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Waymo in Portland

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Re: Waymo in Portland

#441

Post by SloppyDrive »

nostrademons wrote: post #143
xnx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The longer-term possible second-order effects are going to be wild. Easier t o get to wilderness? Awesome!, but also crowding like you've never seen (but maybe also more small parks because there will be a glut of unused parking).

I don't see why one of those second-order effects wouldn't be the death of car ownership, with everyone using a rideshare service instead. Hell, that's the business model for Waymo and almost everyone other than Tesla in the autonomous-vehicle industry. It just doesn't make sense to own your own vehicle, use it for ~2 hours/day, and have to worry about parking/storing/fueling/maintaining it when you could have a serv…

I think this fundamentally misunderstands what people want...

Currently I live in a city with an OK pt network; in the a high density apartment. I chose this because I can catch a train to work, go drinking locally, and I dislike driving.

If I could rely on a driverless car, i would happily live further out in the suburbs, as the driverless car removes the upsides of density more than anything else... And I think this is a common sentiment, driven mostly by housing costs.

And then you have the cost of a trip, of owning vs rideshare... If its my car I can choose the furnishing, pay for fuel or power however is most efficient for me (eg solar), not have to pay for cleaning, and store my stuff in the car.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#442

Post by n8cpdx »

Ritewut wrote: post #350
n8cpdx wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need density for trains, but Portlanders think it is a war crime to ask you to work from an office or tear down a dead mall to build housing, so…

Portlanders do not think this. Survey people in Portland and you'll find they want trains as well. NIMBYs don't and NIMBYs make up the majority of people who actually have the time and wealth to go to city meetings.

You can want trains while simultaneously detesting all of the conditions that make trains viable. Just like you can want to drive to work every day and also want to never be in traffic. NIMBYism has nothing to do with being averse to working downtown or tearing down a mall (a radically YIMBY position regarding dead malls).

Re: Waymo in Portland

#443

Post by kalleboo »

conductr wrote: post #66
walrus01 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely a big concern, but given the number of times in my lifespan that I've seen pictures or video of human-driven vehicles that have got stuck on railroad crossings (or just straight up drunk people trying to drive linearly down a railroad track)... I would be curious to compare stats of 100,000 hours of human drivers getting stuck on grade crossings or doing something dumb, such as trying to drive around cross…

> The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement. What's the hot fix for this? Are they just stuck until a tech can physically go out and reset and move them? Or can someone in a…

> Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?

For Waymo, it's this one.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#444

Post by raybb »

dmix wrote: post #288
meowkit wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not like the US didn't try. California spent 15yrs trying to build a high speed train and failed. Canada has been talking about building trains forever too and it usually goes nowhere because the budgets explode like every major infrastructure project these days. UK spent $100M just to deal with bats in a single train tunnel, which is representative of the issue https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo

California high speed rail isn't running now but it is improving lots of things along the way. For example one of the most dangerous crossings in the state is now grade separated with the Rosecrans/Marquardt Grade Separation Project.

https://www.metro.net/about/media-relations/156-million-new-...

Re: Waymo in Portland

#445

Post by senordevnyc »

nostrademons wrote: post #253
ssl-3 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This joke gets made on every story about Waymo. It’s so funny.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#446

Post by dmitrygr »

righthand wrote: post #429
dmitrygr wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit in America presents a much higher chance of encountering dangerous people than a private car. Until those people are permanently, irrevocably, and definitively locked up, it would not matter off public transit were free, or even paid users to use it, it will not be a serious option. Nobody in my family is allowed to use public transit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Debrina_Kawam https://en.w…

This is all FUD and extremely unlikely if not improbable to run into someone violent. If you’re that afraid of public transit and people in general, no amount of “rounding people up against their will” would change your mind.

FUD? Are you claiming these did not happen?

Re: Waymo in Portland

#447

Post by jrflowers »

thereisnospork wrote: post #414
jrflowers wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf Tax revenue was $555mm https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf ~122,300,000 rides (originating + boarding) So about $4.53 per ride. The Portland metro is ~2.5mm people, so about $222/resident/yr. Portland metro area residents pay on average about sixty cents per day to subsidize TriMet. Roughly 1/43rd the average cost of ownership for a new car in Oregon.…

Assuming an average fare of 2.47$ per to make the math even, that's 6.00$/ride total cost. When a company / government gets the cost per mile to run a fleet of autonomous EV's down to ~60cents/mile or so, which is a plausible enough number, then a lot of those transit rides are going to look real silly from a cost effectiveness POV.

Yes. If the government were able to provide transit more cheaply in the future by using new vehicles then the transit that the government provides would be cheaper than it is today.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#448

Post by floxy »

soiltype wrote: post #425
floxy wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only that they are worthy of noting. If there is a modern system, but it happens to suck for some reason, you don't have to mention that one. So feel free to strike that "notable". Which American cities have modern train systems?

Ok, that's an unusual definition of notable.

notable

adjective

no· ta· ble ˈnō-tə-bəl for sense 2 also

1 a : worthy of note : remarkable

    | a *notable* improvement
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/notable

Re: Waymo in Portland

#449

Post by badc0ffee »

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…

I haven't been to Portland for years, but I remember it as being a transit-forward city, with several streetcar lines (one connected to an aerial tram), and decent light rail service covering much of the metro area.

It sounds like they're going to leave that behind, at least for the foreseeable future. A $300 million cut will probably lead to a death spiral in ridership.

Re: Waymo in Portland

#450

Post by UltraSane »

qwerpy wrote: post #355
boc wrote: post #4

I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech, so I can drive it manually when I want/need (snowstorms, off-road), but I can also let it drive me across the country at night while I camp in the back. Would absolutely change the way we move across the US, especially if you have hobbies that involve a lot of gear and equipment.

I want this as well. Hopefully my Cybertruck will get unsupervised driving someday, but until then, it's the closest thing to the dream of electric off-roading, self-driving vehicle with huge cargo capacity. I've already stopped driving myself around 98% of the time, according to my FSD stats.

Why did you buy a Cybertruck?
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