Mass transit will always be cheaper than individual transport, and we often can't even get taxpayers to fund that. I love the idea of efficient, on-demand, self-driving vehicles, but a world where everyone has access to them is an impossible utopia for the foreseeable future.
Also a world where everyone has access to efficient, on-demand, self-driving vehicles will result in a traffic congestion nightmare due to the poor space efficiency of cars. Even the smallest Smart FourTwo is much larger than a cyclist or person standing on a bus.
When you don't have to pay a driver, I don't see why that is the case. A bus costs around 1/2 to a million dollars. A very good used car is 2 grand. Electric car motors are expected to last a million miles and the rest of the car, excepting tires, brakes, and batteries, can be made to last that long also. Electric cars are likely to be less expensive that ICE cars in the long run.
Automatic vehicle systems today could easily run in a tunnel or other highly controlled road today. Small and large vehicles (cars and buses) could both use such a system. This would be a mass transit system that could work for everyone.
Because what you're primarily saving with public transport is not the cost of the vehicles themselves, but all the infrastructure needed if people who would otherwise take the bus all own cars.
Sure, if the 50 people on the bus all buy used beaters you'll probably come out ahead, but once you start thinking about the real cost of the land in big cities needed to park those 50 cars it gets expensive real fast, and that's before factoring in extra load on the road system and other externalities.
Yes, I agree. That's why a multi-level tunnel system with automatic vehicles is needed if we would like to have our world get better instead of worse. Hope we can try it and see if it works at least.
You're comparing what I assume is high end bus costs, as the prices I found for buses were much lower[1], to low end car costs and still ignoring the infrastructure costs. Yes buses and trains cost more per car but they use far less space during transit. Since our transit problems are due to peak throughout times we need far more infrastructure in terms of highways, bridges, etc if we plan around cars than if we plan around mass transit. As the poster you replied to said, if we can't get people to agree to fund mass transit due to the sticker shock when it's a much smaller price than building a highway or making tunnels, how are we going to get people to agree to fund all this extra infrastructure we'd need for everyone to have their own car for all transportation?
I'm hoping with automatic vehicles and tunneling this mass transit versus not mass transit dichotomy will just fade away. Automatic buses and cars could use the same tunnel. Just make sure the tunnel does not clog up by charging each vehicle by how much space it uses up. People are willing to pay for transportation, many just don't like paying for other peoples transportation.
With enough tunnels traffic congestion disappears. Unless for some reason you think people should just not be able to move around when they want to, this would be great.
I've had a couple of used cars that I bought for around 2 grand and "very good" is not how I would describe them. The used cars I got for 8 and 12 grand, on the other hand, were excellent investments. Those cheaper rides were sitting at over 200k miles and I can tell you there was a lot more than brakes and tires getting worn out. I shudder to consider the state of even a single owner vehicle with a million miles on it, nevermind a million automated taxi miles. That said, those little exceptions are a lot cheaper when leveraged on mass transit, batteries especially so in EVs.
Interestingly enough, in the UK, that 1/2 million cost (345,000GBP is about 1/2 million USD) is the 14 year running cost[1]. That doesn't make it cheap, but suddenly that 2K car is not 2K when looking at the 14 year running cost.
