of line from what anyone else in the world would have spent for that system.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#688

Post by bluGill »

annzabelle wrote: post #356
schainks wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS. It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.

In the countries that are closest to America's peers (Canada, Australia, NZ), the public transit is also lacking outside of a few dense cities.

Those cities are enough to prove that transit works. We can then look at other parts of the world and see the same in smaller cities.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#689

Post by xnx »

ultimoo wrote: post #275

I was talking with someone visiting from Florida the other day and they were talking about how Waymo is slurping money that would have otherwise stayed in the local economy. E.g. you pay an uber driver, the uber driver pays the grocery store, etc. This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean…

This is a clever talking point from Uber that doesn't get the same attention for any other nationwide company. Restrict Walmart, Home Depot, McDonald's, Verizon, Apple because they're taking money away from mom and pop: grocery, hardware, restaurants, mobile networks, and phone manufacturers.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#690

Post by xnx »

preommr wrote: post #386
culi wrote: post #154

This urbanist youtuber did a really in-depth video on what the future could look like (both good and ugly effects) if self-driving cars become enough of a success to affect the way we build infrastructure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

Of course it's Not Just Bikes. I used to be frustrated at their poorly thought-out arguments until I realized none of it matters. The videos are made for a certain demographic to jerk off about their special interests. The real world is going to move on and stuff is going to get implemented. These people and their opinions have no real world impact and don't matter outside of their niche little social groups. Self dr…

Agree. Like many movements, "urbanism" stopped being about safe, convenient, affordable transportation and became primarily about catering to anti-car absolutists and self-promotion.
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