Comment by habosa

In public spaces specifically, at least in Sweden, like train stations, the only difference between an elevator and a toilet is that one has to pay to enter the toilet.

Nah, cameras work as long as people are watching and infractions are punished. You need a high conviction rate. Without that people realize that theres a good chance nothing happens, so they stop caring.

Forcing people to pay, and then using that payment to ensure upkeep, is what makes a difference.

Waymo will be making way for cheap versions, where costs are even lower and upkeep a suggestion.

With per-per-minute sharing cars having existed in many cities in Europe 10+ years, this concept is not new.

People will adapt to the level of cleanliness in the car the get into, so it's a slippery slope. Users will behave respectfully in the early days (maybe because they are first-movers), and then it deteriorates long term.

My own experience is that people used to not even leave an empty soda bottle in the cars and now I see remains from take-out in the floor, coffee cups, chewing gum left around the dashboard etc. You can report this to the car service, but they won't be able to take any meaningful action on it.

> I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle.

The self-driving car ”utopia” (or rather moderate improvement) very much hinges on the space savings on roadways and parking, to increase utilization, reduce congestion and allow dead space to be reclaimed. If people think like you (no value judgment, I suspect this might be the future norm), then you’ll see almost no change to the urban landscape as a whole. It’ll continue to be a one-flesh-body-per-2-tonne vehicle utilization, a ~5:1 provisioning of parking spaces, 25-50% of urban areas being roadways+parking, and a double-digit productivity loss from commuting and running simple errands.

That leaves you with an individual comfort improvement (allowing you to be on your phone while in the car) for a premium price, and increased surveillance tech on personal vehicles. (And, to be fair, it can still be huge for drunk driving deaths, access for elderly & disabled, once costs come down). Overall, very mediocre imo.

Controversial take: the US has painted itself into a corner, where by ignoring the well being of people in their own communities, they need so many workarounds to prevent space sharing between the ~2-3 social groups where intermingling means friction and fear. There are very real logistical challenges to a gated community segmentation of the physical world. This paints the resistance to public transit in a different light: it’s not so much about being public, but rather being shared with strangers, especially of different social cohorts. It also explains the sacred status of air travel which mainly has been left outside the debate: imo because of the higher socio-economic average clientele. Now that cost has come down and low-cost airlines like Spirit share the same airports, the friction has come there as well.

That's what transit is like in your country? How unfortunate.

Because if they ever become super popular, it will be prohibitively expensive to actually police all the surveillance. Likely to store / process it all. AI does an alright job summarizing videos today (Gemini Flash) but it has to get a lot better if they're going to actually police at scale.

I assume it’ll become less manned and less action taken because manning and taking action costs money, reduces margin, and removes cars from circulation. Certainly for crimes they’ll go after you. But leaving litter, spilling stuff, even leaving bodily fluids, I suspect will get through the cracks more and more as margins compress.

Are there any alternatives?

Both Uber and Lyft and over decade old, and until Waymo came, there were no real alternatives to them.

Wouldn't it be more likely they would charge for "leaving trash in car"?

Shouldn't cost much to check car using cameras after each ride.

Being pedantic, even if you have to pay for a type of car, you still have no variance to expectation when you know what you are getting. I think that point was more about the variance in driving, driver etc rather than car type.

Re: enshittification in general. I think the incentives are better aligned for self-driving. Eg. charging people who create trash etc can also make the company money whilst improving overall experience.

With non self-driving, you have to rely on user ratings etc to penalise a specific driver, which seems inherently more fuzzy. The company has conflicting goals of keeping enough drivers (drives costs down etc), whilst guaranteeing a certain experience. It is difficult to create a system for drivers to “improve” (eg. Clean their car) and for a company to directly encourage that, whereas it’s easier to just charge people who litter more etc in a fully automated system.