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Waymo in Portland

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Re: Waymo in Portland

#251

Post by llbbdd »

NoGravitas wrote: post #244
briffle wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at taking the train from my town to Glacier National Park along with my bike. The route goes from Portland and Seattle to Chicago, and has a stop at south glacier. Step 1, get to the local train station in my town. There are 6 trains daily between me and Portland. Also, amtrak on the cross country trains requires the bikes to be in a box, in storage cars. So I gotta get a large bike box, and get myself, my b…

Most of this is just that the US rail system is amazingly shitty by global standards.

The US is a very big, very spread out place. I'm not sure which country has trains that take you directly to your front door.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#252

Post by doug_durham »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #206
starkparker wrote: post #127

For context, this is coming in as TriMet is laying off staff, reducing service frequency, eliminating bus lines, and cutting parts of light rail routes due to a $300M budget shortfall. The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month; TriMet relies heavily on payroll taxes that are deeply unpopular among the self-employed and small business owners, so the…

> The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month; An alternative view of this is the majority of voters are expected to reject a tax increase in the upcoming elections, in a state that elects a supermajority of Democrat legislators. https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Referendum_120,_Increase_to_G...

They aren't rejecting a tax increase. They are voting to give themselves a pay raise at the expense of infrastructure.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#253

Post by nostrademons »

ssl-3 wrote: post #213
xnx wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people. Love this concept. As self-driving vehicles become a larger share of road use, roads can be more efficiently designed just for them: no speed limit, just 2 strips of pavement for the tires, no signage or striping, etc.

Perfect. We'll just build the cars with parts that seldom fail. And we'll make them very strong, so that the only risk from hitting a deer or even a cow is a splash of gore. That should help eliminate the need to turn. A loud horn and flashing lights will do pretty well for any errant humans that cross the path. We can even reduce rolling resistance by using steel wheels instead of rubber, and we can make the road a…

I already made this joke up-thread:

> You might even call such an arrangement a "train"

Joking aside, though, the big issue with trains is last-mile. The road network covers a lot more land than the rail network does, and can reach places that trains can't. And this seems to be inherent to the physics of it, driven (hah) by cars ability to turn where trains cannot.

Mass transit enthusiasts love to gloss over the very real convenience issues that mass transit has, saying "Well everybody should just live next to the train station." The world doesn't work like that. Hence why I think a hybrid system of dockable autonomous vehicles that can be linked up into a train in high-throughput thoroughfares gives you the best of all worlds.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#254

Post by ggreer »

tristanj wrote: post #226
ggreer wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me if their costs are lower yet. Waymo's vehicles are rather expensive (estimates for their newer Zeekrs are around $75k each), and they need to pay some number of remote monitors for exceptional situations (as noticed during the recent blackout in San Francisco). They also have to collect tons of data to build & maintain high resolution 3D maps of the areas they operate in. And they have to pay eng…

We're looking at different metrics, you're analyzing the average total cost, while I'm analyzing the marginal cost. Waymo has enormous fixed costs like you mentioned, mapping cities and paying engineers are not cheap, which need to be amortized over a massive self-driving fleet. But those are fixed costs which don't increase with fleet size. Waymo currently operates only ~3000 vehicles, which is not enough to amortiz…

Even when just looking at marginal costs, I doubt Waymo is half that of a human driven vehicle. If we assume a robotaxi lasts 200k miles before being retired, then the cost of the vehicle alone ($75k) is 37.5 cents per mile. If a vehicle drives 200 miles a day, that's $5 of electricity (250Wh/mile x 10 cents/kWh), maybe $15 of labor to clean, and the space to park it near downtown ($3/day). That's another 12 cents per mile for a running total of 50 cents per mile. Then factor in maintenance (tires, brakes, suspension, etc) and you're probably close to $1/mile. Then you also need support staff, remote operators (approximately 1 per 50 vehicles, but paid significantly more than Uber drivers), and plenty of compute and storage for the high resolution maps (which must be constantly updated as the environment changes). And none of that includes the R&D costs to improve the vehicles or the self-driving software. Yes many of these costs decrease as fleet size increases, but it'll be a while before it gets below $1/mile. (Nationwide, Uber's rates are $1-2/mile depending on the area.)

There are other considerations as well. For example, available ride shares can scale up/down with demand, while Waymo & competitors will need lots of spare vehicles to satisfy peak demand.

I'm certain autonomous vehicles will eat up the market currently held by Uber/Lyft/Taxis. It's just going to take longer than a lot of people expect.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#255

Post by fsckboy »

bdangubic wrote: post #237
spankalee wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The reason that self-employed don't like payroll tax is that they have to pay both sides of it, so it seems like more than they paid as employees.

I am self-employed and have been since 2007-ish and while paying "both sides" is the downside, there are soooooo many upsides to being self-employed (especially since the Trump tax sh#t has been enacted and especially if you are setup as S-Corp) that I seriously* do not mind paying both sides at all.*

you probably have a high wage profession, and you max out FICA etc. and stop paying payroll taxes around April every year. You don't like the income uptick at that point cuz you're just so darned happy to pay payroll taxes? There's a line on the form, you could throw in some more. But housekeepers are also self-employed and those taxes fall much more heavily on them. While they are in a lower tax bracket and pay less as a percentage of their income tax, payroll taxes don't work that way (till somebody chimes in to say "no, Portland Oregon is absolutely confiscatory on this score, we practice Bolshevism!" which would be missing the point)

I seriously don't mind living in America and paying taxes here but, but when better and more efficient tax regimes are available, or when socialist tax proposals derail local economies, I seriously want to educate people about them.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#257

Post by pavon »

bojan wrote: post #70
xnx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple factors: market viability, climate compatibility, capacity, and definitely regulatory factors. Currently DC, NYC, Boston and Chicago are all being slowed down by anti-Waymo groups like Uber drivers and public-transit lobbyists.

Waymo is a sort of public transit. It's just an vastly more inefficient than any other form of public transit, but an order of magnitude more efficient than private passenger cars.

Depends on your definition of efficiency. Any ride service will drive more miles thus resulting in more congestion and more energy use than personal vehicles, because in addition to driving from point A1 to B1, they have to drive from B1 to A2. They get closer with density but never match. They will also always be more expensive to operate per mile because you need to cover the cost of the driver (human or machine).

The flip side is drastically fewer parking spaces needed, most of which can be located outside of the city core. And decreased costs due to fewer accidents.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#258

Post by HaloZero »

sheept wrote: post #186
xnx wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Portland is really forward-thinking, they would be smart to use this opportunity to jump to the next stage of public transport by focusing on flexible bus routes and Waymo/rideshare subsidies for the poor and disabled.

Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design. They're still cars, so they still contribute to traffic and increased pavement wear, and I cannot imagine they'd be cheaper at scale than buses for storage/maintenance/cleaning.

It's not a bandaid because American urban design isn't going to change substantially. I don't see American cities changing their mind on how they build and where they build.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#259

Post by insane_dreamer »

Surprised Portland is allowing Waymo in, considering that they have a decent public transport system (judging by US standards, not European standards), with light rail.

Public transport ridership took a massive hit with the pandemic and never fully recovered.

Waymo does not solve a public transport problem. I don't mind that it takes money from Uber, Lyft, etc., but the damage it also transfers income from human taxi drivers (what little they can salvage from Uber, Lyft) to a large corporation.

I see it as a net negative for society, not a net positive.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#260

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #207
whatgoodisaroad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

once we've refactored humans out of driving, the speed limits can go way up

I don't think so. Engineers design a road for 55. Police say make it 40 for $$ and pretext. Public says make it 60. Karen says make it 30. Politician says they don't care as long as Karen stops screeching, the public doesn't hate them and the police doesn't hate them. End result ->45 Refactoring the humans out would only change a couple of the less influential inputs to that equation. It might actually make it way wo…

> Engineers design a road for 55.

Not always.

I think a lot of time, speed limits are set based on the expected amount of traffic, not the curvature or the road. For example, I-5 in the Portland area south of the OR-217 interchange has extremely gentle curves. You could take them at 100 mph and not risk losing grip.

Yet the limit is 55 mph anyways because that area is expected to have considerable traffic, with traffic merging on and off. The limit is kept low to keep collision speeds low.

But if every car was autonomous, that wouldn't be necessary. Autonomous cars can be far more cooperative than human drivers, even without inter-car communication. It's 4 lanes wide. We could let that left lane go 90 mph for the cars that don't need to be exiting any time soon, while the right lane travels slower because cars are either merging on or off. Human drivers suck at this kind of arrangement because we have slow-pokes that think "The limit is just a limit, I don't have to go that fast" and go 5 under the limit in whatever lane they feel like, combined with others that think being overtaken is a personal insult, people that think their lane is a birthright and don't let people merge ("I have to tailgate or else people get in front of me!"), and other toxic human behaviors.

Take the human out of the equation, and we can easily go faster than 55.

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