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> Car usage will go up by an order of magnitude because a major cost of driving isn't the dollars, but the time. This is why I think self driving cars will mak

> Car usage will go up by an order of magnitude because a major cost of driving isn't the dollars, but the time. This is why I think self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides, the more people will drive (self driving or otherwise). If road infrastructure is the same, that necessarily means a much higher density of cars on the road. It's possible that self driving cars will be more space efficient on the road, but ten times more efficient? I think it's more likely that there will just be way more cars on the road and traffic will worsen considerably.

modeless 9y ago
You are absolutely right, and this is not widely understood yet. I expect people to live farther from work and spend more time in cars and in traffic. On the other hand, need for parking will plummet and that should free up a bunch of space in cities, increasing density. I wonder if there is money to be made betting on this in the markets? Which companies will benefit, or lose, from these shifts?
- rickycook 9y ago
  that’s very true. i read somewhere that something crazy like 30% of traffic in city areas are people looking for car parking. don’t have a source on it, but the parking situation definitely shouldn’t be ignored, at least as far as the most built up/problematic areas are concerned
  - xbmcuser 9y ago
    If we have self driving cars the roads in cities will get a lot wider as no side parking in many streets many 2 lane or 1 lane would become 3 or 4 lane streets as well. Would allow for dedicated bus lanes as well so traveling by bus could also become a lot faster.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      If we have self-driving cars that aren't parked the same way as human-driven cars, but instead drive unoccupied to park somewhere else, then the extra space from reduced roadside parking will largely be occupied by extra traffic lanes to accommodate the added deadhead traffic.
  - greeneggs 9y ago
    > i read somewhere that something crazy like 30% of traffic in city areas are people looking for car parking. Without a source, this is just a made-up statistic, i.e., worthless. Here's a source for you, though [1]. > Sixteen studies of cruising behavior were conducted between 1927 and 2001 in the central business districts of eleven cities on four continents (see Figure 1). ... About thirty percent of the cars in the traffic flow were cruising for parking. The data varied widely around these averages, however; on some uncrowded streets no cars were cruising, while on some congested streets most of the cars were cruising. Cities have changed since these observations were made, and the data are selective because researchers study cruising only where they expect to find it. [1] "Cruising for parking" by Donald Shoup http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf
LrnByTeach 9y ago
Road Traffic won't worsen as you mentioned, let me explain why ? Increased capacity utilization. I assume, you are a technical person. If you look back at year 2000, In a typical IT company there is a server Box for each category. A Database server box , a WebServer Box ( physical machines ) etc.. very few people used viruvalization etc.. Physical Machines capacity utilization is around 15% . Come to 2017, with Amazon AWS cloud is providing on demand servers to thousands of companies, all of them TIME Sharing tens of thousands of Servers. Same thing applies with self-driving cars. Higher utilization by ride sharing leads to FEWER cars on the Road. Today average occupancy in a car may be 1.3 with Self-driving RIDE sharing, if it goes to 2.6 that is HALF the CARS on the ROAD compared to today. Doubling the average people in car from today is much EASIER, since that BEHAVIOUR of Sharing is tied to FINANCIAL gains to people. If you ride by yourself , 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION cost is $500 vs. If you Share it is $200/month, that motivate people to SHARE and leads to LESS cars.
- oh_teh_meows 9y ago
  OP's probably referring to induced demand [0], or something similar to Braess's paradox [1]. But I see your point though. If people are incentivized to share a car then that might reduce the load. That said, my suspicion is, once you take the driver out of the equation, you can do so much more than just ferrying people. E.g courier/shipping services, or mobile food stalls (food truck that sells food while moving on the highway, once engineers figure out how to safely and autonomously speed match two cars), etc. The induced demand may be greater than the savings from ride-sharing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
  - LrnByTeach 9y ago
    Yes, the financial incentives for sharing the RIDE , coupled with Induced demand make Autonomous cars so cheap like $200/month for 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION, the adoption goes exponential at this point . I will give you one great example of 'Exponential adoption' happened in recent history of technology. In the year 1998, at the early days of Internet, we used have only WIRED Broadband Router. Everybody has a 100 Feet CAT 5 cable in the home, when you need to connect a different computer/laptop you change that CAT 5 to that ROOM from Router. 100 Feet CAT 5 wire used to cost $75 those days. When Wireless ROUTER are released in the next 10 months, at the cost of $100 every body bought, it is no brainer instead of Buying couple of CAT5 100 Feet wires which each cost $75 and still inconvenient . In my memory this is the most RAPID adoption in a matter of one year , whole USA moved to Bought WIRELESS Routers. Same thing will happen with , Electric Self-driving on-demand summon CARS where it costs $200/month using it any time vs. owing CAR costs $400/month ( insurance , Gasoline , etc.. )
itissid 9y ago
The economics of self driving cars make any such assumptions sort of up in the air. Maybe self driving car fleets will be so numerous, they will optimize via carpooling in busy urban pockets. Maybe people will stop driving there own self driving car to work and use these. Maybe people will own/ride in really small self driving car that network to optimize and self park. > The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides. This may not be generally correct. People also like to commute quite a bit by rail in certain areas. Living on the east coast I can tell you this because of #of people using NJ Transit and Amtrak is big. Cars take much longer to get to NYC already. Commuting to city via subway trains is so that there is shortage of housing right in manhattan where no one goes by cars.
theptip 9y ago
I agree that traffic will be "worse" in some sense, in that there will be more of it. But maybe not "worse" in the important sense of how annoying it is, since we won't be consciously piloting a machine through it. Instead we could be sleeping, playing video games, working on laptops, etc. I think that vehicle design will shift a lot once we start optimizing for these new use-cases, and this might make a big difference to how tolerable road journeys are. This is all very hard to predict though...
- oasisbob 9y ago
  Agree that it's going to be harder to predict, and probably dependent on the individual. When it comes to commuting in the Pacific Northwest, for most of the year an extra half-hour of available daylight at the end (or start) of the day is the difference between getting out climbing during the work week, or not. Personally, I'd trade a comfortable commute for that extra time, no question. Of course, maybe a self-driving car could allow for working during the morning commute, and getting off earlier... Hmmm.
  - gboudrias 9y ago
    > for working during the morning commute, and getting off earlier Surely you mean turning your 8 hour shifts into 10 hour shifts?
  - theptip 9y ago
    > maybe a self-driving car could allow for working during the morning commute, and getting off earlier That's what I'm hoping for. It's already sort-of possible in the special-case of commuting on a bus like Google/Apple/etc. offer in the Bay Area. Can we reach the point where working while in transit is as productive as being on site (face-to-face meetings notwithstanding)?
kbenson 9y ago
Traffic might be worse, initially, but once people are okay with sharing seats in a van, you might see a massive rise in ad-hoc ride-sharing/carpooling. These services know where you're getting picked up and where you're going, so there's no reason that can't route close vehicles/riders designating as okay with sharing to have a higher rider ratio per trip. Even with increased total per-person trips, we might be able to achieve a relatively low per-vehicle trip increase. Couple that with the ability to reclaim a lot of space designated for parking, and forward thinking cities might make themselves much more walkable as well.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  once people are okay with sharing seats in a van That's going to be a long wait in the US! People would rather pay 10x to sit in their own luxury bubble in traffic and have everyone see how fancy their luxury bubble is vs. /gasp/ sharing it with others. Most people here don't want mass transit, they want their big truck / SUV to haul 1-4 people ("it's safer for my kid").
  - kbenson 9y ago
    I think that depends quite a bit on the people in question, and quite a bit on what types of vehicles come to market to support this usage. Compartmentalized vehicles with shutters of some sort might find quite a bit of use. People that don't own a car and want to get around cheaply might find quite a bit of use. Designated child-only vehicles for school shuttling might see quite a bit of use. A small stretch vehicle with lots of doors would be perfect.[1] 1: https://jalopnik.com/5344758/six-door-prius-limo-totes-kids-lots-of-junk/ https://jalopnik.com/5344758/six-door-prius-limo-totes-kids-...
  - dheera 9y ago
    > People would rather pay 10x to sit in their own luxury bubble in traffic I think it has a lot less to do with the bubble factor than the fact that public transportation in the US just sucks, period. My 3-mile commute from Menlo Park to Palo Alto would take - bus: 58 minutes (2 minute walk from home to bus stop + 12 minutes average wait for ECR bus + 10 minutes on ECR + 12 minutes average wait in Palo Alto Transit Center for bus 22 + 15 minutes on bus 22 + 7 minutes walking to work) - train: 51 minutes (4 minutes walking from home to station + 30 minutes average wait till next train + 5 minute train ride + 12 minutes walking to work). - running: 35 minutes end to end - bike: 15 minutes end to end - Uber: 13-20 minutes - driving: 8-12 minutes I bike, but I can see why others would drive. Public transportation is basically defunct here. I can run faster to work than taking public transportation. That says something about seriously how bad it is.
chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
To detail one particular addition of traffic to the roads: students - with self-driving cars, students from K-12 may much rather want to have the independence to hop in a car rather than ride a "stinky school bus". Parents may end up loving it, especially those who already drive their kids to school. And I'm sure the school districts would love self-driving cars, because it means they can pass the travel expenses onto the parents to pay for those cars, instead of having to buy tens of millions of dollars worth of buses, pay bus drivers, liability and insurance, gas, etc. (where I grew up a single school bus cost the district over $1m; we had a fleet of maybe 40-50 buses) In my home-town of 30k people, nearly 2,000 of those are high school students alone, plus probably another 1,000 elementary school kids, and maybe 800 middle school. No doubt they'd all want to use the cool tech to ride to school instead of taking the school bus. Add 4,000 more cars to the road please. (And as for ride-sharing, that may be fun once in a while, but why do that when I can get an entire entertainment pod all to myself?)
- kjksf 9y ago
  The self-driving platform will financially nudge you in the right direction. Currently Uber charges more during rush hour. It's rather obvious that self-driving operator will implement similar price discrimination e.g. $10 if you drive alone, $5 if you share with one or more people. And the more they want you to share, the bigger the surcharge e.g. if $10 vs. $5 doesn't have desired effect then maybe $20 vs $5 will. It's a win-win during rush hour (operator makes much more money from the few people who don't care about money and minimizes over-all traffic by packing more people into a single car).
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    Still, traffic will be worse when you compare one bus with 50 people vs. 12 self-driving cars with 4 people each. A bus is 14-15m long, whereas even a small car like the Chevy Bolt is over 4m. So parked bumper-to-bumper the cars produce >3x as much traffic, and then you add some gaps for actually driving you're up to 4x. Personally I'm very skeptical of both the claim that a) self-driving cars will see huge adoptation at the cost of car ownsership and that b) self-driving cars will give less traffic, less pollution and be significantly cheaper than owning a car. On the latter point, we have basic economic theory: say the average American today spends $600/month total on owning a car. Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month? No, they'd go for an initial price of $400/month for a couple of years to get customers, then sneak back up to $600/month once they've caught most of the market.
paulie_a 9y ago
But will it be worse than taking public transportation? In my experience Public transportation sucks. It's fine for getting around locally, but is terrible for commuting. For a short 3 month period I found uberpool to be far superior to taking a train. Some days it cost a dollar more. Some days it cost less. The travel time was pretty much equivalent plus it was more comfortable. I hate driving in rush hour traffic but as a passenger I didn't mind.
- halflings 9y ago
  You are probably judging public transportation from an American point of view. The vast majority of public transport systems in the US are greatly under-developed compared to what is done elsewhere. A small European city such as Toulouse has orders of magnitude better public transport than Los Angeles or San Francisco for example.
orasis 9y ago
This can be fixed quickly with congestion pricing.
Gustomaximus 9y ago
> self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. I definitely see your logic towards higher density with things like 'office cars' so people do more travel. Or sleeping cars but that would be outside typical peak hours. But would self driving increase volume that much? Possibly if people stopped getting trains/busses but this should be remain cheaper and faster via priority lanes most cities have. Also in general; Freeways; most traffic jams are caused from someone breaking and then the next person breaks a bit more and so on creating a jam. With self driving car the computers will be able to talk and do a 'everyone accelerate on this mark' and get the flow happening even on very crowded roads. And ideally accident reduction that often creates traffic jams. Cities: Algorithms will start making little efficiency improvement to driving. All the little things like removing unnecessary lane changing. People double parking to drop something off. And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups. We will need to make rules to adapt and keep the flow, e.g. stop people have cars driving around the block rather than parking. Ensure we have 'road neutrality' so the wealthy dont pay a premium for faster trips where other cars in the fleet move aside and slow everyone else type deal. Anyway, I dont profess to know the answer. Its all a guess! I do suspect the benefits will outweigh additional trips people might take. Besides, who knows, maybe by then we'll have the 'Boring company' or equivalent making private roads so only the plebs use public roads anyway....
- doikor 9y ago
  > With self driving car the computers will be able to talk and do a 'everyone accelerate on this mark' This won't even be necessary as the self driving cars will have vastly superior reaction time when compared to humans. Especially if the cars are electric and thus have almost instant power to the wheels. Especially if you use tricks like radar underneath the car in front of you so you can react to what the car one car ahead of you does etc. Also a lot of the highway traffic jams are caused by too small distance between the cars. A self driving car should be much more efficient in keeping enough distance between the cars to keep up the flow.
- nkoren 9y ago
  > But would self driving increase volume that much? Absolutely. Not even accounting for induced demand, you'll see ~30% more vehicle-miles due to empty-vehicle repositioning. As you say, accelerations and decelerations can be synchronised, accidents reduced, and standing wave behaviours eliminated, all of which will indeed help traffic flow more efficiently. But this is not by any means enough to compensate for empty-vehicle redistribution, much less induced demand. > And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups. That's only possible in environments where there are no pedestrians or cyclists -- eg., segregated motorways/freeways, which already have no intersection conflicts. At best it represents a space saving, not really a time saving.
flukus 9y ago
> The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides There are places with comfortable public transport today but it seems most prefer would prefer a 40 minute drive than a 1 hour train ride even though it frees up their time.
- taneq 9y ago
  > it seems most prefer would prefer a 40 minute drive than a 1 hour train ride even though it frees up their time. A train ride frees your time up less than an autonomous car ride because on a train you have no personal space. You always have to be aware of people around you and where your own belongings are, watch for your stop, etc. In a car you can focus on whatever you're doing.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
randycupertino 9y ago
> This is why I think self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. Yeah, of course self driving cars are going to make traffic way worse! Who even thinks otherwise? Suddenly you are going to have millions of disabled and homebound seniors wanting the cars to take them to do grocery shopping and errands, kids being driven around to and from from school and practice, and low income residents sleeping in their cars commuting to work in higher income areas of the country. Self driving cars will make traffic exponentially worse.
- wiz21c 9y ago
  another climate apocalypse... 'cos even if all of these cars are electrical, they still need quite a lot of energy to be built and, after a while, destroyed...
  - mcny 9y ago
    I feel the same way but I feel a little guilty for feeling that way. It feels like saying climate change will get way worse if poor people can afford to eat beef (because cowd fart and stuff).
  - lallysingh 9y ago
    One mitigating factor for that is that service cars will have much higher duty cycles (80%+?) than private cars currently do (5%). What might be interesting is how they deal with peak usages like commute hours. Would swarms of cars try to hop over to the next time zone when it's easy?
tlrobinson 9y ago
I agree, in the short term. In the long term a critical mass of well-behaving self-driving cars may be able to regulate traffic much more efficiently than humans currently can. In the medium term we may also see dedicated self-driving car lanes with higher speed limits.

modeless 9y ago

You are absolutely right, and this is not widely understood yet. I expect people to live farther from work and spend more time in cars and in traffic. On the other hand, need for parking will plummet and that should free up a bunch of space in cities, increasing density. I wonder if there is money to be made betting on this in the markets? Which companies will benefit, or lose, from these shifts?

rickycook 9y ago
that’s very true. i read somewhere that something crazy like 30% of traffic in city areas are people looking for car parking. don’t have a source on it, but the parking situation definitely shouldn’t be ignored, at least as far as the most built up/problematic areas are concerned
- xbmcuser 9y ago
  If we have self driving cars the roads in cities will get a lot wider as no side parking in many streets many 2 lane or 1 lane would become 3 or 4 lane streets as well. Would allow for dedicated bus lanes as well so traveling by bus could also become a lot faster.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    If we have self-driving cars that aren't parked the same way as human-driven cars, but instead drive unoccupied to park somewhere else, then the extra space from reduced roadside parking will largely be occupied by extra traffic lanes to accommodate the added deadhead traffic.
- greeneggs 9y ago
  > i read somewhere that something crazy like 30% of traffic in city areas are people looking for car parking. Without a source, this is just a made-up statistic, i.e., worthless. Here's a source for you, though [1]. > Sixteen studies of cruising behavior were conducted between 1927 and 2001 in the central business districts of eleven cities on four continents (see Figure 1). ... About thirty percent of the cars in the traffic flow were cruising for parking. The data varied widely around these averages, however; on some uncrowded streets no cars were cruising, while on some congested streets most of the cars were cruising. Cities have changed since these observations were made, and the data are selective because researchers study cruising only where they expect to find it. [1] "Cruising for parking" by Donald Shoup http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf

LrnByTeach 9y ago

Road Traffic won't worsen as you mentioned, let me explain why ? Increased capacity utilization. I assume, you are a technical person. If you look back at year 2000, In a typical IT company there is a server Box for each category. A Database server box , a WebServer Box ( physical machines ) etc.. very few people used viruvalization etc.. Physical Machines capacity utilization is around 15% . Come to 2017, with Amazon AWS cloud is providing on demand servers to thousands of companies, all of them TIME Sharing tens of thousands of Servers. Same thing applies with self-driving cars. Higher utilization by ride sharing leads to FEWER cars on the Road. Today average occupancy in a car may be 1.3 with Self-driving RIDE sharing, if it goes to 2.6 that is HALF the CARS on the ROAD compared to today. Doubling the average people in car from today is much EASIER, since that BEHAVIOUR of Sharing is tied to FINANCIAL gains to people. If you ride by yourself , 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION cost is $500 vs. If you Share it is $200/month, that motivate people to SHARE and leads to LESS cars.

oh_teh_meows 9y ago
OP's probably referring to induced demand [0], or something similar to Braess's paradox [1]. But I see your point though. If people are incentivized to share a car then that might reduce the load. That said, my suspicion is, once you take the driver out of the equation, you can do so much more than just ferrying people. E.g courier/shipping services, or mobile food stalls (food truck that sells food while moving on the highway, once engineers figure out how to safely and autonomously speed match two cars), etc. The induced demand may be greater than the savings from ride-sharing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
- LrnByTeach 9y ago
  Yes, the financial incentives for sharing the RIDE , coupled with Induced demand make Autonomous cars so cheap like $200/month for 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION, the adoption goes exponential at this point . I will give you one great example of 'Exponential adoption' happened in recent history of technology. In the year 1998, at the early days of Internet, we used have only WIRED Broadband Router. Everybody has a 100 Feet CAT 5 cable in the home, when you need to connect a different computer/laptop you change that CAT 5 to that ROOM from Router. 100 Feet CAT 5 wire used to cost $75 those days. When Wireless ROUTER are released in the next 10 months, at the cost of $100 every body bought, it is no brainer instead of Buying couple of CAT5 100 Feet wires which each cost $75 and still inconvenient . In my memory this is the most RAPID adoption in a matter of one year , whole USA moved to Bought WIRELESS Routers. Same thing will happen with , Electric Self-driving on-demand summon CARS where it costs $200/month using it any time vs. owing CAR costs $400/month ( insurance , Gasoline , etc.. )

itissid 9y ago

The economics of self driving cars make any such assumptions sort of up in the air. Maybe self driving car fleets will be so numerous, they will optimize via carpooling in busy urban pockets. Maybe people will stop driving there own self driving car to work and use these. Maybe people will own/ride in really small self driving car that network to optimize and self park. > The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides. This may not be generally correct. People also like to commute quite a bit by rail in certain areas. Living on the east coast I can tell you this because of #of people using NJ Transit and Amtrak is big. Cars take much longer to get to NYC already. Commuting to city via subway trains is so that there is shortage of housing right in manhattan where no one goes by cars.

theptip 9y ago

I agree that traffic will be "worse" in some sense, in that there will be more of it. But maybe not "worse" in the important sense of how annoying it is, since we won't be consciously piloting a machine through it. Instead we could be sleeping, playing video games, working on laptops, etc. I think that vehicle design will shift a lot once we start optimizing for these new use-cases, and this might make a big difference to how tolerable road journeys are. This is all very hard to predict though...

oasisbob 9y ago
Agree that it's going to be harder to predict, and probably dependent on the individual. When it comes to commuting in the Pacific Northwest, for most of the year an extra half-hour of available daylight at the end (or start) of the day is the difference between getting out climbing during the work week, or not. Personally, I'd trade a comfortable commute for that extra time, no question. Of course, maybe a self-driving car could allow for working during the morning commute, and getting off earlier... Hmmm.
- gboudrias 9y ago
  > for working during the morning commute, and getting off earlier Surely you mean turning your 8 hour shifts into 10 hour shifts?
- theptip 9y ago
  > maybe a self-driving car could allow for working during the morning commute, and getting off earlier That's what I'm hoping for. It's already sort-of possible in the special-case of commuting on a bus like Google/Apple/etc. offer in the Bay Area. Can we reach the point where working while in transit is as productive as being on site (face-to-face meetings notwithstanding)?

kbenson 9y ago

Traffic might be worse, initially, but once people are okay with sharing seats in a van, you might see a massive rise in ad-hoc ride-sharing/carpooling. These services know where you're getting picked up and where you're going, so there's no reason that can't route close vehicles/riders designating as okay with sharing to have a higher rider ratio per trip. Even with increased total per-person trips, we might be able to achieve a relatively low per-vehicle trip increase. Couple that with the ability to reclaim a lot of space designated for parking, and forward thinking cities might make themselves much more walkable as well.

seanp2k2 9y ago
once people are okay with sharing seats in a van That's going to be a long wait in the US! People would rather pay 10x to sit in their own luxury bubble in traffic and have everyone see how fancy their luxury bubble is vs. /gasp/ sharing it with others. Most people here don't want mass transit, they want their big truck / SUV to haul 1-4 people ("it's safer for my kid").
- kbenson 9y ago
  I think that depends quite a bit on the people in question, and quite a bit on what types of vehicles come to market to support this usage. Compartmentalized vehicles with shutters of some sort might find quite a bit of use. People that don't own a car and want to get around cheaply might find quite a bit of use. Designated child-only vehicles for school shuttling might see quite a bit of use. A small stretch vehicle with lots of doors would be perfect.[1] 1: https://jalopnik.com/5344758/six-door-prius-limo-totes-kids-lots-of-junk/ https://jalopnik.com/5344758/six-door-prius-limo-totes-kids-...
- dheera 9y ago
  > People would rather pay 10x to sit in their own luxury bubble in traffic I think it has a lot less to do with the bubble factor than the fact that public transportation in the US just sucks, period. My 3-mile commute from Menlo Park to Palo Alto would take - bus: 58 minutes (2 minute walk from home to bus stop + 12 minutes average wait for ECR bus + 10 minutes on ECR + 12 minutes average wait in Palo Alto Transit Center for bus 22 + 15 minutes on bus 22 + 7 minutes walking to work) - train: 51 minutes (4 minutes walking from home to station + 30 minutes average wait till next train + 5 minute train ride + 12 minutes walking to work). - running: 35 minutes end to end - bike: 15 minutes end to end - Uber: 13-20 minutes - driving: 8-12 minutes I bike, but I can see why others would drive. Public transportation is basically defunct here. I can run faster to work than taking public transportation. That says something about seriously how bad it is.

chiefofgxbxl 9y ago

To detail one particular addition of traffic to the roads: students - with self-driving cars, students from K-12 may much rather want to have the independence to hop in a car rather than ride a "stinky school bus". Parents may end up loving it, especially those who already drive their kids to school. And I'm sure the school districts would love self-driving cars, because it means they can pass the travel expenses onto the parents to pay for those cars, instead of having to buy tens of millions of dollars worth of buses, pay bus drivers, liability and insurance, gas, etc. (where I grew up a single school bus cost the district over $1m; we had a fleet of maybe 40-50 buses) In my home-town of 30k people, nearly 2,000 of those are high school students alone, plus probably another 1,000 elementary school kids, and maybe 800 middle school. No doubt they'd all want to use the cool tech to ride to school instead of taking the school bus. Add 4,000 more cars to the road please. (And as for ride-sharing, that may be fun once in a while, but why do that when I can get an entire entertainment pod all to myself?)

kjksf 9y ago
The self-driving platform will financially nudge you in the right direction. Currently Uber charges more during rush hour. It's rather obvious that self-driving operator will implement similar price discrimination e.g. $10 if you drive alone, $5 if you share with one or more people. And the more they want you to share, the bigger the surcharge e.g. if $10 vs. $5 doesn't have desired effect then maybe $20 vs $5 will. It's a win-win during rush hour (operator makes much more money from the few people who don't care about money and minimizes over-all traffic by packing more people into a single car).
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  Still, traffic will be worse when you compare one bus with 50 people vs. 12 self-driving cars with 4 people each. A bus is 14-15m long, whereas even a small car like the Chevy Bolt is over 4m. So parked bumper-to-bumper the cars produce >3x as much traffic, and then you add some gaps for actually driving you're up to 4x. Personally I'm very skeptical of both the claim that a) self-driving cars will see huge adoptation at the cost of car ownsership and that b) self-driving cars will give less traffic, less pollution and be significantly cheaper than owning a car. On the latter point, we have basic economic theory: say the average American today spends $600/month total on owning a car. Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month? No, they'd go for an initial price of $400/month for a couple of years to get customers, then sneak back up to $600/month once they've caught most of the market.

paulie_a 9y ago

But will it be worse than taking public transportation? In my experience Public transportation sucks. It's fine for getting around locally, but is terrible for commuting. For a short 3 month period I found uberpool to be far superior to taking a train. Some days it cost a dollar more. Some days it cost less. The travel time was pretty much equivalent plus it was more comfortable. I hate driving in rush hour traffic but as a passenger I didn't mind.

halflings 9y ago
You are probably judging public transportation from an American point of view. The vast majority of public transport systems in the US are greatly under-developed compared to what is done elsewhere. A small European city such as Toulouse has orders of magnitude better public transport than Los Angeles or San Francisco for example.

orasis 9y ago

This can be fixed quickly with congestion pricing.

Gustomaximus 9y ago

> self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. I definitely see your logic towards higher density with things like 'office cars' so people do more travel. Or sleeping cars but that would be outside typical peak hours. But would self driving increase volume that much? Possibly if people stopped getting trains/busses but this should be remain cheaper and faster via priority lanes most cities have. Also in general; Freeways; most traffic jams are caused from someone breaking and then the next person breaks a bit more and so on creating a jam. With self driving car the computers will be able to talk and do a 'everyone accelerate on this mark' and get the flow happening even on very crowded roads. And ideally accident reduction that often creates traffic jams. Cities: Algorithms will start making little efficiency improvement to driving. All the little things like removing unnecessary lane changing. People double parking to drop something off. And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups. We will need to make rules to adapt and keep the flow, e.g. stop people have cars driving around the block rather than parking. Ensure we have 'road neutrality' so the wealthy dont pay a premium for faster trips where other cars in the fleet move aside and slow everyone else type deal. Anyway, I dont profess to know the answer. Its all a guess! I do suspect the benefits will outweigh additional trips people might take. Besides, who knows, maybe by then we'll have the 'Boring company' or equivalent making private roads so only the plebs use public roads anyway....

doikor 9y ago
> With self driving car the computers will be able to talk and do a 'everyone accelerate on this mark' This won't even be necessary as the self driving cars will have vastly superior reaction time when compared to humans. Especially if the cars are electric and thus have almost instant power to the wheels. Especially if you use tricks like radar underneath the car in front of you so you can react to what the car one car ahead of you does etc. Also a lot of the highway traffic jams are caused by too small distance between the cars. A self driving car should be much more efficient in keeping enough distance between the cars to keep up the flow.
nkoren 9y ago
> But would self driving increase volume that much? Absolutely. Not even accounting for induced demand, you'll see ~30% more vehicle-miles due to empty-vehicle repositioning. As you say, accelerations and decelerations can be synchronised, accidents reduced, and standing wave behaviours eliminated, all of which will indeed help traffic flow more efficiently. But this is not by any means enough to compensate for empty-vehicle redistribution, much less induced demand. > And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups. That's only possible in environments where there are no pedestrians or cyclists -- eg., segregated motorways/freeways, which already have no intersection conflicts. At best it represents a space saving, not really a time saving.

flukus 9y ago

> The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides There are places with comfortable public transport today but it seems most prefer would prefer a 40 minute drive than a 1 hour train ride even though it frees up their time.

taneq 9y ago
> it seems most prefer would prefer a 40 minute drive than a 1 hour train ride even though it frees up their time. A train ride frees your time up less than an autonomous car ride because on a train you have no personal space. You always have to be aware of people around you and where your own belongings are, watch for your stop, etc. In a car you can focus on whatever you're doing.
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randycupertino 9y ago

> This is why I think self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. Yeah, of course self driving cars are going to make traffic way worse! Who even thinks otherwise? Suddenly you are going to have millions of disabled and homebound seniors wanting the cars to take them to do grocery shopping and errands, kids being driven around to and from from school and practice, and low income residents sleeping in their cars commuting to work in higher income areas of the country. Self driving cars will make traffic exponentially worse.

wiz21c 9y ago
another climate apocalypse... 'cos even if all of these cars are electrical, they still need quite a lot of energy to be built and, after a while, destroyed...
- mcny 9y ago
  I feel the same way but I feel a little guilty for feeling that way. It feels like saying climate change will get way worse if poor people can afford to eat beef (because cowd fart and stuff).
- lallysingh 9y ago
  One mitigating factor for that is that service cars will have much higher duty cycles (80%+?) than private cars currently do (5%). What might be interesting is how they deal with peak usages like commute hours. Would swarms of cars try to hop over to the next time zone when it's easy?

tlrobinson 9y ago

I agree, in the short term. In the long term a critical mass of well-behaving self-driving cars may be able to regulate traffic much more efficiently than humans currently can. In the medium term we may also see dedicated self-driving car lanes with higher speed limits.