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Comment by LeafStorm | Hacker News Reader

While driverless cars do provide advantages over normal cars, there are two counterpoints I would like to make.

First, there are people who simply will not trust the driverless cars. I was talking to a friend yesterday who said that he wouldn't ride in a driverless car, and he wouldn't want to drive on the same road as one. Uptake is not going to be as fast as people seem to expect once the cars are practical for market.

And second, in the words of Jarrett Walker [1]: "Technology never changes facts of geometry." No matter how small you can make the engines, airbags, and frame, as long as you have each passenger in a separate, self-propelled, hopefully crash-proof shell, they are always going to take up far more space than a bus or a train, and require far more resources to construct.

[1] http://www.humantransit.org/2012/08/bus-stigma-and-driverles...

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> First, there are people who simply will not trust the driverless cars. I was talking to a friend yesterday who said that he wouldn't ride in a driverless car, and he wouldn't want to drive on the same road as one.

This will change over time (and quite fast). Ever heard of red flag laws?[0]

> In the United Kingdom, the Locomotive Acts (also known as Red Flag Laws) was a policy requiring self-propelled vehicles to be led by a pedestrian waving a red flag or carrying a lantern to warn bystanders of the vehicle's approach.

> The most infamous of the Red Flag Laws was enacted in Pennsylvania circa 1896, when legislators unanimously passed a bill through both houses of the state legislature, which would require all motorists piloting their "horseless carriages", upon chance encounters with cattle or livestock to (1) immediately stop the vehicle, (2) "immediately and as rapidly as possible... disassemble the automobile," and (3) "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes" until equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified.

At least with driverless cars, we're getting support from the government (in NV and CA, so far).

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_laws

Might take a generation or so to die out till driverless cars will reach near 100% adoption.

I've heard that when electricity came about there were people afraid of touching light switches because they had something to do with electricity. I personally know a person (mentally healthy, over 80 years old) that does not want to be alone in the room with turned on TV because she's afraid of electricity.

Buses and trains are, sometimes[1], lousy modes of transport. A company could provide self-driving cars for its commuters. Being small means the vehicles can pick up passengers from their homes (or local coffee shops, or wherever) without that being annoying for the other passengers.

[1] I guess it depends what buses and trains you catch.

If driverless cars, why not a driverless buses ?

Because the cost of the bus service has almost nothing to do with the cost of the bus driver.

In the United States, the federal government will subsidize capital investments for mass transit systems (a/k/a buses, in most cities, also railway/busway in some), but not operating costs (drivers & mechanics). Labor costs are, in fact, one of the major costs of location transportation authorities.

When I lived in San Diego, the bus line by my house ran at half the frequency using buses twice as large on weekends, which I can see no explanation for other than saving money on labor by making transit service much less useful.

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