Blog/2025-02-15/Fully Autonomous
Today, on our way to Costco we saw a Zoox AV. It honestly looked pretty cool. If the government and unions don't get in the way, I anticipate that these AVs are going to revolutionize public transit.
While the obvious thing is point-to-point transport, the ideal would be if we could add more fixed-route vehicles of this form. A mix of a larger minivan-style AV and smaller share-auto style AVs would be quite useful. The fact that they're autonomous means that they could be demand-responsive[1], that smaller forms become viable[2], and we can do almost point-to-point[3]. The mix of form factors means that we could deploy smaller transit for the hills of Chinatown and for places with low volumes of passengers and we could deploy bigger vehicles for the denser parts of the city.
Currently, SF Muni is one of the slowest ways to get around SF. On shorter routes walking can be competitive with it. On longer routes it's always outdone by an ebike and almost always by pure pedal power. The reasons for these range from the lack of signal priority, to dedicated lanes often not being truly dedicated, to the fact that there are too many stops, to the fact that many drivers go AWOL.
Muni mostly runs large buses or trains. This is because they need a driver on every vehicle and so smaller vehicles are not cost-effective. SF's ideal public transit vehicle, however, is probably a share-auto: a small shared-use vehicle that is compact enough that many more of them can occupy a city block's worth of road lanes. But such a vehicle is infeasible here because you need a driver in each vehicle and human labour is very expensive. If SF allows it to happen we could very quickly encounter a rapidly lower-traffic system that transports many more people much faster.
The future is quite exciting!
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Without drivers required to dispatch, more passengers waiting can be compensated by more AVs dispatched.
- ↑ No bus to the Outer Sunset can be frequent because we cannot afford that many drivers for so few people.
- ↑ The ideal mode of transport is quick at moving people from point to point, but if you're using a shared service you can get where you want to go much faster if other passengers are happy to settle for the wrong side of the road, a block away, etc.
