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Let's assume you have two levers. One of these levers is to quadruple road capacity through new roads. The other is to quadruple road capacity through driverl

Let's assume you have two levers. One of these levers is to quadruple road capacity through new roads. The other is to quadruple road capacity through driverless cars with perfect routing efficiency. What do these have in common? First: they are still massively wasteful of space. Moreso with a driverless car, which is going to be able to avoid having to find a parking spot nearby. Second: induced demand. Double capacity, triple, quadruple, it doesn't matter. It will return to the "barely works" equilibrium in short order, except you'll have further lashed yourself to a wasteful mode of transport. I recognise cars have unique utility and that driverless cars will enhance that utility. But for mass people movement, a train is the clear leader, followed by a bus in a dedicated lane. As the world becomes increasingly urbanised that will only grow more important.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Lever 1 is impossible in big cities unless you want to raze hundreds of buildings and/or build big stacks of bridges with only a bit less razing. (And tunnels are even less of a possibility than stacked roadways.) It's harder than just providing parking space for the cars and there are problems with that.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  Agreed. My point was that folks predicting the Self Driving Singularity set great store by efficiency gains, but that these are in meaningful terms the same as capacity gains. Whether we increase the number of cars on the road by packing them tighter or adding roads doesn't matter. Any gains are quickly consumed.
yellowapple 7y ago
> Moreso with a driverless car, which is going to be able to avoid having to find a parking spot nearby. Only if wasting energy is acceptable. Loafing about doing loops around the owner will very quickly be more costly in terms of energy expenditure (plus opportunity cost of "now I have less energy to go to my next destination") than parking for awhile, especially if we get to a point where every parking space is capable of EV charging (which is exactly the direction in which I'd like to see the world gravitate, since that'll significantly alleviate the problems with EV range relative to ICE). Thus, I'm far from convinced that this will ever actually be a significant problem. Only way the "perpetually-circling autonomous vehicle" problem would be realistic is if we lived in some Nikola-Tesla-esque utopia where wireless electricity is abundant and constantly charging cars as they drive (or maybe if it's a sunny day and solar tech gets advanced enough to be able to meaningfully power a car on solar power alone).
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  What I was driving at was that people will expect their car to drive away after rush hour (meaning 4 trips, not 2, per day). And they will expect it to come early and loiter near their workplace, which usually won't mean parking or stopping. So to recap: the car is used twice as much and yes, does laps of the block while waiting to pick you up.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Right, but the longer it's loitering, the more fuel and/or battery it's wasting. Likewise, the further "away" it drives, the more fuel and/or battery it's wasting. The ideal will always be for it to park (or better yet: charge) as soon and as close as possible, and to delay "unparking" and departing for pickup until as late as possible. It's possible that some people will want to subvert that somewhat (i.e. "please park at this specific parking garage instead of the closest" or "please loiter for a couple minutes and wait for me"), but - again - I ain't convinced those will actually amount to a significant traffic impact. EDIT: as another bonus, self-driving cars don't have to worry about whether or not the driver can get in/out during these "wait for my owner to need me again" periods, so they can park in much tighter parking spaces while they wait.

AstralStorm 7y ago

Lever 1 is impossible in big cities unless you want to raze hundreds of buildings and/or build big stacks of bridges with only a bit less razing. (And tunnels are even less of a possibility than stacked roadways.) It's harder than just providing parking space for the cars and there are problems with that.

jacques_chester 7y ago
Agreed. My point was that folks predicting the Self Driving Singularity set great store by efficiency gains, but that these are in meaningful terms the same as capacity gains. Whether we increase the number of cars on the road by packing them tighter or adding roads doesn't matter. Any gains are quickly consumed.

yellowapple 7y ago

> Moreso with a driverless car, which is going to be able to avoid having to find a parking spot nearby. Only if wasting energy is acceptable. Loafing about doing loops around the owner will very quickly be more costly in terms of energy expenditure (plus opportunity cost of "now I have less energy to go to my next destination") than parking for awhile, especially if we get to a point where every parking space is capable of EV charging (which is exactly the direction in which I'd like to see the world gravitate, since that'll significantly alleviate the problems with EV range relative to ICE). Thus, I'm far from convinced that this will ever actually be a significant problem. Only way the "perpetually-circling autonomous vehicle" problem would be realistic is if we lived in some Nikola-Tesla-esque utopia where wireless electricity is abundant and constantly charging cars as they drive (or maybe if it's a sunny day and solar tech gets advanced enough to be able to meaningfully power a car on solar power alone).

jacques_chester 7y ago
What I was driving at was that people will expect their car to drive away after rush hour (meaning 4 trips, not 2, per day). And they will expect it to come early and loiter near their workplace, which usually won't mean parking or stopping. So to recap: the car is used twice as much and yes, does laps of the block while waiting to pick you up.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Right, but the longer it's loitering, the more fuel and/or battery it's wasting. Likewise, the further "away" it drives, the more fuel and/or battery it's wasting. The ideal will always be for it to park (or better yet: charge) as soon and as close as possible, and to delay "unparking" and departing for pickup until as late as possible. It's possible that some people will want to subvert that somewhat (i.e. "please park at this specific parking garage instead of the closest" or "please loiter for a couple minutes and wait for me"), but - again - I ain't convinced those will actually amount to a significant traffic impact. EDIT: as another bonus, self-driving cars don't have to worry about whether or not the driver can get in/out during these "wait for my owner to need me again" periods, so they can park in much tighter parking spaces while they wait.