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> Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive But how is this going to work? In cities, everyone uses thei

• intopieces 10y ago
  I could see apartment complexes and neighborhood associations partnering with these autonomous vehicle services to provide transportation for their residents, then eventually municipalities demanding it of new developments, with a reduction of parking space requirements in combination (similar to what Austin, TX does with ZipCar and businesses: if you have 2 Zip car spaces, you can reduce your parking requirement by 4).
• Retric 10y ago
  Often you need a car to get to the subway which does not take that long. Slug lanes also become more useful with self driving cars. Combine the two and you get a self driving car to central location > car or public transit to city center > self driving car in the city. Remember parking is often 10+$ a day due to land value, so two ~4$ trips can be a net savings. Finally, even a 20-30% drop in demand would be huge in such a capital intense industry.
  • Mz 10y ago
    Remember parking is often 10+$ a day. And can be more of a hassle or less conveniently located than a transit stop.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • dazc 10y ago
      Plus the damages. In 20 years I have suffered many thousands worth of damages and every time it's when I'm not in the car.
    • cfreeman 10y ago
      A good portion of traffic in downtown areas is people driving around trying to find parking.
      • Mz 10y ago
        When I lived in downtown San Diego, I felt sorry for the car people. Some streets are one way only and some parking is two hours only, etc. If you aren't extremely familiar, it can be a nightmare to try to figure out where to park and then find your way back to the building you are going to. And then one day I realized some of the buildings were multi story parking structures and it kind of made me mad. So much of the city infrastructure is whored out to the needs of arrogant, obtuse car people, very much at the expense of everyone. It brings quality of life down and cost of living up for absolutely everyone because of people wanting the right to drive their own damn car everywhere, no exceptions. And I stopped looking on them with pity or sympathy and started looking on them as parasites who totally deserved whatever small misery they were inflicting on themselves with driving around, looking for parking. But I did not deserve the misery they were inflicting on me with things like worse air pollution.
  • jfim 10y ago
    > Slug lanes also become more useful with self driving cars. And faster. A lot of the traffic on highways is caused by rubbernecking, which self-driving cars are mostly immune to.
    • gohrt 10y ago
      If one driver in 20 is a rubbernecker, all the cars slow down.
• yessql 10y ago
  Peak pricing can spread out demand a bit, and also, people can use much smaller vehicles most of the time. We buy cars for worst case size or conditions. Look around the parking lot of a white collar work place that is filled up with four wheel drive all terrain vehicles and pickup trucks. Ride sharing for rush hour would use a ton of compact vehicles. Even if the number of vehicles is the same to account for peak usage, the majority of the vehicles will be much smaller and much less capable, and therefore much less profitable for manufacturers.
  • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    How does "spread out demand" work out with "people need to work 9-5"? As for "much smaller cars most of the time": not if you want to maintain the current safety level while also being able to travel faster than 20 mph.
    • inimino 10y ago
      The idea that everyone needs to arrive at and leave the office at the very same minute has always been idiotic. It's a holdover from assembly-line thinking. Presumably in a predominantly ride-sharing, autonomous-car world this would be reflected through pricing rather than through ridiculous commuter traffic jams.
• tedajax 10y ago
  Fully autonomous fleets of cars will push societal changes we can't yet predict. Right now everyone shows up to work at about the same time. Is that a fixed position society will always uphold? I don't know, there's a lot of things I don't know. The only thing I can predict is that in the same way the personal automobile upended the social structures of the day, autonomous vehicles will likely do something similar.
  • sbov 10y ago
    Always? No. Will autonomous cars change it? Doubtful. In fact, it could make it worse, because who cares if your commute is 3 hours instead of 2 as long as you can watch American Idol while you're doing it.
    • kmkemp 10y ago
      I'd love to see what the average household pays for vehicles. If you don't think that money is high on the motivational list for people, you need only look at what happened the last time gas prices were $1/gallon higher than today. In any case, I doubt car ownership will "fall off a cliff". It will be a gradual change. Many people won't trust the software, there will be a few incidents that get tons of media coverage to scare people off (no doubt funded by entrenched interests). Some people won't trust that the amount of time it takes to get a ride will be low enough, especially in more rural areas. Many people like the culture of car ownership. But at the end of the day, if it saves hundreds of dollars per month and is roughly as safe and convenient as owning a car, the value proposition will be too strong to ignore. But that's a change that will take (IMO) 15-25 years to see widespread adoption.
      • tedajax 10y ago
        The thing is that even in rural areas the logistics of autonomous cars allow you to get away with just one for an entire family. The fact that the car can come back home and pick someone else up later means that even if there are still people who own cars (and I suspect lots of people still will) sharing amongst small groups will likely decrease overall count of owned vehicles.
• btbuildem 10y ago
  Look at tuk-tuks and minibuses in developing countries -- the US has a lot of catching up to do since public transit was destroyed.
• Kalium 10y ago
  If your average car occupancy count goes from one-point-something to two, it would be a huge change in number of cars required and traffic congestion.
  • slapshot 10y ago
    It could. It could also go from one-point-something to zero-point-something. Until now, the floor for car occupancy was 1. It's now zero. There is the possibility of empty trips (repositioning for next shuttle run, driving to distant parking lot, etc) adding rather than subtracting traffic.
    • Kalium 10y ago
      I agree that a certain amount of repositioning trips is likely, but I also expect that they will be calculated for when they are fastest and cheapest. Even in an all-electric-car-all-the-time scenario, fuel isn't free and sitting with the engine off is easier on the car than idling on a highway.
• joakleaf 10y ago
  If the cars no longer need a driver, then self-driving cars combined with route planning may open the door toshuttle-based door to door ride-shared commutes... Potentially cheap enough to be a good compromise between current uncomfortable public transport, and owning your own vehicle (but unable to put the commute time to good use). With that being said... I am also pretty doubtful. People like to own cars.
• kbenson 10y ago
  It's much easier to coordinate ride sharing when there's an interested third party in place. ad-hoc ride-sharing for a reduces cost could result in the average car traveling at much closer to full capacity much of the time. If you set it up ahead of time, it could even optimize a route that picks up and drops off along an optimal route. Don't think of it as replacing what historically was walking outside and hailing a cab, think of it as setting up a carpool with office mates except you don't have to know them, and you don't have to work out all the details, it will be handled for you.
  • ssharp 10y ago
    I think you overestimate how willing someone is to sit in a small car with 3 other strangers during their morning and evening commutes. I don't see a huge impact on ownership at least in the first decade or two of autonomous cars. Lots of people still have relatively specific needs, e.g. requiring car seats of various sizes for their young children, needing to pick-up or drop-off kids at school, sports practice, etc. Mass transit works well in dense areas because the vehicles are large and only need to go short distances or go long distance over a specific route. When everyone has their own custom route, person A's route may make person B's route unacceptably longer. Also, sitting on a bus/train with 50 strangers is less of an odd social situation than sitting in a car with one stranger. Once autonomous cars get to the point where they don't require any driver attention at all, I think it will make ownership even more appealing since you could customize the entire to match whatever you want to do while you're hauled around.
    • nkrisc 10y ago
      Every morning I sit with many strangers in a train car for about an hour commuting to work. Sure a car is not quite the same, but I don't think it's that much different either. Society will adapt.
      • ssharp 10y ago
        I'm also looking at it from my point of a view, as someone in their mid-30's. I'd assume the generations before mine will be much more likely to accept this than my generation.
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Or, if there are enough cars for peak hours, then demand for new cars will not fall that much (although the structure of ownership may in fact change). Initially, no, but long-term you can move much parking to cheaper places around the periphery of the urban area rather than needing a parking spot where people live, one where they work, and fractions everywhere else they might go. So sustainable density of everything that isn't parking spaces in the city core goes up, walkability and transit access improve, so the cars/people ratio drops.
  • shimon 10y ago
    In the shorter term, there are still huge efficiencies to be gained with smarter ride sharing. Imagine if something like uberpool served a majority of car commuters instead of a tiny fraction... you could get a lot of cars off the road but still provide a very high level of service.
    • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      Or, wait, what if we made the car really long and put in even more passengers per driver? It might even have a pre-determined schedule and be pretty cheap?
      • bambax 10y ago
        Trains won't stop in front of your house.
        • dragonwriter 10y ago
          No, but busses can be pretty close, and shared vans actually will. I suspect those are closer than trains to what the grandparent post was referencing.
  • jmilloy 10y ago
    So all the cars also drive back out of the city around 9am and back in again around 3pm? That sounds like more cars on the road (over the course of a day) rather than less.
• zzzzzzzza 10y ago
  I think you overestimate the percentage of people that a. work b. work 9 to 5 jobs. there's plenty of cars on the road at other times. would be surprised if load was more than 2-3x as high at those peak times (which could easily be accommodated by ride sharing)
  • gohrt 10y ago
    if people have so much flexibility, why does rush hour exist?
    • sobani 10y ago
      you made a typo: it's "rush hourS" Depending on the location there are 3-4 rush hours in the morning and 3-4 in the afternoon.
• semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  > sleep comfortably Have you ever been in a car? I've gotten plenty of sleep in cars, but never has the word "comfortable" crossed my mind when I woke up afterwards. I reckon it's something about that whole annoying safety thing requiring you to sit still upright strapped to your seat that ruins the comfort factor for me. YMMV though.
  • bambax 10y ago
    Self-driving cars of the future don't need to look / be shaped like a conventional car. Not all of them at least. The ones designed for slow night travel don't need to be air efficient, they could be shaped like a big square with almost real beds (like on a train).
    • semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      That would be hilariously unsafe in case of a crash. Look, we already have big square cars with beds in them, called RVs, and it's illegal and highly unsafe to sleep in those beds while driving. It doesn't matter how slow and safe the autonomous car is, as long as it's traveling on the same roads as other cars, some of which are fast and driven by humans, crash safety is very much an issue.
• erikpukinskis 10y ago
  > In cities, everyone uses their car at exactly the same time: roughly, between 8-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. Good question. How the system deals with congestion. Two things: 1) Taxis make variable pricing possible, which gives markets an incentive to spread out demand. "Would you like a $15, 45 minute ride to San Francisco by 9:15, or $4, 25 minute ride arriving at 10:30?" 2) In big cities we'll start to see quick transfers to- and from- mass transit. You'll push a button on your phone. The phone will say "Ride begins in 8 minutes to minimize transfer time". You finish your email, put on your coat and walk outside. A car picks you up, drives you to the transit center. You get out, walk across the platform, get onto a train. Train stops, you walk back across the platform into another car. It takes you to your destination. Why? It will save you time in traffic if you care about, and it'll be cheaper if you care about that. Of course during off peak times, you can just take the cab the whole way for the shortest trip.