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> Self-driving cars are going trigger a new wave of automobile growth, at least in the US. They won't be dangerous, will run clean, be super convenient and unbe

> Self-driving cars are going trigger a new wave of automobile growth, at least in the US. They won't be dangerous, will run clean, be super convenient and unbelievably inexpensive to own and operate. My guess is that you are wrong. At least what comes to driving in cities. As the (current) main problem of cars in cities is not accidents, emissions, lack of convenience or even cost. It is the massive amount of space one car takes[1]. And self driving tech is not going to do anything to solve that. If not the opposite, when empty cars are driving around looking for a parking spot. [1] https://permaculturenews.org/images/bus_car_bike_compare.jpg https://permaculturenews.org/images/bus_car_bike_compare.jpg

darksaints 7y ago
I think it's going to be far worse than that. The economics of self driving cars are so biased toward taxi-like usage that the city streets won't just be filled with cars taking up a lot of space. They'll be filled with cars moving at a glacial pace because the streets are all gridlocked by pickups and dropoffs. Every street will look like an airport or elementary school pickup/dropoff zone. And even where there aren't commuting clusters, the fact is that cars will actually obey the laws, meaning pedestrians will finally be free to cross at unmarked intersections, and cyclists will be able to share the lanes with cars.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  Who's to say cities won't regulate how many of these cars can be on the road at any time? They already do this for taxis... And I believe some of them put limits on Uber and Lyft, too. Right?
  - thelittleone 7y ago
    This is done in Singapore. You can buy a car no problem but you need a certificate of entitlement to register and drive it. COE price fluctuates based on demand but has been over $50k USD (no mistake). A small island nation. Traffic still gets pretty bad but it would probably be a lot worse without this policy.
    - criddell 7y ago
      London has congestion pricing for certain zones as well.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I'd also like to point out skepticism to "unbelievably inexpensive to own". To operate, sure. But to own? The tech in these cars alone could easily be $100k. And there's no reason to think society will allow you to operate a car that's 99.999% safe when you could be operating a car that's proven to be 99.99999%. As time goes by, more 9s will keep accruing. And the extra 9s will keep the tech costing the same or more per car as time goes by.
- criddell 7y ago
  Eventually they will be cheap. How much would you spend for a computer with the processing power of an iPhone in 1990? Thirty years from now that $100k tech package will be $500 and it will be orders of magnitude better. When cars stop colliding with each other, safety standards can be relaxed. Get rid of heavy bumpers and structures added to withstand 50 mph offset crashes. The cars become very light weight which lets you decrease the size of the drivetrain and batteries. You end up with something closer to a fancy golf cart than a Camry and they will cost less than $10k. Your 99.9999% argument doesn't sound right to me. In the US at least, we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to cars. We could eliminate thousands of deaths per year by simply limiting the top speed of all cars to 25 mph. But we don't because we are willing to accept the risk that comes along with 85 mph speeds (in Texas) for the convenience.
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    Would you also say we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to poisons and heights? Because your statement appears pretty hyperbolic to me when comparing some of the ways people die in the US. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      > Would you also say we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to poisons and heights? For poisons, absolutely. "Nearly all poisoning deaths in the United States are attributed to drugs" And we handle drug dangers very badly. For heights, I don't know. Your link says falls which is not the same thing, especially when the elderly are involved. I couldn't find what fraction of those involved heights.
criddell 7y ago
Couldn't part of that be "fixed" by sprawl? Get the density low enough then all you have to worry about are high capacity corridors across the city. Right now I live in a suburb of Austin. I rarely go to downtown as all the places I go during the week (work, my kids' school, movie theater, grocery stores, restaurants, doctors) are out here as well and parking is plentiful.
- ItsDeathball 7y ago
  This is what's been tried from about 1960 to now. It turns out to not be anything near sustainable financially, because the low density development doesn't provide enough tax revenue to pay for maintenance on the infrastructure. Once an inner-ring suburb needs to raise taxes to replace its water pipes, it starts emptying out to newer suburbs farther out that don't have to support legacy infrastructure and things like pensions. If you look at closer-in suburbs built 30 years ago, you'll see abandoned former Walmarts and Pizza Huts that followed the growth outwards once their buildings were fully depreciated. Austin might be slightly different because it's changing to fit the mold of an expensive coastal city from the inside out, but the pattern holds in other areas that aren't as trendy right now.
nightsd01 7y ago
beefield: a self driving car doesn’t NEED to take up space in a crowded city. It can drive you to work, then you get out, then it can go drive itself to a less crowded area. Then when you’re ready to leave the office it can be there when you’re ready to go.
- journalctl 7y ago
  Where... where does the car live? It has to take up space somewhere. And if you say “outside the city”, then you’ve just reinvented suburbs.
- acdha 7y ago
  That sounds like more vehicle miles in downtown areas which are already severely congested. A large part of the problem is that cars are the least spatially-efficient form of transportation: having them drive more miles at peak times isn’t going to work unless we see huge improvements elsewhere, which seems unlikely.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    What could be a more realistic option is electric velomobiles (a recumbent bike with an outer shell) which have a capacity of one person and a few bags. You get the benefit of weather protection and convenient speed while being extremely safe and space efficient.
    - acdha 7y ago
      I think there’s a lot of room in the e-bike space but don’t forget transit even if it’s not cool enough to get VCs interested. If the city planners do their jobs competently few things beat a bus in a priority lane for getting a large number of people around a city quickly with low to no CO2 emissions.
      - magduf 7y ago
        >If the city planners do their jobs competently That's expecting way, way too much in America.
Silhouette 7y ago
It is the massive amount of space one car takes[1]. That is a legitimate concern, but the kind of photo you linked to that is often used in advocacy is horribly misleading. In reality, if cyclists rode anything like that close together, there would be accidents all the time because no-one would be able to make turns or travel at different speeds. The general advice to drivers here in the UK is that you should allow as much space around a bike as you do when passing a car, and authorities have conducted public education campaigns on this and even prosecuted drivers for passing too close. From a safety point of view, that advice is clearly sensible, as passing too close to a cycle is quite dangerous, particularly at higher speeds. But you can't have it both ways by claiming cycling is safer and healthier with that sort of space allowance but also that cycling is as space-efficient as it appears stacking bikes up close together like that. In reality, a bike is much smaller than a car, but in terms of proportions, a bike plus adequate space around it is only a bit smaller than a car with adequate space around it. Buses are similarly very misleading in that sort of photo. That is partly because unlike typical car journeys they follow circuitous routes that may be 2-3x as far and as slow to get a single passenger from (somewhere near) A to (somewhere near) B. It's also because unless you're looking at an area with very high population density or very high usage routes/times, most buses don't travel anything like fully loaded but still take up the extra space whether they have 50 passengers, 20 passengers or none at all. If you're going to show a full-size car for each individual travelling, as these photos invariably do, why do they always show a single bus at exactly its maximum capacity? If you showed both at average occupancy levels, the photo would look very different. This is without getting into the traffic modelling where you find uniform traffic speeds are much more efficient, but while cars can achieve something close to that on clear roads, it is heavily disrupted by both relatively slow-moving cycles that you might not be able to overtake and stop-start buses that might block a traffic lane while allowing passengers on and off. There are very practical questions to be asked about why we still drive around in vehicles with space for 4-5 people and luggage capacity for going on a two week holiday even if we're travelling alone and lightly loaded, but a lot of the anti-car arguments made by pro-cycle and particularly pro-bus advocates using the kind of photo linked above are rather disingenuous.
- enoch_r 7y ago
  1. It seems to me that all the photos are of roughly "maximum congestion" of each vehicle type. So the cars are pictured as if they're stopped at a light or in heavy traffic, while if they we traveling at 50mph I'd hope for much, much more following distance. So yes, the bikes would have somewhat more distance between them if they were moving, but that seems fair to me, as the cars would too. 2. I don't want cars to pass me within a few feet. That doesn't mean I feel unsafe when riding within that same distance of other cyclists. The relative speed is much lower, the mass is much lower, etc. Similarly, I will happily ride much closer to an immobile object (e.g. a curb) than I would like someone to pass me at 40mph. So I think the space taken up by a moving bicycle is larger than the bike itself, sure, but absolutely no way is it anywhere close to the size of a car plus following distance plus safety buffer.

darksaints 7y ago

I think it's going to be far worse than that. The economics of self driving cars are so biased toward taxi-like usage that the city streets won't just be filled with cars taking up a lot of space. They'll be filled with cars moving at a glacial pace because the streets are all gridlocked by pickups and dropoffs. Every street will look like an airport or elementary school pickup/dropoff zone. And even where there aren't commuting clusters, the fact is that cars will actually obey the laws, meaning pedestrians will finally be free to cross at unmarked intersections, and cyclists will be able to share the lanes with cars.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
Who's to say cities won't regulate how many of these cars can be on the road at any time? They already do this for taxis... And I believe some of them put limits on Uber and Lyft, too. Right?
- thelittleone 7y ago
  This is done in Singapore. You can buy a car no problem but you need a certificate of entitlement to register and drive it. COE price fluctuates based on demand but has been over $50k USD (no mistake). A small island nation. Traffic still gets pretty bad but it would probably be a lot worse without this policy.
  - criddell 7y ago
    London has congestion pricing for certain zones as well.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

I'd also like to point out skepticism to "unbelievably inexpensive to own". To operate, sure. But to own? The tech in these cars alone could easily be $100k. And there's no reason to think society will allow you to operate a car that's 99.999% safe when you could be operating a car that's proven to be 99.99999%. As time goes by, more 9s will keep accruing. And the extra 9s will keep the tech costing the same or more per car as time goes by.

criddell 7y ago
Eventually they will be cheap. How much would you spend for a computer with the processing power of an iPhone in 1990? Thirty years from now that $100k tech package will be $500 and it will be orders of magnitude better. When cars stop colliding with each other, safety standards can be relaxed. Get rid of heavy bumpers and structures added to withstand 50 mph offset crashes. The cars become very light weight which lets you decrease the size of the drivetrain and batteries. You end up with something closer to a fancy golf cart than a Camry and they will cost less than $10k. Your 99.9999% argument doesn't sound right to me. In the US at least, we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to cars. We could eliminate thousands of deaths per year by simply limiting the top speed of all cars to 25 mph. But we don't because we are willing to accept the risk that comes along with 85 mph speeds (in Texas) for the convenience.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Would you also say we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to poisons and heights? Because your statement appears pretty hyperbolic to me when comparing some of the ways people die in the US. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > Would you also say we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to poisons and heights? For poisons, absolutely. "Nearly all poisoning deaths in the United States are attributed to drugs" And we handle drug dangers very badly. For heights, I don't know. Your link says falls which is not the same thing, especially when the elderly are involved. I couldn't find what fraction of those involved heights.

criddell 7y ago

Couldn't part of that be "fixed" by sprawl? Get the density low enough then all you have to worry about are high capacity corridors across the city. Right now I live in a suburb of Austin. I rarely go to downtown as all the places I go during the week (work, my kids' school, movie theater, grocery stores, restaurants, doctors) are out here as well and parking is plentiful.

ItsDeathball 7y ago
This is what's been tried from about 1960 to now. It turns out to not be anything near sustainable financially, because the low density development doesn't provide enough tax revenue to pay for maintenance on the infrastructure. Once an inner-ring suburb needs to raise taxes to replace its water pipes, it starts emptying out to newer suburbs farther out that don't have to support legacy infrastructure and things like pensions. If you look at closer-in suburbs built 30 years ago, you'll see abandoned former Walmarts and Pizza Huts that followed the growth outwards once their buildings were fully depreciated. Austin might be slightly different because it's changing to fit the mold of an expensive coastal city from the inside out, but the pattern holds in other areas that aren't as trendy right now.

nightsd01 7y ago

beefield: a self driving car doesn’t NEED to take up space in a crowded city. It can drive you to work, then you get out, then it can go drive itself to a less crowded area. Then when you’re ready to leave the office it can be there when you’re ready to go.

journalctl 7y ago
Where... where does the car live? It has to take up space somewhere. And if you say “outside the city”, then you’ve just reinvented suburbs.
acdha 7y ago
That sounds like more vehicle miles in downtown areas which are already severely congested. A large part of the problem is that cars are the least spatially-efficient form of transportation: having them drive more miles at peak times isn’t going to work unless we see huge improvements elsewhere, which seems unlikely.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  What could be a more realistic option is electric velomobiles (a recumbent bike with an outer shell) which have a capacity of one person and a few bags. You get the benefit of weather protection and convenient speed while being extremely safe and space efficient.
  - acdha 7y ago
    I think there’s a lot of room in the e-bike space but don’t forget transit even if it’s not cool enough to get VCs interested. If the city planners do their jobs competently few things beat a bus in a priority lane for getting a large number of people around a city quickly with low to no CO2 emissions.
    - magduf 7y ago
      >If the city planners do their jobs competently That's expecting way, way too much in America.

Silhouette 7y ago

It is the massive amount of space one car takes[1]. That is a legitimate concern, but the kind of photo you linked to that is often used in advocacy is horribly misleading. In reality, if cyclists rode anything like that close together, there would be accidents all the time because no-one would be able to make turns or travel at different speeds. The general advice to drivers here in the UK is that you should allow as much space around a bike as you do when passing a car, and authorities have conducted public education campaigns on this and even prosecuted drivers for passing too close. From a safety point of view, that advice is clearly sensible, as passing too close to a cycle is quite dangerous, particularly at higher speeds. But you can't have it both ways by claiming cycling is safer and healthier with that sort of space allowance but also that cycling is as space-efficient as it appears stacking bikes up close together like that. In reality, a bike is much smaller than a car, but in terms of proportions, a bike plus adequate space around it is only a bit smaller than a car with adequate space around it. Buses are similarly very misleading in that sort of photo. That is partly because unlike typical car journeys they follow circuitous routes that may be 2-3x as far and as slow to get a single passenger from (somewhere near) A to (somewhere near) B. It's also because unless you're looking at an area with very high population density or very high usage routes/times, most buses don't travel anything like fully loaded but still take up the extra space whether they have 50 passengers, 20 passengers or none at all. If you're going to show a full-size car for each individual travelling, as these photos invariably do, why do they always show a single bus at exactly its maximum capacity? If you showed both at average occupancy levels, the photo would look very different. This is without getting into the traffic modelling where you find uniform traffic speeds are much more efficient, but while cars can achieve something close to that on clear roads, it is heavily disrupted by both relatively slow-moving cycles that you might not be able to overtake and stop-start buses that might block a traffic lane while allowing passengers on and off. There are very practical questions to be asked about why we still drive around in vehicles with space for 4-5 people and luggage capacity for going on a two week holiday even if we're travelling alone and lightly loaded, but a lot of the anti-car arguments made by pro-cycle and particularly pro-bus advocates using the kind of photo linked above are rather disingenuous.

enoch_r 7y ago
1. It seems to me that all the photos are of roughly "maximum congestion" of each vehicle type. So the cars are pictured as if they're stopped at a light or in heavy traffic, while if they we traveling at 50mph I'd hope for much, much more following distance. So yes, the bikes would have somewhat more distance between them if they were moving, but that seems fair to me, as the cars would too. 2. I don't want cars to pass me within a few feet. That doesn't mean I feel unsafe when riding within that same distance of other cyclists. The relative speed is much lower, the mass is much lower, etc. Similarly, I will happily ride much closer to an immobile object (e.g. a curb) than I would like someone to pass me at 40mph. So I think the space taken up by a moving bicycle is larger than the bike itself, sure, but absolutely no way is it anywhere close to the size of a car plus following distance plus safety buffer.