-- "If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up. If housing is an essential good, like food and clothing, we should cheer when prices stay flat—or even when they fall. Instead, many Americans seem to think of a home as existing in a quantum superposition between a present-day necessity and a future asset." --
I completely agree; we should build more damn houses. It's better for everyone except people seeking to extract rent from land values.
That said, it's going to be incredibly hard to circumvent the system of incentives we've set up for home-ownership in the US. Building codes are one thing, but baking property ownership into policy as a core investment vehicle is another... Building ARE commodities, and should not be treated as speculative assets in a healthy society.
Aside from building more (which we should do!), thinking about property ownership incentives is another side of the coin that deserves attention -- this is likely what enables the self-deception required to forget the basic laws of economics, as Thompson discusses here.
lol. This is a really lovely contest, but with the near-glacial pace of tree growth, I'd hope they'd mix up the criteria just enough every year to keep it interesting to us fast-moving humans.
Self-driving cars are modern public transit. "Train brain" is old thinking that public transit should take billions of dollars and decades to make fixed-route trains that only get travelers part of the way to where they actually want to go.
Trains and busses are far denser than cars, and that's part of the appeal. You can move more people around with less space needed.
"Train brain" is working just fine for China and Japan, I think it would work great in the US. Why can't I get on a train from Columbus to go to Philly? I should be able to.
> Trains and busses are far denser than cars, and that's part of the appeal. You can move more people around with less space needed.
This is true only for contrived examples comparing the vehicles directly. Comparing the real-world throughput of a highway vs. a rail line (in the US) and the density advantage goes away.
> Why can't I get on a train from Columbus to go to Philly?
The US has a different approach to property rights than China, so constructing a new right of way through thousands of private properties is much more expensive. Building new rail lines has massive environmental costs (it's a lot of steel and concrete!). Even once built, it's very hard to compete with a $100 flight that gets you between Columbus and Philly faster.
> This is true only for contrived examples comparing the vehicles directly. Comparing the real-world throughput of a highway vs. a rail line (in the US) and the density advantage goes away.
Does it? Can you post some information to back that up?
I'm not a transportation analyst, but this might be a reasonable comparison.
In Chicago there's a commuter rail-line that carries 6,171,000 passengers per year (~17,000/day).
There's a tollway that runs roughly the same route that carries 240,000 vehicles per day. Even if you divide that across 8 lanes you get 30,000/day. That number would go up if since there's often more than one person per vehicle.
Trains and rails are amazing at moving people between fixed points during rush hour, but are vastly underutilized the rest of the time.
In the future, it would be great to see rail lines replaced by dedicated self-driving lanes where cars could safely go 100+ mph.
> And building 20 lane highways doesn't take billions of dollars?
Building highways is very expensive, but much much less expensive than new rail. The most cost effective and environmentally sound thing to do is to make the most possible use out of existing infrastructure. As safe and predictable drivers (no fast stops and starts, swerving, or accidents), Waymo smooths traffic for everyone.
Depends on how you define public. The important characteristics to me are that there is affordable transport available to everyone. Government ownership and operation of the vehicles is not important to me.
Government ownership makes the most sense when there is a natural monopoly. There is not a need for a monopoly on urban transportation.
If Waymo continues to grow their OEM partner pool, then presumably they'd have a better ability to put cars on the road than Tesla. I'd say right now it's "advantage Tesla" but could easily see this flipped on its head if Waymo announces more partnerships soon. Could very easily see them partnering with major US automakers like Ford or Stellantis (lol maybe even GM, but that seems extreme)
Tesla self-driving doesn't exist and will only work on Tesla vehicles if they ever develop the capability.
Waymo self-driving works now and has been demonstrated on multiple vehicles. Waymo could utilize the manufacturing capacity of the entire auto-industry.
Oh yeah, I totally agree. Should have specified. That advantage only applies to making vehicles. In terms of driving, operation, and pretty much everything else, clearly 'advantage Waymo'
In SF, when Cruise & Waymo were both operating at the same time, there was a lot of animosity towards autonomous vehicle driving behavior (especially emergency vehicles). Both companies got lumped in together, but this seemed to stop as soon as Cruise paused operations.
It's nice that Austin will get a chance to see Waymo first, and have the ability to differentiate between the performance whenever Tesla launches. It'd be great if both performed flawlessly, but I have my doubts about one of these companies ability to act responsibly...
I tried Cruise in Austin, and it was nothing more than a curiosity. What should have been a ten minute ride took almost forty minutes because the car took a circuitous route with lots of backtracking, presumably because the cars were programmed to stay away from certain intersections and avoid left turns. It was my first time in a self-driving car, so the cool factor was definitely there, but it was far from being a real product.
Both companies got lumped together, but Waymo had and continued to have issues after Cruise stopped operations. Some of those continued making headlines, like the 3am honking.
During the time they were both operating public service in SF, Waymo had slightly fewer incidents proportional to their fleet size, but almost all of them were extremely minor. Cruise had mostly minor incidents with a few catastrophic failures.
Waymo is offering L4 rides in multiple cities and scaling fast; they're largely considered to be the leader in the space by a wide margin.
Zoox is just starting to offer L4 rides in Las Vegas & Sf. It's trailing Waymo by a few years, but has good design & core tech.
Tesla is taking a very different & controversial approach, and is generally viewed, by most people with knowledge of the industry (armchair experts on X aside), as far behind in core technology for L4 cars, but as having the best driver assist system. I think they're in for a rude awakening when they try to launch 'real' self-driving cars in Austin, but time will tell.
Overall, do yourself a favor, and check out Waymo videos on youtube.
I completely agree; we should build more damn houses. It's better for everyone except people seeking to extract rent from land values.
That said, it's going to be incredibly hard to circumvent the system of incentives we've set up for home-ownership in the US. Building codes are one thing, but baking property ownership into policy as a core investment vehicle is another... Building ARE commodities, and should not be treated as speculative assets in a healthy society.
Aside from building more (which we should do!), thinking about property ownership incentives is another side of the coin that deserves attention -- this is likely what enables the self-deception required to forget the basic laws of economics, as Thompson discusses here.
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