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Comment by rdiddly | Hacker News Reader

Interesting read, though I think they're overestimating the cost of the human driver in relation to the total cost of running a route/taxi/shuttle/bus/etc. If you go completely autonomous, maintenance costs don't go away. (And in fact vandalism probably goes up.) Fuel costs, which at some point are going to become a big deal again, don't go away. And permitting fees either stay the same, go down or go up, depending on how local governments handle it.

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I guess we can approximate vandalism very easily through both shared car platforms such as car2go (for vandalic users that are left alone in the car), and vandalism against taxi substitutes such as uber (for rage against displaced driver jobs).

It doesn't seem that car2go-style cars get vandalized a lot; next-user reporting controls most of what goes above a level of vandalism (smoking users and some trash in the car is normally not reported).

Rage against uber by taxis has been more rampant (imho); so if we add bus drivers, lorry drivers, taxi and Uber drivers, etc. there might be a lot of damages on the short term. But once these displaced workers find another job that vandalism will disappear, so it will be transient during adoption times only.

You haven't captured every motive for vandalism, but I agree with you that it's probably mostly transient. Kind of like how the people who go crazy with drugs & prostitution in Amsterdam (well with pot legalization I probably no longer have to travel quite so far to fetch this example, but anyway...) are mostly visitors for whom such a thing is novel. Most Dutch natives are pretty blasé about having access to those things.

I notice the Car2Go (or e.g. Zipcar) next-user reporting system depends on their knowing the identity of each user at every point in time. Which is presumably also true if you've used an app to hail or summon an autonomous vehicle... Still I guess I was nostalgically imagining something like the relative anonymity of today's cash-fare bus services. (Though even those are loaded up with surveillance cameras.)

At the same time, the world moves on marginal changes, and many industries that depend on shipping are inherently low-margin anyway (think grocery stores). Business models that are barely viable now could be substantially viable with a ten percent reduction in transit cost.

> And in fact vandalism probably goes up.

I guess it's too much to expect Americans to act like the Japanese when it comes to taking care of public spaces.

Autonomous vehicles aren’t public spaces. They’re privately owned capital. I’m not making a value judgement here, but I am saying that other people do.

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