Self-Driving Cars Cannot Replace Good Transit

People keep telling us self-driving cars are going to make public transit irrelevant. So we pressure-test that claim using the stuff that actually decides whether a city works: speed between cities, traffic and reliability, passenger capacity, comfort, safety, and what happens when 20,000 people all need to get home at the same time.

We also bring real-world perspective from riding the tech ourselves and talking with autonomous vehicle enthusiasts. We’re not anti-autonomous vehicles at all. We like the promise of safer streets and better on-demand rides, and we can absolutely see how robotaxis can help with accessibility, seniors aging in place, and trips that don’t fit neatly on a bus or rail line.

Our bottom line is “freedom of mobility,” where you can choose a train, a bus, a scooter, your own car, or an autonomous vehicle, and each option works better because the system isn’t forced into one mode. Subscribe, share this with a friend who argues “AVs will replace transit,” and leave a review with your take: what should cities build first?

Transcript

The Big Claim About AVs

SPEAKER_02 0:18

The comment we get all the time is that self-driving cars are going to make public transit irrelevant. So that's countries like China, which are moving people at a whopping 270 miles per hour.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Is your self-driving autonomous car really going to compete with that? So this week we are going to get into self-driving cars, which is a topic we've talked about in the past and about how they fit into the future of public transit.

SPEAKER_02 0:41

We rode around in OMO with my friend Vumpsey, who is an autonomous vehicle enthusiast, I would say. And we also chatted with JJ Ricks, who is a YouTuber really focused on autonomous vehicles. So we have kind of covered all sorts of different arguments there and actually gone and ridden some of the technology ourselves. So if you're interested in seeing that, we'll put a link down below for you to check that out.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

To be clear, we are not anti-autonomous vehicles. Personally, I think the technology is really cool and does have a place in the future on America's roadways. Totally.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Yeah, and I mean it's just essentially a safer version of a taxi in a lot of ways is the is how I see it. There's all sorts of different benefits that come along with it. And there's trade-offs as well. But yeah, the point of this video is not to say that autonomous vehicles are not the future because they absolutely do play a role in the future of transportation.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Yeah. So the real point of the video that we're going to try to make is an argument about how autonomous vehicles, as great as they can be, will never be a real replacement for a solid public transit system or even a solid high-speed network that will connect between cities. So we're going to break out this argument into two sections.

Intercity Speed Limits Of Cars

SPEAKER_02 2:02

And to kick it off, we'll start off with intercity. So we'll kind of hit the first piece of this, which is speed. Cars, whether they're driving themselves or being driven by you, can only go so fast, with the exception of Chris's husband Brent, who can drive them pretty fast from what I understand. They just can't get up to the same sort of speeds to compete with rail systems.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah, and that's not only just a you know hesitation of human driving or you know conditions on the roadway. It is actually just a limitation of vehicles themselves. Cars today are not really designed to go sustain speeds sustained above 90 miles an hour for really long periods of time. There are exceptions. You have things like the Autobahn in Germany, where we're sitting right now, where there is no speed limit, and then you sort of drive as conditions allow. But even those roadways, they're not really expecting you to go the same uh speed as a train. You know, they're not expecting you to go 150 miles an hour uh for sustained periods of time on the Autobahn.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

And some of the arguments that folks will make against this and that we've seen in our comments section in the past is that these cars are going to have their own dedicated spaces and tunnels and bridges to be able to do this. Even with that, yes, those speeds will go up, uh, but we're not getting to the levels of kind of conventional high-speed rail that you would see here in Europe, in Japan, in China, uh, and other places. Even, I mean, compare it competitive with the Acela would be tricky in the United States to maximize those speeds. Not to mention that the cost of building out these dedicated right-of-ways just for autonomous vehicle traffic uh would be immense. There are other issues with this later down the road that I'll save for those pieces of the argument, though.

Traffic Makes Trips Unreliable

SPEAKER_01 3:47

The second point between inner city travel would be traffic. So whether you are driving your own car or the car is driving itself, you are still creating traffic on this highway between these two cities, and that traffic will add up to uh, you know, some variable travel times as you are traveling between. Uh, we like to use Austin and Dallas as an example pretty often on the show. Typically, it is a three to three and a half hour drive with limited to no traffic between Austin and Dallas. But even uh on a normal day, it could get up to five plus hours. I have certainly uh been stuck in traffic on I-35.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

I've done it with you, and it took five hours when we were going to film our episode with the folks at Data up in Dallas, their transit advocacy group. Uh, we did our Dallas in a day using only public transit and met with them, and it took us five hours. And I remember vividly that it was bumper to bumper traffic the whole way because I get car sick pretty easily. And let's just say that the trip was made a little bit extra longer by me needing to pull over a couple of times long the journey. Uh I won't say anymore to save you the view of that. But um, yeah, I mean, it that sort of trip is a really unreliable time. If you have to be in Dallas at 10 a.m. for an important meeting and you're leaving from Austin, you really have to either leave very early the night before, or you need to to, or sorry, very early that morning, or leave the night before if you definitely want to make it on time.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

And one of the arguments that people who are really in favor of this autonomous future where it replaces trains and public transit will say that, well, if every vehicle on the road is automated, then you optimize speeds and you have more reliability. But that's not necessarily going to be true. Autonomous vehicles are still gonna have to enter the roadway at variable times because you still have this human element of humans are not on a schedule. So they're always going to be entering the roadways at different and variable times. And in reality, we will never have a future, at least not in our lifetimes, where every single vehicle on the roadway is automated. Right.

SPEAKER_02 5:49

To get to that point, I mean every single gas or electric vehicle basically on the road today would need to be replaced. And like when you're driving around on the streets in your city, I'm sure you very regularly see cars that are 25 years old driving around. Are very normal to see cars at 25, 30 years old uh driving around on the roads. People are going to hold on to their cars for a long time, both just because it's practical, but for cost reasons. I mean, not everyone is going to be able to either afford to buy their own autonomous vehicle and/or the autonomous vehicle future where everyone is sharing all of these different rideshare cars might not be economically viable for them. That is an argument that a lot of them will make, is like it's going to be cheap to be able to get all these things, but like that, we don't know that that will actually be the case in reality.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Yeah, and sociopolitically in the country, it's just not going to happen.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

Yeah, people love driving too. That's the thing. A lot of people really love driving. A lot of people really distrust some of the technology, even though, in my opinion, they really shouldn't distrust the technology. I mean, obviously, you need to distrust elements of it as it's still continuing to be developed, but from what we've seen so far, they know the technology is considerably safer than human drivers. So one other piece of this is capacity.

Capacity And Road Space Reality

SPEAKER_02 7:01

So cars are notoriously not the most space efficient thing in the world to move people around. Uh, during a rush hour commute, the average car is holding 1.2 people in the United States. Uh, each car obviously takes up a good amount of space on the road, and that is why in so many places we end up with terrible traffic. Trains, on the other hand, are much more space efficient at moving people. If we take an example from Japan for their intercity networks on the Shinkansen network, each Shinkansen train can carry nearly 1,300 people, and during the peak hours, they run 16 trains per hour per direction, which means on a single double-tracked line, you can move 20,000 people per direction per hour. Those numbers are staggering amount of people back and forth between cities.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Absolutely crazy that you can move that many people that quickly, and there's not really anything comparable in the US right now to be able to move that many people. Uh, an argument that folks will make again that if you are packing in the highways with these autonomous vehicles, you do have some efficiencies, and that may be the case, but even with those efficiencies, you still need roughly 20 lanes of traffic to handle a comparable amount of people uh traveling between, again, so say Austin and Dallas. Um, obviously there's not gonna be that many people traveling between Austin and Dallas every single day, yeah, but if you are doing this at scale, the scale eventually does break down just because, as you said, cars are not space efficient. And I'm sure everybody has seen this. There's that poster or that post uh online that circulates that shows one intersection and it shows how many people fit uh within a certain space. Yes. And it'll show like, you know, 10 people for like cars, and then it shows uh 20 people in the same amount of space or more, 30 people for a bus, and then it shows like bicycles and it's like 50 people for bicycles. Yep. So uh yeah, cars are just very inefficient when it comes to using space on the road.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Yeah, and I mean, even in the ideal scenarios with cars on the road where it's like we're gonna do car sharing and like more people will be riding in each car, and maybe you're doing, you know, some shared buses on the roadway, even if you cut that 20 lanes per direction in half, or even even down to eight lanes per direction. I mean, even I-35 is not eight lanes per direction the whole way in between these two cities. And this is in Texas the place where we have no problem making highways wider, and it has clearly not solved the issue in these places such as between Austin and Dallas, even between Austin and San Antonio, there's also all sorts of different issues in terms of traffic and reliability.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Even the Texas DOT, knowing that an autonomous future is coming and preparing for it, has still gone back to the governor and said, hey, we need to be serious about trains. So even the Texas DOT knows that autonomous vehicles will not be the solution for the future. Will the governor do anything with that information? Probably not. Probably not.

Comfort Bathrooms And Moving Around

SPEAKER_01 9:56

Another point here is comfort. So a self-driving car would be very comfortable to get you between point A and point B. We are not denying that at all. Uh, not only do you have some physical comfort of being in a uh sort of more enclosed space and you can control your AC and your music and all this kind of stuff, but then you also, you know, have a limited exposure to other people. Some people enjoy that, they don't want to see other people. It's a very American thing on your commute that it's just you. Uh, but you do have some comforts that are afforded to you with this uh vehicle. However, there are a lot of comforts that come with a train as well. If a train is done very well, you have nice bathrooms that you can go and use. You're not gonna get that in autonomous vehicle. You also have little cafes or restaurants that you can go to. I think the biggest benefit is the fact that you can just stand up. Yeah. Like you can't stand up in your Waymo.

SPEAKER_02 10:48

Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

Uh, and if I'm on a three-hour journey or longer, I have to get up at some point.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Yeah, I mean, stretch your legs, go for a walk. Some of these trains will have a bar on board. Like it in many cases it's easier to get work done. And some self-driving cars in the future, sure, maybe they will set up a better workstation. But oftentimes on trains, you can get a table with a plug, you can set up and and you know, work on your. I mean, I edit videos on the train sometimes. It's not as nice as editing videos on here, but easier to catch up on emails, all that sort of stuff. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's different types of comfort. Like, I understand why some people would prefer to just be like alone and have their own space, but I think that the the other elements here of like being able to have a meal while you're, you know, while you're going cooked on the train for you, or again, use the bathroom, uh, outweigh some of those. And not to mention, in the future, there's nothing saying that on trains you could not have the option for private capsules, and like you can rent your own space on the train and pay a little bit extra to have uh your own little private work area or something like that. Um, we see that on some trains. I've seen some videos of the the new night trains in China, for example, where everyone has their own kind of tiny little compartments. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

I noticed on one of the trains, so I'm in Germany right now, visiting Lewis, and we've been traveling around. We've gone to Berlin and we've gone to Dresden, so definitely keep an eye out for those episodes. But on one of the trains, and I believe it was from Berlin to Dresden, uh, there was a small space set aside in the train that was like a toddler space. Yes. Where like parents could take their kids and the kids can just kind of play in that room. They're confined. Imagine having to travel with toddlers in a vehicle for five hours, and regardless of if the vehicle's driving itself, now they have a place on this train where they can go and they can play.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

It's pretty amazing. Like, on uh that's very common on trains in Germany. Some of them will have toys already in there, they'll have like a train set, they'll have games, they'll have things like that. Um, and it's even a place in some cases where like different kids on the train can socialize together. So now you have two sets of parents that can be hanging out with their kids in there. Um, it's yeah, both good from just like it's much easier than having your kids strapped in the seat for five hours. Uh, they can be actually active and doing something, but also from like a social standpoint can be a really nice benefit.

unknown 13:03

Yeah.

City Streets And AVs Circling

SPEAKER_01 13:04

The second half of this argument is the intra-city part of it. And again, intra-city is everything that's contained sort of within that city uh boundary. And the first topic here is geometry/slash traffic. And we've talked a little bit about traffic and how it can be optimized with autonomous vehicles, but if you have autonomous vehicles on the roadway, you are still creating traffic uh for your city. If you are a self-driving car like Waymo or Zook or some other autonomous provider that is really there to act as sort of a small public transit system where it's picking up riders on demand, a lot of times those vehicles aren't just parked somewhere, they are circling a block or they are traveling uh on their way back to a depot before they have to turn around and go back and pick somebody up. And you end up with vehicles that just add to more and more traffic. And we see examples of this every day. There was this great example, I believe it was in Austin, of a neighborhood where uh there was a cul-de-sac, and Waymo just decided this cul-de-sac made the most sense for turning around and heading back out in whatever direction they needed to go. And the neighbors were concerned because suddenly at eight o'clock in the morning, there were 20 vehicles in a row just coming and making circles in their cul-de-sac before heading out of their neighborhood. And they even admit, you know, it's not like the Waymo's are driving recklessly, they're not going too fast or anything. But now you're just adding traffic in this small cul-de-sac for absolutely no reason.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

Yeah, and I mean I've I've seen plenty of clips too from San Francisco and things like that. It's like, you know, you you get to a street and it's just Waymo, Waymo, Waymo, Waymo, Waymo, all in a line. Even the last time I was visiting Austin for a wedding in April, I couldn't get over the numbers that had increased in all of these vehicles on the road, and so many of them have literally no one in it. So uh I think I think this really shows itself more so on the intercity, on the intra-city uh level versus kind of going between cities just because the spaces are so much more compact and just having a couple more vehicles circling the block instead of just going and parking somewhere, uh it definitely will add up over time.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

Yeah, and another point that I actually just sort of thought of, and it's not really on our note sheet, is there's going to be a future of just overcrowding of autonomous vehicles of all different types. And I'm thinking, you know, you're gonna be out on the street and you're going to see your Waymo's and your Zooks and your other vehicles. You're going to see your little Uber delivery vehicles on taking up space on the sidewalk. And very soon, I just saw a demo of this in Detroit the other day, you're gonna have a lot more autonomous flying drones that are gonna come in to make deliveries. We are gonna be bombarded with autonomous vehicles in every space, every piece of our urban space. And if there's any future where we can maybe reduce a little bit of that noise, we're gonna have a much more peaceful future, I think.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Yeah, yeah. And again, I mean, uh to be clear, I think that there are benefits here in a lot of cases, but it is not to bring this to the scale of being able to replace transit networks. It's to be able to uh do exactly what a taxi or an Uber does today. Not to move tens of thousands of people after a sports event, but to move people who are kind of taking less convenient trips across town or folks who want to spend a little bit extra to have their own private space to maybe take a phone call while they're on their trip, things like that, not trying to move everybody all at once. To give them some points here, I mentioned parking. I do think that uh it makes it so that you do have to rely on less parking garages and surface parking lots in cities. So that is like one of the tangential benefits that are coming as a result of this potential future, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Yeah, absolutely. There is a future where if if the majority of Americans don't own a vehicle and an autonomous vehicle is called on demand to pick them up, to take them to work, or or whatever case may be, there are some benefits there. Like you said, reduced parking. Uh, there could be some reduction of vehicles on the roadway, but again, that is a future where almost all, or at least a vast majority of Americans are going to buy into that future, and I just don't see it happening anytime soon. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:09

Moving

Safety Wins And Emergency Risks

SPEAKER_02 17:10

along, the next point on the list is safety, and this kind of goes in two ways for me here. So, number one, I will say that as someone who rode an e-bike very often living in Austin, I felt significantly more comfortable when a self-driving vehicle was passing me on the road than when a human-driven vehicle was. That self-driving vehicle's got sensors all over it. There's countless examples now with videos of Waymos getting out of the way of scooter, like so there's a one in my head right now. Someone is riding a scooter down the road, hit a bump, fell into traffic, the Waymo swerved out of the way at the very last second. In an instance where like I really don't think a human driver would have been able to react in time. Certainly if they were, you know, on a on texting on their phone or had something to drink before, they would not have been able to, and managed to like swerve back in to avoid a car coming the other way, like nothing had happened, and it was just totally fine. Um you know, when when folks are distracted driving, which is unfortunately the norm today, it's so often it's it's so rare to see people not texting on their phones, not doing all sorts of different things while they're driving. Um these autonomous vehicles really make a huge difference. But on the flip side, there are some negative safety benefits, and I this is an interesting one to me because I feel like folks on the other side of the transportation spectrum politically than I am, like to point to emergency vehicles as uh a point of concern when cities install things like bike lanes and bus lanes, um, which to be clear, an emergency vehicle can use a bus lane to get by and get through traffic. They have a hard time navigating around a sea of autonomous vehicles that get very confused in emergency situations, though.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

And we had a very real situation in Austin where there was an unfortunate um shooting event at a bar in downtown Austin, and there were instances where Waymo's were blocking police from being able to access the scene. Um, so this is a very real concern with autonomous vehicles as well, and something that has to be solved in the future.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Right. And I mean that's one example with police. I've seen it with firefighters as well. I forget exactly where this one was. A firefighter had to be like standing there talking with Waymo support over the phone. Uh to their credit, they eventually did give this firefighter, I forget if it was fire police, uh, the ability to get in the car and eventually drive it. It took about two minutes for it to happen, which again, I mean, to their credit, saying, but that this is a new problem that a car with a human in it would not have. They would understand, oh, there's a fire in front of me. I need to move out of the way quickly. Uh hopefully, yeah. So some people these days, you never know. But um, so the safety element there is definitely a concern, but it's you know, there's benefits and risks with these as new technology here.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Another

Events Crowd Control And Downtown Impact

SPEAKER_01 20:01

point we're gonna make here on Interest City is events. Almost every major city, especially in the US, has huge events all the time. That's concerts, sporting events, uh, festivals, you name it, there is something going on in your city. And if you are completely divesting of your public transit, no buses, no trains, and you're just gonna rely on autonomous vehicles. Think of an arena with 20,000 people getting out at one time, and now those 20,000 people are calling autonomous vehicles to come pick them up. Even if you have those vehicles lined up ready to go, think about how many blocks of traffic that is going to take of autonomous vehicles being lined up to come and pick somebody up. It's just not a real, you know, reliable way to get people out of a specific location uh in a quick manner.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

And even today, I mean, uh, even folks who do drive to sporting events, uh, like I think of uh examples of family members who go to Patriots games. I think of uh my my in-laws who go to see Phillies games in Philadelphia all the time. Uh like they will oftentimes go and they'll drive, but they talk about how either they will leave the game early, if it's a game that it's like the Phillies are up by six runs or something, they'll leave two innings before the game's over so that they don't have to sit in the parking garage for an hour to leave. Or or in in New England again to talk about the Patriots, like they sell parking at different prices based on what time you get to leave afterwards. So it's already inconvenient with the number of people who are driving in personal cars. If the future is just personal cars and autonomous vehicles, and you eliminate the other options in both of those examples I just gave, there is for Gillette Stadium in in Boston, you've got the MBTA uh commuter rail has service to pick people up. It doesn't move that many people after each game, it's just not as popular of a service. But in Philadelphia, I mean you're right on the their main, I forget which line it is, but one of the two sub oil. I was gonna say the blue and orange line just to piss people off because you did that instead of the names of them. But uh if you eliminate those options for people, the just sheer additional number of folks will will really get to the point where it gets out of hand and it becomes not fun to go to the event anymore, not worth it to go to the event anymore. And then what does that do to your downtown areas when people are not going into downtown for the event and they're not grabbing dinner before the game and they're they're not staying at the hotel for the weekend and coming in from the you know out of town? Um it can have ripple effects for sure.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

And I think honestly, if you're trying to keep an active street activation around your uh stadium, arena, conference center, whatever, people who don't have to worry about going back to their vehicle, they may take a few more minutes to say, uh, you know what? I have time, I'm gonna go to this restaurant, I'm gonna go grab a drink before I head to the train station. Yep. You do end up with, I think, more economic value in these areas uh when you have more public transit options or just at least more options to get people out of that area, they don't feel as much pressure to rush out.

SPEAKER_02 23:02

Yeah. So

Accessibility Plus Freedom Of Mobility

SPEAKER_02 23:03

I mean, I don't know, to put some final thoughts on this, I think while we're looking at this, again, very exciting future with the cool autonomous technology coming out that I do really think will have a lot of major benefits in different ways. The last time we talked about this, we talked about accessibility quite a bit. And I think self-driving cars have a real potential benefit for folks who are in a wheelchair or who have a hard time getting around and navigating public transit systems in particular, that that could be such an amazing tool for them to be able to travel around the city. But at the same time, I don't think we can be putting all of our eggs in that basket and essentially stop investing in public transit and putting all of our eggs in that basket saying this is gonna be the future because we are going to we're you know, in the United States in particular, our transit systems are already massively underfunded, outdated, and behind the times compared to basically everywhere else in the world. And if we do nothing, I mean it's it's only going to get worse, and we potentially set ourselves up to be in an even worse position in the future because even if this vision does come to reality, what happens if it just is expensive? Now you're leaving behind so many people who are already, you know, fighting to get by with transportation costs as high as they are today with gas prices and all and all of that. I mean, it you're setting yourself up for a potentially very dark future. I didn't mean it to say Doom and Gloom, Lewis is back. We've been joking that I've been more positive this week as well and Dresden and uh Berlin. But that was I even made myself feel it would be a dark future though. That would be a dark future. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

On a on a cheerier note, uh the there absolutely is a place for autonomous vehicles in our future. And you make really good points on folks with disabilities of of any type. Uh it's going to be easier for them to use the system. I think of elderly folks being able to call a car directly to their house. You know, it's probably gonna be a lot safer for them than uh, you know, driving after a certain age or certain impairments or whatever. Um, also for people uh who just don't have close access to existing transit currently. I am 30-minute walk, I'm a 30-minute walk to the closest bus stop from my house. So if I want to go there, I have to ride a bike. Or if at that point, if I'm riding a bike to the bus station, I'm just gonna ride on my bike to the final destination. But if it's a rainy day or something and I have the option of calling uh a car to come pick me up, or I don't have to go and park my vehicle somewhere that I'm going, uh, you know, it's a good solution for me as well. Totally. So absolutely there is a future. We're not saying it that there's not. Um, but we would like to see, uh, as we've said multiple times in the show, a freedom of mobility for people in the US where you have the option of choosing an autonomous vehicle, a bus, a train, your own scooter, your own car, whatever the case may be, if you have 10 options to get somewhere, I think that's true freedom of mobility than especially what we have today.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

And I think it makes all 10 of those options better because each like mode of transit will be less busy. You'll have be able to get to where you're going just a little bit faster.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

So so there you go. There's the uplifting counter to I even made myself pretty depressed there.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

That was that was rough. Um definitely stay

Support The Show And What’s Next

SPEAKER_02 26:20

tuned. Obviously, uh Chris is here visiting in Germany. We just filmed a couple really fun episodes in Berlin as well as in Dresden. So stay tuned for those coming out over the next couple weeks. If you want to support the show directly, the best ways to do so are via our Patreon. You can also become a member right here on YouTube. It's a little bit easier to sign up that way. Uh, you can check out our buy us a coffee, our merch, all that sort of stuff. Um, and also just share any episodes with a friend who you think might be interested in this. But with all that being said, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit Tangents Tuesday.