This is great. Especially for people with disabilities that prevents them driving a car. Hopefully, coverage area will increase exponentially over time..
Self-driving jitneys will be able to extend public transit into the cul-de-sac subdivisions that are impervious to useful bus service. Let little 8 seat shuttles bring people out to the main line for trains or full-size busses to carry away. It is terribly inefficient to run a 50 person bus with 3 people in it, one of whom is a paid driver. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/autonomous-driverless...
Or try this - Waymo giving a discount for pickups at station. I used to use the Toronto subway this way - take the subway as close as I could get, and then take a taxi the last couple of kilometres. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/clean-rides-clear-benefits-wa...
Taxi services make going carless more feasible, this isn't a net negative to public transit, rather a positive: you mostly use transit for your daily routine, and use a taxi/ride share/autonomous car for those edge cases where transit or biking makes little sense.
A few autonomous taxis in each of the 1000 most sparsely populated counties would dramatically improve the quality of life for those people, particularly for the elderly. No bus line in the world can do that - not in places like Idaho or Western Kansas. I think they should be government funded as soon as it's feasible.
kjkjadksj|3 months ago
michael1999|3 months ago
Self-driving jitneys will be able to extend public transit into the cul-de-sac subdivisions that are impervious to useful bus service. Let little 8 seat shuttles bring people out to the main line for trains or full-size busses to carry away. It is terribly inefficient to run a 50 person bus with 3 people in it, one of whom is a paid driver. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/autonomous-driverless...
Same for small towns - they just don't have the population or the density to run large busses with drivers on fixed routes at a reasonable frequency. I've seen smaller city busses with routes that only run every 90 minutes. But smaller self-driving vehicles can collect a few people and run them around. See https://www.chandleraz.gov/residents/transportation/transit/... or https://ridewithvia.com/news/waymo-and-via-announce-strategi...
Or try this - Waymo giving a discount for pickups at station. I used to use the Toronto subway this way - take the subway as close as I could get, and then take a taxi the last couple of kilometres. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/clean-rides-clear-benefits-wa...
seanmcdirmid|3 months ago
standardUser|3 months ago