22 ms·

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 co

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.
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        Humans care about trip latency, but there are different components. One person walking five minutes to a designated corridor may save ten people on a minibus three minutes on their trip each by avoiding unnecessary diversion. And this can add up quite a bit depending on how many passengers you are avoiding diverting for. There's a reason why (good) bus lines tend to be direct and on main roads. The main reason why non-dense places don't see good bus service is because of labor costs. In developed countries labor is easily the biggest source of cost when it comes to a bus, so agencies will run one 40-passenger bus every half hour rather than three 15-passenger buses every ten minutes. Removing labor makes the latter scenario affordable, and if buses are coming every ten minutes average wait time is about five minutes, which is comparable to Lyft or Uber today in some places.
      - tomjen3 8y ago
        We are used to busses going at set times from set positions. Why can't I request a $STARTUP ride from A to B, at about 30 minutes from now and let them try to calculate a route based on who else is going now? You could run that when you get out of bed and see what comes up, so that by the time you had showered it would be clear when you could go and then you could make the go/no-go decision. I mean today it is a no-go decision from be, simply because it takes a minimum of twice as long to go to work by bus as by my car, but with a smarter route, that may not be an issue.
    - smogcutter 8y ago
      How is that different than just... taking the bus?
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        Lack of pre-defined and centrally-planned route.
        bobthepanda 8y ago
        Is that a good thing, though? In practice the lack of a pre-planned schedule means that rideshare vehicles have to divert to get to you, being as much as 10-15 minutes away, which is not much better than just waiting for a bus.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Quickly catching a bus that isn't going where I want to go isn't ideal either.
        untog 8y ago
        That doesn't seem like a positive. People like predictability. They know their drive home takes X minutes, give or take Y, which is a small number. Having a different route every day makes the value of Y a lot more variable.
        eesmith 8y ago
        There's another aspect to "predictability." Back when I was a bus commuter, it was comforting to see the same faces every day. Even without chatting or acknowledging each other, there was a sort of familiarity to the strangers.
      - dmortin 8y ago
        It can pick you up at your house.
      - pavon 8y ago
  - pm24601 8y ago
    > Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale Like busses and trains? Seriously. Public transit. The issue is a geometric one. There is only a fixed road capacity. Consuming that road capacity with deadheading vehicles is the worst usage.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      Public transit has other significant drawbacks. IE, it can't go point to point, and is instead stuck in a movement pattern that isn't changing.
      - VintageCool 8y ago
        A self-driving taxi might help that a lot. Call up a self-driving uber to take you from your home to the nearest train station, and take the light rail into downtown. I think it would be feasible for the self-driving taxi companies to have a small fleet of cars in each neighborhood that could respond rapidly to take people for short trips.
        stale2002 8y ago
        That would still significantly increase commute times. By definition, public transit can only serve a specific segment of the commuting population.
      - scarmig 8y ago
        > IE, it can't go point to point, and is instead stuck in a movement pattern that isn't changing. That's not inherent to public transport. You can easily imagine a public network of bus transit where users send in a request for transit an hour or two beforehand; software coalesces the set of requests into a dynamic set of routes and stops; and tells the user to turn up at a stop (relatively) near the origination point and drops them off at a stop (relatively) near their destination point. Whether it's economic or feasible is a separate issue. But funding mechanism, transport form factor, and autonomy are all distinct parts of a transportation method, and it's a mistake to think of "private autonomous cars" as competing with "legacy human-driven buses with set routes."
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale, as Uber/Lyft pool is already demonstrating. Links? I haven't found any way to practically share Lyfts for long-ish trips. I don't see any evidence Lyft or Uber will ever do much with shared-rides. For self-driving cars, people wanting to save money will drive their own cars before they share rides. If you have a car, you've sunk a lot of money into it and so the per-ride cost is fairly small. Even a self-driving car has to price-in wear-and-tear.
    - swiley 8y ago
      It's a shame, that would probably solve a lot of their problems with the ratting system.
misterpigs 8y ago
I like this future.
tropo 8y ago
I would have mine continuously drive around the block. Another option is to have the car drive out into the suburbs in search of free parking to abuse. For a family, the car would drive home to be available for other users. Each trip thus turns into two trips, one to drop a person off and another to pick a person up. The ride service model doesn't work except for the people already tolerating ride services. Lots of us want to keep our junk in our cars. We haul around our snacks, spare shoes, and raingear. Our cars might get dirty, but at least it's our own filth, not a puddle of a stranger's vomit.
- emiliobumachar 8y ago
  You can presumably still keep your own car even if everyone else is renting one for each single trip. It won't make sense financially, but it won't be more expensive than today. It will be more clearly a leisure expense, as in, you'll know which part is your transportation cost and which part is the extra you choose to pay for keeping your junk and having the filth be your own. Who knows, it may be a fairly popular alternative. I certainly value those things, just not enough to pay thousands of dollars extra for them.
  - Consultant32452 8y ago
    The car as a service option won't be the solution for most families, because they have a lot of nonhuman cargo they need to store in their car: strollers, diaper bags, sporting equipment, etc.
    - emiliobumachar 8y ago
      I agree that families with small children have a need for car-as-storage, but that passes after a couple years (per child). I'm not so sure about sports. For hardcore athletes, then yeah. But for your weekly biking or skiing or surfing trip, the equipment can be hauled on and off larger car-as-service's hired for the purpose. The rest of the time, store the equipment in a fraction of the space you would use to store a car with the equipment in. Disclaimer: I was never a regular in any big-equipment sports. If I'm wrong, well, like I said owning a car might still be fairly popular when they self-drive.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
docbrown 8y ago
There was recently a segment on NPR with a researcher for future automation. I’ll try to dig up a link but he made the opposite point of you. He claimed self-driving cars will give us more traffic but it will be much more efficient thanks to software. The lanes would be able to get shrunk from 12ft to 6ft due to better control and by doing that, you’re now able to possibly double your available lanes on a single road for the increase in cars.
- Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
  No, let’s use the 6ft freed up for a protected bike lane.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    a sibling comment is imagining a future where automated cars will be so good (and pervasive) that we no longer design cars to survive catastrophic crashes and can build them in any size, down to a single seat. I am going to take it a step further and say that lanes will become obsolete at this point, and we just pack them together as close as allowed by width. in this vision for the future, is it still necessary to chisel out 6ft on every surface street for humans to ride self-propelled bicycles?
- dmortin 8y ago
  There can be single passenger cars too instead of the current 4-5 seaters, which will take up less space than current cars.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    good luck passing the crash tests
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      The crash test standards are passed by humans. If we get to a point where self-driving has dramatically (>95%) reduced crashes, crashworthiness becomes less of a pressing issue and we may be well advised to reduce the standards. (I'm fairly bearish on the prospects/likelihood of self-driving cars in my lifetime, but that's orthogonal to the point above. If they exist, we might not need to build mini-tanks anymore.)
skybrian 8y ago
There are different parking problems. For example, today we can have a long line of taxis waiting for people to arrive at an airport. I suspect these are more easily solvable since there is more flexibility about parking spots (the cars don't need to be within walking distance and only a few need to be close by). But there will still be idle cars that need to be put somewhere during off-peak times.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  Why would self driving taxis behave different than human driven taxis? I mean, the same argument (cars don't need to be in walking distance) applies to taxis whether a human drives it or a computer?
  - briandear 8y ago
    Yes. I drove a taxi for a time during college and I remember drivers would camp at the airport for hours to get a $100 trip but would resent “short trips” despite you actually making more money on multiple short trips than a single airport run. Many of those drivers would use the airport wait time to take a shower, play poker, socialize, sleep. (For those not familiar, taxis at major airports wait in a slow moving off-site queue before you actually ever see them arrive at the terminals; that off-site often resembles a third-world village with everything from laundry, food vendors, ping pong, etc.) Drivers line up their cars, and they do their thing, returning to the vehicle from time to time to move it forward in the queue. Autonomous vehicle “drivers” don’t need to shower, use the bathroom, eat or sleep, so instead they can be constantly moving rather than camping at airports. A car in motion is generating revenue, so I think autonomous taxis would be fewer in number than human taxis as well as behaving in revenue-optimizing ways (i.e. not camping at the airport.) Theoretically, those airport taxi villages would likely turn into charging stations with a few employees to provide necessary services.
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      > A car in motion is generating revenue Not necessarily. A lot of the self-driving taxi utopia is based on the idea that self-driving taxis will serve commuter traffic. And the major facet of commuter traffic is that you're going to have a high-volume, unidirectional traffic flow--once that car drops off its worker, there is no demand for it make any trips nearby. So if that car is in motion, it's still not carrying anybody, so it's not generating revenue.
henvic 8y ago
I imagine that on a more free market economy probably Ubers would have QR codes, username handles, or some other way for you to just scan your phone (or type a code) near the door of the ride-sharing vehicle and the driver agree to the ride in the spot. This would be very nice to reduce queues and traffic at airports or other agglomeration places. It just doesn't make sense to wait 5-10min at a large airport like SFO, JFK, LAX, or ATL for a Uber ride while you see just many people being dropped off in front of you. This only happens thanks to the taxi monopoly. It'd be better for everyone if you could just walk in any car in these scenarios.
pm24601 8y ago
Taxis do park. (Hotels, airports, train stations) Not parking means excess capacity is creating traffic jams. So to avoid paying for storage, self driving cars are going to consume energy and space in travel lanes.... cities should charge the f out this.
walshemj 8y ago
No its just what really rich people used to do in London have an employee drive their car around the block when the traffic wardens showed up. The partners at one place I worked at in London did this.
greedo 8y ago
I remember when movies first started coming out on VHS and Beta (yes I'm that old). The video store that quickly popped up in my town quickly realized that renting a VHS player would help with sales and rentals; costing something like $10 a day (with 1 movie rental included). The problem was that they only had 10 players, so that if you didn't reserve one ahead of time, you were playing the lottery on high demand days. On weekdays there were plenty of players available, but on Fri/Sat nights it was crazy. The owner didn't have enough capitol to have players idle on the slow nights, so the problem wasn't resolved until everyone who could, bought their own player. I see the same issue happening with any ride service model. Unless some part of it is being subsidized, I find it hard to see how a company will be able to have enough capacity for peak demand while not wasting a ton of capital. And if people have issues with getting a ride service, they'll buy their own, further complicating the profitability margins of ride service companies.
- mjamesaustin 8y ago
  Same way as Uber and Lyft do it – they charge demand pricing.
  - cfmcdonald 8y ago
    In which case no one with a limited budget (i.e. most people) is going to rely on this for commuting.
- epicide 8y ago
  The big difference is that existing ride sharing and driverless ride sharing are compatible with each other. Ride sharing companies can slowly increase their number of driverless vehicles as it makes financial sense for them. Even if they only need them one or two days a week, there is still a balance that can be struck and that balance should increase over time as more people continue to utilize ride sharing services.
  - tkahnoski 8y ago
    Even further a self-driving car can relocate itself to meet ad-hoc demand. This means privately owned vehicles (assuming they are self-driving) could be enlisted to service this additional demand. Most vehicles sit idle in a parking lot but could be doing meaningful work. (Queue SitCom script where someone tries to leave a party but forgot to turn off the feature and their car won't be back for 30 minutes...)
joe_the_user 8y ago
The existence of self-driving cars isn't going suddenly dematerialize existing automobiles. It would be, at the least, a long transition process for everyone to switch. Not only do many people have significant capital sunk into their cars but a lot of people would have trouble affording the cost of using a self-driving taxi and some number of others would simply object for whatever reason. Moreover, maintaining a car and using a self-driving taxi is even more expensive - cars sitting around still decay and require maintenance as well as insurance.
pfortuny 8y ago
The driveway... That nust be a different planet than the one I live in.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
fluxem 8y ago
Most of the people go to work around the same time. Additionally, people most go in the same direction. Therefore, self driving car won't be able to serve 10 commuters per day. 2-3 is the max. I suspect, most of owned cars are used to drive to work. So, I don't see how self driving taxi/sharing will solve commuting issue and therefore, owning a car will be still popular.
- francisofascii 8y ago
  If people are going at the same time in the same direction, then take more than one person.
  - secabeen 8y ago
    Now you're heading home. There are 4 people in the car. Who gets dropped off first? My carpool partner lives less than a mile from me. It still takes almost 10 minutes to divert and drop her off. If you're the last drop off, you lose 60 minutes a day to these drop-offs and pickups.
    - tomjakubowski 8y ago
      A problem that doesn't exist in a high frequency mass transit system with lots of transfer options!
babuskov 8y ago
> 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. Maybe we'll have a AirBnB type of service where you would rent your self-driving car to others from 9 to 4 and the "AirBnB car" company would make sure it goes where there's demand. This way people owning the cars are still sure to have their own ride even when there's high demand.
- 14 8y ago
  I could not even imagine the headache of such a system. For example, I drive what I like to call beater cars. They are paid for fully in cash and generally are not worth more then a couple thousand if that and we are talking Canadian dollars. I like this because I have kids and they are hard on my car and I am also hard on my car. I like to eat in my car as I work in the community and do a lot of driving around so often grab food to go and park and eat. I have spilled countless times despite my best intentions. I have had a bottle of soap leak on my floor not realizing somewhere from the till to car the cap flipped up. I have had a kid fall asleep in the back and pee their pants. Coffee down the dash. Found old fruit under kids seats. You name it. It will be a big headache if you get some kid who rideshares with his mom in your autonomous car while you work that pees all over your seat. Or tracks mud in. Or pukes. Or every other thing I would like to not deal with. I just have a hard time seeing how we get past all that without some insurance covering issues like these.

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.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      Humans care about trip latency, but there are different components. One person walking five minutes to a designated corridor may save ten people on a minibus three minutes on their trip each by avoiding unnecessary diversion. And this can add up quite a bit depending on how many passengers you are avoiding diverting for. There's a reason why (good) bus lines tend to be direct and on main roads. The main reason why non-dense places don't see good bus service is because of labor costs. In developed countries labor is easily the biggest source of cost when it comes to a bus, so agencies will run one 40-passenger bus every half hour rather than three 15-passenger buses every ten minutes. Removing labor makes the latter scenario affordable, and if buses are coming every ten minutes average wait time is about five minutes, which is comparable to Lyft or Uber today in some places.
    - tomjen3 8y ago
      We are used to busses going at set times from set positions. Why can't I request a $STARTUP ride from A to B, at about 30 minutes from now and let them try to calculate a route based on who else is going now? You could run that when you get out of bed and see what comes up, so that by the time you had showered it would be clear when you could go and then you could make the go/no-go decision. I mean today it is a no-go decision from be, simply because it takes a minimum of twice as long to go to work by bus as by my car, but with a smarter route, that may not be an issue.
  - smogcutter 8y ago
    How is that different than just... taking the bus?
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      Lack of pre-defined and centrally-planned route.
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        Is that a good thing, though? In practice the lack of a pre-planned schedule means that rideshare vehicles have to divert to get to you, being as much as 10-15 minutes away, which is not much better than just waiting for a bus.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Quickly catching a bus that isn't going where I want to go isn't ideal either.
      - untog 8y ago
        That doesn't seem like a positive. People like predictability. They know their drive home takes X minutes, give or take Y, which is a small number. Having a different route every day makes the value of Y a lot more variable.
        eesmith 8y ago
        There's another aspect to "predictability." Back when I was a bus commuter, it was comforting to see the same faces every day. Even without chatting or acknowledging each other, there was a sort of familiarity to the strangers.
    - dmortin 8y ago
      It can pick you up at your house.
    - pavon 8y ago
- pm24601 8y ago
  > Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale Like busses and trains? Seriously. Public transit. The issue is a geometric one. There is only a fixed road capacity. Consuming that road capacity with deadheading vehicles is the worst usage.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    Public transit has other significant drawbacks. IE, it can't go point to point, and is instead stuck in a movement pattern that isn't changing.
    - VintageCool 8y ago
      A self-driving taxi might help that a lot. Call up a self-driving uber to take you from your home to the nearest train station, and take the light rail into downtown. I think it would be feasible for the self-driving taxi companies to have a small fleet of cars in each neighborhood that could respond rapidly to take people for short trips.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        That would still significantly increase commute times. By definition, public transit can only serve a specific segment of the commuting population.
    - scarmig 8y ago
      > IE, it can't go point to point, and is instead stuck in a movement pattern that isn't changing. That's not inherent to public transport. You can easily imagine a public network of bus transit where users send in a request for transit an hour or two beforehand; software coalesces the set of requests into a dynamic set of routes and stops; and tells the user to turn up at a stop (relatively) near the origination point and drops them off at a stop (relatively) near their destination point. Whether it's economic or feasible is a separate issue. But funding mechanism, transport form factor, and autonomy are all distinct parts of a transportation method, and it's a mistake to think of "private autonomous cars" as competing with "legacy human-driven buses with set routes."
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale, as Uber/Lyft pool is already demonstrating. Links? I haven't found any way to practically share Lyfts for long-ish trips. I don't see any evidence Lyft or Uber will ever do much with shared-rides. For self-driving cars, people wanting to save money will drive their own cars before they share rides. If you have a car, you've sunk a lot of money into it and so the per-ride cost is fairly small. Even a self-driving car has to price-in wear-and-tear.
  - swiley 8y ago
    It's a shame, that would probably solve a lot of their problems with the ratting system.

misterpigs 8y ago

I like this future.

tropo 8y ago

I would have mine continuously drive around the block. Another option is to have the car drive out into the suburbs in search of free parking to abuse. For a family, the car would drive home to be available for other users. Each trip thus turns into two trips, one to drop a person off and another to pick a person up. The ride service model doesn't work except for the people already tolerating ride services. Lots of us want to keep our junk in our cars. We haul around our snacks, spare shoes, and raingear. Our cars might get dirty, but at least it's our own filth, not a puddle of a stranger's vomit.

emiliobumachar 8y ago
You can presumably still keep your own car even if everyone else is renting one for each single trip. It won't make sense financially, but it won't be more expensive than today. It will be more clearly a leisure expense, as in, you'll know which part is your transportation cost and which part is the extra you choose to pay for keeping your junk and having the filth be your own. Who knows, it may be a fairly popular alternative. I certainly value those things, just not enough to pay thousands of dollars extra for them.
- Consultant32452 8y ago
  The car as a service option won't be the solution for most families, because they have a lot of nonhuman cargo they need to store in their car: strollers, diaper bags, sporting equipment, etc.
  - emiliobumachar 8y ago
    I agree that families with small children have a need for car-as-storage, but that passes after a couple years (per child). I'm not so sure about sports. For hardcore athletes, then yeah. But for your weekly biking or skiing or surfing trip, the equipment can be hauled on and off larger car-as-service's hired for the purpose. The rest of the time, store the equipment in a fraction of the space you would use to store a car with the equipment in. Disclaimer: I was never a regular in any big-equipment sports. If I'm wrong, well, like I said owning a car might still be fairly popular when they self-drive.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

docbrown 8y ago

There was recently a segment on NPR with a researcher for future automation. I’ll try to dig up a link but he made the opposite point of you. He claimed self-driving cars will give us more traffic but it will be much more efficient thanks to software. The lanes would be able to get shrunk from 12ft to 6ft due to better control and by doing that, you’re now able to possibly double your available lanes on a single road for the increase in cars.

Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
No, let’s use the 6ft freed up for a protected bike lane.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  a sibling comment is imagining a future where automated cars will be so good (and pervasive) that we no longer design cars to survive catastrophic crashes and can build them in any size, down to a single seat. I am going to take it a step further and say that lanes will become obsolete at this point, and we just pack them together as close as allowed by width. in this vision for the future, is it still necessary to chisel out 6ft on every surface street for humans to ride self-propelled bicycles?
dmortin 8y ago
There can be single passenger cars too instead of the current 4-5 seaters, which will take up less space than current cars.
- walshemj 8y ago
  good luck passing the crash tests
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    The crash test standards are passed by humans. If we get to a point where self-driving has dramatically (>95%) reduced crashes, crashworthiness becomes less of a pressing issue and we may be well advised to reduce the standards. (I'm fairly bearish on the prospects/likelihood of self-driving cars in my lifetime, but that's orthogonal to the point above. If they exist, we might not need to build mini-tanks anymore.)

skybrian 8y ago

There are different parking problems. For example, today we can have a long line of taxis waiting for people to arrive at an airport. I suspect these are more easily solvable since there is more flexibility about parking spots (the cars don't need to be within walking distance and only a few need to be close by). But there will still be idle cars that need to be put somewhere during off-peak times.

jakobegger 8y ago
Why would self driving taxis behave different than human driven taxis? I mean, the same argument (cars don't need to be in walking distance) applies to taxis whether a human drives it or a computer?
- briandear 8y ago
  Yes. I drove a taxi for a time during college and I remember drivers would camp at the airport for hours to get a $100 trip but would resent “short trips” despite you actually making more money on multiple short trips than a single airport run. Many of those drivers would use the airport wait time to take a shower, play poker, socialize, sleep. (For those not familiar, taxis at major airports wait in a slow moving off-site queue before you actually ever see them arrive at the terminals; that off-site often resembles a third-world village with everything from laundry, food vendors, ping pong, etc.) Drivers line up their cars, and they do their thing, returning to the vehicle from time to time to move it forward in the queue. Autonomous vehicle “drivers” don’t need to shower, use the bathroom, eat or sleep, so instead they can be constantly moving rather than camping at airports. A car in motion is generating revenue, so I think autonomous taxis would be fewer in number than human taxis as well as behaving in revenue-optimizing ways (i.e. not camping at the airport.) Theoretically, those airport taxi villages would likely turn into charging stations with a few employees to provide necessary services.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    > A car in motion is generating revenue Not necessarily. A lot of the self-driving taxi utopia is based on the idea that self-driving taxis will serve commuter traffic. And the major facet of commuter traffic is that you're going to have a high-volume, unidirectional traffic flow--once that car drops off its worker, there is no demand for it make any trips nearby. So if that car is in motion, it's still not carrying anybody, so it's not generating revenue.

henvic 8y ago

I imagine that on a more free market economy probably Ubers would have QR codes, username handles, or some other way for you to just scan your phone (or type a code) near the door of the ride-sharing vehicle and the driver agree to the ride in the spot. This would be very nice to reduce queues and traffic at airports or other agglomeration places. It just doesn't make sense to wait 5-10min at a large airport like SFO, JFK, LAX, or ATL for a Uber ride while you see just many people being dropped off in front of you. This only happens thanks to the taxi monopoly. It'd be better for everyone if you could just walk in any car in these scenarios.

pm24601 8y ago

Taxis do park. (Hotels, airports, train stations) Not parking means excess capacity is creating traffic jams. So to avoid paying for storage, self driving cars are going to consume energy and space in travel lanes.... cities should charge the f out this.

walshemj 8y ago

No its just what really rich people used to do in London have an employee drive their car around the block when the traffic wardens showed up. The partners at one place I worked at in London did this.

greedo 8y ago

I remember when movies first started coming out on VHS and Beta (yes I'm that old). The video store that quickly popped up in my town quickly realized that renting a VHS player would help with sales and rentals; costing something like $10 a day (with 1 movie rental included). The problem was that they only had 10 players, so that if you didn't reserve one ahead of time, you were playing the lottery on high demand days. On weekdays there were plenty of players available, but on Fri/Sat nights it was crazy. The owner didn't have enough capitol to have players idle on the slow nights, so the problem wasn't resolved until everyone who could, bought their own player. I see the same issue happening with any ride service model. Unless some part of it is being subsidized, I find it hard to see how a company will be able to have enough capacity for peak demand while not wasting a ton of capital. And if people have issues with getting a ride service, they'll buy their own, further complicating the profitability margins of ride service companies.

mjamesaustin 8y ago
Same way as Uber and Lyft do it – they charge demand pricing.
- cfmcdonald 8y ago
  In which case no one with a limited budget (i.e. most people) is going to rely on this for commuting.
epicide 8y ago
The big difference is that existing ride sharing and driverless ride sharing are compatible with each other. Ride sharing companies can slowly increase their number of driverless vehicles as it makes financial sense for them. Even if they only need them one or two days a week, there is still a balance that can be struck and that balance should increase over time as more people continue to utilize ride sharing services.
- tkahnoski 8y ago
  Even further a self-driving car can relocate itself to meet ad-hoc demand. This means privately owned vehicles (assuming they are self-driving) could be enlisted to service this additional demand. Most vehicles sit idle in a parking lot but could be doing meaningful work. (Queue SitCom script where someone tries to leave a party but forgot to turn off the feature and their car won't be back for 30 minutes...)

joe_the_user 8y ago

The existence of self-driving cars isn't going suddenly dematerialize existing automobiles. It would be, at the least, a long transition process for everyone to switch. Not only do many people have significant capital sunk into their cars but a lot of people would have trouble affording the cost of using a self-driving taxi and some number of others would simply object for whatever reason. Moreover, maintaining a car and using a self-driving taxi is even more expensive - cars sitting around still decay and require maintenance as well as insurance.

pfortuny 8y ago

The driveway... That nust be a different planet than the one I live in.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

fluxem 8y ago

Most of the people go to work around the same time. Additionally, people most go in the same direction. Therefore, self driving car won't be able to serve 10 commuters per day. 2-3 is the max. I suspect, most of owned cars are used to drive to work. So, I don't see how self driving taxi/sharing will solve commuting issue and therefore, owning a car will be still popular.

francisofascii 8y ago
If people are going at the same time in the same direction, then take more than one person.
- secabeen 8y ago
  Now you're heading home. There are 4 people in the car. Who gets dropped off first? My carpool partner lives less than a mile from me. It still takes almost 10 minutes to divert and drop her off. If you're the last drop off, you lose 60 minutes a day to these drop-offs and pickups.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    A problem that doesn't exist in a high frequency mass transit system with lots of transfer options!

babuskov 8y ago

> 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. Maybe we'll have a AirBnB type of service where you would rent your self-driving car to others from 9 to 4 and the "AirBnB car" company would make sure it goes where there's demand. This way people owning the cars are still sure to have their own ride even when there's high demand.

14 8y ago
I could not even imagine the headache of such a system. For example, I drive what I like to call beater cars. They are paid for fully in cash and generally are not worth more then a couple thousand if that and we are talking Canadian dollars. I like this because I have kids and they are hard on my car and I am also hard on my car. I like to eat in my car as I work in the community and do a lot of driving around so often grab food to go and park and eat. I have spilled countless times despite my best intentions. I have had a bottle of soap leak on my floor not realizing somewhere from the till to car the cap flipped up. I have had a kid fall asleep in the back and pee their pants. Coffee down the dash. Found old fruit under kids seats. You name it. It will be a big headache if you get some kid who rideshares with his mom in your autonomous car while you work that pees all over your seat. Or tracks mud in. Or pukes. Or every other thing I would like to not deal with. I just have a hard time seeing how we get past all that without some insurance covering issues like these.