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Driverless cars aren't a fix for our transport woes
- ilaksh 11y agohttp://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage
- Wingman4l7 11y agoFor a very narrow definition of the term "fix", maybe. What is the fix we're looking for? To alleviate traffic congestion? To spend less time on the road? Or maybe just to remove the necessity of having to focus all our attention on the act of driving itself?
- npsimons 11y ago> To spend less time on the road? Or maybe just to remove the necessity of having to focus all our attention on the act of driving itself? I would say yes to at least these two; the only reason most people care about congestion is that it negatively impacts these two. Autonomous vehicles may not "fix" these issues, but they might be one step towards fixing the issues.
- vkou 11y agoTo reduce the outrageous amount of resources we pour into inefficient modes of transportation like single-passenger vehicles?
- GnwbZHiU 11y agoIt does not fix, but it helps. At least you can do something more useful while on the road.
- kuschku 11y agoYou can do that in the subway, too. And it’s faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
- trhway 11y agoconsidering that driverless car would make sitting in traffic less painful one can see how it can lead to even more congestion and worse traffic in peak times. Also significant majority of driverless cars would be "Uber-ed" on the cheap and thus would allow to be on the road in the car for the people who wouldn't own/use car otherwise. Plus delivery vehicles, currently limited by the number of available drivers, will be in practically unlimited number on the roads.
- meesterdude 11y agobut driverless cars would make the actual 'sitting' obsolete, or at least a much more rare occurrence.
- paulsutter 11y agoAuthor neglects to consider that carpool lanes could (and should) be converted to "self-driving only", as a phased approach to increasing capacity. Second step, make controlled-access highways driverless-only. It's not necessary to upgrade /every/ vehicle to self-driving to start getting benefits, the change can happen one lane at a time.
- jacquesm 11y ago> Author neglects to consider that carpool lanes could (and should) be converted to "self-driving only", as a phased approach to increasing capacity. That would decrease capacity for the rest of the road. Maybe you could allow single occupant self driven cars to also use the carpool lanes. But to move carpoolers out of the carpool lanes and make them exclusive for self driving cars will simply cause car poolers to stop pooling and will increase traffic.
- paulsutter 11y agoYes, less capacity for manually driven cars because there will be fewer of them. Besides, the capacity increase from a pure self driving lane far outweighs the increase from a carpool lane. In fact, many argue that existing carpool lanes give less overall capacity.
- meesterdude 11y ago> What are we left with? Not much really. In terms of time savings and safety, autonomous vehicles will not be a disruptive innovation to urban transport systems Strongly disagree with the professor here. I'm not saying they will fix all our problems, and wont bring some new ones in addition, but to insinuate that driverless cars will not have a disruptive impact on safety and time saving leads me to question the authors understanding of autonomous vehicles. Actually there are several other "facts" that author states that I disagree with, or that are separate from autonomous vehicles. I think this stuff is certainly important to evaluate and weigh the pros and cons, and I agree its not going to be a silver bullet for all our problems, but this reads like a wonk who doesn't believe the internet will ever go anywhere. In addition, who knows what additional technological or social changes take place that would impact how, when and why we travel. TL;DR: author's magic 8-ball needs another shake.
- kuschku 11y agoSelf-driving cars can’t disrupt urban transport systems, because they don’t solve the issue. The issue is that everyone wants their own, big, car, and everyone wants to use them at the same time. During the morning commute you have over a hundred times more cars on the road than in the late evening, at 10pm, for example. The only solution that allows the streets not to be completely overwhelmed by cars is to put the cars underground, or on elevated roads, or use more efficient systems. 40 cars vs. one bus. Self-Driving cars don’t help in urban environments at all. Many cities already suggest to just use P+R instead of using cars downtown.
- tormeh 11y agoDriverless cars will create less unnecessary queues due to faster reaction times, but yeah, that won't help all that much.
- demallien 11y agoFirstly, you assert that everyone wants their own big car. This is not true. I don't want one, and I'm not alone in that amongst people living in cities with good public transport. I choose my mode of travel (including cars) as a function of the time it's going to take to get there, and how much stuff I'm lugging. If I am carrying a lot or travelling out of peak hour, I take a car. If I'm under time pressure, I'll probably take the metro. In Paris we have Autolib, which is a wonderful car service where you can reserve a car at one station and drop it off at another. There are over a thousand if these stations in the city, so there's normally one near you and your destination. But the brilliance of this is that I can go to work using public transport (because peak hour), gi to the gym after work and then drive home. Or catch public transport to a restaurant in a Saturday evening, and drive home, or whatever. Self driving cars will make this type of system even better because I can use one without having a station near me, I just call a car. At the moment city centres get clogged by cars because public transport in the suburbs is horrible. But if you can get a car to a transport hub and then commute into the centre, I think a lot of people would prefer that to being stuck in heavy traffic for hours. Maybe not you, but many people.
- vlehto 11y agoIt seems like the whole congestion problem could be greatly diminished if employers would take responsibility of the negative externality they are causing. Let's say employer can dictate when you arrive at work. Then your employer has to pay you salary for the time you spend commuting. The result should be either flexible hours or employers finding arrival times that don't overlap too much. It's overly simplistic idea, but you get the point?
- 1stop 11y agoOr employers who only hire people who live nearby?
- jacquesm 11y agoCompanies routinely establish themselves in locations where their employees can't live or can't afford to live. Zoning laws don't help with this either.
- snarfy 11y agoZoning laws are a big part of the problem. There are far too many backroom deals where the politician rezoning an area as 'high occupancy residential' happens to be the brother of the guy building the apartment complex there. The problem is systemic.
- vlehto 11y agoThat is only partially true. Company has to be within acceptable commute range for the employee. Lets say our company needs several employees. It is necessary to have critical mass of employable people living inside that range. The problem here is that 15min commute vs. 45min commute doesn't matter much to the employer. So companies try to go near major traffic routes at the outskirts of big cities. There employable population and cheap property converges.
- vlehto 11y agoIn the beginning of the industrial revolution, it used to be relatively common for employer to arrange housing for the workers. No time commuting, but the catch is that the house is part of the salary. But the employer then gets to hire based on merit.
- mentos 11y agoDriverless cars will reduce the cost of taking a taxi such that it may become viable for car owners to completely opt out of owning a car. But if 10 million people need to get to work parallel to each other what does it really matter if the cars are Ubers or self owned?
- legulere 11y agoAlso this actually increases the use of roads: Instead of just transporting people the cars have to drive between the points where it will load off people and where it will pick up people. With ownership of autonomous vehicles it will get even worse: http://www.humantransit.org/2015/11/self-driving-cars-a-coming-congestion-disaster.html http://www.humantransit.org/2015/11/self-driving-cars-a-comi...
- koalaman 11y agoDriverless isn't about driverless cars per say. It's about driverless vehicles and a future where large fleet based transportation companies use various driverless vehicle formats to optimize for efficiency, speed, and comfort. A bunch of driverless SUVs might not alleviate consumption much (although they could if they were all full of people), but a fleet of fully enclosed driverless motorcycles could. Once the technology matures I could imagine our subway infrastructure being repurposed to serve as channels for vehicles like this.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoWe know that self driving cars will not solve all the world's problems, but one can reasonably expect there to be some improvement. Whether that improvement suffices for a satisfactory level of service is another matter and will depend upon the reciprocal interaction between demand and capacity - which the article does not go into. But there's no such thing as a panacea to free movement, whether you like the current form of public transport or not. Even if we got Star Trek's transporters I'm sure there would be complaints about the congestion in transporter room five. There are significant costs to public transport that the article hasn't addressed as well. The switching costs of using public transport, whether you stay with the same form of public transport or not, are significant. The time you spend waiting for connections; the time spent waiting for all the other people to board, and alight, at their connections; the bother of finding which platform your train is going to be on when under time pressures to make the connection; the incredible cost paid when a bus, or train, is overloaded or unavailable. It's all very well to observe that a train can carry a particular number of passengers per mile per hour on a particular space of track, refer to the maximum theoretical capability of the system when trains are running within a certain safety distance. If you look at figures for energy costs, then public transport will similarly come out as the vastly superior option. But the cost of a form of transport is assessed in more than simply its use of space to move people through or its translation of energy into passenger miles. Even when one is going to be stuck in traffic, it's often more reliable, faster, and certainly less bother, to drive to the destination. Especially since the bus is going to be sitting in traffic anyway, that's a tragedy of the commons problem going on there but it doesn't change the underlying trade-off. For some that trade-off is so great that when denied access to private transport they can't make the trips at all - I know people who don't own cars, who cannot work 10 miles away, because the buses don't run that early in the morning, or because there is one bus that runs that early in the morning and if it's unreliable they've taken on a financial liability in gaining the job that they'll be unable to effectively discharge because they'll lose their job. None of which is to say that public transport is a bad idea. I love the idea of fast regular trains that are little bother to get on, despite the fact that most of the time I drive to work. But if one's in favour of it, perhaps it would be better to be in favour of it - in favour of improving it - rather than against something else.
- ensiferum 11y agoAutonomous drive is a novel idea but doesn't really provide any real solution. Most important selling point at the moment is that you could take the time spent in car and spend it doing something else such as your work while the car drives itself (i.e. is stuck in the traffic). However if the real problem we want to look at is the overall stupidity of traffic congestion that is extremely a) energy inefficient, b) time consuming c) unenvironmental d) space intensive the first real question to be asked really is, why does everyone need to commute to the same place in the same time? It seems that urban city planning has really gone horribly wrong with all the businesses and companies packing into the "business district". The direct consequences in terms of economy and environmental pollution not to mention direct impact on individual life (time wasted in a car...) are dire. In order to really solve the problem of traffic congestion the ultimate solution is to disperse with this silly need. If people are really required at a place physically (i.e. cannot do their work remotely) urban cities should become decentralized with several business hubs closer to the suburbuan areas. Failing that a secondary solution is to increase the efficiency of the transit. One derp sitting in his Ford Thunderfuck XL EarthDestroyer 5600 is incredibly stupid. Like the author of the commented a train is massively more efficient, has higher throughput and scales better. I know americans (and aussies) consider this to be an inferior mode of transport, they rather sit in their cars. But I personally don't really understand this. I'd never accept a commute that would take more than 15 minutes. My life and time is simply too precious for that.
- sneakest 11y ago> the first real question to be asked really is, why does everyone need to commute to the same place in the same time? Schools (K-12) are one of the biggest drivers of why at the same time. Schools start and end at specific times. This (usually) requires one adult to be around to drop them off and pick them up at school or the bus stop, especially K to at least early middle school. Because of this a lot of people in (sub)urban areas leave from home and from work around the same time. The difference in traffic congestion is drastic when you compare summer to the school year in larger cities with no meaningful mass transit.
- jessriedel 11y ago> the first real question to be asked really is, why does everyone need to commute to the same place in the same time? > If people are really required at a place physically (i.e. cannot do their work remotely) urban cities should become decentralized with several business hubs closer to the suburbuan areas. Yes, other business hubs are called "other cities" and "towns". There's a reason people pay a premium to pile into the same city, and you can't wish away the large benefits of density, both in terms of housing and in terms of businesses.
- Symmetry 11y agoLess need for parking spaces could cause a pretty significant increase in density which would make walking and public transport better.
- Shivetya 11y agoTrains, Trains, Trains. Get real. First off they cost so much more per mile they already bust the bank and then comes maintenance. Finally the end is they cannot respond to population movements. Light rail is already a boondoggle of an expense in many cities trying to fit them in, with per passenger costs so many times that of alternate solutions only a politician could love it. Trains are a romanticism that blinds people to their real cost. Heavy rail has many uses and sharing tracks can be a good solution. However when new heavy rail is proposed they don't want to take into account existing support infrastructure, they want to build all new end points; here is a hint start and end at an major airport where taxis and buses already provide service and parking is plenty As for the safety canard, we don't have enough history on autonomous cars and buses with proper planning to make that call. If you want to even the playing field, instead of making a new train track you instead use that same space for dedicate autonomous vehicle travel. In this you can let cars and buses serve the same central points and at the end of the route there is no need to change vehicles. Bonus, no trains or tracks to maintain!
- npsimons 11y ago> Bonus, no trains or tracks to maintain! I'm honestly curious: what's the maintenance cost differential between train tracks and road? And between trains and other forms of public transport (buses, etc)?
- kuschku 11y agoRoads for busses are far more expensive to maintain than light rail. Road maintenance of asphalt road for heavy use (like bus lanes) is so expensive that all the bus stations here are using the same road-building techniques the romans already used, and they still go through the stones in a few decades. Just for my city the estimated savings are in the amount of 19 million EUR for switching the main bus lines to light rail. And it would improve quality.
- RightWingRabble 11y agoDo you have a link to the numbers? I'm curious about the actual costs, since what you're saying contradicts Shivetya. Without numbers and sources, I have no idea who's actually right.