There are two groups of people that you can optimize for. One is the group of people who already rides the bus. In most US cities this is a small group of people who have no real alternative.
The other is the group of people who might ride the bus if it were convenient. Not just in terms of accessibility to a stop, but also accounting for the journey time. If someone tries riding the bus and finds that a 20 minute drive becomes an hour with stops every single block, they might never ride it again.
In most US cities (outside of the few big ones with decent transit), public transit is basically treated as a welfare service for those who cannot get around by any other means. Not saying that this service doesn't have value, but making all decisions in that mindset isn't going to attract more ridership from those who could choose to drive instead.
In my experience, the problem was long wait times between buses and unreliable pickup times. That meant you realistically had to add buffer at each end of your trip: in case the bus was early and in case the bus was late. Not only was that more than 20% of my trip time, it was also mental overhead of worrying whether you already missed the bus.
The bus might come 2x per hour. Maybe 2:18 and 2:48. But it might come at 2:15 or 2:25. So you need to arrive at 2:13 and possibly wait 12 minutes. Or if you arrive late you might be waiting 30+ minutes.
For fixed route transit, speed is latency. The faster the bus can make the average trip, the tighter the timetable can be given the same number of buses. Fewer stops also improves consistency which means you can plan to arrive at the stop closer to the scheduled time, and timetables can be tightened even more by reducing the layover times that keep the bus synchronized with the time table.
Separately, the variability problem can be somewhat solved with the real-time location updates that many agencies provide. You'll still have to wait the same amount of time, but some of it can be done comfortably in your house when the bus is running late.
It helps with latency too or schedule padding. Bus schedules are unreliable because of all the stops which slow them down and encourage bunching of busses on a route with a lot of service.
Bus bunching is often blamed on traffic or scheduling, but in my experience in NYC, a lack of enforcement and/or accountability plays a role too. I live near one end of a bus line and commute to the other end 5 days day a week. On a daily basis, there are large gaps where buses miss their scheduled times. Then, as they approach the end of the line, they arrive and depart in groups of three or four, which only worsens the problem.
There already are “express” buses that don’t stop at every stop. They don’t solve the issues I described above. Cutting the time between bus arrivals would be a much more effective solution.
Making buses faster can improve frequency though, and it's likely cheaper to improve frequency by making them faster than buying and operating more buses. The speed is almost directly correlated with the interval between buses, going 20% faster means ~20% less time between buses.
A bus route that is made twice to be twice as fast (whether through stop consolidation or some other means) will mechanically be twice as frequent, given the same number of service-hours. Slow buses are either more expensive to run, or come less frequently.
I reliably pickup times are amplified by the number of stops that are made. The stop and go time is fixed. The amount of time it takes 2 people to exit a bus versus four is lot linear. It depends on how full the bus is. But it definitely does slow down when people are getting off and on at every single stop.
I would ride the bus if it wasn't filled with crackheads. Stopped Bart when it went downhill and all the white collar people stopped riding it and it just became desperate people, homeless, or crackheads.
The public services death spiral is real. Services get defunded -> they get worse -> reduced user base -> more cuts. The only way to break the cycle is to improve the services.
Safety is only one of the issues. Convenience and comfort are others. Basically a city needs to decide whether it wants people to use the bus, and then act like it.
I was in SF middle of last year and was on the BART a good bit, and it was... fine? It remains the most objectionably noisy mode of transport I've ever been on, but it didn't feel any less safe than when I've been there previously.
Mass transit systems generally reduce anti-social behavior with either fare gates or heavy policing. For whatever reason, when you crack down on fare evasion you filter out a lot of troublemakers.
Crackheads are what's left after everyone who demands more convenience leaves. The more convenient you make public transit, the more non-crackheads will be on the bus with you.
BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service).
Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders.
Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something like 70% of 2019 levels, and continuing to rise. Number of unique riders is actually above the 2019 level now.
Maybe you haven't tried riding BART again within the past several years?
I left SF ~2021, but even in 2019 it was kind of in a death spiral. Hopefully it's better now, loved it back when I lived there. But still hear mixed reports from friends.
There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.
And in this example, how many stops would you have to cut to turn an hour-long bus ride into a 20 minute one, to compete with the car? You're effectively cutting it down to two stops - where you board, and where you disembark. That's just not a plausible way to organize a bus route, aiming it at one person with a car.
> There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.
I find this very unlikely to be true for people who have spent any amount of time driving in a city.
They don't own cars because owning a car in the city sucks in a lot of ways, more so than in rural areas.
So yeah, if your point is that if you take away all the bad parts of using a car, and leave public transit as is, then using a car comes out ahead. Splendid.
That feels like you've made a tautology here. In places where public transit is more convenient than driving (and parking), many people choose not to own and drive a car.
Counterpoint: many people are driving cars they cannot afford and car loan delinquencies are at record highs. People would take public transit if it were an option.
If public transit was super convenient I think way more people would take it. There are things and places I don’t frequent purely because of parking and public transit isn’t convenient.
But I don’t want to drive three miles to park in a sketchy lot to hop on a train that will drop me off a mile from the venue.
> There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.
Yeah, no, this simply isn't true.
People don't take transit in America because largely that transit is sparse, infrequent, unreliable, and slow. When a twenty minute drive becomes a hour and a half of buses and walking, virtually nobody rational will willingly choose that.
I think if surveyed at least 90% of native English speakers would understand "I want to wash my car" to mean a full size automobile. The next largest group would probably ask a clarifying question, rather than assume a toy car.
Yes, but you're speaking to a computer, not a person. It, of course, runs into the same limitations that every computer system runs into. In this case, it's undefined/inconsistent behavior when inputs are ambiguous.
Humans have the ability to reason and think critically, so it's pretty trivial to answer unless you think you're getting tricked by a riddle and the answer is the non-intuitive one.
You think that the reasonable interpretation of the question is that I want to go to the car wash but not to wash my car there, because I plan to wash my car at home?
> I Want to Wash My Dog. The Dog Wash Is 50 Meters Away. Should I Walk or Drive?
I dunno, that seems pretty clear to me still. Of course the answer to the question is now less obvious, since you can walk your dog to the dog wash but not walk your car to the car wash.
Sure, there are alternate explanations of both sentences, but there is one simplest and most straight-forward explanation. A system that assumes an explanation that is not the most clear, and does not ask clarifying questions, has room for improvement.
If things need to be exactly stated in a structured format that leaves no ambiguity, we already have programming and query languages for that.
They said "Available Today" on January 4th but have said actually customer deliveries are planned for April.
> “The first customer deliveries will probably take place in April. There are production-related issues, getting subcontractors involved. Starting production. A lot depends on the goods and officials.”
The whole industry is always working on improved batteries. But it's a long road from lab-scale to mass production, and often improvements in one area have downsides in another.
New generations of cells that improve energy density usually start out more expensive than existing chemistries, so they show up at the high end of the market first and work their way down.
If we do get truly improved solid-state batteries available in EVs in the next 5 years, it will likely start at the high end of the market and work its way down over many years to cheaper segments as production capacity ramps up. The base model EVs aren't going to suddenly have their batteries swapped out with ones that are twice as good for the same price.
Addressing them head on would be providing verification of your claims alongside the initial announcement, not being intentionally vague and then using reasonable skepticism as marketing.
Addressing the claims one by one is still doing it head on. There's not some logic timeline for this stuff.
The slow drip of verification is a smart move IMO. It keeps them in the media for longer (Gabbo) and stops them from being lost in the other 1000 different battery announcement. Hopefully getting them funding I'm guessing they need to start full manufacturing.
That said, while this certainly is a promising battery based on the claims, I won't get my hopes up until there's an actual product I can buy.
I'm not sure being hesitant to accept claims without evidence is a mark against credibility.
I think stringing this out certainly has marketing advantages. But I think if they really had this kind of breakthrough they would be focusing on billion-dollar deals with manufacturers to ramp up capacity rather than internet hype marketing.
They haven't said a peep since CES over a month ago where they very quietly talked about their battery, no big fan fare. They seemed to be keeping a pretty low profile, it was all the YouTubers that started a huge hype train. That drove a lot of understandable skepticism, and now they're getting third party tests done to settle the question, no doubt because some investors got nervous about all the skepticism.
I'd suspect the next set are charge cycle tests so that will take some time. I was certainly skeptical of the C rate claims and those are quick to do and kick out.
Moving renewable power is easy, we have a grid for that. Infrastructure for movement of electricity is ubiquitous in places that have never seen a hydrogen pump.
If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.
This is a source of a lot of similar press around EV depreciation. They compare the MSRP of an EV 3 years ago with the current used market price, ignoring that the actual price paid is often significantly less due a combination of discounts, tax credits, and rebates.
The part that's interesting to me is how much the depreciation is posed as negative rather than positive.
The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value. If a car isn't viewed as an investment and/or the intention is to drive it into the ground, depreciation is purely positive because it means that there's insanely good deals on some great cars right now. Of course everybody's needs are different, but for a lot of people there's nothing that comes remotely close of the value of a gently driven, practically new 1-3 year old lease return EV.
> The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value.
Depreciation is based on real-world qualities of a vehicle that determine how desireable it is to own over time. Toyotas tend to depreciate slower than Mercedes-Benz, for example, because maintenance and repair costs tend to be lower. For someone looking to buy a car new and drive it for 10+ years, they are probably going to be drawn to car models that have a reputation for reliability and thus hold their value. Even if you don't care about the resale value of a car, you probably do care about the underlying factors driving that resale price.
With EVs the factors driving depreciation are concerns about rapid tech obsolescence, battery degredation and replacement costs, incentives and new price cuts, and charging infrastructure. You also hear stories about Tesla drivers waiting 6+ months for a replacement part, Rivians being totaled because of a dent in a rear quarter panel, etc. These are all reasonable things for a buyer to be concerned with, in my opinion.
But I agree that if you are ok with all of the above in a used EV (range and charging speed may not matter if you have a place to charge at home, for example), there are good deals to be found.
I would point out a subtlety here: deprecation is based on perceived value, and this perception tracks much more closely with the glacial knowledge of the larger public than it does with that of an informed individual.
Battery degradation is extremely overrepresented in the minds of the public for example and based mostly on the performance of early entrants like the original Nissan Leaf. Since then, chemistries and management systems have progressed dramatically and rendered it a moot point — most EVs made in the past several years will have their batteries outlast the useful life of the vehicle. In the case the Ariya, Nissan appears to have overcorrected for the Leaf's reputation to such an extreme that they can be fast charged to 100% for many dozens of cycles and still show no capacity loss.
This is a gap in knowledge that smart buyers who are willing to do a little bit of research can exploit and get much more car for their money than would otherwise be possible.
I don't understand why this is grey, this is exactly correct. Depreciation is good actually ignores the realities of why a car's value is tanking in the first place. The only time high depreciation is good for you as a buyer is if you think the market is mispricing cars and they're actually far more valuable than the cost they're being sold for. But best keep that secret because the market will be quick to correct once it's discovered.
EV depreciation is a very different beast. Basically, EVs are still being sold at a higher price point than their actual cost justifies in some markets. Part of that is manufacturers being a bit behind on their cost cutting and part of that is just because the market is incentivizing selling vehicles at inflated prices.
If you strip that away, you get to more reasonable price points already getting common all over Asia, Australia, and even the EU market right now. There you might find reasonably priced new vehicles at around 25K euros or even below 20K. A few years ago, those vehicles didn't exist and ASPs were closer to 40-50K for a cheap one. So, the second hand value of those older vehicles has indeed depreciated enormously. Because they simply are not worth as much relative to the much cheaper newer generation of cars. These vehicles got obsoleted by a better and cheaper generation of cars.
With hydrogen cars, companies sell them at a loss. They always have. That's why Toyota, the biggest proponent, sells more EVs than they ever built hydrogen cars. Pretty much every quarter now.
The better/cheaper generation of hydrogen cars never materialized. And it probably never will. The hydrogen distribution network never happened either. Because as it turns out, making hydrogen is really expensive. So aside from a few heavily subsidized filling stations, the economics for those is so terrible that they tend to shut down as soon as the subsidies run out. So, that's why they are relatively worthless as a second hand car. You are better off buying a second hand EV. And since those have depreciated a lot, hydrogen cars simply aren't worth more second hand.
And since there is no realistic prospect of ever producing hydrogen cars or hydrogen at price points that can match those of EVs and electricity, hydrogen based transport is at this point dead as a door nail.
Copying the cable model would favor big media companies over smaller, more local players.
A music-streaming style option, where the user's monthly payment is distributed in proportion to the articles they read, might be better. (Although not without it's own issues)
I tend to agree, but the big problem is "who will operate this?".
The music model worked because a heavyweight like apple was able to come in and negotiate with a huge number of labels while simultaneously allowing access to unlabeled content. That expanded with Spotify, though they got there by effectively stealing the music for as long as possible until they were established.
I can't see how that'd work with news. Especially since so many of the news outlets exist and have been created to run propaganda for the owners. A decent number of them are effectively just funded by billionaires that want to push their agendas.
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