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Could Cruise be the Theranos of AI? And is there a dark secret at the core of the entire driverless car industry?
(garymarcus.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Technology
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Those are reasons to fund better public transit, not double down on smaller cars.
Better public transit than Seattle, NYC, Philly, Chicago, and San Francisco? Seriously. Seriously. I've lived all of these places and I gotta tell you, it's bad everywhere in the US and the problem isn't the transit. It's people.
Literally any city in Europe or china has better public transit than anywhere in the US, and it’s not even close.
So your suggestion is to attack transit in America in a way that would not work for American because of America's unique problems with scale. Good to know. Do you know what would happen in most major cities in the US if all the car drivers suddenly had to take public transit? It would overwhelm any system you put in place. And the pollution would be astronomical.
I'm all for walkable cities and suburbs, and I'm even good with reducing the number of people who need to drive and therefore cars on the road. But this isn't a zero sum game. So unless you can show me a plan that is viable to take the place of the system I don't really want to hear naysaying about electric robotaxis or any of that.
This has been studied.
Americans don't have problems with scale, they are just toi car dependent to think of anything else.
Those people that stink, guess what: they are desperate and don't have any other form of transportation than to take an underfunded Bus.
Imagine the busses would receive a checkup and cleaning everytime they complete their route, come every 5 minutes, and wouldn't have to wait with the car traffic. Suddenly, it sounds much better doesn't it?
Just out of curiosity where are you from. Because when I said scale I meant people vs available usable land vs cost to update the infrastructure. America has a similar population to the entire EU. But the EU is 1,707,642 sq mi, and the US 3,794,100 sq mi. We have almost three times the size to cover with transit. Japan has 145,869 sq mi and 125.7 million people.
If you had read the article posted you would perhaps have a better understanding of why it is a scale problem and a funding problem. Those aren't the only problems but they are some of the big ones.
It cost Japan something like $1BN USD of today's money to implement high speed rail.
Just to cover San Francisco to Los Angeles in California was estimated to cost $9BN in 2008. It's now estimated to cost between $88BN and $128BN. That's just to cover 350 miles.
The checkup and cleaning of busses, trains and so on is a thing. It's called preventative or scheduled maintenance and it is being done. But to expect that every route would get that kind of maintenance after every single completed run? While being actively used by 207 million people daily? That's a fever dream. We don't have the kind of man power that would take with the expertise it would take. It sounds better yes. But I want to see the plan you (or anyone) has to make it work. Where would these people board these buses and trains? Who is going to clean them? Who is going to service them? The automotive industry as a whole has a shortage of technicians. The aviation industry has a shortage of technicians. The average age of an aviation tech is 55. These people are retiring and nobody is replacing them.
I'm not blaming them for stinking. I fully understand that homeless people ride public transit because it's dry and warm and relatively safe. I understand that most homeless people work and aren't homeless on purpose. I also don't blame them for their lot in life. But people will absolutely pay money to use rideshare when and if it is available to forgo having to deal with having their senses assaulted. They absolutely will forgo spending their valuable time on public transit in order to get to and from work faster because the average work hour here isn't 8 hours for a full time employee. It's 10. And adding an additional hour or more to that per day for transportation? It adds up.
According to this article Seattle (where I live) has a good score for its public transit and the median income of drivers to transit commuters and still only accounts for something like 9% of transit users. And that's with a city that is "super walkable".