It should be Dallan?

Also, do you have the same issue with the demonyms Manhattanite or Seattleite?

Being smaller does not help that much much in cost per mile, but has a big cost for functionality.

The cameras, LIDAR, and sensors are all fixed costs. You need them on even a single-person car. And they’re extremely costly.

https://www.worldatlas.com/places/the-most-dangerous-highway...

To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:

* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute

* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles

* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch

* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent

The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.

That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.

- states where the major cities commonly have snow for > 3 months

- states where the major cities commonly have snow for < 1 month

Inclement weather is likely the differentiator. Blue state California gets Waymo in its biggest cities, which handily do not get much snow. The other Waymo cities are all below the Mason-Dixon Line.

so, no suburbs, only enclaves

Dallards?

https://www.twu.org/twu-tech-newsletter-waymo-no-mo-in-nyc-f...

I never thought of this, but I think this is a valid concern. Uber drivers will end up spending in their locality while money that goes to Waymo will be used for further investment that’s probably concentrated in the Bay Area. I will say this though, Uber it self somehow takes > 50% of the cut a driver and makes and once again spends it on engineers in California, so Uber is guilty of this same issue, but Waymo is probably worse at this than Uber.

In general AI is guilty of destroying the demand for normal human labour and accumulating money into companies with highly paid engineers.

> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.

What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!)

I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita.

I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus

As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people!

It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus.

I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.

Hmm. Maybe in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris,_Texas?

In reality I think you can get better experiences than a taxi with a rideshare service (which they really aren't for a very long time), but it's very hit or miss.

So less consistently bad as a taxi service... but far from consistently good.

Jokes aside I always thought this was a crap argument. If you can get more useful signals into a system, it's likely to perform better. Duh!

But never argue with a CEO: their interest is profit, not honest conversations.

At $200, you might as well add lidar. At $50,000 vision only made more sense.

A trained marksman may be able to hit a clay pigeon with a 22, but it's easier with a shotgun.

So saying a human can do something doesn't mean it's the easiest way.

That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.

A bus could serve 40-100 daily. The infrastructure already exists - the same as for cars. It's pretty low cost also - especially electric buses that have lower maintenance costs. The problem is that you have to ride with other people.

The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.

I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.

Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.

The problem is rush hour. You still will need some kind of minibus that can serve 4-8 people efficiently, and take up way less space. An added benefit is that if you cut peak traffic volume by 3/4th, you can eliminate congestion.

The reason I say Waymo specifically is that I don't think it's well appreciated the tech advantage Waymo has by using Google's unequalled geospatial data. Elon keeps claiming that Teslas will do the same thing much cheaper and everywhere, but there's no actual evidence that that is possible. Grinding out larger and larger service areas in more cities is likely to be the way automated rides expand for the next several years.

But also I support the critique. Especially of DART, which I don’t see how the rail service ever works in a city designed like this. With residents who hop all over the metroplex on a somewhat random and sporadic basis, covering great distances. I think Waymo/robot is the best path for mass transit until we use it so much we stop buying cars. Then, the city can build rails and hopefully robots can be more efficient with less lanes of road. The Waymo solution gives A to B where a rail requires ABCD, in a metro where first and last mile may be 10+ miles each, that just doesn’t work. Also, rail has a chicken and egg problem. It really needs critical mass to run more frequently and justify the expense but it can’t get much usage at all because of this first and last mile problem. So it is kind of like a zombie of solution, we invest in it to seem modern and whatnot, but in reality it’s mostly a transportation subsidy for lower income people that can’t drive, it supplements the bus system which many car owners would never use and don’t consider an option for their first/last miles (it’s a class thing in Texas, just is, most people will never use a public bus). A small percentage of the population use it more than twice a year.

Idk, just thoughts.

Tesla also has a robotaxi service in Dallas, FWIW, in testing.

I used to be frustrated at their poorly thought-out arguments until I realized none of it matters. The videos are made for a certain demographic to jerk off about their special interests. The real world is going to move on and stuff is going to get implemented. These people and their opinions have no real world impact and don't matter outside of their niche little social groups.

Self driving cars will happen, and not because "billionaires and big companies with lots of money", but because it'll provide increased automation. It'll make it easier for people to get from point A to point B, even if it's not using buses that people like NJB and his ilk are for some reason obsessed with.

I imagine Google has enough money that they can self-insure. Particularly since it's a very low accident rate.

Why should Google leave money on the table? They will raise the price until it's just below what people are already paying.

We did that though!

It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss.

Ex. Penn Station's real estate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...

I suspect this will only work in the US if the "rail company" is actually public.

- https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod

- https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.h...

They also have a highly regarded school system... Turns out that is only the case as long as you don't have any special needs.

In the end you waste long enough time to defend it to delay investments in affordable housing and public transit, both. You then funnel that money into road construction and fuel subsidies.

Imo, the biggest problem is that of convenience. Convenience (time), cost, comfort, and (perceived) safety are the factors people use to make transportation mode choices.

If buses aren't prioritized in traffic above single occupant vehicles via dedicated bus lanes, signalling, etc. then they'll always be slower than a car because of the additional stops. Frequency is also a consideration that factors into timing, as well as transfers.

If any US city wants to get people onto transit, they need to prioritize transit above less efficient modes, amongst other things.

A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an entirely different location for dinner. I think it would be incredibly hard to get that problem right and you would still be fighting an uphill battle that people don’t like to take the public bus.

Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.

tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on.

Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.

Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.

but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.

I lived in one of the most walkable neighborhoods in Chicago for 30 years before moving to suburbia with 0 walkability. It is completely untrue that walkability is secretly better than suburbia and those suburbanites don’t know what they’re missing.

It will be logic and driving behavior that makes the difference between Waymo/Tesla/others rather than whether the perception accuracy is micron level or not.

I've seen Walmart and similar companies criticized countless times for driving local shops out of business. It has been a common attack for decades, IME.

This doesn't mean the big corporate option is always inherently bad, but it's weird to me that their defenders often attack the very notion that there could be tradeoffs and downsides.

I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.

So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.

I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble.

All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even.

Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.

It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.

> As of July 23, 2026, we have temporarily removed our safety analysis from this report, as well as relevant references to the analysis throughout the report (denoted in-text by a reference to this section). We were made aware of data discrepancies between City agency data for New York City for-hire vehicle crashes with serious injuries or deaths, as well as City agency data definitions related to such crashes. We are working to resolve these discrepancies and ensure our findings properly represent the data and the driving records of New York City for-hire vehicle drivers and Waymo vehicles. Other than this section, the remainder of our report remains unchanged.

My guess is jdlyga read this report before it was modified.

Our light changed to green and the Waymo waited until the next red turned green and then proceeded into the intersection in anticipation of the cars ahead moving.

If profit is the primary motive than India makes no sense, but that isn't the only motive.

Even if you don't agree with the advocacy part of it, I think it's still valuable to watch to get the "urban planning professional" perspective on it

this reddit thread has excerpts from the report and some comments explaining why the comparison was fraught

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1v1qiz0/waymo_has...

The cost threshold should be pretty low. No fuel (only electricity), and no drivers. Those are two of the larger cost factors here.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic...

PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.

I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.

Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus

Genuinely and not trolling.

Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts.

My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens.

If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM.

Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car.

With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.

That makes the fixed route better than a flexible route. Sure the flexible route is faster in the best case. However it is unpredictable and people have deadlines of when they can arrive: a flexible route cannot meet those consistently enough.

Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation.

Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.

We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices?

The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them?

Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making.

Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.

cities grow in capabilities in direct proportion to the number of people who have access to it and their capabilities. it might be cheaper labour leading to better roads, plumbing etc

I fully intend to pay my transportation costs myself.

It’s not about getting a free ride, it’s about being able to get to work while sleeping, saving money on housing, and pocketing the difference.

Cars are the very bottom, by very considerable margin. You need to prove otherwise.

I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.

    > Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints

Cambridge Dictionary (UK): "A system of vehicles such as buses and trains that operate at regular times on fixed routes and are used by the public."

Collins Dictionary: "A system of buses, trains, etc., running on fixed routes, on which the public may travel."

Please state your concerns.

Uber does 1 billion, for reference.

There's still a long, long way to go. Waymo has proven it can operate a high-priced service in a handful of cities in good weather, it hasn't yet demonstrated true scale and affordability.

- ChatGPT

[citation needed]

Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.

Hardware gets commodified and cheaper, not services usually. Do you pay less for cable tv now compared to 20 years ago?

https://www.openplans.org/who-we-are

Yes, studying a specific thing can commonly produce particular perspectives but that doesn't inherently discredit the discipline.

I guess you don't want to stop more times than needed, so maybe you'd want to cluster the demand somehow into "virtual stops", and you may lack some amenities like shelters.. so maybe the traditional bus route is good enough. Though it feels like it's ripe for optimisation (you know the classic no buses come for 30min then 3 arrive at once, or these buses are all full whilst others are roaming empty)

1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow.

2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency.

3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable.

4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.

To give a clear answer that others have beat around: it is the network. Transit works when you can get places. When you can get many places it doesn't work.

The real question is how can Dallas get there - which is a hard problem is you need a massive network investment before it becomes useful to many people and so there is a lot of upfront investment needed first.

The US has a poor history with getting a good return on investment for transit. In general even where the investment does get good ridership, the amount spent was way out of line from what anyone else in the world would have spent for that system.

Practically all of those towns have had a focus of building walkable/bikeable spaces with dense mini-downtown areas for at least decades if not longer.

Its not impossible for this to eventually happen to these already built US suburbs, but a lot of these places were explicitly designed around everyone coming and going by car. A lot of these suburbs weren't even planned with the idea of pedestrians ever leaving the neighborhood. They'll have few actual entrances and exits, with those rarely connected to any kind of infrastructure outside other than busy roads.

> fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented

A lot of those fast-growing areas are in cities with zero transit and often don't even neighbor a city with any real transit. Look at places like Princeton, Celina, Melissa, Anna, etc. They border towns like Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, and more which also aren't connected to DART. All of these towns actively shun public transit. A lot of home buyers in these areas just don't care about transit access at all, with many actively opposed to transit. So what, maybe Princeton does decide to make some transit. Ok, where do I go with that? From one suburban house to another without a car? A bit easier time getting to Little Ceasars, Taco Bell, and Walmart? Its entirely disconnected from practically any other place the people there actually need to go, because its not like many people actually work in Princeton or Celina.

So it'll take a lot of additional development and rethinking of what these places are and how they ultimately function for transit to actually make sense there.

I'm not saying public transit and walkability/bikeability can't possibly happen in North Texas. I like biking around, I ride DART when it makes sense, and I do push for expansion of bike infrastructure and good DART access. But I also see the heat index for today is 105F, it'll be about 110F on Friday. I don't think I'll be riding a bike to get the groceries. I don't think the Netherlands often gets weeks where the heat index is >100F practically every day. And finally, it will take changing a lot of minds about public transit to get buy-in from a lot of the population to actually do it.

Things like WalkScore show up on real estate listings as a value add.

Your comparison to Netherlands is rough because you are talking about a country that has a fairly mild climate and older cities that generally have density and not much sprawl. I don’t comprehend these examples.

Also those cities are incredibly tiny with probably a concentration of employment. Keep in mind the Netherlands is about 115 miles wide and maybe 180 north/south diagonally. That’s roughly the size of the Dallas metro area.

Someone who lives in Arlington might commute to downtown Dallas, an office building in Plano or downtown Fort Worth. You multiply that by millions of people and it becomes a very hard problem that a typical city bus cannot handle.

Now I do think there is probably opportunity for a Waymo like solution with 10 seats that could do driverless ride sharing but I don’t see how a city can build a bus system that works, people don’t want to take a bus unless it has zero transfers. The last mile problem is incredibly hard and places like Texas are hot. I asking through a strip mall parking lot is further than most of the cities in the Netherlands in that video.

Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...

>The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas

So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?

That said, Waymo is indeed not the right tool for the actual inter-city trips.

I want a Ferrari. It would be good for me. Should taxes pay for it?

But since you asked in kind of a flippant way: who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.

I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.

I, and people like me create wealth. Some of that wealth is pooled at an administrative level that makes sense across a town, state, or nation. Its still wealth I created; and I expect it to be used to benefit me, ideally proportionally to the tax taken.

Unemployment can be justified as crime prevention; Disability and healthcare systems limit individual worst-case outcomes (especially if due to chance). Super-commuter subsidies do what?

Is the city and county provided point-to-point transit for disabled people[0] not "public transit"? Is Line 0[1] not public transit? Most people say yes; the dictionary should be updated to reflect actual usage, not the other way around.

[0] https://www.mta.info/accessibility/access-a-ride

[1] https://fairtiq.com/en/blog/line-zero-the-public-transport-e...

You can have strong anti- "car-culture" views and still be committed to the truth.

It's interesting this hasn't happened with cable I somewhat agree with you there. However you have alternatives that are just as good like Netflix and cost 20 bucks or less if you can live with ads.

Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)?

As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact.

I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.

I have never lived in Amsterdam but my obeservatiob is that these are older cities already baked in with density. So it’s much easier to switch back to bicycle and share infrastructure.

You can build a new city in Texas with transit in mind but people are still going to be commuting 30mins or more in every direction.

My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that.

Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.

2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet.

3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places.

4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop.

From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.

Cold weather transit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0

Transit is small towns and suburbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas. In 1960, 8 million fewer people lived in the Netherlands, and cars definitely existed and were mainstream back then. This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.

It's never too late to change course. It's not a black and white choice where we must suddenly give up our vehicles and never drive, it's more like a gradual increase in the number of trips that are feasible and enjoyable without a car.

I know people who lived in Cleveland who started using the bus to get to work when the HealthLine BRT line was completed. They still drive basically everywhere else, but that one bus line changed their daily habits dramatically.

If the Netherlands is the size of the Dallas metro area, then why isn't the Dallas metro area like the Netherlands? Dallas-Fort Worth has over 8 million people in it, it's not like it's a drastically smaller population than the Netherlands. This argument of "America has a bunch of empty space outside of metro areas" is irrelevant to the conditions inside of those metro areas.

Most Americans by population live in metropolitan areas. They don't live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, some people do, but 80%+ of Americans live in very much urban areas. So we can exclude the <20% of Americans from this "we should have decent public transit" debate if you would like, I am fine with that.

The Netherlands actually built out a lot of car-focused infrastructure in the mid-century just like the US. The difference is that they have since pushed that development mindset out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTSNWDTE888

This idea that America "can't go back" is a farce, because it makes an incorrect assumption that other countries never grew in population and therefore never built any new suburbs after the spread of the automobile.

The Netherlands grew from 11 million people in 1960 to 18 million people today. Do you think the Netherlands never built a new neighborhood in that time period?

This doesn't mean that people in the Netherlands or Japan don't own cars. Far from it. What it does mean is that driving a personally owned car in a one-person-per-car paradigm isn't necessary to survive and thrive in those places. Transit-oriented development means that they have other options.

You are concerned about how difficult the climate is, here is how Singapore stays walkable despite hot and rainy climate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_SJ1NBMrH0

Here is how people use public transit in Yakutsk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0

I will also inform you that buses are indeed air conditioned and have heaters, just like a car. You can think of a bus as a car but much larger and fits more people inside.

Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses? I transfer buses all the time in my city, or transfer from bus to train. That doesn't mean it takes me a long time go get around.

I will tell you why: because demand is induced. There isn't some innate human nature where we all automatically prefer cars and have decided by evolution that anything less than a car is less ideal. No, demand is instead induced: if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.

Induced demand is especially prevalent in the US because personal vehicles are heavily subsidized over other options. The US government engages in forever wars to secure low oil prices, subsidized by federal tax dollars. Gas taxes are underfunded and don't keep up with inflation to ensure driving is offered below the real cost. Society subsidizes traffic deaths as nobody, not even insurance companies, compensate society when a 19 year old dies in a drunk driving crash and all the economic activity they would have generated over their lifespan evaporates.

Personally owned cars at a ratio of one car per person are literally the most expensive way to get around on this planet until you get into stuff like private jets and helicopters. They're even more expensive than buying a plane ticket between many destinations. You say that people in Dallas don't want to take the bus, but if it was available, reliable, had a frequent schedule, and got them to everywhere they needed to be, they probably would be very excited to ditch the $5,000-10,000 annual total cost of vehicle ownership.

And, while public transit in Texas has a long way to go, Dallas Area Rapid Transit has ridership of 52,823,800 annually. If you are saying that people in Dallas don't want to transfer buses, I'd have to ask where those 52 million rides are coming from?

Non-americans don't. To me, being socially expected to tip for a Taxi feels like a parody from a sketch comedy. ditto for tipping barbers or expecting tips over 10%. The only time I've tipped a Uber was when me and my friends were at risk of losing a train. The driver (unprompted) went pedal to the metal to make it on time, so afterwards I gave him a couple of bucks.

Tip culture is bad for rideshare drivers in aggregate anyways. The apps carefully manage the pay of drivers on each market so necessary supply is guaranteed at minimal cost. If a expectation of tipping exists, the platforms simply pay less. Now drivers also have maximize for tips instead of just driving the goddamn car.

Because from the 70s onward the former industrial northeast and miswest was actively de-urbanized and suburbanized with environmental and zoning law (don't blame this all on the locals, a lot of this rolls downhill from the states). This obviously coincided with de-industrialization. So basically all these former market and mill towns basically wound up underwater because they not only kicked out their economy but wound up in a situation where every stupid sidewalk repaving costs a bajillion bucks because pursuant to state law whatever it needs to be brought up to code which means some BS green space buffer, etc, etc.

Source: Live in one.

At the end of the day you're basically right it's a lie when it comes to some random Dallas suburb.

After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance.

There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested.

The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.

It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.

Would they have published that result with the same fanfare?

When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.

Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. If they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.

Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.

Can and implemented are often worlds apart.

A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.

I am pretty pro transit and urbanism but it really annoys me in these discussions when people (not you specifically) just wave their hands and go "add more buses, ez, problem solved", completely disregarding the physical realities of how we have constructed our civilization.

So people are using public transit in Germany not because they love to but because they are forced to.

And the system is far from perfect, Germans are complaining because public transportation is having a lot of delays. You can't reach every point you need, you have to wait and some times public transportation is dirty and filled with dirty, rude, violent people, drug addicts and drunks. Not a lovely way to travel.

    > car[s] are always clean

In the typical suburb there is enough density for a good static network to work. Note that I said "good", and "network". A suburb cannot support a bus every hour, the service is too bad - but it can support a bus every 10 minutes or better because the service is acceptable. Also: network, not route - the important part is you need to be able to get to all the places you would normally go and that means the entire network matters and the ability to quickly/easially transfer to other routes is critical to success.

Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.

You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.

Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.

And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).

So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?

But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.

Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.

So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.

Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?

This might be news to you, but it doesn't cost $130k to drive an old Toyota Camry around in DFW. Every home is pretty much guaranteed to have parking for 1+ cars.

If the average Singaporean could buy a car for $5k, the government mandated their apartment had a parking spot or two, and gas cost $0.79/L you think they'd all still want to be in the heat all the time?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying transit can't possibly work in hot places. But you're needing to convince people to leave a nice comfortable air-conditioned space to willingly go be outside in the heat. Singapore did that by making cars incredibly expensive to own. I can't imagine making a Toyota Corolla cost $130K to be a popular policy in the US.

> I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas.

I 100% agree with this. People are choosing to ride around in air-conditioned boxes instead of being in the heat. People choose to live in these sprawling suburban neighborhoods with zero walkability. People choose to prevent overturning parking minimums, people choose to expand highways and people choose to vote against bonds to build bike infrastructure. That is the choice tons of North Texans are making. I do think their decisions are rather short-sighted and often disagree with them, but those are the choices being made.

> This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.

I never said this. You're literally making a straw man here. In fact I'm saying the opposite of that. I agree its not impossible. Just a lot harder as people's mindsets are extremely different and the climate is very different.

If I had the weather of a lot of Germany or the Netherlands or UK or Norway I'd probably be outside a good bit more. I really don't mind riding a bike in the cold, exercise warms you up. If I was taxed like Singapore, I'd probably eschew the car.

- Dallas is much much hotter than the Netherlands.

- Overall Netherlands population density (including rural areas) is higher than DFW metro.

- For most of the cities in the YouTube video shared they are a few miles by a few miles. The length of a typical Dallas frontage road. It makes sense to walk and bike in those small hamlets.

Going back to density, you are right the Netherlands moved back from a car centric life but that did not change population density before or after. Most cities in the Netherlands are a multiple of DFW so you have this tough argument. What works in the Netherlands is not necessarily a solution for DFW. You would need to rebuild the city to be denser, have more businesses located together and then build out transit while ignoring that it’s too hot for a good portion of the year to ride a bike or walk around outside.

My back of napkin math ended up with 30k sq ft per person in DFW compared to 20k sq ft per person in all of the Netherlands.

I think Waymo is a great step in the right direction.

EDIT: Your statement of "its not like its drastically smaller population" is also just not true. 8 is not about the same as 18. I ended up replying thinking they were closer without realizing this as well. So less than half the population on about the same area. Having half the average density before even thinking about how dense the clustering is really makes quite a difference!

Density of where people actually choose to live, which you've already alluded to with the things you're saying. Similar population, similar kind of area. But look at both on a satellite image. One actually has a lot of farmland for that area. Where people actually live its often a good bit denser.

Why is it like that? That's what people have voted for, that's what they've supported. Try actually talking to the people who live there and suggest to them they should live in a zero lot line home or a townhouse with shared walls.

> Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses?

I wouldn't mind transferring busses if there was good service. But instead transferring busses around here usually means sitting in the baking hot sun on a concrete bench in >100F heat for a half hour. If the next bus was in like 5 minutes, I probably wouldn't care.

It also often means you're probably taking a very suboptimal route instead of a direct route to the place. So not only do you have an additional wait to change busses, you then also have a much longer path to ride. And you're likely going to end up going a slower average speed, as you're having to stop to pickup/dropoff people along this longer route as opposed to just continuing on. For instance, it'll take me over an hour to go to where the new Dallas Stars arena will be in Plano as I need to make 4-5 bus changes. Its a 15 minute drive although it will probably be way more than that once 20k people try to leave at once.

Now, obviously, busses can change routes. They can get more busses and do more routes. They can get more busses and offer faster service. There's a lot of potential solutions to this. It doesn't have to be that way. But in the end getting people to put more funding into it is pretty challenging.

> if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.

Its often not very comfortable riding a bicycle in 110F heat index when you've got this air-conditioned box you could ride in sitting in your garage.

FWIW, the real problem isn't tip culture, it is the power imbalance between labor and the company that is using that labor (without employing drivers), but I dunno how much of an audience that kind of argument has on this particular site.

I don't know where your flaws in logic is coming from, but I have seen the numbers enough different places to know there is one someplace.

Cool, so if you have the numbers or graphs, paste a link

I of course believe you're lying. Probably out of the standard xenophobia.

It wouldn't make sense considering average US household infrastructure vs average EU household infrastructure so I sincerely doubt you're able to prove it, or whoever you're going to cite as proof.

I don't think that's why there is little tip culture in eg east Asia. It's just... the price the business expects you to pay is mostly advertised upfront, it's known to everyone involved, why would you pay more if you got exactly the service you have ordered? It simply does not make sense.

And I doubt that 4 or 12 is the ideal bus size in that place.

A larger bus is needed for useful transit.

The US will never fix the externalization of salaries until the public refuses to tip at ridiculous percentages and situations. You'll see a 40% tip expectation at restaurants, your local dentist will install a tip screen. Just tip 10% at sitdown places and refuse emotional blackmail. If you feel any guilt, just make the habit to tally the dollar amount of "normal" tips and make monthly donations to your local food bank.

EDIT: My point is that tipping culture is unrelated to worker rights. Many countries with large informal economies (i.e minimum wage isn't enforced for most people) have no expectation of tipping. The reason Norwegians don't tip drivers isn't because they have a wonderful safety net, it's because there's isn't a social pressure to do so.

Mixing charity and payment of services is stupid and a moral hazard. Servers have shit wages in the US by law because people tip and the same is true (via algorithm) with rideshare drivers.

We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.

You could not efficiently run a bus service in most US cities at a level of “good service”. Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs but I don’t see that happening yet and Waymo is at least a nice step on the potential direction.

Even with great service it’s an uphill battle to get enough ridership.

Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car. That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.

Waymo is a step in a direction of an interesting future. If you can take the current blueprint and make it more efficient that sounds like a win to me?

Holy shit, you have to walk a mile from a cul-de-sac just to get to a street with an intersection?

Who the hell designed these streets? (I guess Big Auto?)

Also, governance isn't like manufacturing, it doesn't get easier at scale, it gets so much harder.

Living in a perfectly planned super dense urban utopia where I can quickly walk wherever I want is extremely appealing to me. I would also like living in the wilds where once a week I drive to the general store and back as the full day's task. Suburban living is my least desired outcome. But everywhere there is room for it, it happens, even without a city to latch onto. There are good reasons for that.

Think about it.

> . If we could modulate form to meet demand precisely, like Uber but for all transit, it would be far quicker and more efficient.

Efficiency is not the only or even the primary goal. The primary goals are to "Get people from where they are, to where they want to be, when they want to go, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable price.

Your modulate demand fails at that. A fixed route bus is predictable. I know in advance when it will be there to pick me up and where/when it will drop me off. That means I can plan my day. With Uber or any other demand/response system you don't get that and have to hope every time that it will get you there in time.

Quicker is much harder to quantify. A bus can connect to a faster rail (which potentially can go 300 km/h - only a race car can do that). A bus can be given signal priority while the uber needs to stop and wait more. However a bus will stop to pick up others on the way. (but if your "modulate to meet demand" does that it is worse than either a bus or uber because you can no longer predict when you will get there). A bus network done right is also likely to drive changes in your city such that most of the places you go are where the bus is going and that makes it just as fast.

I'm prepared to be wrong though. The question is, are you?..

Also we should not assume only the bus. A train is a useful part of any large transport network. There should be a train between Dallas and Fort Worth that makes the trip in 10 minutes - you can't do that in a car (a race car with a professional driver could beat that if we block all traffic, but no normal car or driver can even if traffic is blocked). Sure the current train takes an hour, but we can make is faster with existing technology.

It isn't big auto that designs these places. Big auto likes them, but the people like it because they don't know anything other than cars, and they know they hate living on a busy street with lots of cars. Those are the only two options they know about so don't bother replying with all the others you know about, they don't exist as options.

Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.

While we're experiencing tons of growth in the far-flung suburbs with practically zero walkability, we're also seeing a good bit of redevelopment of places like Richardson, Garland, Carrolton, some parts of actual Dallas, and even some parts of Plano like the old downtown. A lot of these towns are trying to rebuild their downtown areas and more to be far more pedestrian, bike, and transit friendly.

Its entirely possible to live a car-free life in some places in DFW. There are definitely pockets where one can comfortably live without a car. I spent a bit of time without a car and got by with just a bicycle and motorcycle after my car was destroyed in a hailstorm. Because I had purposefully chosen bikeable places with decent transit to live near where I worked it really wasn't that big of a deal. But in the end you pretty much have to give up going to large parts on any kind of regular basis.

And yes, I do hope things like AVs can solve a bit of the current cost of operating bus lines. Nearly half of the cost to operate a line is the cost of the driver. We could run so much more capacity and really rethink a lot of the economics.

Only because you can never get the political supported needed to get there. If you somehow got the needed support people would start using it and it would turn the US city into a transit city. Note that political support needs to last for at least 5 years, in the real world there is an election every 2 years and so before you can get your bus system working for 5 someone will win an election on "lets stop wasting all that money on the bus system" platform and kill the whole thing.

> Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs

We we cannot. you cannot optimize a 10 set ride share that much. They would be even more expensive at that scale. Nobody likes busy ride shares - you have a deadline of when you need to be there and flexible routes mean that some days you are late because the rideshare decided to take a detour to pick up (or drop off) someone else.

> Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car

Because the bus nearly everywhere provides terrible service. Sure some people can take a few trips via bus, but then the car they need for the rest is just sitting around while you still make payments (including taxes and insurance).

> That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.

You don't need to get there. You just need to get "close enough". If you give people a situation where they can REASONABLE do nearly everything on transit most will give up the car. However if there is even one semi-regular trip that needs a car they may as well use the car for everything.

If only we could build a network of high speed, maglev trains covering the span of the entire planet, from the southern tip of Chile, through the Darien Gap, across the Bering Strait, all the way up to Paddington Station and down past the Suez Canal all the way to Johannesburg; that, plus airplanes and modular autonomous transit, should cover 90% of transit needs, and anything more than that will be served by older technologies, off-road vehicles, horseback/camel, and of course for the most treacherous environs, on foot is still best. But I cannot imagine a world where a traditional bus system would be superior to a highly coordinated system of autonomous modular transportation.

I really think this is completely wrong. You will convince approximately 0 people in Dallas to use a bus if this is what you are offering them.

I don't know how they managed to do the above. However we know that they have done it, and the costs must have not been excessive.

When you show me facts I'll change my mind. Until then the above facts are compelling.

I still think it’s really hard because even with that self selection, what happens when your work changes. Probably some of my Silicon Valley bias of swapping companies every few years but it can throw a wrench in your commute easily.

- if you give someone the option of a bus with a transfer or taking a car they will almost always take a car (thinking of Dallas)

- if you can get me a bus that very nearly gets me door to door with low to no wait people will consider taking it over a car. Very nearly to me is 5-10 mins of walking at most. That’s like a single section of a frontage road in Dallas at best.

- I don’t see how you build that kind of service. Maybe you do live in DFW but it’s massive. Just walking from one intersection of a frontage road to the next would take me at least 10-15mins and thinking of job density there it’s pretty low and then thinking of those folks and how many are commuting from similar places is even lower.

You are arguing that if you could create a great bus service that people would take it and I am trying to point out that a great bus service in a place like Dallas is not economically feasible. It has nothing to do with politics at least from the upfront problem of it not being feasible.

Basically you are making correct observations but only for part of the picture. And if the discussion is about finances and economics, I would say that the part about where money comes from is pretty damn important, no? :)

Also, even from across the pond, I also saw historical photos of the old USA. Those suburbs from before WW2 were way closer to the Europe really. There were more small businesses everywhere, there were commerce blocks etc. And pre-WW2 infrastructure was much cheaper and less complex that contemporary one. So sure, old suburbs were probably much healthier economically.

As for the moderns suburbs (from 50s and up) you can view more knowledgeable people than me if you really wish to uncover facts and truth. I won't post spoilers, but you may guess them from the context easily.

I disagree. It is not politically feasible and so we won't get there, but the economics work out: a great transit network even in a place like Dallas could get enough riders to sustain itself. Problem is we need 50% of the families in Dallas Fort Worth to pay $200/month to pay for it, and nobody will stand for that - even though nearly every family in spending more than that per car.