Waymo in Portland

Because this creates a huge backlog and queues of cars. Even at 4 people per car a moderate 16k-person event needs 4 000 trips from the stadium in a short time.

Also because this creates a huge pressure on the system. Those 4k trips will starve the system in other places because companies won't just have a few thousand idle cars just laying around in case of events. Welcome to surge pricing.

BTW a similar pressure exists at peak hours when everyone leaves for work, or from work. Two trains carrying 2000 people with 15 minute intervals will need 500 cars minimum (4 people per car) for the same trip in the same direction.

2000 employees at Spotify office in Stockholm will need 500 cars minimum to take them home. In the center of the city. When other offices also leave work for home. Lol.

(In Stockholm subway carries 1.3 million passengers a day. Good luck replacing this to 1-4-people per car)

> Seemingly very rare that anyone argues for public transit expansion based on any of the following:

Waymo has ~2,500 cars on the road in the US by last count, and combined they are doing between 400,000 and 500,000 rides per week. Total. For the whole country.

TriMet, in just the Portland metro area, did 122,000,000 rides last year, or roughly 2,300,000 rides per week.

Let’s say you moved every single Waymo car in the United States to Portland. Great. You’ve now covered 17% of what TriMet did last year.

Now you simply have to build/buy five more Waymo cars for each one that you brought to Portland, bringing the Portland metro area’s Waymo fleet to ~15,000 cars.

Since we’re abolishing public transit for some godforsaken reason in this thought experiment, that’s fifteen thousand cars that are on the roads constantly. It’s not like adding 20,000 new households where people’s cars are often parked, it’s much, much worse than that.

These 15,000 cars would also likely need additional dedicated infrastructure for fuel/charging, which is expensive and extremely logistically difficult.

It’s not just a terrible idea fiscally (unless you truly believe that Waymo could finance, insure, maintain, and provide infrastructure for a fleet 6x the size of its current nationwide inventory with a budget of $555mm), but it’s logistically just… bad.

It is bad for one simple reason: Waymo, as it exists, does not compete with public transit. It competes with taxis and other ride hailing services. Modes of transportation at scale are not interchangeable. Anyone can buy and legally fly a Composite-FX Mosquito helicopter, but Composite-FX does not compete with airlines or airports.

Waymo’s self driving stuff could eventually be useful on buses, but Waymo-as-a-municipal-transit-vendor would be a completely different business from “Uber without drivers”.

- Those events do happen today exactly as described and nobody dies.

- I'm not sure why those trips would starve the system, or why companies would not have idle cars lying around "in case of events". Where there is space for events to happen, they happen all the time. Surge pricing solves immediate high demand, over a longer window there's no reason to believe that companies would essentially leave money on the table by not having a larger fleet, especially if that fleet can be trivially re-allocated automatically over areas much larger than a single city, or state.

- In cities I've lived in, people don't just leave work exactly at 5pm like robots and immediately congest the roadways.

- This is a parallel concern, but why is a company like Spotify of all things not fully remote? Why do any of those employees need to bombard transit at all?

- Buses are also cars that don't require additional infrastructure to carry more people

>

My point was that nobody ever argues those things because they're the worst parts of public mass transit, and they are among the most self-evident justifications for private transit. Instead it has to be "The US can't fathom" and other broad strokes like that because the idea that it can and simply rejects it is harder to accept.

Like you admit that Waymo can’t compete with transit unless you hobble transit.

Waymo raised $16 billon in February. If they really need $500mm to build a transit competitor in Portland, the only reason why they would reach into the taxpayer’s pocket instead of their own would be to undermine a genuinely more useful and capable system that they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of competing with.

Aka your pure fantasy that you present as fact. Of course there might be idiots who may claim to "seize the means of private transportation" or something like that, but let's not pretend it's a serious argument.

> Cars are just generally a better experience. They go from A to B, and they don't have other people on them. Those factors make them obviously desirable.

Can't see anyone arguing against that.

> All of that aside my main point is to push back against the idea that more trains solve any problems with US transit, especially looking forward even a little into the future.

Strange then that Northeastern Corridor whose validity you immediately called into question, keeps increasing ridership.

> solve a transit gap between self-driving vehicles and air travel that will likely increasingly narrow.

Of course they don't for many obvious reasons that start with words like "capacity" and "throughput".

It's also funny and ironic that you imagine the fantasy argument of "we'll take your cars away in favor of public transportation" and then literally arguing for taking away any and all alternative modes of transport except cars, and especially except cars owned by private companies (I do love the coming era of arbitrary surge pricing at any convenient time).