4 ms·

If you need to leave to go to work at 8:00 AM, to get there at 8:30, it's a 5 minute drive from your office to my house, and I need to leave at 9 to get to my j

by lambda 11y ago

If you need to leave to go to work at 8:00 AM, to get there at 8:30, it's a 5 minute drive from your office to my house, and I need to leave at 9 to get to my job at 9:30, then an on-demand driverless car can take care of both of us. It can also pick up the person who was able to take public transit in but needs to run errands on their lunch break, as well as the second shift worker, and take someone else home for dinner, and get someone else to the airport at 3 AM. Right now, many people have cars sitting idle for a large portion of the day because they need them for an hour a day, or sometimes an hour every couple of days, or a couple of hours a week. While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks. In addition, there may be other people who could take public transit, walk, or bike to work, but don't because there are other things that they need to do at various points that require a car, and so it's more convenient to just always have it available. So yeah, driverless cars can only get you so far, you're right that the peak demand number is pretty much the minimum number you could have. But if I go an look at my residential street during the day, when commuters are presumably at work, I still see about half of the cars present. Those are all cars that wouldn't be necessary if everyone were riding in self driving cars that could rearrange themselves based on demand. That reduction in number of cars would also reduce the amount of space needed to store all of those cars, which could help bring everything closer together making it more walkable, bikeable, or efficient for public transit, which could further reduce the demand for cars.

lmm 11y ago
> While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks. Do we really have excess capacity compared to the peak demand? Put another way, how many people own a car and aren't using it at e.g. 8:50AM? At a complete guess I'd say maybe 5%? (Also, given zoning and city layout, most houses are a lot more than 5 minutes away from most offices. Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both).
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both). If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount). Self-driving cars can make car-pooling easier - it can be a hyperlocal public transport system. Pick up 4 people who are traveling from/to within a 2-mile radius with each other, and peak traffic will be 25% of what it is now (best case). It's even simpler considering that most people commute the same route everyday.
  - lmm 11y ago
    > If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount). What does the self-driving car change in that case? Wouldn't that be just the same as ordinary carpooling that we can do today?
    - sangnoir 11y ago
      * More flexibility: currently a driver has to be first in, last out * ability to add more vehicles on demand * automation
    - lambda 11y ago
      Right now, I need to manually find someone who is carpooling. If there happens to be someone on my street that I know and is going to roughly the same place, that's fine. However, there are many trips which have overlapping segments that I'd never be able to find without an automated system. For carpooling with my own car, that's really too much work to try and hunt down someone, figure out how cost sharing is going to work, ensure that our schedules are in sync often enough for it to work out, and so on. With an automated system, it can just adapt to changing demands. Maybe some days schedules are too far out of sync, so it just sends dedicated cars. Maybe some days there's someone better to pool with. You can already do this with systems like UberPool, but with self driving cars, you don't have to pay a dedicated driver, so it becomes even cheaper and more convenient.

by lambda 11y ago

lmm 11y ago

> While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks. Do we really have excess capacity compared to the peak demand? Put another way, how many people own a car and aren't using it at e.g. 8:50AM? At a complete guess I'd say maybe 5%? (Also, given zoning and city layout, most houses are a lot more than 5 minutes away from most offices. Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both).

sangnoir 11y ago
> Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both). If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount). Self-driving cars can make car-pooling easier - it can be a hyperlocal public transport system. Pick up 4 people who are traveling from/to within a 2-mile radius with each other, and peak traffic will be 25% of what it is now (best case). It's even simpler considering that most people commute the same route everyday.
- lmm 11y ago
  > If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount). What does the self-driving car change in that case? Wouldn't that be just the same as ordinary carpooling that we can do today?
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    * More flexibility: currently a driver has to be first in, last out * ability to add more vehicles on demand * automation
  - lambda 11y ago
    Right now, I need to manually find someone who is carpooling. If there happens to be someone on my street that I know and is going to roughly the same place, that's fine. However, there are many trips which have overlapping segments that I'd never be able to find without an automated system. For carpooling with my own car, that's really too much work to try and hunt down someone, figure out how cost sharing is going to work, ensure that our schedules are in sync often enough for it to work out, and so on. With an automated system, it can just adapt to changing demands. Maybe some days schedules are too far out of sync, so it just sends dedicated cars. Maybe some days there's someone better to pool with. You can already do this with systems like UberPool, but with self driving cars, you don't have to pay a dedicated driver, so it becomes even cheaper and more convenient.