8 ms·

>I think the best way to do it is to redesign cities to specifically accommodate self-driving cars That will never happen. The car has to drive itself on exist

by drcross 10y ago

>I think the best way to do it is to redesign cities to specifically accommodate self-driving cars That will never happen. The car has to drive itself on existing infrastructure or not at all.

paulsutter 10y ago
Where "never" means "early in the transition?" Once self driving cars are widespread, changes are certain even if gradual. Gradual examples include increasing density by replacing parking lots with buildings, relaxing zoning requirements for parking with new residential units, etc
- kuschku 10y ago
  Where would you park the self-driving cars then? Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already. So you'd need huge parking areas somewhere still. And the "increade density, reduce parking requirements" — if you do that, you can just improve transit, and get the same advantage. But that doesn't happen. People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share. Self-Driving cars provide no advantage there.
  - nickez 10y ago
    > Where would you park the self-driving cars then? They will be driving around and not be parked.. > Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already. Maybe self driving cars can be the "last/first mile" in transit so that more people actually will use public transit. > People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share. I don't want to own a car and no-one that I know of in my surroundings want to own a car. Car companies even do private leasing now because people do not want to own a car. > Self-Driving cars provide no advantage there. I think you have to think bigger. Why would you want to own a car if you could call one at any moment with your phone with an app?
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >> Where would you park the self-driving cars then? > They will be driving around and not be parked.. They could also go to park in more remote areas, that are uncomfortable for people to walk to, and come back when asked to.
      - bryanlarsen 10y ago
        So we're going to have a bunch of self-driving cars driving around without people in them? Sounds like that's going to make our traffic problems worse, not better.
        coldtea 10y ago
        That's assuming our traffic problems are because of "too many cars" and not because of inefficient utilization / driving. That said, I didn't say we'll have cars driving around with no people in them. I said that cars will be able to drive to remote parking areas by themselves.
    - justJanne 10y ago
      > Maybe self driving cars can be the "last/first mile" in transit so that more people actually will use public transit. So the Park+Ride concept. That’s already possible today, yet completely underutilized. A criticism often brought against transit is "I’d have to switch trains at some point", do you think these people would start using that now? > They will be driving around and not be parked.. All the time? That’d be quite wasteful, considering most cars are only used for about 2h a day, during the rush hours, for the commute. > I think you have to think bigger. Why would you want to own a car if you could call one at any moment with your phone with an app? Why would you want to own a car if you could call a taxi at any moment with your phone with an app? Why would you want to own a car if busses and trains come every 2-5 minutes at every stop, and you’re never more than 400m from a stop? Reality is, as European cities show, all these "advantages" can already be gotten with public transit today. I’m not sure what self-driving cars actually improve compared to existing public transit methods. And especially because they’re using space more inefficient than existing transit methods, these advantages would have to be huge to make any tradeoff worth it. Otherwise you could just invest in better transit, not self-driving cars.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share. That's a historical accident, not some fundamental of the human condition. Already young people buy less cars than people their age 1-2 generations ago, and car-pooling is increasingly more popular. Heck, suddenly a sizable percentage of the population became part-time taxi-drivers with Uber and Lyft.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Is that so? If americans want to live like that, why don’t american cities look like european cities already? There seems to also be a cultural element, and I doubt that can be solved with merely technological means.
      - alexc05 10y ago
        I suspect it isn't about desire but income. A car can typically cost up to $10,000 per year regardless of specific purchase price there is insurance, fuel, repairs and/or car payments (lower purchase price on used vehicles raises maintenance significantly) ... sure you can shave a bit here and there, but on the whole if you're going to own a car, you're going to be out a lot of money. Making the choice not to own gives you a leg up for other purchases. Housing, I suspect is bennefitting from similar post-hoc analysis. "Millennials don't want to own homes" which I've seen in headlines should also be weighed against the fact the houses today cost many multiples more than a typical annual salary. I believe when my father was buying his first home the rule of thumb was "roughly 5* annual salary" nowadays in Toronto homes are easily 10* This stuff (microhousing, ultra-mobility) isn't necessarily about "enlightenment amongst the youth" it's the crushing cost.
        krisroadruck 10y ago
        Crushing cost and income instability. I know very few people my age (35) or younger who've held a single job for longer than maybe 3-5 years, most of the time its even shorter than that. Our parents could count on a job being stable for decades at a time and with regular raises. When you don't know where you will be working 2 years from now its hard to predict where you will be living 30 years from now. Makes signing a mortgage kind of a dumb idea.
  - ebalit 10y ago
    During rush hours, most of the cars only have one person in it. Cheap self driving taxis could reduce quite a bit the number of cars during rush hour by pooling rides.
    - justJanne 10y ago
      Or you could have people use busses or other transit methods. Yet a common criticism when that is suggested is that only the poor use public transit, and that everyone in public transit smells bad. Which is what I’m questioning here: Self-Driving cars provide no real technological advantage over existing transit methods, and the real issues are social problems. And we can’t solve social problems with technological solutions.
      - ForHackernews 10y ago
        Theoretically, you could have multiple self-driving bus operators, and price-discriminate between them. Rich people would pay more to commute in a bus with leather seats, premium coffee and fast wifi, with the added bonus of not having to breathe the same air as the poors.
      - dao- 10y ago
        They very much do provide real technological advantage. They can be smarter than traditional public transit, allow you to be more flexible, reduce waiting times, allow you to get from A to B without changing trains / buses, get rid of stops, eliminate the last couple of hundred meters that you may have to walk today, etc.
    - vincnetas 10y ago
      Cars that are pooling people are called buses. And yes they can also be made self driving.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    > Where would you park the self-driving cars then? Providing dense parking garages gets a lot easier if it doesn't need to be omfortable for people to get to the cars and you don't need to be able to open the doors when parked etc. But the overall need for parking will also drop if more cars are shared. > Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already. But self-driving cars can be used to augment the transit system too. E.g. complement buses with mini-buses and smaller cars to handle overflow. Imagine an Uber-like service with an option to "call a bus" to any number of nearby "bus stops" at a lower price than if you call a car. If a full size bus is within 5 minutes, with space free, it'll make you wait for that, otherwise it'll dispatch a regular car at the same discounted price. You could do away with normal bus schedules in favour of having the buses follow the busiest stretches at any time of day, and use cheaper/smaller vehicles to take other passengers. E.g. near me the main bus route is used by two very distinct groups of people who either intend to go quite far, or who intend to go to the nearby train stations or high streets in either direction from me. During certain parts of the day the riders are often dominated by one or the other, and you'd get far more efficient use if you could shuttle people between the train stations/high streets and the longer distances separately. Knowing the start/end of each journey would allow you to "sort" the riders accordingly and dispatch vehicles much closer to optimal. > And the "increade density, reduce parking requirements" — if you do that, you can just improve transit, and get the same advantage. See above - automated vehicles will change transit too, but there are lots of situations where people still want to go door to door and are willing to pay accordingly. E.g. I take the bus from the local train station and home most of the time, but if I'm in a rush I might not be able to wait. Sometimes currently that's frustrating as getting a taxi her normally will take me 5 minutes. If I'm in a rush and there's a bus <10 minutes away, there's certainly a non-zero chance that the taxi will be late and the bus fast, and the bus will arrive first and I have to consider if I want to cancel the taxi or wait and be later than if I'd just taken the bus in the first place. With a "combo service" with guaranteed pickup from specific locations in <5m by either bus/min-bus/car at the same price depending on what's closest, I think you'd see a lot more people here opting for something like that than people who currently use the bus, which could very well have the effect of making it viable to use far more buses. A lot of the car users I see here (London suburb) mostly use public transport anyway, and have the car as "just in case" that will be increasingly hard to justify with solutions like the above. Couple that with increasing pressure to reduce the number of allowed parking spaces in new developments further and it will keep getting less desirable to own cars many places. > People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share. Do they? A lot of people feel they need a car, but I think far fewer want a car if they felt they had better options. Personally I don't even have a drivers license. Sometimes think about getting one, but it's an annoying time commitment for little benefit, when I can have a car here with a driver in 5 minutes so I can relax and read or play a game while I get to my destination. Ten years ago it was more annoying, but now it's gotten to a point where I don't think I'll get a drivers license in my lifetime (I'm 40), as the inconveniences keep dropping. The one remaining thing that makes me sometimes wish I had a car is for road trips on holidays to places outside of bus routes where it's expensive to hire a driver - self driving cars will take away that inconvenience too. A lot of people do want to own a car still, but I suspect that car ownership will start trending downwards very quickly once self-driving cars drive the cost of car sharing services down further and make it easier to provide better guaranteed availability and shorter waits and more flexibility (e.g. get whatever type of car you happen to need) A lot of people also have conflicting wants. E.g. they may actually want to own a car, but want that next holiday more, and so opt out of car ownership once a shared one ends up sufficiently cheaper.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    It's pretty much a universal law of economics: if you make something cheaper, people will find new uses for it and it will get used more. Self-driving cars reduce the costs of cars quite substantially: risks go down substantially, expands the pool of people who can use it (young, elderly, drunk), the ability to multitask makes the time a commute takes much less expensive, the ability to call a car is hugely convenient. And of course the fact that you don't need a driver means commercial driving gets a lot cheaper. I expect self-driving cars to substantially increase the number of cars on the road.
    - lallysingh 10y ago
      I also expect self-driving cars to substantially reduce the size of vehicles on the road. We typically buy cars for the max capacity we intend to use them for. Self-driving Smart (the brand) cars may be the new norm.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > risks go down substantially, expands the pool of people who can use it (young, elderly, drunk), the ability to multitask makes the time a commute takes much less expensive, the ability to call a car is hugely convenient. Rentable cars in most major areas and high-density transit system already fulfill exactly these requirements. Take any city in Europe. ~15-20% of the people commute with cars. Do you think these people, who could already use transit, suddenly will stop driving? What advantage do self-driving cars provide to them that transit and rentable cars don’t?
  - jfoster 10y ago
    To what extent does that stay true when you can get picked up quickly, not have to worry about parking, and it works out to cost a fraction of the price of owning a vehicle?
    - kuschku 10y ago
      In most European cities, the transit system does exactly that – even in my outermost suburb of a German 250k city we have 4 buslines nearby (within of 4min walking) with a frequency of 15-30min, and a few more with an hourly frequency. So why do 15-30% of people in these cities still drive? What will self-driving cars provide that transit and rentable cars didn’t yet?
  - sametmax 10y ago
    In France there are more and more cities with electrical cars you can rent on the fly. In my street I have 3 of them, I can just book it in 1 minute and hop on. It's always awailable and clean. No need to pay for gaz, parking is garanteed. Maintenance and insurance is included. So really, I don't mind sharing it.
- mulletbum 10y ago
  I can see the commuter lanes in many cities being converted to self driving lanes with 100mph speed limits. That alone would push people into self driving vehicles.
  - wrsh07 10y ago
    You wouldn't even need 100mph speedlimits if self-driving cars can avoid some of the common high-traffic pitfalls [eg traffic waves [1]] It's likely that even at equal or higher density, self-driving cars will be able to have higher throughput with comparable speed limits. Initially, though, it might be sufficient to "encourage" them by allowing them in commuter lanes. [this should even be trivial, because it should be pretty easy to find passengers uber-pool style if adding passengers would improve the trip] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
    - alonmower 10y ago
      Slight tangent but one of the most interesting parts (to me) of lane splitting on a motorcycle is getting to navigate through these waves and actually see the dense and sparse segments as you pass through them
dagw 10y ago
We happily redesigned cities to accommodate cars, what makes you think we won't do it again for self-driving cars?

by drcross 10y ago

>I think the best way to do it is to redesign cities to specifically accommodate self-driving cars That will never happen. The car has to drive itself on existing infrastructure or not at all.

paulsutter 10y ago

Where "never" means "early in the transition?" Once self driving cars are widespread, changes are certain even if gradual. Gradual examples include increasing density by replacing parking lots with buildings, relaxing zoning requirements for parking with new residential units, etc

kuschku 10y ago
Where would you park the self-driving cars then? Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already. So you'd need huge parking areas somewhere still. And the "increade density, reduce parking requirements" — if you do that, you can just improve transit, and get the same advantage. But that doesn't happen. People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share. Self-Driving cars provide no advantage there.
- nickez 10y ago
  > Where would you park the self-driving cars then? They will be driving around and not be parked.. > Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already. Maybe self driving cars can be the "last/first mile" in transit so that more people actually will use public transit. > People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share. I don't want to own a car and no-one that I know of in my surroundings want to own a car. Car companies even do private leasing now because people do not want to own a car. > Self-Driving cars provide no advantage there. I think you have to think bigger. Why would you want to own a car if you could call one at any moment with your phone with an app?
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >> Where would you park the self-driving cars then? > They will be driving around and not be parked.. They could also go to park in more remote areas, that are uncomfortable for people to walk to, and come back when asked to.
    - bryanlarsen 10y ago
      So we're going to have a bunch of self-driving cars driving around without people in them? Sounds like that's going to make our traffic problems worse, not better.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        That's assuming our traffic problems are because of "too many cars" and not because of inefficient utilization / driving. That said, I didn't say we'll have cars driving around with no people in them. I said that cars will be able to drive to remote parking areas by themselves.
  - justJanne 10y ago
    > Maybe self driving cars can be the "last/first mile" in transit so that more people actually will use public transit. So the Park+Ride concept. That’s already possible today, yet completely underutilized. A criticism often brought against transit is "I’d have to switch trains at some point", do you think these people would start using that now? > They will be driving around and not be parked.. All the time? That’d be quite wasteful, considering most cars are only used for about 2h a day, during the rush hours, for the commute. > I think you have to think bigger. Why would you want to own a car if you could call one at any moment with your phone with an app? Why would you want to own a car if you could call a taxi at any moment with your phone with an app? Why would you want to own a car if busses and trains come every 2-5 minutes at every stop, and you’re never more than 400m from a stop? Reality is, as European cities show, all these "advantages" can already be gotten with public transit today. I’m not sure what self-driving cars actually improve compared to existing public transit methods. And especially because they’re using space more inefficient than existing transit methods, these advantages would have to be huge to make any tradeoff worth it. Otherwise you could just invest in better transit, not self-driving cars.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share. That's a historical accident, not some fundamental of the human condition. Already young people buy less cars than people their age 1-2 generations ago, and car-pooling is increasingly more popular. Heck, suddenly a sizable percentage of the population became part-time taxi-drivers with Uber and Lyft.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Is that so? If americans want to live like that, why don’t american cities look like european cities already? There seems to also be a cultural element, and I doubt that can be solved with merely technological means.
    - alexc05 10y ago
      I suspect it isn't about desire but income. A car can typically cost up to $10,000 per year regardless of specific purchase price there is insurance, fuel, repairs and/or car payments (lower purchase price on used vehicles raises maintenance significantly) ... sure you can shave a bit here and there, but on the whole if you're going to own a car, you're going to be out a lot of money. Making the choice not to own gives you a leg up for other purchases. Housing, I suspect is bennefitting from similar post-hoc analysis. "Millennials don't want to own homes" which I've seen in headlines should also be weighed against the fact the houses today cost many multiples more than a typical annual salary. I believe when my father was buying his first home the rule of thumb was "roughly 5* annual salary" nowadays in Toronto homes are easily 10* This stuff (microhousing, ultra-mobility) isn't necessarily about "enlightenment amongst the youth" it's the crushing cost.
      - krisroadruck 10y ago
        Crushing cost and income instability. I know very few people my age (35) or younger who've held a single job for longer than maybe 3-5 years, most of the time its even shorter than that. Our parents could count on a job being stable for decades at a time and with regular raises. When you don't know where you will be working 2 years from now its hard to predict where you will be living 30 years from now. Makes signing a mortgage kind of a dumb idea.
- ebalit 10y ago
  During rush hours, most of the cars only have one person in it. Cheap self driving taxis could reduce quite a bit the number of cars during rush hour by pooling rides.
  - justJanne 10y ago
    Or you could have people use busses or other transit methods. Yet a common criticism when that is suggested is that only the poor use public transit, and that everyone in public transit smells bad. Which is what I’m questioning here: Self-Driving cars provide no real technological advantage over existing transit methods, and the real issues are social problems. And we can’t solve social problems with technological solutions.
    - ForHackernews 10y ago
      Theoretically, you could have multiple self-driving bus operators, and price-discriminate between them. Rich people would pay more to commute in a bus with leather seats, premium coffee and fast wifi, with the added bonus of not having to breathe the same air as the poors.
    - dao- 10y ago
      They very much do provide real technological advantage. They can be smarter than traditional public transit, allow you to be more flexible, reduce waiting times, allow you to get from A to B without changing trains / buses, get rid of stops, eliminate the last couple of hundred meters that you may have to walk today, etc.
  - vincnetas 10y ago
    Cars that are pooling people are called buses. And yes they can also be made self driving.
- vidarh 10y ago
  > Where would you park the self-driving cars then? Providing dense parking garages gets a lot easier if it doesn't need to be omfortable for people to get to the cars and you don't need to be able to open the doors when parked etc. But the overall need for parking will also drop if more cars are shared. > Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already. But self-driving cars can be used to augment the transit system too. E.g. complement buses with mini-buses and smaller cars to handle overflow. Imagine an Uber-like service with an option to "call a bus" to any number of nearby "bus stops" at a lower price than if you call a car. If a full size bus is within 5 minutes, with space free, it'll make you wait for that, otherwise it'll dispatch a regular car at the same discounted price. You could do away with normal bus schedules in favour of having the buses follow the busiest stretches at any time of day, and use cheaper/smaller vehicles to take other passengers. E.g. near me the main bus route is used by two very distinct groups of people who either intend to go quite far, or who intend to go to the nearby train stations or high streets in either direction from me. During certain parts of the day the riders are often dominated by one or the other, and you'd get far more efficient use if you could shuttle people between the train stations/high streets and the longer distances separately. Knowing the start/end of each journey would allow you to "sort" the riders accordingly and dispatch vehicles much closer to optimal. > And the "increade density, reduce parking requirements" — if you do that, you can just improve transit, and get the same advantage. See above - automated vehicles will change transit too, but there are lots of situations where people still want to go door to door and are willing to pay accordingly. E.g. I take the bus from the local train station and home most of the time, but if I'm in a rush I might not be able to wait. Sometimes currently that's frustrating as getting a taxi her normally will take me 5 minutes. If I'm in a rush and there's a bus <10 minutes away, there's certainly a non-zero chance that the taxi will be late and the bus fast, and the bus will arrive first and I have to consider if I want to cancel the taxi or wait and be later than if I'd just taken the bus in the first place. With a "combo service" with guaranteed pickup from specific locations in <5m by either bus/min-bus/car at the same price depending on what's closest, I think you'd see a lot more people here opting for something like that than people who currently use the bus, which could very well have the effect of making it viable to use far more buses. A lot of the car users I see here (London suburb) mostly use public transport anyway, and have the car as "just in case" that will be increasingly hard to justify with solutions like the above. Couple that with increasing pressure to reduce the number of allowed parking spaces in new developments further and it will keep getting less desirable to own cars many places. > People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share. Do they? A lot of people feel they need a car, but I think far fewer want a car if they felt they had better options. Personally I don't even have a drivers license. Sometimes think about getting one, but it's an annoying time commitment for little benefit, when I can have a car here with a driver in 5 minutes so I can relax and read or play a game while I get to my destination. Ten years ago it was more annoying, but now it's gotten to a point where I don't think I'll get a drivers license in my lifetime (I'm 40), as the inconveniences keep dropping. The one remaining thing that makes me sometimes wish I had a car is for road trips on holidays to places outside of bus routes where it's expensive to hire a driver - self driving cars will take away that inconvenience too. A lot of people do want to own a car still, but I suspect that car ownership will start trending downwards very quickly once self-driving cars drive the cost of car sharing services down further and make it easier to provide better guaranteed availability and shorter waits and more flexibility (e.g. get whatever type of car you happen to need) A lot of people also have conflicting wants. E.g. they may actually want to own a car, but want that next holiday more, and so opt out of car ownership once a shared one ends up sufficiently cheaper.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  It's pretty much a universal law of economics: if you make something cheaper, people will find new uses for it and it will get used more. Self-driving cars reduce the costs of cars quite substantially: risks go down substantially, expands the pool of people who can use it (young, elderly, drunk), the ability to multitask makes the time a commute takes much less expensive, the ability to call a car is hugely convenient. And of course the fact that you don't need a driver means commercial driving gets a lot cheaper. I expect self-driving cars to substantially increase the number of cars on the road.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    I also expect self-driving cars to substantially reduce the size of vehicles on the road. We typically buy cars for the max capacity we intend to use them for. Self-driving Smart (the brand) cars may be the new norm.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > risks go down substantially, expands the pool of people who can use it (young, elderly, drunk), the ability to multitask makes the time a commute takes much less expensive, the ability to call a car is hugely convenient. Rentable cars in most major areas and high-density transit system already fulfill exactly these requirements. Take any city in Europe. ~15-20% of the people commute with cars. Do you think these people, who could already use transit, suddenly will stop driving? What advantage do self-driving cars provide to them that transit and rentable cars don’t?
- jfoster 10y ago
  To what extent does that stay true when you can get picked up quickly, not have to worry about parking, and it works out to cost a fraction of the price of owning a vehicle?
  - kuschku 10y ago
    In most European cities, the transit system does exactly that – even in my outermost suburb of a German 250k city we have 4 buslines nearby (within of 4min walking) with a frequency of 15-30min, and a few more with an hourly frequency. So why do 15-30% of people in these cities still drive? What will self-driving cars provide that transit and rentable cars didn’t yet?
- sametmax 10y ago
  In France there are more and more cities with electrical cars you can rent on the fly. In my street I have 3 of them, I can just book it in 1 minute and hop on. It's always awailable and clean. No need to pay for gaz, parking is garanteed. Maintenance and insurance is included. So really, I don't mind sharing it.
mulletbum 10y ago
I can see the commuter lanes in many cities being converted to self driving lanes with 100mph speed limits. That alone would push people into self driving vehicles.
- wrsh07 10y ago
  You wouldn't even need 100mph speedlimits if self-driving cars can avoid some of the common high-traffic pitfalls [eg traffic waves [1]] It's likely that even at equal or higher density, self-driving cars will be able to have higher throughput with comparable speed limits. Initially, though, it might be sufficient to "encourage" them by allowing them in commuter lanes. [this should even be trivial, because it should be pretty easy to find passengers uber-pool style if adding passengers would improve the trip] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
  - alonmower 10y ago
    Slight tangent but one of the most interesting parts (to me) of lane splitting on a motorcycle is getting to navigate through these waves and actually see the dense and sparse segments as you pass through them

dagw 10y ago

We happily redesigned cities to accommodate cars, what makes you think we won't do it again for self-driving cars?