Originally Posted by
cooker
One of the barriers to LCF or LCL and we hear it here all the time, is that public transit is stigmatized as smelly, dangerous and so on. I think it is possible, that if people start to give up car ownership and rely on first on chauffered Uber and later on hired driverless vehicles, they might also become less hesitant about sharing a ride because they assume the one or two other passengers are their kind of people, and thus shared transit will become less stigmatized. Multiple smaller cars can also be a lot more flexible than large buses, so a diverless car might pick you up at your door, and offer you a discount if you agree that it can pick up one or two other passengers along the way. The usage will then define the popular routes, much like foot traffic across the newly laid campus lawn shows where the sidewalks will need to be. Cities might enourage or subsidize independent jitney services or incorporate it into public transit because it will mean less costly road maintenance if they can eliminate large buses.
However, it might end up that people still prefer to ride alone, and the benefits of sharing won't emerge, and the roads will be as congested as ever and we will still need traditional public transit buses for people who opt out of paying extra for a single occupancy vehicle.
I think the stigmas of public transit are very relative to a culture where private car ownership/driving are normalized. What I mean is that if you look at young people who use transit while they are in college, or people who take transit when they travel to cities where transit is "the way to get around," people are fine with it and dealing with those smelly or obnoxious passengers is just par for the course. It's when they go home or to some other place where driving is the norm, at least for people in their social class, that they fall back into the habit of making excuses for not taking transit. Ultimately the real reason is that it's just not "the thing to do" because their peers, relatives, colleagues, etc. all drive so unless they are the type of person who doesn't mind being different, they're going to make whatever reasons work in their mind to justify going with the flow. This is why marketing departments put effort into normalizing their products and not just advertising the benefits.
This is why autonomous vehicles operating to augment transit vehicles has real disruptive potential, i.e. because people are basically still taking a car to their destination, but the car is operating like a streetcar on rails. If their reasoning is that it's more private and hygienic to travel in their own car, then they can pay a little extra to ride alone. Probably most people will realize the benefits of getting a better deal by taking a shared ride and of course they'll be reminded often that sharing rides reduces traffic congestion on the roads. Carpooling was promoted the same way, but it is too difficult to coordinate shared rides when people have different destinations and time-constraints, and one person has/gets to be the driver while others have to be passengers at the mercy of a host.
I think many more people would take transit if the schedules and routes were more comprehensive. In peoples' minds it boils down to having to choose whether to have a car or not. Once they choose to invest in the car, they are so much less likely to leave it at home to take a bus unless they live someplace like NYC where driving and parking are enough of a hassle to make transit clearly more convenient. With autonomous vehicles, transit systems are suddenly augmentable without adding new buses and drivers to the system. Still people will choose private vehicles, even if they don't drive them themselves, but the balance will shift a bit toward ride-sharing, which will become more synonymous with transit because fixed routes/schedules along with flexibility made possible by smart technology will cause the two forms of transportation to converge a bit.
Obviously I'm not going to be satisfied as long as I can see opportunities for reducing waste and pavement being missed, but I think the use of autonomous vehicles like rail-cars will increase the opportunities for making better choices available to people. Cynics on this cite will point out that it doesn't matter what opportunities are available, people continue to choose waste in the interest of convenience, comfort, economic stimulus, etc. but until something is done about that, we can only hope that more opportunities emerge to make better choices and that more people choose to make them.