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Waymo in Dallas

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Re: Waymo in Dallas

#561

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

Guestmodinfo wrote: post #327
m_a_g wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One thing about private car ownership in the US is that it is a VERY BIG country and sparsely populated so who will pay for the public transport connecting every nook and corner because in the US it's so sparsely populated. Even in India I see metro train being very successful in places which are densely populated but in states like Rajasthan which are very big and sparsely populated there public transport is a failu…

1. We don't need to connect every nook and corner with public transit. Each city having its own would be sufficient. 2. The US is sparse _because_ of cars: the space allocated for parking pushes things apart.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#562

Post by torginus »

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…

> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily

The problem is rush hour. You still will need some kind of minibus that can serve 4-8 people efficiently, and take up way less space. An added benefit is that if you cut peak traffic volume by 3/4th, you can eliminate congestion.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#563

Post by xnx »

tptacek wrote: post #372
xnx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely true, but snow affecting driving conditions is becoming pretty rare in cities like Chicago.

Seems about as common as it ever was? (I'm very bullish on Waymos here).

You're right. I remembered some headlines about road salt usage and took them at face value, but the long-term trends are not clear.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#564

Post by solatic »

Sheeny96 wrote: post #35

Why are the cars so big? Wouldn't it make sense to have a bunch of much smaller, single person vehicles?

The smallest single-person motorized vehicle is a motorcycle. Leaving stability aside for a minute - one of the issues with electric motorcycles is that the batteries are too small to have range that most riders consider sufficient.

If you have a large enough battery to deliver sufficient range for an electric taxi (driving around most of the day, hopefully, if it is well-utilized), with 4 wheels for stability... I doubt that you could really get significantly smaller where the smaller size would make a big difference.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#565

Post by bluGill »

xnx wrote: post #532
yreg wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?

Microvans exist. However they are not cost effective. Drivers are expensive and they don't get much better fuel economy than a bus that holds several times the number of passengers. Waymo changes the driver costs but not the other costs of running transit. Worse for the van, it holds few people so you dare not let it get popular because it can't handle a random surge of just two families trying to go somewhere at the same time. Your 4 person bus cannot handle my family of five, which is only slightly above average, there are bigger families in every neighborhood.

A larger bus is needed for useful transit.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#566

Post by 1123581321 »

airza wrote: post #526
missedthecue wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The finances of these metros rarely incorporate road costs; their accounting does not require them to incorporate the future liability for infrastructure maintenance and so everything looks good until they need to redo the roads.

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

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#567

Post by bluGill »

FromHoiPolloi wrote: post #518
hahla wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your entire view point is framed incorrectly. The problem isn’t can a bus solve the problem, it’s the majority of people don’t want to endure the hassle of riding the bus.

ok... Why the majority of people don't want to endure the hassle of riding the bus?

Because most buses have terrible service and people are confusing the service with the vehicle. Where buses get good service they get used.

When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.

Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. If they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#568

Post by bluGill »

Yizahi wrote: post #559
missedthecue wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 financi…

When logic and the observation disagree that means your logic is missing something. Don't double down on flawed logic, figure out where the flaw is.

I don't know where your flaws in logic is coming from, but I have seen the numbers enough different places to know there is one someplace.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#569

Post by toasty228 »

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…

They made it work in hong kong with buses/minibuses... it can work everywhere, as long as you try it a tiny bit. But no let's send billions to private company to add more 2500+ kg of metal that displace a single 70kg meatbag, such a waste of resources and energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#570

Post by bluGill »

servo_sausage wrote: post #440
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…

Because a transit method that follows a fixed route, on a schedule, is inherently worse than an on demand one; unless you can separate the traffic.

This is false. A fixed route is predictable. You know when it will be there and can plan for it. Non fixed routes mean you cannot be sure when your ride will arrive and thus cannot be sure you will arrive on time.

That makes the fixed route better than a flexible route. Sure the flexible route is faster in the best case. However it is unpredictable and people have deadlines of when they can arrive: a flexible route cannot meet those consistently enough.

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