ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
6d ago
If
the rule you followedall the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?
When something bad happens, it allows the organization responsible to say, "well, we have a training program in place, so we did our due diligence and are not responsible." See also diversity and sexual harassment training sessions. At worst the organizational fix is to just hire a new set of training consultants to revise the training program.
ThenElection
6d ago
Something like 2/3 of operating costs of public transit in the USA is labor costs. If you can replace most of those with AVs, you can get more bus routes, without any radical assumptions or requirements for the broader transit system.
ThenElection
6d ago
My suspicion is that the issue is less about how an actual, well-constructed UBI would be corrupted/abused (as you say, it's difficult), but in that most actual "UBI" programs wouldn't be an actual, well-constructed UBI. In practice, it wouldn't be rolled out universally (even if universality was a genuine aspiration), and that would allow for politicians to pick and choose the constituencies that benefit. And so you get the government creating a "UBI" targeting black pregnant trans artists.
ThenElection
6d ago
Citation needed for inflammatory claim
Sure.
https://sftransitriders.org/on-mayor-luries-plan-to-allow-waymo-on-market-street/
ThenElection
6d ago
One of the weird things about American politics is that "public transit advocates" have a hate-on for autonomous vehicles. This is despite the fact that AVs would allow running far more bus routes, more cheaply, than today.
I can't decide if this is because public transit advocacy today is mostly about an aesthetic aversion to cars and roads, or if it's because coalitional politics demands that public transit advocacy simultaneously look to protect make work union jobs.
ThenElection
6d ago
One thing that makes it a bit worse than regular make work corruption: public transit is useful in a place like DC. WMATA's existence makes it so a more reliable, cleaner, effective replacement can't take its place. Just handing out bags of cash to favored groups would in some ways be better, because at least private companies could run the existing profitable routes.
Yeah, it's not realistic to think labor costs would literally go to zero. Did some research and public transit labor and associated costs in the US are likely around 50B annually; for comparison, Alphabet's workforce is around 100B (though of course the vast majority aren't working on AVs).
LIDARs are expensive, but probably a lower proportion of the cost of the vehicle for a bus than for a regular car (even if buses require more sensors).
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