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Self-driving cars will "cruise" to avoid paying to park

• superkuh 8y ago
  This is easy to solve. Do not allow vehicles to operate without a human inside of them. It's only prudent from a safety standpoint. Driving is the most dangerous thing humans do regularly by far. Software is the most unreliable system humans use regularly. Combining the two without human oversight is criminally negligent at the current date.
  • VintageCool 8y ago
    I want to see self-driving taxis in the future once the software is reliable.
    • dymk 8y ago
      At minimum, four or five companies with billions in funding are working hard to make that a reality
• neolefty 8y ago
  Cities will have to regulate to prevent extra congestion. Good to know ahead of time, so they can at least get a head start? Or better to wait and see?
  • wnissen 8y ago
    And it should be far easier to do so with a self-driving car. There will have to be a mechanism for it to pay tolls, parking meters, etc. without human intervention. It's always been funny to me that inside a building on 5th Avenue it costs $1000 sq/ft but you can drive on the street outside that building for free.
    • zdragnar 8y ago
      Access to transit options is usually factored into the taxable value of building space. If the city isn't directing a portion of the taxes collected to maintain those transit options, that's the fault of the city. There's already gas and other assorted taxes that go into the roads, as well as parking meters and such. The idea that "driving on the street" is free simply doesn't hold.
      • michaelleslie 8y ago
        Contrary to popular belief, gas taxation does not come close to covering the cost of road maintenance and construction.
    • reallydude 8y ago
      > There will have to be a mechanism for it to pay tolls, parking meters, etc We have transponders for this, in wide use, across the world.
    • stevenwoo 8y ago
      They have been using license plate readers for this for more than a decade in cities across Europe and Asia.
• Zhenya 8y ago
  Possibly, the cost of parking will go down as the demand to park your personal vehicle will decrease (and cost of ownership increases).
  • stevenwoo 8y ago
    Wouldn't another possibility be cities charging for entry to reduce traffic to maintain revenue after building the system - it's been adopted in London and Singapore among others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
• elicash 8y ago
  This will happen -- only if cities do not plan for this. Self-driving cars would not need the same type of parking that other cars would need. You could probably fit MULTIPLE times the number of self-driving cars into the same space as a normal parking lot if people don't actually need to go inside of it. (Which is why articles like this are important.)
  • rhacker 8y ago
    This is a great observation, in a sense you can treat the system as a large queue- SDVs slowly moving forward in a parking lot towards the exit during the day. The one closest would be invoked. This obviously only works with a taxi system, not "owned" SDVs.
    • elicash 8y ago
      Also you can basically stack them and use elevators.
• jkravitz61 8y ago
  Companies would also be incentivized to not have too many extra cars on the road at all as they would be paying for it in terms of their running costs.
• chrisco255 8y ago
  We should wait until a problem actually manifests itself before trying to solve it. At this point, this is just pure armchair speculation. No one knows what the second order effects of self-driving cars will be. Ride sharing may become even more prevalent than it is now and people may eschew car ownership altogether. Who knows?
  • Varcht 8y ago
    Agreed, it is quite possible that an influx of "steady state" (compared to human piloted) vehicles for humans to follow around will improve traffic conditions overall. A large component of traffic is the "accordion effect".
    • r_klancer 8y ago
      The accordion effect applies to highway traffic, though. The study discusses central cities that have (for good reason) expensive parking. A steady stream of moving cars is not appropriate for an urban center, as they would form a barrier to walking, cycling, scooting which is apparently a thing now, etc.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • afarrell 8y ago
    For non-disastrous problems, we should wait until a problem manifests before implementing a solution and paying the costs of its tradeoffs. However, it would be wise to theorise about solutions so that we have time to design cheap ones.
  • colechristensen 8y ago
    Wait for a problem to manifest and then there will be huge backlash against fixing it because of how expensive the change will be because business models were build and scaled using the old rules.
• DeonPenny 8y ago
  But there will be fewer cars in general. Why buy a car when a selfie(trademarked) will cost $1-$2.
  • rhacker 8y ago
    The article is discussing the near term, mentioning a small minority of 2000 cars can cause this.
  • lalaithion 8y ago
    This is an interesting comment. "selfie(trademarked)" implies that someone is selling something with the word "selfie" principally identifies a certain product and seller. There are two types of trademarks; registered and common law. Registered trademarks have to be registered with the government, and while a brief search at http://tmsearch.uspto.gov http://tmsearch.uspto.gov does bring up many "selfie" related trademarks, they are all related to taking pictures of yourself (or your pets), and trademarks are industry-specific, and so do not apply to self driving cars. There are also common law trademarks, which are created when you first start selling a product in a geographical area. The US is one of the few countries to recognize common law trademarks. But in order for you to have one, you need to actually be selling something. Of course, I don't think there's any penalty to lying that you have a trademark, so perhaps you're just doing this "to be safe". Either way... very interesting!
  • dmortin 8y ago
    Everyone will go by car everywhere, so there won't be less cars, only companies will own them.
    • randyrand 8y ago
      By and large almost everyone already goes by car everywhere. "According to Census survey estimates, there were about 1.8 vehicles available per U.S. household in 2016." If America was a public transport country, I would agree with you. But it's not. The only exception is NYC - but even then car ownership is not exactly low. "within the five boroughs, ownership is lowest in Manhattan, with only 23% of households owning a car, followed by Brooklyn and the Bronx, with 44% and 46% respectively."
• dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Just make the tickets for obstructing traffic as lucrative to write as speeding tickets, add a little case law to broaden the scope of "obstructing traffic" and the problem will magically solve itself. People will find something to do with those cars that does not cause congestion for no other reason than it's cheaper than parking.
• dbcurtis 8y ago
  So, do taxis cause a parking problem? No... taxi's are on the roll because if they are parked they do not generate revenue. Every sensible self-driving car company out there is pursuing a ride service model. I don't see people taking a self-driving car that they own down into the city center and parking it there while they work 9 to 5. Once self-driving ride services become competitive, people will own far fewer daily commuters. They will put their money into a 4WD that can take them skiing, and leave it in the driveway on work days.
  • jcranmer 8y ago
    Commute traffic is very bursty and very unidirectional. People generally don't commute by taxi today, so replacing commute trips with taxis would both increase the number of taxis and cause the pattern of these new taxis to not match current patterns.
    • bduerst 8y ago
      >Commute traffic is very bursty and very unidirectional. Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale, as Uber/Lyft pool is already demonstrating.
      • dmortin 8y ago
        There will be self driving (mini)buses too cheaper than a self driving car ride (more stops because of more passengers carried).
        • nordsieck 8y ago
          Bus vs car is just a miniature version of hub-and-spoke vs direct flight. Outside of very dense cities (Seoul, Tokyo, New York, etc.), mass transit isn't a very good idea because humans care about trip latency. A lot. That being said, there's probably still a place for busses during rush hour in a lot of places.
          • 8y ago
• b_tterc_p 8y ago
  Imagine applying for transit to work somewhere in the range of 8-10 AM and a giant transit optimizer schedules your self driving car pickup and drop off. Not in the sense that all cars are coordinating at the tactical driving level, but broadly at the planning level. We want x cars on the road at time t to optimize efficiency. That would be nice futuresque public transport
• quotemstr 8y ago
  There's a solution to this problem: toll all roads. When a car drives on a road, it's monopolizing a small portion of public land. Why should we let the owner of that car do it for free? Charging a congestion-minimizing price will ensure that traffic flows smoothly and that we allocate road space to its most productive use.
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    The roads are a public good. Tolling all of them to decrease usage just screws poor people in the same way upping the gas tax to discourage driving would. In order to raise cost enough to make a difference you basically have to screw the poor by definition because (broadly speaking) they make up the bulk of the price sensitive users and will be the first to do something else. Tolling all the roads is like putting a fee on a public park because too many people use it. It defeats the point of having public roads in the first place. The whole point of public goods is that the benefit to society of making them freely (or close enough that everyone can afford it, e.g. municipal water) available outweighs the cost.
    • quotemstr 8y ago
      We do, in fact, charge people for access to public parks. The parks still serve their purpose. The price mechanism is what allows for efficient allocation of scarce resources. There's nothing wrong with using it. Demanding that scarce things be free is just imposing a price control, and price controls always lead to shortages and misery.
      • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        Using the roads is not free in the slightest! There may be no fee to access (most of them) per use but you need to pay for a vehicle, jump through some expensive regulatory compliance hoops (insurance, registration, inspection/emissions if applicable in your state) and then pay for consumables (primarily fuel but also tires) and maintenance. Congestion also imparts a cost though it is not directly monetary (time valuable, all else being equal people will choose the faster option). If alternate forms of transit (subway, bus) are available people will naturally load balance to them based on their situation. If you want to reduce road congestion without making people's lives worse then make public transit better and more available. Don't arbitrarily increase the price of the roads. Tolling all the roads to decrease usage is no different than a fuel shortage that drives up prices (something we can all agree is not good for anyone). Too many people depend on private cars for increasing cost to be a good strategy.
• joshe 8y ago
  My grandmother had Alzheimer's, and was often asking me, a 12 year old kid, to take her places. The zoo, "mom's house", Betsy's, school, and "the store". Often 5 different places within 30 minutes. With self driving cars and a voice interface... I have this crisp mental image of thousands of older people wandering city roads as their cars try to get them to their imaginary destinations.
  • zdragnar 8y ago
    My grandparents had it as well, and I recall a time they called my uncle because they'd gotten themselves to Menards but then couldn't remember where they where and needed him to get them back home. I wonder if they could have brought a fob that had addresses saved under names ahead of time. Get in the car, tell it to take them home, and it reads the address of "home" off of the fob. Of course, then there's the issue of payment and them needing to independently keep track of their money, but it's a start maybe?
  • personlurking 8y ago
    I could imagine safety features, as part of the car's OS, such as: "if grandma wants to go somewhere, take her for a 10 minute ride around town and return home". On the other hand, nostalgists might keep them occupied. "The nostalgist is an interior designer specializing in recreating memories for retired people. Rather than settling for a typical ‘retirement village’ experience where everyone’s apartment looks the same, the wealthy elderly of 2030 will have the luxury of living in a space inspired by their favourite decade. Nostalgists recreate the setting of their preferred time and place for seniors wishing to relive their past, from a small-town 1970s living room to a 1980s university dorm room."
    • saltcured 8y ago
      Better yet, the embedded AR displays in the glass will just flip to VR mode and give her a virtual ride without leaving the garage...
  • Reedx 8y ago
    That's an interesting thought (also imagine really drunk or high people giving instructions to their car). Sounds like something out of Black Mirror.
• llcoolv 8y ago
  This article says that with self driving cars, there is no incentive to park. So, the several gallons of fuel/electricity the car is going to burn during a working day are for free then?
  • throwaway2048 8y ago
    still way cheaper than parking in downtown cores.
    • rohit2412 8y ago
      Well then the obvious solution is to make downtown driving expensive. Charge money to enter downtown
      • throwaway2048 8y ago
        Then they have even more incentive to remain downtown circling around.
        • Retra 8y ago
          Until they run out of fuel. Then you have them pay more for that as well.
        • btowngar 8y ago
          Charge $2 / 15mins for a SDC to be present downtown?
      • bluedino 8y ago
        It's arleady $8 to cross the golden gate bridge. It's going to cost anohter how much exactly when I enter 'downtown'?
      • jfk13 8y ago
        Bill vehicles according to the length of time spent in the area, minus any period spent off-road in a parking facility or similar (which will presumably be charged separately by the operator of the parking facility).
• Reedx 8y ago
  Relatedly, cars also clog the roads looking for parking spaces. The SF Transit Agency says that accounts for 30% of traffic, although it's unclear how accurate that number is[1], it's probably safe to say it contributes a good deal. 1. https://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-transit-agency-says-drivers-seeking-parking-account-for-30-percent-of-traffic-but-data-questioned/Content?oid=2580026 https://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-t...
  • mc32 8y ago
    Sure, but at some point people _have_ to park their cars to get to their final destination (do some business in a building, or whatever). Self driving cars by their nature can go on unattended on the roadways, after letting their person out, to avoid parking fees.
    • mertd 8y ago
      What is preventing a company with a self-driving fleet purchasing a few parking lots or cutting deals with them? The cost of it would be a rounding error next to their investment in a self driving fleet.
      • r_klancer 8y ago
        Honestly, I think they should be provided at the outskirts of the city or metro area, and riders should transition to some kind of transit or circulator vehicle to get to their final destination. Or to a bike or e-bike or some kind of urban-friendly light electric vehicle. With automated parking (for individually owned vehicles) and, you could just step out of your car and onto a waiting vehicle.
  • rhizome 8y ago
    On the other hand, I've seen both Uber and Lyft drivers blocking entire active lanes of traffic on busy streets to pick people up. Would that we had traffic-increase numbers for that.
    • 8y ago
• henvic 8y ago
  The main problem with central planners (and I believe most transportation planner would classify as one) is that they believe they must know the answer to everything from a centralized standing point. Indeed cruising for a little bit while the driver does a quick errant might be better than parking when it's pricey. We do that all times when there is more than a driver in the car. However, it feels arrogant to me to decide that when self-driving is a thing the cars will just clog the roads cruising while the drivers aren't there. This ignores a bunch of things. Here is an unexhaustive list: a. The risk of collisions is greater driving than parked. b. Autonomous ride-sharing services would probably be a thing in this scenario (be it running some errands while the owner is busy or just deployed full-time like this). c. There might cheaper denser far away garages that the vehicle could just immediately head to thanks to availability awareness. d. It is very unlikely that the auto sector would program vehicles to clog traffic like this on purpose (though someone hacking their car to keep running nearby might happen). e. Parking in San Francisco is very expensive. However, San Francisco is not the only city in the world and cities are vasty different from one another. Usually, for example, they are not islands and vehicles could drive, say, 10min to a parking lot on the nearest city (maybe giving a ride to someone else in the way). I'm not saying that we should not consider doom scenarios, but reality has shown it most central planners fear too many things that don't happen often. We all use the Internet today, and it is relatively easy to fire a few threatening messages to people around the power to terrorize them (and get away with it). However, it just barely happens if you count in statistics.
  • maxerickson 8y ago
    Plus we can just tax empty vehicles that are driving around. (similar to how we charge a fee to leave an empty vehicle in a public space) It's bizarre how difficult we choose to make easy problems.
    • henvic 8y ago
      Please don't. Taxing is evil and has unintended consequences. Just charge for road use instead. * For reference on unintended consequences of taxation I recommend Frédéric Bastiat's "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen" essay. Link: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html (you can just jump to 'Taxes' or - better - read the whole thing as it is very interesting and not that long). He's more recognized for the Broken window fallacy/parable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
• justtopost 8y ago
  This assumes Level 5 autonomy. I personally think this is quite far off. A level 4 car would be a huge liability cruising around a city, and city traffic, speciffically meandering engergy wasting empty cars will not be at all positive.
• russellbeattie 8y ago
  We don't have to worry about this any time soon, but I have to admit I laughed at the headline because I hadn't thought of it before. Makes perfect sense, really. Just like you'd tell a friend dropping you off at a bank that you'll be just a few minutes, so they take a trip around the block a few times before picking you up. If you live close enough to your destination and will be a while, you could tell your car to "go home and come get me later." Avoiding paying to park might not even be a thing because no one bothers with local parking spots. Again, not a problem I expect to worry about in my lifetime.
• purplezooey 8y ago
  The roads will be clogged for the foreseeable future because we don't build any new roads. $5.9 trillion went to wars in the Middle East, however.
  • whyaduck 8y ago
    In most cases, building roads isn't the solution to congestion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand Mass transport improvements and zoning reform are far more likely to make cities more affordable and livable.
  • jstarfish 8y ago
    It doesn't matter how much money you spend on building roads, traffic only gets relieved for a little while before it is followed by new development to clog everything back up again. And once that development spins up your options for expanding anything further dry up quickly. It's a cycle that perpetuates itself while also compounding the problem with each iteration. It's the culmination of poor urban planning, poor public transportation and a culture of selfishness. Cars are a relic of the 1920s-- they do not fucking work at scale but nobody is willing to admit it.
• klochner 8y ago
  this will accelerate the rollout of congestion pricing in the US.
• lowlevel 8y ago
  I don't see anyone actually owning a self driving car, and hence I don't buy that they will be cruising to avoid parking. Why would anyone want anything to do with owning a car that could just be summoned at any time to taxi you where you need to go? No -40 gas-ups... no scheduled maintenance... no insurance.. no car payment...
• thrusong 8y ago
  I'm echoing the sentiment that a self-driving car would either head home or be part of a ride-sharing/taxi-like service. Hopefully we can eliminate street parking and put those lanes to use as vehicle and bike lanes.
• yellowapple 8y ago
  Can't these cars just, you know, drive themselves somewhere else? If I know I'm going to be at work, for example, it'd be reasonable for my self-driving car to drop me off at work and go home (preferably recharging itself) before coming back to pick me up at the end of my shift, no? Why sit there perpetually wasting energy by circling around? Not like I need my car (and if I do, then I can recall it and wait). For cases where I'm someplace for less than an hour, then sure, maybe this would be a problem. Even then, though, no reason why the car can't find a less-congested spot and idle about over there.
• cryptonector 8y ago
  Bad idea. This will greatly exacerbate street congestion. Imagine rush hour, only all day long.
• jeffreygoesto 8y ago
  @Ex-PJ-FAs: Welcome back, loiter mode... =;-D Remember Chipotle lunch breaks...
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• ummonk 8y ago
  I mean, I’ve always wished I could just drop myself off and have my car go find parking (including driving farther away to where free parking is available)...
• mrnobody_67 8y ago
  The average car won the road has 1.1 occupants... with self driving cars there's an enormous risk this plummets dramatically, increasing traffic, slowing commutes, and making cities less livable.
• joemaller1 8y ago
  This is a fist stage solution. The second stage is that the vehicles wander off to find something useful to do. The entire idea of parking and parking lots can be eliminated with some clever pooling of resources and predictive modeling. The environmental benefits of replacing fields of asphalt and cement with greenery and open space will be huge.
  • kaybe 8y ago
    I wonder what kind of useful things the vehicles can come up with. Even when you don't consider a scenario where they become sort of sentient, if there was a method to make them offers and let them decide which ones to take.. might lead to interesting results.
    • joemaller1 8y ago
      this would be a welcome repurposing for ad-tech real-time bidding markets
• jessriedel 8y ago
  The obvious solution is to charge a small amount for road usage in places where roads are congested. This doesn't even have to apply to human driven cars if cities don't want it to (although it of course should for efficiency's sake). Self driving cars will need the ability to be pulled over by police, so at the least you can just give out big tickets to driverless cars that aren't paying the congestion fee when they are pulled over.
• dawhizkid 8y ago
  I still find it hilarious that perhaps the biggest threat to adoption of self-driving taxis in urban centers might be...electric scooters.
• air7 8y ago
  To me this seems like worrying about overpopulation on Mars (metaphor by Ng)
• calbear81 8y ago
  Do we consider self-driving cars "parked" or "loading" if it's parked in a yellow or white zone? The definition today seems to be if you have a human behind the wheel, you can generally squat for a bit as you're assumed to be loading but what about a self-driving car? How do we know it's not waiting to pick someone up vs. someone just double parked it there?
• alkonaut 8y ago
  No they won’t. If they are that clever they can work as taxis, go back to my house, or find a free parking outside the city. But more importantly, the second this happens, cities would switch their congestion charges to be by the hour instead of on entry. Cameras could be moved from city limits to being on every traffic light.
  • dTal 8y ago
    This is exactly what would happen, if only because congestion would spike as people used roads as moving parking spots. One way or another, the economic cost of doing this would normalize.
• cornellwright 8y ago
  This seems needlessly alarmist. If this is a problem it will get solved. It's probably not a big problem because: 1. Cars can go off and park somewhere further away. Cruising around the city isn't free (fuel, maintenance, risk of damage) 2. We should be able to get more density out of our existing parking lots if cars can park each other in and shuffle around to let each other out. 3. Cars can go do something more useful (run errands, work for ride share).
  • ProAm 8y ago
    > Cruising around the city isn't free (fuel, maintenance, risk of damage) Says this will cost about .50 an hour (USD) so quite affordable.
    • cornellwright 8y ago
      I would love it if it cost me only $0.50/hour to operate my car. Conservatively I'd go with more like $5/hour (assume 10mph average at $0.50 per mile). According to [1], median daily unreserved parking in SF is $29/day, so at 6 hours you break even. You can likely get much cheaper than this by driving a bit further away. Even at the $38 for New York and $42 for Honolulu you still break even around 8 hours. [1] https://investinganswers.com/articles/most-ridiculously-expensive-places-park-america https://investinganswers.com/articles/most-ridiculously-expe...
      • ProAm 8y ago
        Straight from the article: > "Even when you factor in electricity, depreciation, wear and tear, and maintenance, cruising costs about 50 cents an hour—that's cheaper than parking even in a small town," says Millard-Ball. "Unless it's free or cheaper than cruising, why would anyone use a remote lot?"
        • cornellwright 8y ago
          I don't have time to dig into it, but $0.50 seems like a wishfully low number.
• simplecomplex 8y ago
  How will flying cars drop people off? How will quantum teleporters avoid collisions?
• russfink 8y ago
  I think the problem is that most of us do not currently have chauffeurs; issues like this can be resolved by asking WWMCD (what would my chauffer do)? Likely, he/she (they) would drive up to a few miles away to a vacant parking lot and wait for your summons, rather than cruise around. If a police officer tapped on the glass, they would move onto another spot, perhaps go fuel up while waiting. By adapting ourselves to a future that has personal, automatic chauffeurs, we start to realize we no longer need proximity to our car. Parking is no longer a problem, costly parking garages are no longer necessary, parking meters disappear, ... it even gets to a point where entire metropolitan areas can "ban" parked cars, allowing all street space to be used for travel (no longer have to widen roads for more flow) and/or beautification/lower collected pollution. And since we have a chauffeur driving us, we can sleep or do work the car, meaning we can start our commutes much earlier / much more widely varied reducing "rush hour" congestion. We no longer have to leave work to pick up kids and take them to soccer practice - the car just does that for us. I have only scratched the surface. Just remember, WWMCD?
• throwaway66666 8y ago
  Hello, I am from the future. You will not be able to buy a self driving car. You will however be able to rent it, on an hour, minute, or per mile basis. Not too different from what you can do today with a lyft/uber. It will be "your car" only if you book it for let's say 3 full months. The very next day it will drive away on it's own. Max period of 'ownership' will be 6 months. This will be known as "THE FLEET SERVICE", and every major car manufacturer, car seller, and car renter will jump on it. Lyft will be competing with GM will be competing with hertz. There is so much more money to be made when one car is servicing many people, and when you pay for it non stop, or it plays ads to you during your commute. Records your schedule, destinations, music preferences, and unencrypted http traffic and sells it to advertisers. You can buy, sorry, rent the privacy X models, for a premium. Sometimes the cars will take different routes, to make sure you drive buy a starbucks, perhaps you will request it to stop to get a coffee. This will be advertised as a "learns your preferences and the things you love", but most of the time, it will just choose to slow down a bit when it drives by that huge billboard, you should really look at, while on the highway. Think of this like when comcast owns the router in your house, and makes it be a node for their xfinity service, and has you locked out of admin panel. Or when your ISP injects JS in the html served to you. Or for when you run serverless on amazon. Point being, there is more money to be made in a renter's market than an owner's market. You will, however be able to buy a semi-autonomous vehicle like you can do today, but fully autonomous will be prohibited, as the main companies will lobby with dumb excuses like "Who will be responsible in the case of a fatal accident? The company will be". Also, if you spend 150k to buy an autonomous model, and we update the service, your model gets no update and stops working in a year. The rented models always work. Governments will be against this, but will finally comply when law enforcement and tax agencies get free access to all information, though they will deny that is the case. Hackers and open source enthusiasts will "hack" some cars to modify them to run custom software (linux self driving distro), or install adblockers and location spoofers for privacy reasons. A practice that will instantly become illegal and be branded as domestic terrorism.
  • erdo 8y ago
    This is excellent :)
• pierrebai 8y ago
  So, we need an intelligent autonomous vehicule (i.e. you don't need to drive it) that will get you to work, but that you don't have to park. It should also increase traffic density and not sit idle while you work, but instead earn revenue while you work. Bravo, you just invented the public transit system.
• aaron695 8y ago
  I'm not going to spend $50,000 to have some random smelly chump use my car while I shop. And even if I get it to park remotely I'll still call it back early so I don't have to wait any time. There's something there but we'll solve it, work it out later. Boring might be running fulltime by then. It's also impossible to model we'll all possibly live hours out of town when transport and delivery is free and easy
• gnopgnip 8y ago
  Many small cities have laws against cruising already. A $100+ fine for driving around the block twice within a certain amount of time.
• gesman 8y ago
  They can also be AI-trained to park in a closest spot and then peacefully leave at a first sight of enforcement. Such information can be sent to other self-driving cars from "nearby" self driving cars :)
• outside1234 8y ago
  This article is assuming most people will own cars. I think its highly likely that when we get to this level of autonomous driving that its most likely that someone like Ford or Telsa will operate fleets with enough coverage that most people will opt for pay when you want one. So when you are done with the use of the car, it just goes back into the fleet, and onwards to the next passenger. Imagine not actually having to choose a car type but being able to use a commuter 99% and an SUV for the 1 ski trip a year, and a minivan for a night out on the town with lots of friends. This is going to drive people towards a fleet approach - its just plain a better fit for their needs.
• dfilppi 8y ago
  Kind of begs the question: why would parking exist in such a world?
• amelius 8y ago
  I'm looking forward to an RV that will drive me around SV while I sleep to avoid insane housing costs.
• cbdumas 8y ago
  It seems that most commenters here didn't read the article. The root of the problem is that the cost to use space in the street is zero everywhere, while the cost to park off the street is (to some degree, usually) driven by demand. That is, high demand areas (downtown, near retail, etc.) have high parking fees buy they have NO fees to use the street. This doesn't make any sense, and it sets up an incentive to cruise over parking. This incentive exists today even without autonomous cars, the only difference is that "cruising" with a human driver always has the additional cost of a humans time. The fix presented in the article is properly pricing the use of the street.
• socrates1998 8y ago
  There a multitude of easy fixes for this. I believe in London if you drive into the center, you have to pay a road fee or something like that. Seems to me that this would fix the issue. Also, I think that self-driving cars will have people sharing cars rather than owning one themselves, this will lead to fewer cars being owned overall, but not necessarily leading to less traffic since when you own a car it mostly just sits in your parking space. Fewer cars means that those self-driving cars will probably be always on the road, which won't lead to any traffic savings.
  • chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    That's the congestion pricing that the article was talking about.
  • erdo 8y ago
    At the moment it's a bit if a blunt instrument as you pay it once, then can drive around as much as you like for that day
  • tomjen3 8y ago
    Honestly I don't see it as a problem, because the cars will drive a little further away to avoid having to run all the time, and I can just request my car to drive back to me when I am about to pay. In the places where I live, 5 minutes of driving means no-cost parking, as opposed to expensive parking; most likely it will be more effective to be able to use the parking that is a bit further away more effectively. And should I go somewhere to e.g see a movie or eat at a restaurant, the car can park so far away that there will be plenty of space for manual cars.
• Animats 8y ago
  Another self-driving car non-problem, like the trolley problem. This is what happens when academics with too much free time ("Adam Millard-Ball, associate professor of environmental studies") start pontificating on the subject. The big problems with self driving cars are 1) too many "fake it til you make it" people involved, 2) the good sensors cost too much, 3) machine learning vision isn't reliable enough at identifying objects, and 4) crap designs that make very optimistic assumptions about roads, rather than doing full ground profiling.
• erdo 8y ago
  How about making it illegal for an autonomous car to contain no people when it's moving? (With licenced exemptions where necessary) I know that might sound stupid, but what kind of world are we planning here... One where old people, drunk people, blind people, tired people, children, or those without a licence, can get exactly where they are going? Or one where we can sack all the delivery and taxi drivers? Because if it's just the second, then self driving cars are significantly less interesting for me. For most cities self driving cars are not going to be better from an environmental / congestion perspective than properly funded public transport.
• Animats 8y ago
  Meanwhile, China has self-driving suitcases.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW-QMhkt6_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW-QMhkt6_8
• trumped 8y ago
  false... when self driving cars will become popular, nobody will own a car and you will just walk out to catch onE. It will saves tons of resourses
• AceyMan 8y ago
  Busses don't stop. Busses don't park (except for overnight). Great, SV Unicorns — you've successfully invented an electric bus with seating for four. /s
• towaway1138 8y ago
  Somewhat related, I've often thought of getting a few buddies together, finding a smallish roundabout, and doing a DOS on it for an hour or two...
• davesque 8y ago
  Cruising would really be cheaper than just parking? Maybe in NYC, SF, and places like that. For the other 99% of the world, I have a hard time believing it.
• laingc 8y ago
  I - and everyone I know - would not even remotely consider allowing my self-driving car to be rented out to other people while I’m not using it, let alone deliver meals or similar. Here are some of the many perks of having a car, currently: 1) It’s there when I need it. 2) I can leave my stuff in it if I want to. 3) I don’t have to share it with anyone else. 4) There is no dirt, mess, bad smells, damage, or other discomfort that I myself am not responsible for. One of the main advantages of owning my own car is that I can then exclude other people from using it. Now either I and everyone I know across hemispheres, continents, and cultures are weird exceptions to the vast majority of humanity (possible), or Bay-Area-Dwelling commenters on Hacker News are outliers in the way they feel about transport.
• mud_dauber 8y ago
  You know what this sounds like? A fine-grained subway system. And I'm good with it.