Well, self-driving buses are definitely more likely to happen than self-driving general-purpose vehicles (due to buses already having predefined routes and often dedicated infrastructure), but which problem are we trying to solve here, exactly?
"Bus driver" is not exactly a high-paying job, yet one that is important for social cohesion: passenger safety and informal surveillance of roads and neighborhoods sure are crucial!
When it comes to anything 'self-driving', the main goal should be to reduce road traffic and neighborhood pollution-by-parking-spaces. This does nothing for either purpose.
An excellent way to ensure passenger safety is not to share an enclosed space with someone dangerous.
> When it comes to anything 'self-driving', the main goals should be to reduce road traffic and neighborhood pollution-by-parking-spaces.
When it comes to transportation systems, the goals should be: safety, utility, reliability, convenience, speed, flexibility, efficiency, environmental impact (pollution, noise, etc.).
> In my city, 70% of the operating budget is labor
Link? Because, well, your city is certainly special! Unless, like, you group things like 'pension liabilities', and 'insurance involving personnel' under 'labor', which is... creative but not accurate.
You should probably know that "Labor" includes a hell of a lot more than drivers though. That's, at minimum, the tiremen to the body guys to the mechanics that maintain the busses. That's the electricians, the carpenters, the plumbers, that maintain the shop(s). That's the planners (that dictate "X bus will be due for an oil change this day, we need to make sure it's here"), the office administrators, the shop supervisors, the road supervisors.
Paying the bus drivers does not account for 70% of the budget, I assure you.
Absolutely. Having so many drivers, and so much custom hardware, leads to a cascade of additional employees and expense for legacy transit systems. A transit system (self-driving cars) oriented around driverless vehicles and very lightweight support infrastructure (distributed charging, cleaning, repairs) can be much more cost efficient and agile.
I mean sure, drivers need support, but getting rid of drivers increases the support requirements. Drivers perform the legally-required pre-trip every time they leave the yard. This finds things that must be fixed. The coach will then spend 12-28 hours on the road (across multiple drivers), with a driver making sure anything that feels off gets reported.
I've dealt with self-reporting systems in this area, and I do not have the words to tell you how much less I trust self-reporting than an 8 hour test-drive by someone that knows the bus.
This skips over all the local police's missing person reports that show up for every driver that can help. Completely unrelated to the job of driving - but when it's my kid that doesn't come home, arguably more important to me.
Drivers are sticking around, and I think a lot of people are confused about how much they do to keep things running
>> An excellent way to ensure passenger safety is not to share an enclosed space with someone dangerous.
US citizen? Can I ask, why is it that US citizens are so worried about dangerous people in public transport? Is it a rational concern or is it more of a -no offecne meant- preconceived idea? Is it something that's evenly geographically distributed or something you find more in certain places than others?
I'm asking honestly and curiously and hoping more to clear up my own preconceptions than to enforce them. I do find it strange; because I use public transport basically all the time (I don't own a car). I live in the UK and some years I commuted daily by train to work and back. Otherwise I take the bus when I have far to go. I have consistently traveled between the UK and Greece by train and ferry boat for some 15 years now. I've never felt that I was in any kind of danger, although to be fair some times the London trains can be a bit of a pain in the ass on a Saturday night (too many drunken brits, but they're mostly harmless, and really just rowdy).
I've been on some pretty wild lines too. For a few years me and a friend would take the night train from Paris to Venice, and back on the return. That's a sleeper train with six-person cabins. We rode it on through the years of increasing immigration waves from Africa through Italy to the North of Europe, so I've traveled with people with ... varied life histories for sure. Still, all this time, me and my friend's most memorable experience remains the time a Chinese gentleman was asked to open his luggage by border guards in Switzerland, at which point everyone in the compartment (and possibly the ones next door) was very clearly able to smell the large fresh fish he was carrying in his bag. They took him off the train because he didn't have papers. For himself, not the fish. I hope he reached his destination. I bet everyone would have been eager to fast-track him along.
I mean, it's not the boring safety of sitting in your car but it's not dangerous. Only interesting. And the night train, when it careens through the Alps you're like a baby in the cradle, swaying gently and lulled by the sound of the rails. I miss that train. I think the company went bankrupt during the pandemic and they don't run anymore. That has complicated me and my friend's travel quite a bit in the last few years.
So I have good experiences of public transit. What's the problem with US public transport? Why are people so worried about it?
Yes. I understand that there is some enforcement on trains in Europe that you be a paying passenger. In metro trains in the US this is less common or non-existent. Because of the US inability to deal with drug, mental-health, and homelessness issues, public transit often ends up being shelter for a lot of people who have nothing to lose. The risk of being murdered is low, but the risk of an unnecessarily unpleasant experience is high: begging, harassment, groping, smoke-filled train cars, food scraps, having someone spit in your face, urine, vomit, and feces are stories every commuter has. Inter-city trains are generally fine.
There is enforcement in Europe, more or less depending on where you are. In the UK it's not unknown or even not uncommon for homeless folks to board busses or trains and maybe taking a nap (or a good night's sleep) instead of sitting outside and freezing. In the UK and in Greece beggars are also a common occurrence.
>> The risk of being murdered is low, but the risk of an unnecessarily unpleasant experience is high: begging, harassment, groping, smoke-filled train cars, food scraps, having someone spit in your face, urine, vomit, and feces are stories every commuter has. Inter-city trains are generally fine.
That certainly sounds extremely unpleasant. What I'm trying to understand is how high is the risk, really, and whether it is higher in some cities than others. I mean because I still can't imagine public transport where people will spit in your face in the bus or in the train. Although I've seen people getting sick (and then jumping off at the next stop, bastards) on London busses. In London, being puked on of a night out is a real risk but then it's nothing to do with public transport.
Anyway, how high is the risk of such unpleasant experiences in the U? Why is it that way?
Really? "There's a blown-down tree here"... "Someone ran into this lamp post"... "This traffic sign has been vandalized"... "There's someone parked on the grass"...
If you think surveillance is valuable, you should love 360 video recorded by self-driving vehicles which travel all streets in a city, not just fixed routes.
No. I would love for there to be many times more traffic cameras and license plate readers. Video-footage from self-driving vehicles could go a long way to getting dangerous drivers off of the road.
Sorry to burst your bubble in that case, but "getting dangerous drivers off the road" isn't going to happen.
Actual case study, maybe slightly summarized an exaggerated:
-Prosecution: here is a video of Defendant repeatedly running over several pedestrians
-Defense: it was late at night, visibility was really low, and, besides, my client was very drunk. And they really, really need their car and license for their job! They would be ruined otherwise!
-Judge: well, good points, are we missing something here?
-Prosecution: They. Ran. Over. Several. Pedestrians. Forwards, then backwards!
-Judge: yeah, OK, sure, they should cover the immediate medical costs for those unfortunate bystanders, but other than that I order a safe-driving course, 12 months of alcohol interlock and 36 months of suspended license revocation that nobody will care about, ever. Next case!
I am routinely furious where negligent drivers are let off with an "oopsie"[1]. But signs are encouraging that dashcams are already catching all types of criminality[2] that would have not been prosecuted before.
Nope. Does my HN user name give any hints? Over here, bus drivers (and taxi drivers, ironically, despite being not exactly being law-abiding-as-a-class) account for, like, two thirds of all non-urgent-law-enforcement calls.
There is no urban future, despite those who dream smart cities. The reason why it that dense urban areas can't evolve and consume MUCH MORE in the modern world than sparse areas even if most deny it and do not even try to compute the raw materials and energy an urban vs sparse area consume.
The future could be or a mass genocide to lower quickly earth population or an "urbanized" world of single family homes and sheds. That's why all who knows push "urban air mobility" which can't be in dense areas and can't be "collective" as well, because it's a way to reduce the need of infrastructure again and again.
I still have to facepalm at the sheer lengths we’ll go through to avoid building rail or better transit. Yes, let’s have hundreds of startups squandering billions of dollars in investment to replace the lowly bus driver. That’s way better than spending that money in, say, light rail and trolley car systems, expanding existing subway networks, completing desperately needed infrastructure projects, or modernizing and automating existing rail service.
Putting the soap box aside for just a moment however, I could see this being feasible for static bus routes, assuming your city maintains the roads and signals along that route so the ML algorithms piloting the multi-ton death machine on open roads isn’t distracted by a new pot hole or missing road stripe. Since no city in America actually does this though, these things seem about as reliable as the “self-driving” Teslas under Vegas. Then you throw in the need to retrain the algorithm every time the route changes, and the millions in expenses that’ll cost versus the few thousand it takes to retrain a human driver on a new route…
Yeah, nevermind, breaking out the soap box again. Stop trying to short-change infrastructure investments and just invest in the infrastructure already. It won’t make some SV VC fund richer, sure, but it’ll at least go towards something useful and necessary for the city’s occupants.
Many urbanists seem to have a severe case of "train brain" where they can not see how expensive and impractical trains are for contemporary transportation needs. Trains are a solution to a problem from a century ago, and fair very poorly when evaluated capability and cost per passenger mile basis to alternatives. I'm am extremely optimistic about the future of public transportation, but that future is right-sized autonomous vehicles and not fixed route hundred ton trains that move a lot of empty seats.
Most of all, train routes are not adaptable, bus routes are. Trains are definitely nicer from a ride experience though. I feel there is room for improvement in the design of buses.
Jane Jacobs argued that trains are suitable for well established routes of travel. First the bus, then the train.
> Most of all, train routes are not adaptable, bus routes are.
Totally, and this is true on a microscale too. 1,000s of train commuters are regularly delayed by a "sick passenger" on a rail line. With buses, following busses can go around any stopped bus.
I have light rail literally a 5 minute walk from my house in an inner ring suburb, and I never use it. It was built to go downtown 100 years ago, and I never go downtown for anything. It's completely stuck, has to still cross over streets and follow traffic patterns, and then only runs every half an hour l. Instead I just drive. Yes I hate it too.
So light rail or trolleys is the same but worse and more expensive (plus they also still have drivers).
For this to get used, it needs to:
- not be beholden to traffic or congestion. Like a subway or the L? Or dedicated lanes for busses could work and may be drastically cheaper
- needs to be able to service lots of destinations and changing needs. Subways do this by building new lines and stations (again, $$$)
-needs to be relatively clean and safe. This is an actual concern people have that has to be addressed.
> Or dedicated lanes for busses could work and may be drastically cheaper
This is discussed a bit in urban planning circles, one of the reasons trams or light rail is preferred is political, it's much harder for some austerity government to come into power in a city and remove tramlines than remove bus and bike lanes.
Literally this right here. For all the folks jumping in and downvoting my OP by screeching the same tired talking points Capital uses to grease the wheels of politics (“it’s cheaper per passenger mile”, “no more empty seats”, “nobody goes downtown anymore anyway”, “adapt to the dynamism of your urban development”), the reality is that trains are damn near impossible to cut through BS austerity versus flimsy bus and bike lanes. That’s the point. We’re a grown-ass species that still behaves like chaotic toddlers when it comes to urban planning (we don’t really give actual planners the resources, authority, and timelines they need to execute), letting Capital dictate where to build fancy neighborhoods and malls in the middle of nowhere because it’s cheaper for them, rather than forcing and incentivizing modern development near existing transit infrastructure. In other words, we literally permit the developments they then use to justify dismantling mass transit projects in the future, and then a whole bunch of goldfish swarm the comments to go “NoBoDy CoUlD hAvE pReDiCtEd ThIs!”
The brutal core of this argument remains those who demand we take urban planning and development seriously to benefit the masses, versus those who seek fortune and riches bootlicking those who would benefit from chaos and disorganization. I hate to be that blunt about it, but I think the HN crowd can swallow that bitter medicine better than most.
If you’re all-in on a car-focused city, then you’re going to be disappointed. If you have gripes with your current mass transit (like Boston’s infamous Green Line), then it’s better to address those gripes directly than throw the baby out with the bathwater in favor of something newer, shinier, and worse.
Great you've got your trains. Where I need to go is 3 miles away from the station. How do I get there if I don't want to haul a bike on the train? What about when the austerity government comes into power and cuts this last-mile connectivity? Does everyone who doesn't live within half a mile of a train station not matter?
This bus-hate is irrational and self-defeating. A successful mass transit system has multiple modes of transport. Making one of them cheaper than it is now can only be a good thing.
Yeah I think my complaint still stands, which is that they already tried this where I live, and having a literal train straight downtown did not incentivize building there at all.
growing up is realizing that solving self-driving is an easier problem than getting rail built with the current American political process.
Google has spent less so far on building fully self-driving cars than the state of California has spent on HSR and they have only built 22 miles out of 171, never mind that the selected route is clearly the outcome of some stupid politicking.
Light rail also kinda sucks if I am being honest, at least in every city I have lived in.
Well, in developed countries the wage cost of the busdrivers are >50% all other costs. So you could almost double the number of buses, making it much more attractive to take a bus.
Driverless trains are still only used on a minority of railways, and typically only on networks specifically designed for them. I would be very hesitant to support driverless buses with the currently available level of artificial intelligence: buses run on roads of various surfaces and dimensions, navigate around unpredictable diversions and share traffic with hundreds of other road users in a frighteningly complex system.
Plus, even once you've designed a system that can do all that safely, you'll still need staff on board if you want to collect fare revenue.
Waymo is pretty safe already and there's no reason to think technology won't keep improving.
Fare evasion is an interesting point. Of course you can't completely avoid it, as it happens on rail too. But you could install a turnstile on the bus.
And I articulate that position at the bottom of my screed. It could be, but only if cities actually maintain the infrastructure those driverless busses run on - and since no city in America does, all we’re really pitching here is eliminating a job to make service worse to justify cutting it entirely later.
It’s the same blinders I see time and time again: you cannot solve an inherently political problem through technology alone.
> maintain the infrastructure those driverless busses run on
One of the innovations of modern self driving systems is not requiring any accomodation from the infrastructure. It's the same idea as "smart endpoints and dumb pipes".
> only if cities actually maintain the infrastructure those driverless busses run on
You mean roads? Yeah I guess if a city isn't up to maintaining its roads, it's pretty f*cked anyway.
> you cannot solve an inherently political problem through technology alone
Often technology moves a problem away from the realm of politics. Politics is a game of allocating limited resources. If technology brings abundance, the question of allocation is way less important.
The problem as always is NIMBYism. It's not the desire to improve or the budgets that pose a barrier, rather it's the individuals whose housing arrangements would be negatively affected that raise a fuss. They rob all political will from the movement.
Self-driving vehicles are too stupid to drive in the snow. They can't handle variable traction (down to approximately 0 traction on black ice), they can't handle when road markings are entirely obscured by snow pack, they can't handle the general intelligence required to negotiate with humans in the same situation.
Neither can most humans, if we’re being honest. Also, low traction situations are exactly the kind of thing that a computer is ideal at solving. Traction control in EVs is so, so much better than on gas cars purely because the ability to modulate force applied to maintain traction is far faster.
The maneuvers I see them do regularly are unlikely to be done by any current self-driving technology on a congested city street. With dedicated lanes or with no congestion, I can imagine them doing fine.
There are many people who are too young, too old or lack abilities necessary to drive places: they are completely dependent on the will of others to help them get where they need to go. Coordinating the transportation is taxing in many ways and having more options for people to get where they need to go on their own terms is helpful for borders as well as those providing service. Many people cannot leverage existing busses because they don’t go where they need to go when they need to get there. Having something that can more dynamically adjust to meet demand could be very helpful if it can do more than replace the existing system.
Not sure about the States, but in many other places buses require / strongly prefer a separate public lane. Driving more busses in a congested city will probably increase congestion because buses are "clumsy" compared to smaller city cars.
Adding buses to already congested streets might just make the situation worse.
Israel ran into this problem, and they are desperately trying to recover by building light rail in big cities.
Dedicated bus lanes are designed to increase a city’s total throughout. As in by removing a full lane of traffic and only sending bus down that lane things improve.
That seems counterintuitive, but bus utilization and congestion occur at the same time. So one bus is replacing 20-60 cars in busy periods. At 2AM an empty bus may be taking up a lot of road, but the streets are practically empty.
My gut feeling is that it's hard to tell, and could be case-by-case thing.
It might depend on many things, like whether the bus actually goes anywhere useful, or the would-be passengers would still have to travel far from their stop (and would prefer to drive a car, as bus doesn't solve their commute problem). Would be especially problematic in areas with single-family houses spaced far apart. Very infrequent bus service may also be a factor that would sway would-be passengers to drive cars instead, but it would be hard to justify more buses on the line.
Well, I'm not a city planner, just trying to imagine the potential problems. Bet people who deal with this would know better.
NYC bus drivers start at 27$/hour well above the other costs, and those buses are used ~80-100 hours per week.
Classic school bus costs ~10k/year in depreciation and get 10 miles to the gallon making the driver at an average 18$/hour the largest cost even outside of cities.
Starting pay for a CTA bus operator is like $27/hour, and can go up to $40/hour. I imagine other big cities are similar, so probably at least about 20% higher than that range, neglecting overtime. But a driver will work 40 hours a week, though presumably they're not inside a bus the whole time. A bus can be used upwards of 80-100 hours a week (though some will be used less). So operating a bus can be up to $200-250k/year. An average bus lasts around 12 years. So operating it is more expensive than buying it. There are other costs of course (maintenance, cleaning, fuel/electricity, upkeep of bus shelters, etc.), but I think operator cost dominates.
"Personnel costs" means every human working at the transit agency. Self-driving buses aren't going to eliminate the maintenance department at CTA. If anything it could grow because they might expand bus routes.
There’s far more bus drivers than maintenance workers.
Further you need HR and managers to handle having a large driver workforce. So while drivers aren’t responsible for all of that 70%, they are a high percentage of it.
> Self-driving buses aren't going to eliminate the maintenance department at CTA
By moving from specialty vehicles like large diesel busses to vehicles based on commodity/consumer minivans, it will be possible to multiple external services. This gives the taxpayer the benefit of scale and competition.
There's no need for a monopoly in city transit. In a future state, we could have multiple transit providers, similar to how airlines operate today.
does the zeekr mix kneel down so I can get my stroller in more easily? How many wheelchairs fit? Where do I stand if there aren't enough seats, which happens very commonly even on articulated buses. It also seems very inefficient to exit and enter.
Good questions. Zeekr Mix does have lower entry height and a larger opening than typical taxis/rideshares. It is not designed for wheelchairs, but it is already common to operate separate paratransit vans for wheelchair users who are better served by door-to-door transport. Self-driving vehicles guarantee a seat because rides are pre-scheduled.
Because point-to-point self-driving taxis are a fool’s errand. They don’t alleviate congestion, they don’t improve traffic flow, they don’t improve urban planning. They’re a direct replacement for individual cars, but now rent-forever as opposed to owning or leasing ourselves. The whole concept is just to remove another strata of ownership and funnel more money to Capital and away from Governments, which I guess is the whole point if you genuinely don’t like governments for some reason.
The healthier option for the masses is expanding mass transit networks, not luxe taxis. Light rail is infinitely more efficient and safer than individual vehicles, be they owner-operated or self-driving. It moves more people, further, faster, and cheaper than any potential self-driving automobile. When you include the whole of networks - ferries, bus routes, commuter rail - they’re the single most effective solution to everything self-driving car proponents claim their products can do, if only they had another round of funding.
I’m not saying we should stop investing in the technology, mind. I just think it’s a better use of our limited resources to invest in improving, expanding, and modernizing mass transit than to build armies of privately-owned taxis, self-driving or otherwise.
That's a lot of unsupported claims. I'm not familiar with the situation worldwide, but in the US metropolitan transit agencies are primarily a tool to funnel public money to private construction firms and unions. Sometimes this money-suck happens at the rate of $3.5 billion/mile: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
I like public transit, and I Know he public can get a lot more for its money if we leave behind our old thinking.
Not by themselves. But combine them with a congestion tax, unless the taxi is full, and you've got an infinitely adaptable, cheap, and scalable bus network.
A point to point taxi has low capacity and is deadheading empty half the time.
Many buses on more fixed routes (possibly with flexible small deviations) is going to be much more efficient.
Seat utilization (i.e. cost per passenger mile) is a good way to think about things. Small shuttles are almost certainly a win over large buses. Definitely worth running the simulations to see if small (6 passenger) vehicles are even better.
How about we just make the job of driving a bus suck less by making it pay more and giving drivers more leeway to handle problems on their busses, and more support from law enforcement for same, to address the shortage of workers? Then we don't need robo-busses and we can just use the non-robo busses we already have and perhaps even buy more of them, and setup more routes?
The issues with busses are lack of coverage by the network and the shortage of drivers because it's an awful job that pays shit wages, both of which are down in large part due to lack of funding and the political will to allocate it. We don't need a computer to solve these issues.
If you increase wages you make buses either a) more expensive - less incentive for car drivers to switch (and you're hurting low-income passengers) or b) more loss-making - easier for car drivers to lobby politicians to kill them off.
Bus fare is already pretty expensive when you consider the quality of service, speed, and convenience outside major metro areas.
> due to lack of funding
If there's a lack of funding, and there's tech that will make buses cheaper, it's a no-brainer to adopt it.
> the political will to allocate it
Willpower and political capital are limited resources. Why squander them when there are alternatives?
> more loss-making - easier for car drivers to lobby politicians to kill them off.
This logic only holds if you assume public services must make money and this is not a universal rule. Tons of public services hemorrhage money. It's called "spending money to get things" and we as a society have been doing it for basically as long as money has existed.
> If there's a lack of funding, and there's a tech that will make buses cheaper, it's a no-brainer to adopt it.
A regular car retrofitted to operate "autonomously" costs upwards of 100k by a quick google, and we're not talking a Mercedes here, we're talking a bog standard crossover. Busses cost near 6 times what that "autonomous" car costs for a boring one that a person drives, how much do you think a robo one will cost?
Also worth noting, the prototype pictured in the article looks to move WAY fewer people than a standard city bus.
> if you assume public services must make money and this is not a universal rule
I don't assume that. But I'm not the electorate.
> Tons of public services hemorrhage money
And that makes them easy targets for cuts. I personally prefer having public services stick around to serve people. That means stiffening them against political attacks as much as possible, and taking easy wins if they're available.
> how much do you think a robo one will cost?
So now we're arguing the actual cost-benefit of the technology. That's a much better way to approach it than reflexively dismissing it.
To be clear, the majority of bus takers in my experience (several large cities on the West Coast of the US) are perfectly nice people. But often enough as to be a nuisance there are individuals who are: severely mentally ill, openly using drugs or intoxicated, blasting music on their phones, hostile or aggressive, lecherous and intimidating towards female passengers.
This varies widely by area. In the SF Bay Area due to public policy failures in housing, mental health, and substance abuse, some of the main bus routes have turned into rolling homeless shelters. You don't always see that but it's pretty obvious on certain routes at certain times. This makes some normal people uncomfortable — particularly women traveling alone. Regardless of whether that reaction is rational or not, it's another factor that discourages normal people from riding the bus and causes them to vote against public transit funding.
there is pretty often someone crazy on the buses i take, both in SF and DC where i grew up. generally i dont feel unsafe but i also dont enjoy being in an enclosed space with someone losing their mind
The bus stops themselves are also a large consideration. Depending on the local climate one really needs a rain/wind shelter to make waiting comfortable enough, and it is obviously beneficial to have bins, seats and electronic departure boards. A very enlightened transport network would provide free Wi-Fi, but that might be asking for just a bit too much! All in all, I feel that the 'waiting' phase of catching a bus is often neglected, yet vitally important to the total experience.
The best way to improve the waiting component is to make it shorter, but indeed, most stops should have shelters (and they do, at least most of the ones I use in my city...) Wi-Fi might have made sense years ago, but there is good cell service everywhere.
And who exactly are you picturing would be riding a robo bus then? Or is this going to be an expensive bus for tech workers so they needn't rub elbows with the poors?
The driver's area is entirely separated by an internal door, with an optional hole in the glass for operators which take cash. These separating doors became most widely fitted after the COVID-19 outbreak (for the drivers' safety), but they were already in use in many European cities years before that.
"Bus driver" is not exactly a high-paying job, yet one that is important for social cohesion: passenger safety and informal surveillance of roads and neighborhoods sure are crucial!
When it comes to anything 'self-driving', the main goal should be to reduce road traffic and neighborhood pollution-by-parking-spaces. This does nothing for either purpose.