No amount of public transport can accomodate the personal whims and demands of anyone let alone everyone. Even Japan, famous for its public transport infrastructure, still has a healthy population of drivers both in metro and rural areas.
I am not saying to get rid of cars altogether. I am saying that it would be better (and cheaper) for everyone if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first. Reduce the amount of yearly trips that are done by car. Provide alternatives.
The important thing about Japan or Europe is not "they don't have cars", but "people make 3-4x less trips by car compared with the alternative modes of transportation". If you want to have safer roads (in a way that doesn't give even more power to tech companies) the best way to do it is by simply reducing the amount of trips taken.
Waymo has raised about $11bn [1]. That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3].
These things aren't competing. To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency, it's not a good look for American public transit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/business/waymo-investment...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-24/cityla...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-21/high-spe...
Bakersfield to Merced is 171 miles of intercity high-speed rail. It's unclear to me why Californians need to make such trips with any significant frequency, and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit".
22 years ago in Toronto, the Sheppard line (3.4 mi, underground) was built for less than $1b CAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_Sheppard). From what I can tell, costs in NYC are mainly a NYC problem.
What, you think Waymo will be able to weasel out of road tax or drive without roads?
> To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency
We can not. This logic is stupid. This logic will take you to the idea that the best thing to do is to get everyone a helicopter because helipads are cheap to build and it costs zero dollars to "build roads in the sky".
Yeah, you are right. These things are not competing. Yes, you are also right that proper infrastructure (re)development in North America will take a lot more money than what Big Tech has invested in self-driving cars.
The upsetting part is to see even supposedly smart people buying into the idea that American Exceptionalism is a real thing, and that you can keep holding on to the hope to find a shortcut away of your problems. Self-driving cars or not, the US is still going to be an expensive, inefficient country that can boast about its amazing economy, yet most people living there are at third-world country levels of development.
