I hope they succeed, for the sake of my mom who's legally blind and has dreamed about them for decades. but I'd be significantly more excited about self-driving if you could buy level-4 AVs that you can actually own.
Cars aren't the best option, but you can drop self-driving cars into an existing car-centric society one car at a time, with the car buyers paying for themselves.
Making a car-centric society meaningfully less car-centric requires the enthusiastic support of that society, along with competent political leadership, and probably a fair chunk of taxpayer cash too. Suburbs with huge lots make for long walks to the transit stop - but densifying those suburbs is not easy.
I don't own a car; I travel everywhere by bicycle and public transport - but the public transport I use was all built in the 1850s. Some time between then and now my society reorganised into a form that has a lot of difficulty delivering public transport projects.
This is a false alternative, because robocars do not exist, while public transit does exist but simply hasn’t been adequately implemented everywhere.
Politicians (and grifters alike) like to point to a future technology to solve an existing problem only to delay existing solutions which they don’t want to implement, most often for political reasons.
Robocars most certainly exist. They’re probably about 5% of car traffic in San Francisco. I’ve not taken one yet (taxis/ubers/Waymos are mostly impractical with a young kid in the US as you must use a car seat unlike in most European countries) but as a pedestrian they seem mostly a safer than other drivers. As a driver I expect they will eventually induce gridlock but the city can always create more bus lanes.
Portable booster seats are pretty small. I can’t see it working if you have a kid younger than the booster seat min though. Only a few states have strict rules here, Washington and California being a couple, although I think California has a taxi exemption.
Living in San Francisco I've not seen the taxi exemption for California anywhere. New York City taxis are exempt like most of Europe.
My kid is too young for a booster city. It's pretty impractical to take a child seat or booster with you unless you plan to hire a car the other end. When I travel back to see my family in Europe I take the train from the airport. So we bus and Bart to the airport even though it would be much easier with luggage to take a taxi.
My kid is 2. New York City and most EU countries (including Spain, Portugal, UK, France) allow children to ride in taxis without a car seat.
This makes it far more practical for people to live without a car - hard to imagine in most of the US I know. As most such trips are low speed around town (e.g. getting to and from a train station or airport) it seems a reasonable trade off.
The robotaxis that do exist only do so in very limited places using very expensive technology (including off-shored service center for intervention) that is not available for the public consumer markets.
They mean consumer robocars as opposed to robotaxis. The latter exist, the former don't. And the latter are remotely controlled by operators when hard situations arise, but a blind consumer would presumably be on their own or would have to pay an additional subscription for that service.
In the USA where transit in most cities sucks? Seattle is supposedly one of the best but you can’t get to work downtown most days without being harassed by a fent zombie.
Seattle's is only one of the best if both ends of your trip are on the light rail.
The drug addicts are also much less of an issue than a lot of media makes them seem. I'm not sure what would happen if I tried to shove my way through the crowd at 12th and Jackson, but mostly those "zombies" aren't paying much attention to passersby.
I really don’t know who told you that Seattle has one of the best transit infrastructures in the country, lol. It’s not even close to New York or Chicago, nor any of the forward thrust cities (DC, Atlanta). Hell, the light rail isn’t even as good as Portland.
I suspect they may be thinking about growth here, since Seattle’s system has had a very impressive growth, and is improving at a rate no other city in the USA comes close. So in other words Seattle for sure has one of the best transit policy in the USA, however New York for sure has a much better system.
I do disagree with you vehemently about Seattle’s light rail being inferior to Portland’s. That may have been true 10 years ago, but it for sure is not true today, especially after the East link opened earlier this year.
That said, Your parent is wildly off the mark (and honestly quite reactionary) in describing harassment from fentanyl addicts. Such harassment is extremely rare, and in the few cases where it does happen it is a failure of public health policy, not transit and accessibility policy.
> Could other public transit serve the same purpose?
Population density plays a big part. People think of Europe as a public transportation paradise, but a car makes your life easier outside Berlin, Paris, and other major cities. I live on the edge of Copenhagen and public transportation sucks the further you go from the downtown since the major city turn into a giant suburb really fast. Yes, people bike, but many do drive a car.
Surely, not until public transit networks covering literally everywhere regular roads can get you.
Public transit is better, but building it outside of dense metro areas to the extent it becomes competitive is probably even more difficult than building a self-driving car.
While I enjoy going for a walk (and will gladly walk four miles as a leisure activity), I don't enjoy wanting to go somewhere and needing to budget an extra hour (or more) for the extra two miles of walking each way, possibly in bad weather. It's like saying the buses always running a half hour late is a feature because it gives you some time to read.
Walking to the station isn't even the bad part. The bad part is then walking 3min in tunnels smelling like piss to get to the platform, then waiting 7min more for the train to arrive, then walk 3min more to get out of another piss-filled station. That's 10-15 of absolutely-not-enjoyable subway station.
Can I ask why you prefer that some future technology will solve her problem when actual solutions (such as access vans; public transit; etc.) already exist?
And before anyone points this out, if your local government does not offer these solutions that is a political choice of your local politicians. Plenty of local governments all over the world (even in dictatorships) are able to provide these, and changing the policy of your local government should in theory be easier then to roll out technology that does not exist.
I'm blind. I wish to hop in a robocar and drive from Denver to go visit my folks back home in Florida. Is the Denver Access-A-Ride going to take me? Which public transit is available?
I preemptively addressed this. Not providing access is a political choice. The airports/train stations/bus stations in both Denver and Florida should have assistants ready to guide you to your flight/train/bus and the Colorado government could have an agreement with Florida to share services with residents of either state. If they don‘t, there was a political choice not to, which can be changed. If there is no public transit available... well... neither are robocars, but only the former is a political choice.
I want to drive. I want to bring my cat and bring some stuff back from my dad's house. My parents just drove up here to visit me, I would like to do the same. Not take a train. Not take a plane. I want to hop in a robocar and drive to Florida. The same thing that every other person with a car can do whenever they want to. Freedom.
I have a hard time imagining how driving a car is freedom but hopping on a bus is not. In my mind a car is a liability in ways the bus is not. You have to insure your car, find parking, get a license, you cannot drive drunk, your license plate is tracked, etc. etc. vs. a bus which you can just hop in (as drunk as you want) fall a sleep or whatever and when you arrive the bus just drives away and you don’t have to think about it ever again in your life. For me that is true freedom.
now imagine a bus, but its smaller and private only for you. for me that is true freedom! not only can you hop in as drunk as you want, and fall asleep, but you can also control the climate and the music and spread out. and when you arrive the waymo just drives away and you don’t have to think about it ever again in your life
Like I said earlier, this technology does not exist. And even if it did, the infrastructure required for everyone to own and operate such a car would be orders of magnitude more expensive and much much much politically harder choice to approve then to build out public transit and to provide access services.
They specifically referred to it as a "waymo". Everyone wouldn't own one, they would hire one for the trip, like you can already do with a non-autonomous rental car for a cross-country trip.
Own or rent one, doesn’t matter, my point still stands. Access vans, busses, trains, plains, etc. are all technology which exists. Worst case your state can subsidize you a hired assistant with a drivers license who can do the driving. These are all technologies which exist today, and are available to mobility impaired individuals in many parts of the world. Only extremely limited areas have a "waymo" available and only for a limited number of trips. The former can be implemented as soon as there is a political will (and already has been implemented in many parts of the world) while the latter requires faith in a technology that does not exist yet.
Funny enough, my local bus line does that. Admittedly it is unique among my local bus system (due to the rural nature of my local area relative to the rest of the system; and the relative length between bus stops). However the same bus system (King County Metro) also operates the access van, so if you are mobility impaired you do have the option to hail a ride which gets you door to door.
Because technological freedom has, historically, vastly outperformed political choice?
I can buy a robotic car, once they're available. I am nowhere near rich enough to afford even one politician, much less enough to get public transit to happen in California.
Political choices also take time. You have to get people to vote on a budget, you have to actually build the infrastructure, etc. - even busses require bus stops and drivers and maintenance facilities.
Given that robotic cars already exist today, and are planning to expand, basically every reasonable expectation says that robotic cars will happen before politicians change tack on public transit (especially in the USA, where Trump is currently our president - he does not seem gung-ho on public transit)
Like I said, dictatorships manage to do this. Claiming that America is different is just another form of American exceptionalism.
And no, robotic cars do not exist. A very limited version of robotaxis do, but they are nowhere near ready for public rollout on all public roads for the consumer market.
The policy of my local government is subject to a number of constraints beyond my personal desire for transit between points that are relevant to me and my lifestyle. I live in a place with pretty good public transit, but I still routinely drive to a place 3 miles away from me, because all the bus routes that take me there are indirect and would add an hour to my round trip.
