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Here's what this research tells me: demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. Current use is limited by cost and conveni

by kjksf 7y ago

Here's what this research tells me: demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. Current use is limited by cost and convenience. Self-driving car is likely to fix both so it'll lead to more use of transportation. This is a good thing. We're currently deprived and if things go well, we'll get more of what we want. The congestion problem is mostly overblown. First, maybe with rare exceptions like L.A., the traffic is only bad during rush hour, when people are going to work and getting back home. Other times there's plenty. Second, the way we drive currently is very inefficient. Just last weak I was walking in San Diego along a street at ~5:30 PM i.e. rush hour. I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person. Not to mention that ~40% cars were gigantic, because it looks that if people can afford gigantic cars, they'll buy them. And in US they can afford it. Robotaxis would fix those 2 issues. The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol but a utility operated by an organization focused on practicality and cost, like buses and trains. It's also very easy to use pricing to force people to use the available resources efficiently during congestion. Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people. If that pricing delta is not enough, increase the price of to $20 (vs $3) or to $50. Or provide commuting passes tho employers (kind of like Google buses) where a company pays a $100 to robotaxi company per month and the employee gets to use it for free for commute, but only in shared mode. The future with robotaxis is much brighter than those doomsday prediction of traffic.

l3robot 7y ago
Not also to mention something often oversight. An autonomous car can park far away from it's user, meaning we could drastically reduce de number of space taken by parking in the city. First, giving back this spaces to the people as green parks and services places. Second, lower one of the biggest problem in our current city: urban heat island.
- amarshall 7y ago
  But then you’ll likely have a bunch of extra traffic created from the cars going to and from their owner to parking, rather than just to and from their destination. Or from the car just circling the block because the owner would rather not have to wait long for its return.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    The “circling the block” is something that Uber etc. already exacerbate. I think one solution would be to charge for each minute you are in a congested area to avoid having a whole bunch of empty cars clogging the streets.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      There's a big limit on how bad it can be with Uber though because each Uber is currently driven by an actual person. That person costs money and places a natural limit on how many unutilized Ubers there will be. With AVs, this limit no longer exists, and people will start using AVs for runs that currently are prohibitively expensive with care that require drivers.
  - jellicle 7y ago
    Right. You go to the opera, you order the car to drive around the block for two hours and then pick you up. Cost of gas is cheaper than parking and by definition, you're not affected by any traffic congestion caused as you're sitting watching your show. Sure, 1000 other people in the theater are also doing it, but that's not your problem. 30 minutes before the show is over, you order the car to wait in the "no stopping" zone in front of the theater for easy access. You exit the theater and find your car is tangled in a mess of traffic that takes 45 minutes to clear as most of the cars are double-parked and blocking traffic, waiting for their owners. For the duration of the show, no useful traffic has been able to move for a mile in any direction, as empty cars are just idling around and are content to wait, fully stopped. Tragedy of the commons.
Spooky23 7y ago
The problem is those numbers are off. With margin, the services are always more expensive. I drive a fancyish SUV, and my average per-trip cost is around $3. I can Uber for $8-10 minimum or ride a bus for $1.5. Robot cars are going to be more like Uber, as you won’t have the driver losing money on depreciation.
- yazaddaruvala 7y ago
  Robotaxis should roughly drop the cost of “Uber’s” to 1/3. Currently Uber only collects 25% of the fair for itself. The rest is for the human driving. Robotaxis can also be used 24/7 so better capital utilization on the initial investment for the car. Maintenance costs reduce with scale (+in house mechanics to improve margins). Maintenance costs reduce with electric drive trains. Maintenance costs reduce with better initial manufacturing (to optimize overall car costs rather than optimizing for initial sale costs to sell to individuals). Increased scale can mean reduced margins i.e. Amazon. And this is all before the tech is democratized. Once there is competition, Uber’s 25% cut of current fairs (for software engineering and support) starts to drop too.
  - desas 7y ago
    > Currently Uber only collects 25% of the fair for itself. The rest is for the human driving. Who pays for the car currently? In the UK it's not uber, it's the human as far as I've understood it.
    - yazaddaruvala 7y ago
      If you believe Elon Musk the Model 3 currently sold for $50-60k USD will be worth $100k USD as a robotaxi. For us in 2019 it really is hard to imagine the worth of a car that is used 99% of the time rather than parked 95% of the time. When robotaxis have been real for a decade, car manufacturers will build and run robotaxi fleets. Unlike today, vertical integration of manufacturing, maintenance, recycling and operating the fleet of cars creates a lot of consistent demand and can bring significant economic advantages even more than Musk’s current estimate. Even the car manufacturers goals change. Rather than optimizing to sell cars (have them degrade and sell more), cars will be optimized for durability, maximum materials reuse, lowest variable cost per ride, ergonomic rides.
viburnum 7y ago
So much transporting is just to mitigate land use failures. More transportation is solving the wrong problem.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Solving it is better than continuing to live with it.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    The point they're making is that the only possible solution is to solve the land use problem, so that the majority of people can live lives that don't require individual automobiles. Broadly speaking, this means building densely enough that walking, biking, and mass transit are suitable for most trips.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      Yes, their point is clear enough. My point is that the politics of landuse are hopeless enough that other mitigations will be more beneficial for quite some time to come.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        I disagree, I think the politics of land use are more easily solvable than the simple physics problem of too many cars, not enough space. Plenty of other countries in the world (and even some US cities) have solved the land use problem to the point that most people don't use space-inefficient private vehicles to get around. It's solvable and there are working models to emulate. This is not true of your alternative.
        maxerickson 7y ago
        How does Northern Wisconsin emulate the Randstad? Does everybody move to Green Bay?
amarshall 7y ago
Driverless private cars (which the article is about) and driverless taxis aren’t the same thing. The former does nothing to solve the traffic density or vehicle size problem. Even focusing on driverless taxis, Uber and Lyft have offered for some time options for nicer cars, larger cars, and nicer larger cars, so presumably there’s a market for taxis to still be a status symbol, unlike you state. Finally, your economic incentives have nothing to do with driverless cars; it’s just a tax or toll on non-pooled taxi rides—that could be implemented right now. And, in the end, even a full car is still less dense than a bus or train.
- Falkon1313 7y ago
  The uber/lyft/limo large cars vs standard cabs/cars are usually used for a trip when there are more passengers or cargo. With private cars, the larger ones are bought when there might ever be a trip with more passengers or cargo, even if 99% of the time they just have a single occupant. Also normal cars spend most of their time parked. Driverless taxis wouldn't need to.
kps 7y ago
Single-person cars can be half width and share a lane, and run much closer together at speed.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  This is only really a wide savings once manually-driven cars are banned from the roads entirely. How long, if ever, do you think it will be for that to happen?
CydeWeys 7y ago
> The congestion problem is mostly overblown. It's really not. Congestion is a huge problem already, and increasing the current road utilization by 83% will bring entire cities to a standstill for the entirety of waking hours. > I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person. Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants, so things will get much, much worse as far as how many people are actually being transported vs road utilization. You then go on to talk about robotaxis, but that supposes that most people will give up the idea of personal car ownership entirely instead of just buying their own AVs; this doesn't seem likely.
- Aloha 7y ago
  If the future is car as a service, then yes congestion does not automatically get worse, you call an automated car to pick you up, and another one to take you home, it might also mean that more ride sharing happens too
  - Moru 7y ago
    But we already have buses and bicycles. Car as a service might just as well make the congestion worse since it will go empty to pick you up.
    - maccam94 7y ago
      Think Uber carpooling, minus drivers, much cheaper, and short pickup times. Maybe 6-10 person shuttles instead of sedans/SUVs in denser areas. To a car service, moving an empty vehicle is inefficient and a waste of money.
      - masonic 7y ago
        Keeping an empty electric vehicle in motion all the time is cheaper than parking it, in urban contexts.
        jcranmer 7y ago
Someone 7y ago
”The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol” You’re not the only one claiming that, but I don’t think it automatically follows. People can currently afford to buy cars for themselves, so unless self-driving cars will be (much) more expensive, people still would be able to afford them. So, in this case, the question is what else, if anything, people would want to use their money on instead of on owning a car. If, on the other hand, self-driving cars will be much more expensive, there’s a risk that they will be too expensive. That may be offset by having self-driving cars make more hours each day, but I don’t think that’s a given. One reason people own cars is that it guarantees a car is available when they need it. If people value that highly, self-driving cars will have to cater for that. I think that would mean the number of self-driving cars would have to be fairly similar to the number of cars now on the road. If that’s the end-game, why wouldn’t many people own a self-driving car, or lease one for their personal use?
- kjksf 7y ago
  When you use X and then a substitute Y arrives that is 10x cheaper and more convenient, you'll switch to it. Using robotaxi network will be much cheaper than total cost of owning a car, mostly because cars are dramatically underutilized. On average a car is used 1-2 hrs a day out of 12-16 hrs it could be used as a robotaxi. To start off we have 5-7x price difference. Then most use is not shared. Assuming robotaxis will be used by 2 people on average, it's another 2x cost difference, 10-14x combined. The cars will be much cheaper. Think $25k Toyota corolla, not $45k SUV or pick up truck. Fleet operators will ask for cars that are cheap and reliable, not for luxurious interior. The cars will last much longer. 500k miles vs. 100k miles of a typical car for personal use. 500k is already a reality with Teslas (https://qz.com/1737145/the-economics-of-driving-seven-teslas-for-2-5-million-miles/ https://qz.com/1737145/the-economics-of-driving-seven-teslas...) and Tesla is working to make 1 million miles cars. Not to mention that GM spends 3 billion dollars on advertising each year, which goes to increase the cost of your car. It'll be a no-brainer to pay $200-$300 per month for (effectively) unlimited robotaxi service than $400 per month for a lease + $100 month for insurance + fuel + cost and inconvenience of refueling. Furthermore, you won't be able to buy those cars. Consider the following scenario to its logical conclusion: Tesla (or whoever) introduces a robotaxi service. A car that costs $30k to make can be sold for $40 k to you or put to use as a robotaxi and make $100k - $300k over its lifetime (big spread because it's hard to predict how the pricing will pan out). Why would Tesla sell a car to you for $10k profit if they can make $70k profit? For the first 10 years they'll be busy making cars exclusively for robotaxis and they'll prioritize grabbing market share. There will be no $40k self-driving Teslas to buy. But won't GM or Ford or Toyota sell me that car? In 2008 car companies went bankrupt because of 20% drop in car sales. If robotaxis take off, they'll shrink car market by way more than 20%, permanently. I can't see how this won't end up in bankrupting pretty much every car maker as we know them. Those that will have self-driving technology will also switch to making robotaxis exclusively. Those that don't will either become OEMs to the kinds of Waymo (and eventually be bought by them when they vertically integrate) or go bankrupt. Privately owned cars might become like yachts: sold in very low numbers to multi-millioners.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
beamatronic 7y ago
Cars are a dead end. No matter who drives them. We need subways like Manhattan. Or at least like the DC metro. Eminent domain and political willpower is all it takes.
justicezyx 7y ago
> First, maybe with rare exceptions like L.A., the traffic is only bad during rush hour, If this is not the only problem, what is the problem...
- coding123 7y ago
  I imagine the bigger problem for road maintenance is the off rush hour trucks driving from 1am to 5am that are tearing up the road at 70mph. Not as much damage when they are stuck at 35mph. So different problems.
runeks 7y ago
> Current use is limited by cost [..] Use is always limited by cost. It’s not possible to separate demand from price, ie. demand only makes sense for a given price.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
How would robotaxis fix the ~80% of cars being single person? It seems like it would make it even worse, replacing some of those with zero people in the car.
- tux1968 7y ago
  True, but if you're alone, you could pay less to share a ride with others being picked up and dropped off along the way to your destination.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    The same is true for Uber. It's much less popular than people getting their own rides.
- yazaddaruvala 7y ago
  Today we buy cars for presentations of status, personal expression, enjoyment and “the worst case” I.e. family and kids all need to go somewhere at the same time. “I’m a truck person”, “I’m a hybrid person”, “I’m outdoors-y” Then we use it 95% of the time for single person use, to commute (not enjoy) with zero recognition of personal expression. Even if people don’t share the robotaxis, they will be optimized for pragmatic use. Taxi sizes will scale with number of people (think enclosed, self driving motorcycles, etc).
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    In practice, I don't expect to see it. Economically, there's value in having whatever cars are closest to you be ones that fit your group. I expect that value will exceed the savings of a smaller car. I bet we'll see something like uber vs uber-xl, rather than something as granular as you're suggesting.
- kjksf 7y ago
  Network of robotaxis has a wonderful quality of increasing utilization with density. It's a self-healing system: the more people use it, the more efficiently we can use it. Efficiency, it this context, is number of people we can transport per hour on a given stretch of the road. It's important, so i'll emphasize it: high utilization of roads is a good thing. Roads are a fixed resource that have already been paid for. High utilization means we're providing more transportation value for the same, fixed price. Most of the time roads are empty. Case in point: it's 1 PM in a busy part of San Diego. I just looked out of the window and the road is empty. Even if there were 10 more, single occupancy cars on that road it would not degrade transportation service for anyone. Plenty of capacity. The bad part is congestion caused by going over capacity. That's the friday night scenario in my neighborhood or commute to/from work traffic during weekdays. Robotaxis give us obvious tools to combat that. When the need for transportation at a given time is so hight that it would cause bumper-to-bumper traffic, it implies that a lot of people are sharing their route with other people. It is the case today but we have no practical way of arranging for those people to share the car. With robotaxis, the fleet can see that 4 people on the same block want to go to roughly the same place so it can direct them to the same car, so that they can more efficiently utilize fixed resource of cars and roads. What if they don't want to share a car with other people? Make them with congestion pricing. Make them pay $10 for a single person ride vs $3 for shared. If $10 doesn't work, then jack it up to $20, $50 or $100. There is a price that will make 90% choose shared ride during congestion. Or if things are really that bad and the trip is non-essential, they'll choose to shift their trip. Maybe 5:30 PM is not the best time for trip to walmart. We can certainly do better than what we do today during congestion: mostly empty, overly big cars.
jfk13 7y ago
> ...it'll lead to more use of transportation. > This is a good thing. Why? Wouldn't it be better if we could reduce our dependence on (mechanised) transportation overall?
- kjksf 7y ago
  Because in all of human history humans have shown zero interest in depriving themselves of things they want. I want transportation. You want transportation. Everyone wants transportation. You, me and everyone else wants to go to the beach, get food delivered, get 1 day shipping from Amazon, eat bananas grown in Chile, drink coffee harvested in Africa, drink wine grown in France, go to a baseball game or visit relatives for Thanksgiving. All are optional activities you can do without. Are you doing without them? I need transportation. You need transportation. Everyone needs transportation. You, me and everyone else needs to go to work, go to a hospital etc. Reducing transportation is not an option. You'll not give up on things enabled by transportation. So the next best thing is making transportation cheaper and more efficient. We've optimized food production to produce 10x more food using the same amount of land. It was a good thing because the option of starving or killing 9 out of 10 people is not very appealing. Robotaxis will allow us to optimize transportation to better use the roads and cars. High utilization of the roads (as long as it doesn't become a crippling congestion) is a good thing. It means we're using a fixed resource to provide as much of what people want at the lowest possible price. And since people bring buses as some alternative to robotaxis: a self-driving bus is also vastly superior to regular bus and when we have density of 100k robocars in a city the size of SF, it'll be a no brainer for fleet operators to have part of the fleet be minivans and buses, taking 16+ people, for the times of congestion.
  - sooheon 7y ago
    > Because in all of human history humans have shown zero interest in depriving themselves of things they want. Any malignant cancer shows zero interest in moderating its growth, until its host dies. I agree with your description of reality, but I think fundamentally we need to price in ecological and medical externalities before I can be quite as optimistic as you are.
m463 7y ago
> use pricing to force ... resources efficiently I think this is the answer. It just won't be a very popular one, because it will on the surface benefit wealthy people.
cookie_monsta 7y ago
> the traffic is only bad during rush hour This would be ok if the rush hour actually lasted 60 minutes. In my city (pop ~6M) it goes from somewhere between 7-10am and 4-7pm with a little spike around lunchtime. I don't work downtown and have the luxury of scheduling most of my driving as I please, so I nearly always opt for around 8pm. Being that my city is playing catch up trying to ease rush hour congestion, I often find myself alone on 4 lane arterials. I am literally King of the Road. Robotaxis aren't going to fix this, nor, sadly is throwing any other type of monetisable product at it. What we need to do is decentralise where people work away from downtowns, stagger work and school starting times so that the entire city isn't running around trying to hit the same 30 minute window and set up incentives for companies to accommodate remote workers. Anything else smells to me like the auto industry trying to sell more cars and the infrastructure industry trying to sell more roads. They're free to do that, but under the guise of easing congestion? No.
- ralphc 7y ago
  I was thinking you were talking about Atlanta until you mentioned traffic being light at 8pm. A lot of times it takes later here, even out to the suburbs.
ajuc 7y ago
> Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people. This is overly complicated, hard to implement and to prevent abuse. There's a much simpler way already in place - tax on fuel. And it's much harder to circumvent or abuse. You can hope they won't catch you driving alone and paying as if you drove with 3 people in car. You can't hope to drive without fuel. Increase the fuel prices 10 times and people will be much more efficient with their use of transportation. You use almost the same amount of fuel no matter if you move 4 people or 1. And public transport uses slightly more to move 20 or 50 people. With high enough fuel prices we can reduce traffic jams to 0. The problem is - it will suck and people will complain. Ultimately people spend time in traffic jams because that's what their least sucky option is.
whoisthemachine 7y ago
It's also highly possible that robotaxi companies would incentivize efficient use of their vehicles in order to drive costs down (and increase profits).
- masonic 7y ago
  They'll optimize profit by being able to respond instantly to hails, capturing as much market share as possible. So, the entire idle fleet will orbit downtown all the time.
  - whoisthemachine 7y ago
    Is that necessary? Couldn't such companies also have many cars parked around downtowns, ready to be activated for a ride at any time? Remember, without a driver, there's no need for someone to "orbit", looking for riders, rather the riders call the cars themselves.
    - masonic 7y ago
      parked... where? Urban parking is already expensive and often hard to find.
bbatha 7y ago
Another point on smaller cars. Robotaxis allow tuning the size of the car to the workload. Commuting? Two person car. Shopping with the family? Sedan. No need to make everyone pick a car that meets their general needs any longer.
em-bee 7y ago
demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. this is an important observation. and the demand will only increase. because as it is easier to get around we are more likely to meet people at further distances, leading to families that are connected across these distances and thus increasing the demand for travel even more.

by kjksf 7y ago

l3robot 7y ago

Not also to mention something often oversight. An autonomous car can park far away from it's user, meaning we could drastically reduce de number of space taken by parking in the city. First, giving back this spaces to the people as green parks and services places. Second, lower one of the biggest problem in our current city: urban heat island.

amarshall 7y ago
But then you’ll likely have a bunch of extra traffic created from the cars going to and from their owner to parking, rather than just to and from their destination. Or from the car just circling the block because the owner would rather not have to wait long for its return.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  The “circling the block” is something that Uber etc. already exacerbate. I think one solution would be to charge for each minute you are in a congested area to avoid having a whole bunch of empty cars clogging the streets.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    There's a big limit on how bad it can be with Uber though because each Uber is currently driven by an actual person. That person costs money and places a natural limit on how many unutilized Ubers there will be. With AVs, this limit no longer exists, and people will start using AVs for runs that currently are prohibitively expensive with care that require drivers.
- jellicle 7y ago
  Right. You go to the opera, you order the car to drive around the block for two hours and then pick you up. Cost of gas is cheaper than parking and by definition, you're not affected by any traffic congestion caused as you're sitting watching your show. Sure, 1000 other people in the theater are also doing it, but that's not your problem. 30 minutes before the show is over, you order the car to wait in the "no stopping" zone in front of the theater for easy access. You exit the theater and find your car is tangled in a mess of traffic that takes 45 minutes to clear as most of the cars are double-parked and blocking traffic, waiting for their owners. For the duration of the show, no useful traffic has been able to move for a mile in any direction, as empty cars are just idling around and are content to wait, fully stopped. Tragedy of the commons.

Spooky23 7y ago

The problem is those numbers are off. With margin, the services are always more expensive. I drive a fancyish SUV, and my average per-trip cost is around $3. I can Uber for $8-10 minimum or ride a bus for $1.5. Robot cars are going to be more like Uber, as you won’t have the driver losing money on depreciation.

yazaddaruvala 7y ago
Robotaxis should roughly drop the cost of “Uber’s” to 1/3. Currently Uber only collects 25% of the fair for itself. The rest is for the human driving. Robotaxis can also be used 24/7 so better capital utilization on the initial investment for the car. Maintenance costs reduce with scale (+in house mechanics to improve margins). Maintenance costs reduce with electric drive trains. Maintenance costs reduce with better initial manufacturing (to optimize overall car costs rather than optimizing for initial sale costs to sell to individuals). Increased scale can mean reduced margins i.e. Amazon. And this is all before the tech is democratized. Once there is competition, Uber’s 25% cut of current fairs (for software engineering and support) starts to drop too.
- desas 7y ago
  > Currently Uber only collects 25% of the fair for itself. The rest is for the human driving. Who pays for the car currently? In the UK it's not uber, it's the human as far as I've understood it.
  - yazaddaruvala 7y ago
    If you believe Elon Musk the Model 3 currently sold for $50-60k USD will be worth $100k USD as a robotaxi. For us in 2019 it really is hard to imagine the worth of a car that is used 99% of the time rather than parked 95% of the time. When robotaxis have been real for a decade, car manufacturers will build and run robotaxi fleets. Unlike today, vertical integration of manufacturing, maintenance, recycling and operating the fleet of cars creates a lot of consistent demand and can bring significant economic advantages even more than Musk’s current estimate. Even the car manufacturers goals change. Rather than optimizing to sell cars (have them degrade and sell more), cars will be optimized for durability, maximum materials reuse, lowest variable cost per ride, ergonomic rides.

viburnum 7y ago

So much transporting is just to mitigate land use failures. More transportation is solving the wrong problem.

maxerickson 7y ago
Solving it is better than continuing to live with it.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  The point they're making is that the only possible solution is to solve the land use problem, so that the majority of people can live lives that don't require individual automobiles. Broadly speaking, this means building densely enough that walking, biking, and mass transit are suitable for most trips.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Yes, their point is clear enough. My point is that the politics of landuse are hopeless enough that other mitigations will be more beneficial for quite some time to come.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      I disagree, I think the politics of land use are more easily solvable than the simple physics problem of too many cars, not enough space. Plenty of other countries in the world (and even some US cities) have solved the land use problem to the point that most people don't use space-inefficient private vehicles to get around. It's solvable and there are working models to emulate. This is not true of your alternative.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        How does Northern Wisconsin emulate the Randstad? Does everybody move to Green Bay?

amarshall 7y ago

Driverless private cars (which the article is about) and driverless taxis aren’t the same thing. The former does nothing to solve the traffic density or vehicle size problem. Even focusing on driverless taxis, Uber and Lyft have offered for some time options for nicer cars, larger cars, and nicer larger cars, so presumably there’s a market for taxis to still be a status symbol, unlike you state. Finally, your economic incentives have nothing to do with driverless cars; it’s just a tax or toll on non-pooled taxi rides—that could be implemented right now. And, in the end, even a full car is still less dense than a bus or train.

Falkon1313 7y ago
The uber/lyft/limo large cars vs standard cabs/cars are usually used for a trip when there are more passengers or cargo. With private cars, the larger ones are bought when there might ever be a trip with more passengers or cargo, even if 99% of the time they just have a single occupant. Also normal cars spend most of their time parked. Driverless taxis wouldn't need to.

kps 7y ago

Single-person cars can be half width and share a lane, and run much closer together at speed.

CydeWeys 7y ago
This is only really a wide savings once manually-driven cars are banned from the roads entirely. How long, if ever, do you think it will be for that to happen?

CydeWeys 7y ago

> The congestion problem is mostly overblown. It's really not. Congestion is a huge problem already, and increasing the current road utilization by 83% will bring entire cities to a standstill for the entirety of waking hours. > I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person. Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants, so things will get much, much worse as far as how many people are actually being transported vs road utilization. You then go on to talk about robotaxis, but that supposes that most people will give up the idea of personal car ownership entirely instead of just buying their own AVs; this doesn't seem likely.

Aloha 7y ago
If the future is car as a service, then yes congestion does not automatically get worse, you call an automated car to pick you up, and another one to take you home, it might also mean that more ride sharing happens too
- Moru 7y ago
  But we already have buses and bicycles. Car as a service might just as well make the congestion worse since it will go empty to pick you up.
  - maccam94 7y ago
    Think Uber carpooling, minus drivers, much cheaper, and short pickup times. Maybe 6-10 person shuttles instead of sedans/SUVs in denser areas. To a car service, moving an empty vehicle is inefficient and a waste of money.
    - masonic 7y ago
      Keeping an empty electric vehicle in motion all the time is cheaper than parking it, in urban contexts.
      - jcranmer 7y ago

Someone 7y ago

”The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol” You’re not the only one claiming that, but I don’t think it automatically follows. People can currently afford to buy cars for themselves, so unless self-driving cars will be (much) more expensive, people still would be able to afford them. So, in this case, the question is what else, if anything, people would want to use their money on instead of on owning a car. If, on the other hand, self-driving cars will be much more expensive, there’s a risk that they will be too expensive. That may be offset by having self-driving cars make more hours each day, but I don’t think that’s a given. One reason people own cars is that it guarantees a car is available when they need it. If people value that highly, self-driving cars will have to cater for that. I think that would mean the number of self-driving cars would have to be fairly similar to the number of cars now on the road. If that’s the end-game, why wouldn’t many people own a self-driving car, or lease one for their personal use?

kjksf 7y ago
When you use X and then a substitute Y arrives that is 10x cheaper and more convenient, you'll switch to it. Using robotaxi network will be much cheaper than total cost of owning a car, mostly because cars are dramatically underutilized. On average a car is used 1-2 hrs a day out of 12-16 hrs it could be used as a robotaxi. To start off we have 5-7x price difference. Then most use is not shared. Assuming robotaxis will be used by 2 people on average, it's another 2x cost difference, 10-14x combined. The cars will be much cheaper. Think $25k Toyota corolla, not $45k SUV or pick up truck. Fleet operators will ask for cars that are cheap and reliable, not for luxurious interior. The cars will last much longer. 500k miles vs. 100k miles of a typical car for personal use. 500k is already a reality with Teslas (https://qz.com/1737145/the-economics-of-driving-seven-teslas-for-2-5-million-miles/ https://qz.com/1737145/the-economics-of-driving-seven-teslas...) and Tesla is working to make 1 million miles cars. Not to mention that GM spends 3 billion dollars on advertising each year, which goes to increase the cost of your car. It'll be a no-brainer to pay $200-$300 per month for (effectively) unlimited robotaxi service than $400 per month for a lease + $100 month for insurance + fuel + cost and inconvenience of refueling. Furthermore, you won't be able to buy those cars. Consider the following scenario to its logical conclusion: Tesla (or whoever) introduces a robotaxi service. A car that costs $30k to make can be sold for $40 k to you or put to use as a robotaxi and make $100k - $300k over its lifetime (big spread because it's hard to predict how the pricing will pan out). Why would Tesla sell a car to you for $10k profit if they can make $70k profit? For the first 10 years they'll be busy making cars exclusively for robotaxis and they'll prioritize grabbing market share. There will be no $40k self-driving Teslas to buy. But won't GM or Ford or Toyota sell me that car? In 2008 car companies went bankrupt because of 20% drop in car sales. If robotaxis take off, they'll shrink car market by way more than 20%, permanently. I can't see how this won't end up in bankrupting pretty much every car maker as we know them. Those that will have self-driving technology will also switch to making robotaxis exclusively. Those that don't will either become OEMs to the kinds of Waymo (and eventually be bought by them when they vertically integrate) or go bankrupt. Privately owned cars might become like yachts: sold in very low numbers to multi-millioners.

deleted 7y ago

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beamatronic 7y ago

Cars are a dead end. No matter who drives them. We need subways like Manhattan. Or at least like the DC metro. Eminent domain and political willpower is all it takes.

justicezyx 7y ago

> First, maybe with rare exceptions like L.A., the traffic is only bad during rush hour, If this is not the only problem, what is the problem...

coding123 7y ago
I imagine the bigger problem for road maintenance is the off rush hour trucks driving from 1am to 5am that are tearing up the road at 70mph. Not as much damage when they are stuck at 35mph. So different problems.

runeks 7y ago

> Current use is limited by cost [..] Use is always limited by cost. It’s not possible to separate demand from price, ie. demand only makes sense for a given price.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

How would robotaxis fix the ~80% of cars being single person? It seems like it would make it even worse, replacing some of those with zero people in the car.

tux1968 7y ago
True, but if you're alone, you could pay less to share a ride with others being picked up and dropped off along the way to your destination.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  The same is true for Uber. It's much less popular than people getting their own rides.
yazaddaruvala 7y ago
Today we buy cars for presentations of status, personal expression, enjoyment and “the worst case” I.e. family and kids all need to go somewhere at the same time. “I’m a truck person”, “I’m a hybrid person”, “I’m outdoors-y” Then we use it 95% of the time for single person use, to commute (not enjoy) with zero recognition of personal expression. Even if people don’t share the robotaxis, they will be optimized for pragmatic use. Taxi sizes will scale with number of people (think enclosed, self driving motorcycles, etc).
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  In practice, I don't expect to see it. Economically, there's value in having whatever cars are closest to you be ones that fit your group. I expect that value will exceed the savings of a smaller car. I bet we'll see something like uber vs uber-xl, rather than something as granular as you're suggesting.
kjksf 7y ago
Network of robotaxis has a wonderful quality of increasing utilization with density. It's a self-healing system: the more people use it, the more efficiently we can use it. Efficiency, it this context, is number of people we can transport per hour on a given stretch of the road. It's important, so i'll emphasize it: high utilization of roads is a good thing. Roads are a fixed resource that have already been paid for. High utilization means we're providing more transportation value for the same, fixed price. Most of the time roads are empty. Case in point: it's 1 PM in a busy part of San Diego. I just looked out of the window and the road is empty. Even if there were 10 more, single occupancy cars on that road it would not degrade transportation service for anyone. Plenty of capacity. The bad part is congestion caused by going over capacity. That's the friday night scenario in my neighborhood or commute to/from work traffic during weekdays. Robotaxis give us obvious tools to combat that. When the need for transportation at a given time is so hight that it would cause bumper-to-bumper traffic, it implies that a lot of people are sharing their route with other people. It is the case today but we have no practical way of arranging for those people to share the car. With robotaxis, the fleet can see that 4 people on the same block want to go to roughly the same place so it can direct them to the same car, so that they can more efficiently utilize fixed resource of cars and roads. What if they don't want to share a car with other people? Make them with congestion pricing. Make them pay $10 for a single person ride vs $3 for shared. If $10 doesn't work, then jack it up to $20, $50 or $100. There is a price that will make 90% choose shared ride during congestion. Or if things are really that bad and the trip is non-essential, they'll choose to shift their trip. Maybe 5:30 PM is not the best time for trip to walmart. We can certainly do better than what we do today during congestion: mostly empty, overly big cars.

jfk13 7y ago

> ...it'll lead to more use of transportation. > This is a good thing. Why? Wouldn't it be better if we could reduce our dependence on (mechanised) transportation overall?

kjksf 7y ago
Because in all of human history humans have shown zero interest in depriving themselves of things they want. I want transportation. You want transportation. Everyone wants transportation. You, me and everyone else wants to go to the beach, get food delivered, get 1 day shipping from Amazon, eat bananas grown in Chile, drink coffee harvested in Africa, drink wine grown in France, go to a baseball game or visit relatives for Thanksgiving. All are optional activities you can do without. Are you doing without them? I need transportation. You need transportation. Everyone needs transportation. You, me and everyone else needs to go to work, go to a hospital etc. Reducing transportation is not an option. You'll not give up on things enabled by transportation. So the next best thing is making transportation cheaper and more efficient. We've optimized food production to produce 10x more food using the same amount of land. It was a good thing because the option of starving or killing 9 out of 10 people is not very appealing. Robotaxis will allow us to optimize transportation to better use the roads and cars. High utilization of the roads (as long as it doesn't become a crippling congestion) is a good thing. It means we're using a fixed resource to provide as much of what people want at the lowest possible price. And since people bring buses as some alternative to robotaxis: a self-driving bus is also vastly superior to regular bus and when we have density of 100k robocars in a city the size of SF, it'll be a no brainer for fleet operators to have part of the fleet be minivans and buses, taking 16+ people, for the times of congestion.
- sooheon 7y ago
  > Because in all of human history humans have shown zero interest in depriving themselves of things they want. Any malignant cancer shows zero interest in moderating its growth, until its host dies. I agree with your description of reality, but I think fundamentally we need to price in ecological and medical externalities before I can be quite as optimistic as you are.

m463 7y ago

> use pricing to force ... resources efficiently I think this is the answer. It just won't be a very popular one, because it will on the surface benefit wealthy people.

cookie_monsta 7y ago

> the traffic is only bad during rush hour This would be ok if the rush hour actually lasted 60 minutes. In my city (pop ~6M) it goes from somewhere between 7-10am and 4-7pm with a little spike around lunchtime. I don't work downtown and have the luxury of scheduling most of my driving as I please, so I nearly always opt for around 8pm. Being that my city is playing catch up trying to ease rush hour congestion, I often find myself alone on 4 lane arterials. I am literally King of the Road. Robotaxis aren't going to fix this, nor, sadly is throwing any other type of monetisable product at it. What we need to do is decentralise where people work away from downtowns, stagger work and school starting times so that the entire city isn't running around trying to hit the same 30 minute window and set up incentives for companies to accommodate remote workers. Anything else smells to me like the auto industry trying to sell more cars and the infrastructure industry trying to sell more roads. They're free to do that, but under the guise of easing congestion? No.

ralphc 7y ago
I was thinking you were talking about Atlanta until you mentioned traffic being light at 8pm. A lot of times it takes later here, even out to the suburbs.

ajuc 7y ago

> Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people. This is overly complicated, hard to implement and to prevent abuse. There's a much simpler way already in place - tax on fuel. And it's much harder to circumvent or abuse. You can hope they won't catch you driving alone and paying as if you drove with 3 people in car. You can't hope to drive without fuel. Increase the fuel prices 10 times and people will be much more efficient with their use of transportation. You use almost the same amount of fuel no matter if you move 4 people or 1. And public transport uses slightly more to move 20 or 50 people. With high enough fuel prices we can reduce traffic jams to 0. The problem is - it will suck and people will complain. Ultimately people spend time in traffic jams because that's what their least sucky option is.

whoisthemachine 7y ago

It's also highly possible that robotaxi companies would incentivize efficient use of their vehicles in order to drive costs down (and increase profits).

masonic 7y ago
They'll optimize profit by being able to respond instantly to hails, capturing as much market share as possible. So, the entire idle fleet will orbit downtown all the time.
- whoisthemachine 7y ago
  Is that necessary? Couldn't such companies also have many cars parked around downtowns, ready to be activated for a ride at any time? Remember, without a driver, there's no need for someone to "orbit", looking for riders, rather the riders call the cars themselves.
  - masonic 7y ago
    parked... where? Urban parking is already expensive and often hard to find.

bbatha 7y ago

Another point on smaller cars. Robotaxis allow tuning the size of the car to the workload. Commuting? Two person car. Shopping with the family? Sedan. No need to make everyone pick a car that meets their general needs any longer.

em-bee 7y ago

demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. this is an important observation. and the demand will only increase. because as it is easier to get around we are more likely to meet people at further distances, leading to families that are connected across these distances and thus increasing the demand for travel even more.