301–310 of 607 posts
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The cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases, like lower population density neighborhoods. It may save the public money to centralize transit on major corridors and then subsidize trips on Waymo in some areas and at some times.
how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?
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None. Why would you think that? My guess is you're an American living nowhere near an urban rail system but I thought most people here would at least be passing familiar with modern trains. Even some American cities have them.
Why the ad hominem? I've lived and travelled in a ton of places. Trains in low density cities are simply not working well enough. I now prefer to live in exurb and drive everywhere. It's so good.
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How many tax dollars go into subsidizing a public transit ride? Varies from place to place but it's not insignificant.
how many tax dollars go to roads and bridges just for cars?
Like others, my biggest objection with it was their approach to scaling. Tesla aimed for the vision-only general solution with FSD, while Waymo held strong to its LIDAR-first geofence strategy. I held this opinion before using Waymo, as it wasn't available in my city (Houston, TX).
I've used it several times after being invited into their Early Access earlier this month...and, wow, I couldn't have been more wrong.
Waymo drives incredibly well. Like, INCREDIBLY well. Tesla FSD v14 drives well too, but Waymo feels more confident in edge case situations (of which there are many in the city driving space) and, well, I can be on my laptop or whatever during the trip.
Ironically, Waymo pushed me towards using public transit in Houston, so it's incredibly sad to read that this expansion is happening as Portland's public transit system is getting defunded. The time and mental sanity I've gotten back from not driving has been immense and undeniable. (It's weird how "bus-pilled" I became after my first few Waymo trips given that I grew up in NYC taking the bus and subway all of the time.)
All that said, based on how slowly Tesla is scaling their (inexcusably much more nascent) Robotaxi offering, I don't think ANY of our cars are going to get "unsupervised" FSD with the hardware they were shipped with.
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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 pe…
Waymo can expand easily in markets like SF and NYC, where drivers are guaranteed a minimum pay rate of $22+ per hour, but will make less and less economic sense in cheaper labor markets.
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This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept. Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains. The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't h…
> buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency. > the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking…
We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.
Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.
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I spent ten years in the trenches of American urban design policy. The best we could do was lose very slightly less quickly . It's not changing. Trains are great, we should build more, and we probably should replace a lot of bus routes by subsidizing rides on Waymo and its ilk. It'll be cheaper and provide better service.
>Trains are great I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?
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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 traff…
Not even that, there is one curve on I-5 south of 217, it is otherwise a straight line until you get to Wilsonville (and before then it goes up to 65 mph at the intersection with 205).
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>Trains are great I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?
Yesh go to literally any other industrialized part of the world and see how ** backwards the US is on trains I’ve become quite radicalized on trains after visiting Japan and Switzerland myself.
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> 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.
> A "no" vote repeals five sections of HB 3991 related to tax and fee increases, including increases to the state's gas tax from $0.40 to $0.46, payroll tax for transportation from 0.1% to 0.2%, and vehicle registration and title fees, with revenue dedicated to the State Highway Fund for transportation funding.
> They are voting to give themselves a pay raise
A no vote would mean they earn the same they did before they vote. Earning the same is not a pay raise.