12 ms·

I wonder how low "cars per person" we will achieve through self-driving Uber/lyft services? Those type of services, if cheap enough, could replace the need for

I wonder how low "cars per person" we will achieve through self-driving Uber/lyft services? Those type of services, if cheap enough, could replace the need for cars for little trips here and there. But things like commutes are harder to replace. You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away. You'd have to have a lot of extra cars that only make 2-4 trips a day due to demand. Plus a large amount of car lifetime is determined by mileage. Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced. If these self driving car services are so cheap, we might increase the car mileage per person. Which means we'll burn through cars at a faster pace than person. I'm not convinced that the end of personal ownership will be all that bad for car companies. I bet it hurts midmarket luxury the hardest since nobody will buy them.

jawbone3 10y ago
Taxis are already self driving cars, and affordable for parts of the population. Those people buy cars regardless.
- ehnto 10y ago
  Cars are definitely more than a commuting device, they are cultural. Also I think articles like this often forget that while it would be great to not need a car for the morning commute, people in suburbia still need to do many other things like shopping and fetching children etc. Many of those tasks are just easier or more preferred to be done in personal transport. Sometimes you need to leave some shopping in the car while you go in to sit with the kids at an after school thing, before heading past a friends house to drop off their kids then finally heading home. A self driving fleet could probably still achieve that in multiple trips, but how many people want to deal with continuously pre-planning and concerting a half dozen small trips a day? I strongly dislike suburbia and car culture does grind my gears in various ways, but I can't help but feel the car-in-an-app is solving the very specific problem of short once off trips, and solving that doesn't even come close to solving the nations transport issues.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I suspect that a lot of people who live in cities, don't own a car, don't use a car much, etc. don't really appreciate the degree to which people customize cars for their needs (roof racks for sporting equipment like canoes, car seats for kids, etc.) and use them for mobile storage. As an exurban person who does a lot of outdoors activities, it's hard for me to imagine not having a personal vehicle. The economics would really have to be compelling and it's hard to imagine they will be especially if the number of miles "driven" go up.
    - mahyarm 10y ago
      You will have carseat cars, cars with sports racks, larger minivans where you don't need the sports rack and so on. Uber today has a car seat option for example in NYC. I could see cars that let you just move the stroller in and lock it in with standardized connection types in the wheels, no carseat ritual required, no waking up the baby. I can also see cargo delivery cars that you just drop your shit in and it delivers it securely to your house after you have gone shopping. Or even more likely, you just use an app for that and not even go to the store. Malls turn into showrooms. All of that is for a self driving future. What you do today is use something like car rentals when you want to go do outdoor activities. A friend of mine uses uber to go kiteboarding and rents a car with friends when he goes skiing.
      - Kadin 10y ago
        There is probably a pretty well-defined density threshold where vehicle pooling makes sense, vs. personally owned vehicles. In cities, pooled vehicles are a no-brainer. It's probably already faster to have an Uber come get you than it is to park a personally-owned car in the core parts of NYC, SF, or some other megacities. This is only going to get better, including specialty vehicles. But as you get out into the suburbs and exurbs, it's more challenging to provide an acceptable level of service (max. 5 minutes from call to arrival, or some other pain threshold that causes people to just wish they had their own car). The economics also start to get harder: if I take an Uber (self-driving or otherwise) out to my house in the sticks, it's a lot less likely to get a return fare back into the city; that trip is a lot less profitable than circulation within an area. So it's doubly bad for a self-driving car company: you need a lot more cars/customer to provide the same service level, and you're spending a lot more time "deadheading" with empty vehicles, or charging extra to compensate. That's not to say that self-driving vehicles won't significantly affect driving and commuting patterns, even in rural areas, but the displacement of personally-owned vehicles is going to be more challenging and may lag urban areas by a very long time.
- mhurron 10y ago
  A lot of people do not by cars in areas where there is affordable and useful public transportation or taxis. I would say most people are buying cars in areas where a cab would be significantly more expensive. There is currently no viable alternative to cars in the vast majority of the US.
- rexpop 10y ago
  The bullish hypothesis is that taxis come with higher operating costs than those with robotic drivers.
  - jawbone3 10y ago
    That is certainly the silent promise in any gushing text about self driving cars, time will tell how good the robots drive after the few years of neglect most cars suffer.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  Taxis are expensive and unreliable. An Uber fleet of SDCs would be gamechangingly better on both counts.
  - jawbone3 10y ago
    All you save is the driver and some fraction of the accidents, and you gain a lot of sensors that need maintenance. Free transportation would be something indeed, but uber will never be more than a cheap taxi, and "cheap" is just a function of income. Additionally, taxi service doesn't have to be unreliable, that's more about american car ownership being so high there isn't much market for taxis.
    - BurningFrog 10y ago
      I think the typical SDC taxi will be a two seater. Getting rid of the driver not only saves on wages, but also space, weight, fuel etc. By "unreliable" I mostly meant the primitive "call your local monopoly, and they may or may not send you a car in 1-30 minutes, so just stand there and wait and worry" system as opposed to the quick and visible Uber/Lyft experience. I agree that taxi could work like that, I've just gotten used to the thoroughly rotten SF taxi system.
- crooked-v 10y ago
  Taxis in most places are complete crap. Cost doesn't matter if you can't depend on the car even showing up in the first place.
  - zerofan 10y ago
    Taxis are usually disgusting too. I won't take a cab because I frequently feel like I need to shower after sitting in one. I rate Uber drivers almost exclusively by their cleanliness, which is usualy very good.
    - jawbone3 10y ago
      Taxis can be dirty, but there is nothing necessary forcing this state of affairs, and as you say at least one taxi company mantains a higher standard. still, it is not clear that making the car self driving will make the taxi cleaner on average.
Retric 10y ago
Self driving cars make existing mass transit more useful. Many offices have a shuttle bus to the subway for free, but they don't run late and cabs are slow to arrive and pricey. Cheep and fast self driving cars in such areas make the occasional cab ride far easier.
iiiggglll 10y ago
Commutes will be solved when everyone is replaced by automation and we no longer have jobs to get to.
chris_st 10y ago
The "slug lines" of the Washington, D.C. area (places where people can congregate to join other commuters, to use the high-occupancy lanes) give us a useful view into this. Yes, if you're driving alone, you have to use a single car. But having the car take care of finding others going (effectively) the same place, and picking them up seamlessly, for only a short increase in commuter time (and a corresponding drop in fare), will make these cars do a whole lot more than 2-4 trips a day. In fact, given how much of a difference in arrival time for the people on my project (anywhere from 6:30 am to noon to 1pm) I think the cars will be able to do quite a few trips.
- vidarh 10y ago
  My pet idea is that you could do dynamic "bus lines" with this. Have a variety of capacity vehicles, including full sized buses. Have bus stops and have people indicate where they are going, and set preferences (like "willing to accept a change for a discount" to allow better vehicle utilisation), and dynamically adjust the routes accordingly and use minibuses or smaller cars to "backfill" capacity to aim to guarantee that you can be picked up within a certain time. Having fixed routes and scale up size of vehicles based on actual detailed drivership data would be very interesting. I know from my own bus usage that having the certainty that there'll be a bus "soon enough" makes a big difference in how often I take the bus vs. when I'll order a car. If I know that if I go to the bus stop I'll get one or the other but guaranteed within a short time, it'd remove most of my need for ordering cars.
legulere 10y ago
The amount of "persons per car" certainly will go down, with cars going around empty just to collect persons.
- stormbrew 10y ago
  Almost all cars right now are empty nearly all day every day. Vehicles that go around picking people up (cabs, buses, ubers, etc) are the ones that actually achieve utilisation of any significant amount. If more cars are shared, people per car goes down, not up. Also, it's not as if those empty unused private cars disappear when not in use. They take up vast amounts of public and private space in urban and suburban areas.
  - legulere 10y ago
    Parking cars are not as big issues however as moving cars. Moving cars take more space, cause traffic, make noises.
ghaff 10y ago
>Plus a large amount of car lifetime is determined by mileage. It depends somewhat on location. Corrosion from salt (put on roads in winter or from ocean air) is probably more proportional to age than mileage. But I fully agree with this basic point and it often seems to be ignored. To the degree that car lifetime is primarily based on mileage, increased utilization doesn't really buy you an awful lot. In addition, as you and other suggest, basic economics pretty much dictates that, to the degree going somewhere in a car gets easier/cheaper, you'll get more of it. Many people are willing to trade a longer commute in terms of time for taking a train versus driving themselves today. I don't see why having a "driver" would change this equation.
- Retric 10y ago
  Mileage is not a major factor with young cars. People have regularly hit 1,000,000 miles and while many components need to be replaced much of the original car can make it that long. Further replacing a full engine costs less than you might think, it's the piecemeal replacement of individual parts that drives up costs.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I guess I'd question "regularly." In any case, something makes cars depreciate over time. Lots of people don't dump their cars just because they're tired of them. And, if you're just driving somewhere like the US Southwest, age probably isn't the issue.
    - Retric 10y ago
      NYC cabs average 100,000 miles per year and use 1976 cars. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/taxi-tough-a-look-inside-an-nyc-cab-shop-feature http://www.caranddriver.com/features/taxi-tough-a-look-insid... Prios cab hit 620,000 miles on it's first battery. http://www.hybridcars.com/toyota-prius-taxi-running-strong-with-600000-miles-and-original-battery/ http://www.hybridcars.com/toyota-prius-taxi-running-strong-w...
      - 10y ago
schiffern 10y ago
>Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced. What most people don't appreciate is that fleet use completely changes the economically optimal strategy for car manufacturing. If you're selling cars, the dominant strategy is planned obsolescence. The fewer miles the car lasts, the more frequently the car needs to be replaced and the more revenue you make. If you're selling mobility, the dominant strategy is durability and reliability. The more lifetime miles you can deliver from each car that comes off the line, the more revenue you make. Tesla's stated goal is a "million mile powertrain."[1] I think their leadership has already anticipated this shift in the economic calculus. [1] http://www.hybridcars.com/tesla-sets-1-million-mile-drivetrain-goal/ http://www.hybridcars.com/tesla-sets-1-million-mile-drivetra...
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  This is really hard for people to understand. Things like long term cost per seat mile etc. If electrical really is that efficient and maintenance free and cost effective, albeit a heavy investment, they should be employed in buses and taxis first. And long after that, in consumer cars that sit in the parking lot modt of the time.
  - holri 10y ago
    In average Vienna's trams are sold after 42.5 years and four million kilometers.
    - mxstbr 10y ago
      As a person from Vienna, I can vouch for this being reasonable numbers. The oldest generation of electric trams is going to make their last turns soon. See here for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Vienna https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Vienna
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    I wonder if there are any public numbers for maintenance of existing electric busses (e.g. San Francisco's trolley busses) vs traditional busses. Wikipedia just has an unsourced "Electric motors typically last longer than internal combustion motors, and cause less secondary damage from vibration, so electric buses tend to be very long-lived as compared to motorbuses"
woodandsteel 10y ago
>But things like commutes are harder to replace. You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Replacements for commuting with more people per vehicle include self-driving cars taking people to transit stations, as the article discusses, and computerized ride-sharing in self-driving cars or min-vans. In addition, my understanding is that self-driving cars can drive safely with considerably less spacing between cars, so a given road can carry many more people per hour.
- wcummings 10y ago
  >my understanding is that self-driving cars can drive safely with considerably less spacing between cars SDC's still need to maintain a safe stopping distance. The problem is really the opposite, human drivers drive too close, causing bunching, traffic jams, and collisions.
BurningFrog 10y ago
Many transports in a city are not commutes. I think a SDC fleet could be quite busy during non commute hours doing all sorts of deliveries.
bluedino 10y ago
>> traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away. Napping or not a two hour commute isn't going to go mainstream anytime soon, even if you don't have to drive. That's four hours a day on the road and you can't just 'nap' through it every day.
- Kadin 10y ago
  Guess we'll need to agree to disagree and see how the situation shakes out, as we run the "in vivo" experiment. In the area where I live (N. VA), there are already an astonishing (to me, anyway) number of people who drive an hour or more each way to work. 2+ hours a day of just piloting a car down the highway, frequently in heavy traffic. This isn't especially uncommon or anything -- it's not the majority (thankfully, due to all the externalities involved), but it's not rare either. People generally do it because it allows them to buy a significantly bigger/nicer/whatever-er house out in the exurbs than in the inner suburbs, for a given amount of money. I think it's an insane tradeoff, but people are already doing it. If you didn't have to drive the car, and could basically reconfigure the car's interior to some sort of fully-reclining "pod" like the very high-end cabins of transcontinential airliners... it'd seem a lot less insane. I could imagine dragging myself up at oh-dark-thirty much more easily, if all I was doing was staggering from my bed to a vehicle, where I could pass back out until I was five minutes out from the office. The afternoon commute would still be rough, because I don't really do naps, but a self-driving car would let you legitimately work from the road; it wouldn't be that hard to stack up a few hours of email, coding, or other non-face-to-face work to do on the way home. All of a sudden, living in West Virginia and commuting to DC doesn't seem entirely impractical -- and that's probably a nasty problem for transportation infrastructure if a bunch of people all decide to try it in the near future.
zerofan 10y ago
Rush hour traffic is due to human drivers making bad decisions. They knee-jerk the brakes just in case, they rubber neck by accidents, they take too long to accelerate, they try to cut other people off from merging, etc etc etc... Computer drivers could make much better use of the existing bandwidth on freeways. I'm guessing 6X better, since my 15 minutes drive takes 1.5 hours during rush hour. It could be a long time before we ever have enough automated cars to realize this benefit. But when that days comes, we could safely increase speed limits too (computers generally have better reaction times).
kalleboo 10y ago
> You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away Perhaps the only way to get Americans to start riding buses is by making it sexy with an app and adding a smartphone/credit card barrier to keep the poor people out.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Large minivans/buses should and probably will replace work commutes. In Singapore a few startups have started such services. From looking at Singapore government's plans they are trying to bring all places to 15-20 min walk to mrt and then have automated vehicles pick and drop people from designated places to and from the mrt stations. As they are a small country and have made car use and parking expensive they will get a lot of traction for automated services.

jawbone3 10y ago

Taxis are already self driving cars, and affordable for parts of the population. Those people buy cars regardless.

ehnto 10y ago
Cars are definitely more than a commuting device, they are cultural. Also I think articles like this often forget that while it would be great to not need a car for the morning commute, people in suburbia still need to do many other things like shopping and fetching children etc. Many of those tasks are just easier or more preferred to be done in personal transport. Sometimes you need to leave some shopping in the car while you go in to sit with the kids at an after school thing, before heading past a friends house to drop off their kids then finally heading home. A self driving fleet could probably still achieve that in multiple trips, but how many people want to deal with continuously pre-planning and concerting a half dozen small trips a day? I strongly dislike suburbia and car culture does grind my gears in various ways, but I can't help but feel the car-in-an-app is solving the very specific problem of short once off trips, and solving that doesn't even come close to solving the nations transport issues.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I suspect that a lot of people who live in cities, don't own a car, don't use a car much, etc. don't really appreciate the degree to which people customize cars for their needs (roof racks for sporting equipment like canoes, car seats for kids, etc.) and use them for mobile storage. As an exurban person who does a lot of outdoors activities, it's hard for me to imagine not having a personal vehicle. The economics would really have to be compelling and it's hard to imagine they will be especially if the number of miles "driven" go up.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    You will have carseat cars, cars with sports racks, larger minivans where you don't need the sports rack and so on. Uber today has a car seat option for example in NYC. I could see cars that let you just move the stroller in and lock it in with standardized connection types in the wheels, no carseat ritual required, no waking up the baby. I can also see cargo delivery cars that you just drop your shit in and it delivers it securely to your house after you have gone shopping. Or even more likely, you just use an app for that and not even go to the store. Malls turn into showrooms. All of that is for a self driving future. What you do today is use something like car rentals when you want to go do outdoor activities. A friend of mine uses uber to go kiteboarding and rents a car with friends when he goes skiing.
    - Kadin 10y ago
      There is probably a pretty well-defined density threshold where vehicle pooling makes sense, vs. personally owned vehicles. In cities, pooled vehicles are a no-brainer. It's probably already faster to have an Uber come get you than it is to park a personally-owned car in the core parts of NYC, SF, or some other megacities. This is only going to get better, including specialty vehicles. But as you get out into the suburbs and exurbs, it's more challenging to provide an acceptable level of service (max. 5 minutes from call to arrival, or some other pain threshold that causes people to just wish they had their own car). The economics also start to get harder: if I take an Uber (self-driving or otherwise) out to my house in the sticks, it's a lot less likely to get a return fare back into the city; that trip is a lot less profitable than circulation within an area. So it's doubly bad for a self-driving car company: you need a lot more cars/customer to provide the same service level, and you're spending a lot more time "deadheading" with empty vehicles, or charging extra to compensate. That's not to say that self-driving vehicles won't significantly affect driving and commuting patterns, even in rural areas, but the displacement of personally-owned vehicles is going to be more challenging and may lag urban areas by a very long time.
mhurron 10y ago
A lot of people do not by cars in areas where there is affordable and useful public transportation or taxis. I would say most people are buying cars in areas where a cab would be significantly more expensive. There is currently no viable alternative to cars in the vast majority of the US.
rexpop 10y ago
The bullish hypothesis is that taxis come with higher operating costs than those with robotic drivers.
- jawbone3 10y ago
  That is certainly the silent promise in any gushing text about self driving cars, time will tell how good the robots drive after the few years of neglect most cars suffer.
BurningFrog 10y ago
Taxis are expensive and unreliable. An Uber fleet of SDCs would be gamechangingly better on both counts.
- jawbone3 10y ago
  All you save is the driver and some fraction of the accidents, and you gain a lot of sensors that need maintenance. Free transportation would be something indeed, but uber will never be more than a cheap taxi, and "cheap" is just a function of income. Additionally, taxi service doesn't have to be unreliable, that's more about american car ownership being so high there isn't much market for taxis.
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    I think the typical SDC taxi will be a two seater. Getting rid of the driver not only saves on wages, but also space, weight, fuel etc. By "unreliable" I mostly meant the primitive "call your local monopoly, and they may or may not send you a car in 1-30 minutes, so just stand there and wait and worry" system as opposed to the quick and visible Uber/Lyft experience. I agree that taxi could work like that, I've just gotten used to the thoroughly rotten SF taxi system.
crooked-v 10y ago
Taxis in most places are complete crap. Cost doesn't matter if you can't depend on the car even showing up in the first place.
- zerofan 10y ago
  Taxis are usually disgusting too. I won't take a cab because I frequently feel like I need to shower after sitting in one. I rate Uber drivers almost exclusively by their cleanliness, which is usualy very good.
  - jawbone3 10y ago
    Taxis can be dirty, but there is nothing necessary forcing this state of affairs, and as you say at least one taxi company mantains a higher standard. still, it is not clear that making the car self driving will make the taxi cleaner on average.

Retric 10y ago

Self driving cars make existing mass transit more useful. Many offices have a shuttle bus to the subway for free, but they don't run late and cabs are slow to arrive and pricey. Cheep and fast self driving cars in such areas make the occasional cab ride far easier.

iiiggglll 10y ago

Commutes will be solved when everyone is replaced by automation and we no longer have jobs to get to.

chris_st 10y ago

The "slug lines" of the Washington, D.C. area (places where people can congregate to join other commuters, to use the high-occupancy lanes) give us a useful view into this. Yes, if you're driving alone, you have to use a single car. But having the car take care of finding others going (effectively) the same place, and picking them up seamlessly, for only a short increase in commuter time (and a corresponding drop in fare), will make these cars do a whole lot more than 2-4 trips a day. In fact, given how much of a difference in arrival time for the people on my project (anywhere from 6:30 am to noon to 1pm) I think the cars will be able to do quite a few trips.

vidarh 10y ago
My pet idea is that you could do dynamic "bus lines" with this. Have a variety of capacity vehicles, including full sized buses. Have bus stops and have people indicate where they are going, and set preferences (like "willing to accept a change for a discount" to allow better vehicle utilisation), and dynamically adjust the routes accordingly and use minibuses or smaller cars to "backfill" capacity to aim to guarantee that you can be picked up within a certain time. Having fixed routes and scale up size of vehicles based on actual detailed drivership data would be very interesting. I know from my own bus usage that having the certainty that there'll be a bus "soon enough" makes a big difference in how often I take the bus vs. when I'll order a car. If I know that if I go to the bus stop I'll get one or the other but guaranteed within a short time, it'd remove most of my need for ordering cars.

legulere 10y ago

The amount of "persons per car" certainly will go down, with cars going around empty just to collect persons.

stormbrew 10y ago
Almost all cars right now are empty nearly all day every day. Vehicles that go around picking people up (cabs, buses, ubers, etc) are the ones that actually achieve utilisation of any significant amount. If more cars are shared, people per car goes down, not up. Also, it's not as if those empty unused private cars disappear when not in use. They take up vast amounts of public and private space in urban and suburban areas.
- legulere 10y ago
  Parking cars are not as big issues however as moving cars. Moving cars take more space, cause traffic, make noises.

ghaff 10y ago

>Plus a large amount of car lifetime is determined by mileage. It depends somewhat on location. Corrosion from salt (put on roads in winter or from ocean air) is probably more proportional to age than mileage. But I fully agree with this basic point and it often seems to be ignored. To the degree that car lifetime is primarily based on mileage, increased utilization doesn't really buy you an awful lot. In addition, as you and other suggest, basic economics pretty much dictates that, to the degree going somewhere in a car gets easier/cheaper, you'll get more of it. Many people are willing to trade a longer commute in terms of time for taking a train versus driving themselves today. I don't see why having a "driver" would change this equation.

Retric 10y ago
Mileage is not a major factor with young cars. People have regularly hit 1,000,000 miles and while many components need to be replaced much of the original car can make it that long. Further replacing a full engine costs less than you might think, it's the piecemeal replacement of individual parts that drives up costs.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I guess I'd question "regularly." In any case, something makes cars depreciate over time. Lots of people don't dump their cars just because they're tired of them. And, if you're just driving somewhere like the US Southwest, age probably isn't the issue.
  - Retric 10y ago
    NYC cabs average 100,000 miles per year and use 1976 cars. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/taxi-tough-a-look-inside-an-nyc-cab-shop-feature http://www.caranddriver.com/features/taxi-tough-a-look-insid... Prios cab hit 620,000 miles on it's first battery. http://www.hybridcars.com/toyota-prius-taxi-running-strong-with-600000-miles-and-original-battery/ http://www.hybridcars.com/toyota-prius-taxi-running-strong-w...
    - 10y ago

schiffern 10y ago

>Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced. What most people don't appreciate is that fleet use completely changes the economically optimal strategy for car manufacturing. If you're selling cars, the dominant strategy is planned obsolescence. The fewer miles the car lasts, the more frequently the car needs to be replaced and the more revenue you make. If you're selling mobility, the dominant strategy is durability and reliability. The more lifetime miles you can deliver from each car that comes off the line, the more revenue you make. Tesla's stated goal is a "million mile powertrain."[1] I think their leadership has already anticipated this shift in the economic calculus. [1] http://www.hybridcars.com/tesla-sets-1-million-mile-drivetrain-goal/ http://www.hybridcars.com/tesla-sets-1-million-mile-drivetra...

Gravityloss 10y ago
This is really hard for people to understand. Things like long term cost per seat mile etc. If electrical really is that efficient and maintenance free and cost effective, albeit a heavy investment, they should be employed in buses and taxis first. And long after that, in consumer cars that sit in the parking lot modt of the time.
- holri 10y ago
  In average Vienna's trams are sold after 42.5 years and four million kilometers.
  - mxstbr 10y ago
    As a person from Vienna, I can vouch for this being reasonable numbers. The oldest generation of electric trams is going to make their last turns soon. See here for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Vienna https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Vienna
- kalleboo 10y ago
  I wonder if there are any public numbers for maintenance of existing electric busses (e.g. San Francisco's trolley busses) vs traditional busses. Wikipedia just has an unsourced "Electric motors typically last longer than internal combustion motors, and cause less secondary damage from vibration, so electric buses tend to be very long-lived as compared to motorbuses"

woodandsteel 10y ago

>But things like commutes are harder to replace. You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Replacements for commuting with more people per vehicle include self-driving cars taking people to transit stations, as the article discusses, and computerized ride-sharing in self-driving cars or min-vans. In addition, my understanding is that self-driving cars can drive safely with considerably less spacing between cars, so a given road can carry many more people per hour.

wcummings 10y ago
>my understanding is that self-driving cars can drive safely with considerably less spacing between cars SDC's still need to maintain a safe stopping distance. The problem is really the opposite, human drivers drive too close, causing bunching, traffic jams, and collisions.

BurningFrog 10y ago

Many transports in a city are not commutes. I think a SDC fleet could be quite busy during non commute hours doing all sorts of deliveries.

bluedino 10y ago

>> traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away. Napping or not a two hour commute isn't going to go mainstream anytime soon, even if you don't have to drive. That's four hours a day on the road and you can't just 'nap' through it every day.

Kadin 10y ago
Guess we'll need to agree to disagree and see how the situation shakes out, as we run the "in vivo" experiment. In the area where I live (N. VA), there are already an astonishing (to me, anyway) number of people who drive an hour or more each way to work. 2+ hours a day of just piloting a car down the highway, frequently in heavy traffic. This isn't especially uncommon or anything -- it's not the majority (thankfully, due to all the externalities involved), but it's not rare either. People generally do it because it allows them to buy a significantly bigger/nicer/whatever-er house out in the exurbs than in the inner suburbs, for a given amount of money. I think it's an insane tradeoff, but people are already doing it. If you didn't have to drive the car, and could basically reconfigure the car's interior to some sort of fully-reclining "pod" like the very high-end cabins of transcontinential airliners... it'd seem a lot less insane. I could imagine dragging myself up at oh-dark-thirty much more easily, if all I was doing was staggering from my bed to a vehicle, where I could pass back out until I was five minutes out from the office. The afternoon commute would still be rough, because I don't really do naps, but a self-driving car would let you legitimately work from the road; it wouldn't be that hard to stack up a few hours of email, coding, or other non-face-to-face work to do on the way home. All of a sudden, living in West Virginia and commuting to DC doesn't seem entirely impractical -- and that's probably a nasty problem for transportation infrastructure if a bunch of people all decide to try it in the near future.

zerofan 10y ago

Rush hour traffic is due to human drivers making bad decisions. They knee-jerk the brakes just in case, they rubber neck by accidents, they take too long to accelerate, they try to cut other people off from merging, etc etc etc... Computer drivers could make much better use of the existing bandwidth on freeways. I'm guessing 6X better, since my 15 minutes drive takes 1.5 hours during rush hour. It could be a long time before we ever have enough automated cars to realize this benefit. But when that days comes, we could safely increase speed limits too (computers generally have better reaction times).

kalleboo 10y ago

> You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away Perhaps the only way to get Americans to start riding buses is by making it sexy with an app and adding a smartphone/credit card barrier to keep the poor people out.

xbmcuser 10y ago

Large minivans/buses should and probably will replace work commutes. In Singapore a few startups have started such services. From looking at Singapore government's plans they are trying to bring all places to 15-20 min walk to mrt and then have automated vehicles pick and drop people from designated places to and from the mrt stations. As they are a small country and have made car use and parking expensive they will get a lot of traction for automated services.