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Why Autonomous Cars Will NEVER Replace Transit
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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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.
Total cost of a bus is ~$122 USD/hour ($165 CAD)
A car costs $729 USD / $988 per month on average and is used 380 hours per year on average. Therefore $23 USD / $31.2 CAD per hour (no driver cost, unlike the bus). Therefore bus costs the same to run as 5 cars.
It depends of service frequency and stop radius, in North America (while there are different definitions), 106 households per sq mile is the line before it starts dropping to urban. That's 6 acres per houshold.
Assuming they have 2 cars (not a big assumption with that density) and there is a single stop that goes to a transit link 30 minutes away (1 hour round trip) you get the following frequencies:
800 yard radius: 0.65im^2 = 69 households = 138 cars = $1.2m per year = 9,880 bus hours per year = 27 busses per day. And a second stop and you've got a bus every half hour.
Add some bike racks for get a 2400 yard radius: 5.84mi^2 = 619 households= 1,238 cars = $10.8m per year = 88,770 bus hours per year = 243 bus hours per day = 10 busses per hour. A bus every six minutes all day, every day. For houses with 6 acres of property.
That assumes everyone wants to go to the transit link.
I've lived in Japan, and not owned a vehicle. I've lived in a small north American city and taken the bus (I lived on the busiest route) It's orders of magnitude different. I still had to check the bus schedule here in north America. I never even bothered in Japan because the next train was always 2-3 minutes.
Autonomous electric busses are probably the best option for most North American situations, they reduce the per hour operating costs enough that we can absolutely saturate even the least used routes with sub 10 minute service and entice some people out of cars.
Autonomous cars will help though, I think people underestimate how easy and cheap autonomous taxis will become. That combined with buses will probably allow people to give up paying for a dedicated vehicle.
It's also a very low density scenario. Upping density to a cramped 3 acres per household (barely enough for a single horse), that bus frequency increases to 20 per hour, or every 3 minutes.
And this is all before adjusting for peak/off peak. I'm saying if there is a bus at 03h00 Monday morning, the next bus is 03h06 at six acres a house or 03h03 at 3 acres a house. And this is single stop line.
If you put 3 stops on the line, at three acres per household density, were talking a bus every minute. I've chosen a transit link, as that should get people anywhere afterwards, but a suburban stop between two towns might split their hours between the two 50/50, or at whatever frequency works.
As a different example, let's look at NJB's favorite: fake London. London ON has 273,000 registered vehicles (2022). That means the population of London spends CAD $3,236,688,000 on personal vehicles per year. That $3.2 Bn can pay for 19,381,365 bus hours. That's 53,100 bus hours per day.
The city has 9616 roads, but I can't figure out how many Km of road it has. I do know the city is 437 km^2. It's pretty square, so we'll go with 21 km by 21 km. If we slap Chicago city blocks (100mx200m) on that we get 210 roads one way, 105 roads the other way, or 315 roads total for 6615 km.
Going with frequent stops, we normally get 30km/hour but what's with other traffic; since we eliminate everything but trucks and emergency vehicles, we can use the BRT speed of 52km/h. so it takes 127.2 bus hours to travel one direction the entire road network, or 255 bus hours to cover both directions.
With 53,100 bus hours per day, we can send a bus on every road in both directions 208 times per day. That's a bus every 7 minutes, both directions, every hour of every day. And that's the un-optimized solution.
If we "borrow" bus hours from low periods (23h00-04h00) we can increase peak periods. Same with borrowing from weekends or holidays
Busses cost $122 USD per hour, a driver costs $18 USD per hour. So that's a savings of 14.75%. But a human is better a dealing with traffic cones, knowing when they don't have to stop, calling the police if something goes wrong, knowing when to wait a few more seconds for someone running after the bus, letting someone off between stops so they are closer to home, etc. Also, based on you yanks decapitating hitchhiker-bot, you probably want human supervision on your busses. Flexibility on scheduling goes to robo-busses though.
I think so too, but I don't think the robotaxis can take over until most the human driven fleet is off the roads.
I think the key here is focusing on robotaxis, which operate all the time, in contrast to personal self driving cars, that are working <400 hours per year.
You're missing some intangibles that don't allow for that calculation with the density you've got.
People spend money on cars because it's more convenient. You wouldn't get the same amount of money out of a less convenient option, even if it's more "efficient" overall. You can't(or rather shouldn't) have sex with your high school date in the back of the bus.
What about long distance travel? Bus service between towns would be needed too, and at high frequency in order to make up for the lack of cars. It currently takes me 2.5 hours to drive to my in-laws place. On a bus it's a 4-5 hour trip because of bus switching at key cities in between. Additional frequency doesn't even fix that. Density would, because then there would be high speed trains between population centers (like in Japan)
Another big one is shopping, a family can't grocery shop by bus unless they're doing it multiple times per week to make each shop smaller. This problem is solved by density, where's there's a grocery store within a couple of blocks of every house like what I had in Japan, but doesn't work when you need 15 minutes on a bus to get to the store.
It also doesn't account for peak commuting. If you have 60% of your population all needing to travel in a one hour period each morning and afternoon, all moving in a single direction, when your bus routes are 30-60 minutes long, you end up with a lot of problems of needing to over-buy busses and over-hire drivers who aren't needed outside two single runs each day and which are separated by 7-8 hours. A car doesn't mind sitting there unused and unpaid all day.
These problems don't exist with autonomous vehicles.
My bigger point is that the density required for busses (and therefore trams, regional, and high speed rail) is way, way, lower than Canadians and Americans think it is.
Correct, and cars are mostly more convenient because of the lack of transit options.
Just have sex in your house? Car sex is awkward and ungainly anyways.
Trains.
Shop every day, or have it delivered. Also, assuming 1.2 pers per car, we get 6 people per bus. Lots of space for your stuff!
Correct, I gave the number of bus services averaged over the year, these can obviously be adjusted to each services points real requirements.
Busses, yes. Drivers? Split the shifts to cover the two commuting peaks, cross-train with light maintenance. Non-driving is wrenching, cleaning, and admin. Frankly I think finding sufficient drivers is a bigger problem.
Different problems though.
Cars are not more convenient simply because of a lack of transit options. This is a massive misconception. Even in Japan (Osaka) where I lived with some of the best transit infrastructure in the world it was still less convenient than driving for everything except commuting. No matter how frequently bus or train services exist, there will be a need for connections, for carrying bags, and for dealing with others that do not exist in a dedicated personal vehicle.
As for Sex, it isn't adults who own a home that are the primary group banging in the back of cars. It's teenagers and young adults who need more privacy than their home options allow for. You've missed the point here that a car is a private(ish) space that people use for non-driving related tasks.
Long distance travel even with trains doesn't make sense either. Even if there was a train from where I live to the town my in-laws live in, it would still take longer and be more hassle (see luggage) than driving. It's also not cheap. The bullet trains I took multiple times in Japan (again, pretty much the best transit system country in existence) were hundreds of dollars per ticket to go 500 kilometers. For a family, hopping in the car and driving is going to be a hundred dollars in gas and that's it. Trains are great for high capacity links, but again we lack the density to make these viable even if we ripped out all of the cars. There's probably only a few hundred people a day going from my City to the City where my in-laws live, even hourly service would only see a handful of people per entire train.
Shop every day using a bus... now you're just getting silly. I live in a rural area, by bus it takes 15 minutes to get to the store, even if my bus was 2 minutes frequency, I'd still be spending an hour a day doing the shopping. Nobody has time for that shit unless it's literally a 4 minute walk from your house.
The peak commuting problem is a lot bigger than you think, finding drivers willing to split shifts is very unlikely unless you pay them FAR more than they currently make. Suggesting they do maintenance/cleaning during the day is hilariously out of touch with what busses need in terms of maintenance and cleaning.
Autonomous vehicles do have problems, no doubt, the question is whether they're a better choice for the situation at hand.
The question was "what is the minimum density for viable transit"
The dirty economic answer is 106 houses per mi^2.
Other arguments for and against transit are valid in their own right, but obviously require analysis based on individual situations. I don't have the modeling capacity to cover every house everywhere.
Cars don't cost "some money in gas" that's an incremental cost. They cost $8,700 per year to the individual, about $14,000 to the state, plus uncaptured medical, climate, and social costs.
My baseline point isn't that we can magic cars away tomorrow, my point is that "too rural to transit" means actual rural, not suburban, even the least dense.
Also, your culture may need to reconsider priorities if teenagers aren't able to fuck safely in their home, and require and insecure third place, increasing risks.
The economic answer doesn't account for individual experience and desires. It would be economically efficient to remove meat from everyone's diet and make them vegetarian. Massive cost, land, and emissions savings. It's simply not something people want.
Even Japan hasn't given up cars despite the incredible transit system, they have around 590 cars per 1000 people, the US is at around 800 per 1000 people. Even if you only look at Tokyo, it's 300 per 1000 people (comparable to New York)
As for the sex thing, it's not a safety problem, it's a privacy problem. Japan solves this issues with dedicated sex hotels (called Love Hotels) that can be rented by the hour and have extra privacy provisions for coming and going.
I want to see car use reduced, but I'm not walking 100 meters to the bus stop, for a 15 minute bus ride to the nearest train station, for a 20 minute train ride to the city, for another 10 minute bus ride to my work place, with a 5 minute wait on each of those for the transfers. I can drive there in 50 minutes even in rush hour traffic, and it's only 35 minutes when things are clear. Luckily I only commute 1 day a week.
For my situation, a personal autonomous vehicle is the superior option. Or even perhaps a neighborhood dedicated taxi for the commute in, supporting 2-3 people's commute based on time and destination.
In your case this issue is that transit takes twice as long as driving. That sounds like a transit design failure.
I'm aware that transit has challenges in rural areas, but that's a small portion of transit.
The primary point I'm trying (and clearly failing) to get across, is that the North American lie that suburbs arent dense enough to have any transit. As we seem to be agreeing, a large share of somewhere even as low as 6 acres houses can work. Therefore that "standard" 1/4 acre lots that are all over the bloody place are more than dense enough for transit.
There also dense enough for businesses too, but that another argument.
It sounds like a road issue to me. There's only one road the to local village from my house. One road between my village and the nearby city, and my work isn't on that direct line. Nothing can be done about any of those short of a personal bus line just for my house, which is normally called a taxi.
I live in an area with only slightly larger than quarter acre lots, less than a half acre each.
So your neighborhood is somewhere in the 1200-2500 houses / mi^2 ? But it's a ~15 min drive to the village for any shopping? Perhaps a lack of goods and services for your neighborhood is the more important issue.
I'm also not clear on how the train from the village to the city is slower than driving. Is it just a very slow train?
Edit: US units are confusing, my initial density figures were way off. 640 acres to a mi^2
My neighbourhood is on a lake, so while the properties are small, they only exist as a strip along the water and a block out from that. We are surrounded by mountains which make building further difficult.
I think there's around 2000 people around the whole lake, and it takes 15 minutes to drive from top to bottom.
I live on the other side of a mountain from the city, the train we had (it doesn't run anymore) was definitely slower than cars. It also would have to stop multiple times once it got to the suburbs of the city to pick up or drop off people.
In that case, yes, it sounds like a small autonomous fleet from the central point, with a light rail to the city would be a good solution.
My in-laws have a similar chokepoint. Living on an island all traffic is bottlenecked though a single ferry (now reduced capacity due to widening vehicles).
Bus/tram to the neighboring town and city from the ferry would cover 90% of non-farming/work traffic, and avoid needing to wait up to 4 crossings to get across. An small autonomous fleet would achieve the same effect on island.