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Comment by Aromasin | Hacker News Reader

Presumably the dawn of driverless cars is coupled with driverless mass transport, which would offset the environmental impact to some degree? Drivers of these vehicles are often - if not always - the most expensive part of the system. They can only work for so long, often only during daylight hours without a significant pay rise in most first world countries, and it's not a desirable job so very few people train into it.

As such, most bus transport as an example is limited in both routes and hours run. The use of public transport is directly linked with how accessible and affordable it is. If I have to get 4 different routes to get to my destination in 3 times the time as it takes to drive, I'll drive any day of the week. I spend thousands on insurance, servicing, repair, etcetera. If there are hundreds of busses, running just as many routes, at all hours of the day, you bet I'd ditch my car in an instant; driverless or not.

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Yeah, when public transport is done well, people _don't want to drive_. I live in London, I have a driver's license, and I haven't driven a car since I got it years and years ago. Why would I? Instead of having to focus on the incredibly menial tasks of staring at a road or being stuck in traffic, I can browse Hacker News and Reddit, read a book, or even play video games, while I ride a nice double-decker bus, or get from A to B in half the time it takes to drive, with the tube (underground trains). We have 24/7 buses all week long, and some trains run 24/7 during weekends. While London is pretty good, it isn't even the best example of trains, there are several Asian countries with better train systems than we have here, and we're like the only(?) Northern/Western European country that doesn't publicly fund our capital city's public transport organisation, TFL -- it could be both cheaper _and_ better if we followed their lead.

> Drivers of these vehicles are often - if not always - the most expensive part of the system.

Is that true? I expected the exact opposite.

edit: This seems to be true for buses (see replies), but what about for trains? I'd be very surprised.

Some quick math:

A city bus costs ~$250k[1] and should last ~10 years[1].

If the bus runs 12 hours a day, that is ~43000 hours of driving you have to pay for. So even if drivers earn minimum wage (I assume a CDL'd driver would earn significantly more), you end up paying more for the driver than the bus.

[1] https://www.codot.gov/programs/innovativemobility/assets/com...

Yeah that works out for buses to my surprise, but I'd be even more surprised if it held up for trains of any form.

Make that an electric self driving bus and the wages tend towards zero, being some clean/tidy/check etc. Even that can be reduced since you know each passenger and his payment card ID and if he dropped a wrapper/cup = added fee on the card - this invigilation would coerce people to dispose in the self emptying bin at the depot. Thus a great economy would ensue and would dramatically reduce the costs = lower fees = more users. Bus routes tend to run on good main roads(there are exceptions) and are easier for self drive systems.

I thought that intuitively at first, but uneducated napkin math seems to disagree.

Say a Cab costs $50k upfront plus $.5 times 200,000 miles gives us $150,000 for the vehicle over it's lifetime.

If hiring, insuring, managing, and paying a driver costs 100k per year and it takes say 5 driver years for that car to reach EOL, you're at 500k for the driver.

Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of the numbers could chime in, but if I'm reasonably close, that driver is a big chunk of costs.

I wouldn't consider a cab "mass transit" though.

Oops, yeah that's a good point! Ride sharing and "vehicle utilization" was discussed elsewhere in this thread and my head was still there.

>it's not a desirable job so very few people train into it.

I object, although I know this is a side point. Trucking is one of the largest sectors of employment in America. If driving a large vehicle was so inherently undesirable that nobody would train into it, how do you explain... that?

I'll grant that being a bus driver isn't as romanticized as being a truck driver. But at least part of that is because the companies that hire truck drivers market the profession as a lifestyle and the cities that hire bus drivers generally do not.

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