Man, I love ya, but your lack of intellectual precision in your arguments is just exhausting to have to rebut every single time, and these diversions do nothing to move our conversation forward.

"...The vehicles might be bigger and need more material, but if they hold more people, you get more for your resources. In a very simple way, a miata that gets thirty miles per gallon and seats two people is effectively less efficient than an SUV that can seat six people and gets fifteen miles per gallon. There comes a point in the resource scale where bigger is better..."

How can you, with any intellectual honesty, conflate those two completely different resource streams into one measure of value?!

The manufacturer pays for the metal, plastic, wiring, FMCSA testing, and designs the vehicle to meet the regulations appropriate to the vehicle in question. They sell the vehicle, and recoup their expenditures, plus profit.

The buyer pays for fuel, oil, maintenance, expendables, all the other operating expenses, and the depreciation in value of the vehicle itself as it gets used.

And yet, you devise a completely fictional "resource scale" that takes ALL of the expenditures by the company AND the owner - while still ignoring the environmental cost of the vehicle and its use - and try to measure the vehicle's value against this "resource scale". That doesn't exist. That drives neither the manufacturer or the owner, and never enters into their thinking or balance sheets.

Am I supposed to read this, walk-back my previous post, and say, "Oh! Yes, rd95! You are right! This completely arbitrarily-sized yardstick proves that my experience in the fleet vehicle industry, that I work in every single day, and have to know inside-out is entirely wrong!

My day job is in the telematics industry, dealing specifically with how to maintain and track the value of fleets of vehicles. I know the industry inside and out. And no, there is never a point where a large vehicle is less expensive than a small one. It may SEEM like it pencils out, but it doesn't.

However, I get where you are going with your thinking.

It's called the "triple bottom line", and we tried to get companies to adopt these principles back in the 1980's.

It failed. Companies only look at raw material costs. They do not measure the cost of mitigating the shit that comes out of their smokestacks, or they they pour into streams.

"...most cities already have buses and bus routes. To service a lot of the new demand, it's as simple as adding more buses..."

This is just wrong. This is not how buses, schedules, or routes work. At all.

Is there a stigma against buses? Maybe there still is. But that's only because promotion of that viewpoint is funded by those who would lose from transportation infrastructure improvements.

Public transit works. Period. Europe. South America. Asia. Parts of Africa. England. Everywhere you go outside of America, public transit works, and is used heavily by people of every class and social standing.

Americans are not genetically different, so it can work here, too.

The problem we face that is fairly unique to us, is SPACE. We are really widely spread out. Lack of density over the majority of the US makes it REALLY HARD for any public transportation infrastructure to get funding from the Government. It needs to be funded using local funds.

And once you build public transit? Well you now have less money coming in from the government for roads and highways.

So yeah. What WILL happen, and is already happening, and has happened thousands of times before with any new technology, is that the rich will get it first. Then it will expand to accommodate more and more people.

My dad had a phone in his car in the 1970's. My friend's 9-year old now has more power in the iPhone in her pocket, than all of NASA possessed throughout the organization when they sent men to walk on the Moon.

That's 40 years.

You REALLY think we won't be making most of our utility trips in automated vehicles in under 20 years?