Why Autonomous Cars Will NEVER Replace Transit

As much as I agree that decent public transport is significantly preferable to autonomous cars, this video is a bit of a straw man argument.

Self driving cars will never beat trains/busses on efficiency. But that’s not why people like them. The major selling point is the illusion we can sustainably keep living in spread out suburbs.

Trains will not stop at the doorstep of your mcMansion. Trains will not allow you to comfortably carry your biweekly Costco shopping. Trains will not provide you the luxury of traveling from point A to B without ever having to come in contact with the plebs.

Unfortunately, he kind of admits as much in the end of the video. Where says that self driving cars will entrench suburbia and will work in sparsely populated areas.

He’d have been better off focusing on the economics of self driving cars. E.g. how the vegas hyper loop is an insanely expensive money sink, unneeded musk subsidy, and just plain doesn’t work.

I haven't looked enough into the hyper loop. Why does it not work? It seems pretty straightforward to have a tunnel with self driving cars. I feel like that's the perfect environment for them, like a sterile lab.
- https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/12/early-data-from-elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-shows-a-slower-yet-popular-service/

Hear me out: Autonomous Transit

I live somewhere with automated light metro and it's great.

As much as I enjoy saying Fuck Cars, this person is just wrong. They're making some fundamental assumptions that are wrong to base their argument on.

Transit doesn't work in low-density locations.

It's great in Tokyo or Hong Kong, but if you've ever been to one of those cities and the compare it to somewhere like Seattle, you'll know they're fundamentally different. The Seattle Metro Area is 15,000km^{2, Metro Tokyo is 13,500km}2. Metro Tokyo is 40 million people, Metro Seattle is 4 million people.

That doesn't mean there aren't locations in Metro Seattle where a transit application work best, but they're just extremely limited. Most other American cities are the same. The ones that are better suited to transit(more higher density areas) already have more of it (like New York)

Autonomous cars will improve the transit situation in lower density locations until the density exists to support mass transit.

The reason why American cities are low density is because they were built for cars. Or destroyed for cars. But American car-dependent suburbia is not financially sustainable. Car infrastructure isn't just absolutely miserable, it's also extremely inefficient in terms of both cost and space. Self-driving cars or electric cars won't solve this. America needs to learn how to build cities properly again.
- This.
  Everyone shrieks that we can't just tear down cities for public infrastructure and higher density, but completely refuse to acknowledge that that's EXACTLY what we did for cars.
- They weren't built for cars, they were built for single family homes with yards. Cars are just required for that level of density.
  A lot of people don't want to live in cities, because it means giving up the house and yard.
  That isn't a horrible opinion, but it does drive up prices near cities because of inefficient land use.
Transit doesn't work in low-density locations.
What's the minimum density for transit to work then?
- It always seems to be "more than we have now" to US naysayers.
  Have you checked out the Portland Light rail (MAX) and streetcar map these days? It's quickly starting to look like an actual European style transit map. Was the original MAX line (Blue from 10th downtown to Gresham) along a terribly dense and special case part of Portland? Nope. It was through pretty normal US city areas. It's become a backbone of the city's development and transit since then.
  Part of how cities get denser is to stop allowing low density development, and then putting in transit so that developers can build up instead of out.
  Another great example is in Seattle. They've pushed serious Missing Middle mixed use development outside of the city core. My favorite transformation is at the Fauntleroy Way and Alaska junction area. It's built up nicely and now they're running a tram through it and it's going to just keep getting better for people living there.
  The US seems to have developed an idea that once a city it built in a certain way, it can never be changed. There's a serious lack of imagination, vision, and willingness to look to other templates for how a place can grow and adapt in response to changes over time.

In 1903, New York Times predicted that airplanes would take 10 million years to develop. Nine weeks later the Wright brothers achieve the first manned flight.

This guy is a fool.