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> Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants Where do you get that idea from? or maybe, how did you come to that concl
by Supermancho 7y ago
> Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants
Where do you get that idea from? or maybe, how did you come to that conclusion? It's not evident that would be the case. Traffic mirrors demand. Demand goes both ways, unevenly. Prior to the end-of-the-work-day, you would see an increase in empty vehicles consolidating for the imminent exodus of a city, but that would hardly be the common case.
> that supposes that most people will give up the idea of personal car ownership entirely instead of just buying their own AVs
There are multiple ways to ensure this occurs. The same reason horse carriages aren't allowed on Freeways (legal/safety barriers), or almost nobody uses gliders or natural gas cars to commute (impractical), etc. US Society is subject to change/more malleable than you might imagine. Maybe not in our lifetime, but ubiquitous phone booths disappeared in mine, so I hold out hope.
- spc476 7y agoSo here's a hypothetical scenario. Car drives kids to school (in my experience, school tends to start before work). Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work. In the afternoon, car drives (empty) to pick up kids and drive them home, then drives (empty) back to work to pick up the parent. Half the time it's empty.
- Supermancho 7y ago> Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work. This implies there are no other people for which a rideshare would be suitable in either direction at any given time. This seems, like an unreasonable way to predict how mass AV would work. Again, demand is asymmetrical, which means there are opportunities for aggregation and overlap, when talking about mass adoption to the point that "the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants". There's the issue with demand for AV availability (ie traffic), which can never be reduced to zero. This would incentivize better judgement than "I'll stagger the school and work times" Logically, why would AVs be 1-4 occupant vehicles? Once you have AV, you have AV vans and buses, similar to airport shuttling.
- CydeWeys 7y agoWe're not talking about rideshares, we're talking about autonomous personal vehicles. Most people are not likely to give up their personal vehicles; they'll just have self-driving ones.
- wutbrodo 7y agoThis seems like an odd argument to me: "enabling efficiency isn't useful if you assume people's habits won't adapt to the new status quo". Once you've moved personal vehicle use of the sort you describe from essential to luxury, I don't see why you couldn't make users bear the cost of their frivolous externalities.
- imtringued 7y agoI don't want to depend on a taxi. I have to drive to work NOW.
- wutbrodo 7y agoWell, obviously. This isn't something you turn off overnight if the alternative infrastructure doesn't yet support it. But you could make the same argument if pretending it's a necessity about any of a million things that don't exist in modern society today. If your definition of what you're entitled to is no different from the status quo, you're barely even coherently engaging with conversations about how society can and should evolve, improve, or maintain its normz and policies.
- lozenge 7y agoWhy do you think people will choose to rent a self driving car instead of owning one?
- wutbrodo 7y agoFor the same reason I use a combination of transit, Ubers, and rental cars to get a far better experience than car owners at a fraction of the cost. For the same reason that the average person gave up horses and large plots of land and indoor woodfires for heating and cooking: if something is horribly inefficient and costly relative to an alternative, eventually society stops subsidizing it, and the only ones left doing it are the highly irrational or the highly passionate (compare horse ownership 150 years ago to now). There are obviously advantages to owning a car that transport-as-a-service doesn't offer, but the point is that once an alternative is available that's better from a global utility perspective, it doesn't make any sense to subsidize the costly decisions of the irrational (barring interest groups that we as a society choose to explicitly subsidize, like families or the disabled).
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoIn your scenario the number of trips is the same but the car is more often empty because the parent doesn't have to chauffeur the kids around.
- dillonmckay 7y agoYes, that was the point.
- CydeWeys 7y agoNow the parent can be in a different car at the same time, going something else, thus doubling the number of cars on the road.
- Moru 7y agoBut it still takes up space on the road