7 ms·

I have to disagree. Most of the value is in taxi services, where you get dropped off / picked up exactly where you want, there is no need to dedicate so much la

I have to disagree. Most of the value is in taxi services, where you get dropped off / picked up exactly where you want, there is no need to dedicate so much land and structures to parking, there is no need to have cars sit idle for 95% of their existence, and no need to search for parking spots and walk long distances. Of course, I live in a city, where parking is a major pain. But the other things still hold. It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle.

threeseed 7y ago
I actually think autonomous taxi services will be niche. Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. Now the liability for that behaviour is with the driver. In an autonomous car the liability would be Uber which is why they won't do it. An Uber that needs to look for parking in order to pick you up is never going to work in most busy cities. So I suspect you will see people opt for the driver based taxi service instead. Or maybe autonomous taxis will be reserved for emerging markets e.g. Indonesia which are more relaxed about parking.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  I don't doubt that things take time to adjust. But when it makes a lot more economic sense to take a cab compared to owning a car and driving it (after all, the main reasons cabs aren't all that economical today is the requirement of paying a driver while you just sit there), there will be less cars parked on the road and therefore it will be easier to have places where the cars can pull over and pick up / drop off. Anyway, "people are willing to break the law but companies aren't" seems a really weird reason to stick with the status quo over something far more efficient.
- rapind 7y ago
  I wonder though if autonomous taxi's would simply highlight the parking issues and increase demand for better parking solutions (like no parking, just autonomous taxi lanes).
- njarboe 7y ago
  Are parking laws different for Taxis than for Ubers? Say in New York City? Lots of Taxis there so if Ubers are working under the same law, seems like an already solved problem. UPS have millions? of parking violations per year, yet it is still in operation.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    You're missing the point. Drivers own the liability for illegal parking. Autonomous cars would make the developer liable. No government is going to tolerate systemic and wide spread violation of the law.
    - hawaiianbrah 7y ago
      I think “making the developer liable” is jumping to a conclusion that isn’t certain quite yet.
      - dodobirdlord 7y ago
        Well, no company is going to be able to put in writing "Our plan is to have cars park illegally." Any system that gets built will be constrained by actually having to be law-abiding, which Uber drivers are not constrained by.
    - robbrown451 7y ago
      So the government is going to allow individuals to do it, but not the self driving cars? I don't see it working that way. It's just like self driving cars will go a bit over the speed limit if that is the flow of traffic. If they don't, then the laws will be adjusted. It would be silly to indefinitely hold back a huge industry because humans get to exploit legal loopholes but machines don't.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  I think Uber sells the cars to John Doe who registers it in their name then let’s their car take Uber rides. Uber is off the hook for both the illegal parking and the capex.
- p1mrx 7y ago
  If passengers can jump into the car while it's moving slowly (sliding or gull wing doors), then you technically don't need somewhere to park.
- senordevnyc 7y ago
  Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. I take Uber and Lyft in NYC multiple times per week. No one ever “parks”, they just pull up, you jump in, and off you go. Takes less than a minute in most cases, doesn’t block traffic, and I suspect it virtually never results in a ticket. Maybe if they sit there for 10 minutes or more, but that’s exceedingly rare. And even then, they’re not going to get a ticket outside a few ultra-congested areas of manhattan that make up a tiny fraction of this city. Even in most places in manhattan, you could sit in a running car in a no parking zone for hours without getting a ticket. I had a moving truck up on the curb on the Upper West Side in a no parking zone for hours and the NYPD rolled past several times without a glance. Also, this is exactly how taxis all work too, btw, which seems to undermine your entire point.
  - HereBeBeasties 7y ago
    Umm, that is is point though - with autonomy the cars presumably won't break the law and stop where it's technically illegal for 30s to pick you up. They will presumably need to find somewhere legal to park to do so.
    - dkdklk 7y ago
      You might want to look up the legal difference between parking, stopping, and standing. The vast majority of pickups in nyc at least are not illegal under any current law.
      - 8ytecoder 7y ago
        They block bike lanes all the times. It’s illegal to stand, stop or cruise in bike lanes.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      Anecdotally, I've often had Ubers pick me up in specifically marked and designated passenger loading zones when and where that's been appropriate and necessary. And in principle it's really no different from picking up a friend if you're giving them a ride somewhere.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  You forgot one thing. Autonomous cars won't have the same algorithm as selfish humans to position themselves. A human will go to one of the busy places and will probably drive back to the original point of pickup. While a computer will be notified ( 1 car only parked on the busy place) and immediately replaced by a new available/nearby car. Making the process more efficient, more remote places will be handled faster. Busy places more efficient. Not all cabs will need to earn money, since the biggest expense will be the car driving and not the human driver ( waiting for work). And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine, some companies even negotiate it because of the sheer amount.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    > And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine Up until the point they are banned. Everyone, especially lawmakers, are pretty sick of tech companies breaking the law in order to be "disruptive". As we've seen recently with all of the e-scooter bans.
    - NicoJuicy 7y ago
      You won't get banned for paying too much parking tickets. Scooter bans were mostly because it was disruptive having a staple of scooters in the middle of the pedestrian road and they were consistently breaking the rules. Ps. We do similar stuff for cities at our company. So I don't need an externzl source for this currently.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  If valuable, common and practical use breaks parking laws, the laws should be changed.
lostlogin 7y ago
> Most of the value is in taxi services I’m imagining how gross a taxi would be that doesn’t have a driver to provide passengers a low level of behaviour moderation.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  It'll probably just be smooth, hard plastic.
  - connicpu 7y ago
    Hard plastic covered in the last rider's vomit :/
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      Doesn't happen on GetAround.
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    BART went with vinyl because the riders were really uncomfortable with the old wool ones: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/how-bart-finally-decided-replace-its-bacteria-covered-gross-old-seats/1679/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/how-bart-fina...
- judge2020 7y ago
  This isn't much a problem in terms of self-driving, but solutions to this aren't hard; eg. someone could use the app before they enter a self-driving taxi to report that the car has stains, trash, food, etc. left in it. The company behind it could then queue it to be cleaned.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  Well, considering that these won't allow anonymous usage this can be mitigated by kicking out "bad" users and big fines. Also cars can visit the cleaning zone frequently. For "free floating car sharing" (DriveNow/ShareNow, Yandex.Drive, ...) this seems to work quite well.
mlazos 7y ago
The margins on taxi services are so incredibly thin I find it difficult to believe there is any value in autonomous taxis. Especially when you take into account all the edge cases that will have to be accounted for, and the traffic that will be generated. Shipping and trucking are a massive industry, and I think automating highway driving has a much much better cost/benefit. Not to mention being safer.
femto113 7y ago
> It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle. This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. The more I use them the more I wish for a world where every car was shareable: you need to go somewhere? you simply get into the nearest parked car and drive it to where you want to go. And, unlike autonomy, there are no technical barriers to this, only the will to do it and the economic model to sustain it. Sadly these services seem to be in full retreat now but I will miss them and still hope they'll rise again soon.
- acdha 7y ago
  > This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. This is not the conclusion I would draw from car2go failing out of North America. They still had the problem that you are required to find a legal parking spot and there's no guarantee that there will be a car available anywhere near you. Taxis and private vehicles solve the latter and former respectively but they all suffer from the inefficiencies inherent to the system design.
  - femto113 7y ago
    In the end the availability comes down to fleet size. car2go worked best here when they blanketed Seattle with Smart Cars, the fleet peaked around 750 and they were easy to find. After they switched to Mercedes exclusively the fleet was smaller and it became harder (though not impossible) to find them close by. My guess is that 2,500 cars would be enough to make them feel ubiquitous. A small fleet of autonomous cars won't mean it's likely one will be available to pick you up, and nobody has figured out how to deploy & maintain them at scale yet (I think Waymo in Phoenix is only running around a hundred vehicles).
    - acdha 7y ago
      The catch is the cost of parking: they weren’t hard to find here in DC but if you’re seeing lots of available cars nearby that means they’re paying a fair amount for all of that unused capacity. The Uber/Lyft model shifts that cost to the drivers so it looks cheaper as long as you don’t factor in congestion.
ThrustVectoring 7y ago
A car also functions as a usually-secure place to store a good chunk of stuff, rather than taking it with you. This is more relevant if you have children (carseats) or take multiple-destination trips.
- kortex 7y ago
  This is such an under-mentioned point. Cars are fantastic for logistics and storage. Though I imagine if we can automate people-moving, we can figure out logistics bots as well.
Tiktaalik 7y ago
Having every parked, idle car driving around aimlessly around looking for fares is going to create incredible traffic congestion. Studies have shown that the growth in Uber/Lyft has increased traffic congestion. This system autonomously will be even worse.

threeseed 7y ago

I actually think autonomous taxi services will be niche. Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. Now the liability for that behaviour is with the driver. In an autonomous car the liability would be Uber which is why they won't do it. An Uber that needs to look for parking in order to pick you up is never going to work in most busy cities. So I suspect you will see people opt for the driver based taxi service instead. Or maybe autonomous taxis will be reserved for emerging markets e.g. Indonesia which are more relaxed about parking.

robbrown451 7y ago
I don't doubt that things take time to adjust. But when it makes a lot more economic sense to take a cab compared to owning a car and driving it (after all, the main reasons cabs aren't all that economical today is the requirement of paying a driver while you just sit there), there will be less cars parked on the road and therefore it will be easier to have places where the cars can pull over and pick up / drop off. Anyway, "people are willing to break the law but companies aren't" seems a really weird reason to stick with the status quo over something far more efficient.
rapind 7y ago
I wonder though if autonomous taxi's would simply highlight the parking issues and increase demand for better parking solutions (like no parking, just autonomous taxi lanes).
njarboe 7y ago
Are parking laws different for Taxis than for Ubers? Say in New York City? Lots of Taxis there so if Ubers are working under the same law, seems like an already solved problem. UPS have millions? of parking violations per year, yet it is still in operation.
- threeseed 7y ago
  You're missing the point. Drivers own the liability for illegal parking. Autonomous cars would make the developer liable. No government is going to tolerate systemic and wide spread violation of the law.
  - hawaiianbrah 7y ago
    I think “making the developer liable” is jumping to a conclusion that isn’t certain quite yet.
    - dodobirdlord 7y ago
      Well, no company is going to be able to put in writing "Our plan is to have cars park illegally." Any system that gets built will be constrained by actually having to be law-abiding, which Uber drivers are not constrained by.
  - robbrown451 7y ago
    So the government is going to allow individuals to do it, but not the self driving cars? I don't see it working that way. It's just like self driving cars will go a bit over the speed limit if that is the flow of traffic. If they don't, then the laws will be adjusted. It would be silly to indefinitely hold back a huge industry because humans get to exploit legal loopholes but machines don't.
quickthrower2 7y ago
I think Uber sells the cars to John Doe who registers it in their name then let’s their car take Uber rides. Uber is off the hook for both the illegal parking and the capex.
p1mrx 7y ago
If passengers can jump into the car while it's moving slowly (sliding or gull wing doors), then you technically don't need somewhere to park.
senordevnyc 7y ago
Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. I take Uber and Lyft in NYC multiple times per week. No one ever “parks”, they just pull up, you jump in, and off you go. Takes less than a minute in most cases, doesn’t block traffic, and I suspect it virtually never results in a ticket. Maybe if they sit there for 10 minutes or more, but that’s exceedingly rare. And even then, they’re not going to get a ticket outside a few ultra-congested areas of manhattan that make up a tiny fraction of this city. Even in most places in manhattan, you could sit in a running car in a no parking zone for hours without getting a ticket. I had a moving truck up on the curb on the Upper West Side in a no parking zone for hours and the NYPD rolled past several times without a glance. Also, this is exactly how taxis all work too, btw, which seems to undermine your entire point.
- HereBeBeasties 7y ago
  Umm, that is is point though - with autonomy the cars presumably won't break the law and stop where it's technically illegal for 30s to pick you up. They will presumably need to find somewhere legal to park to do so.
  - dkdklk 7y ago
    You might want to look up the legal difference between parking, stopping, and standing. The vast majority of pickups in nyc at least are not illegal under any current law.
    - 8ytecoder 7y ago
      They block bike lanes all the times. It’s illegal to stand, stop or cruise in bike lanes.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Anecdotally, I've often had Ubers pick me up in specifically marked and designated passenger loading zones when and where that's been appropriate and necessary. And in principle it's really no different from picking up a friend if you're giving them a ride somewhere.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
You forgot one thing. Autonomous cars won't have the same algorithm as selfish humans to position themselves. A human will go to one of the busy places and will probably drive back to the original point of pickup. While a computer will be notified ( 1 car only parked on the busy place) and immediately replaced by a new available/nearby car. Making the process more efficient, more remote places will be handled faster. Busy places more efficient. Not all cabs will need to earn money, since the biggest expense will be the car driving and not the human driver ( waiting for work). And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine, some companies even negotiate it because of the sheer amount.
- threeseed 7y ago
  > And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine Up until the point they are banned. Everyone, especially lawmakers, are pretty sick of tech companies breaking the law in order to be "disruptive". As we've seen recently with all of the e-scooter bans.
  - NicoJuicy 7y ago
    You won't get banned for paying too much parking tickets. Scooter bans were mostly because it was disruptive having a staple of scooters in the middle of the pedestrian road and they were consistently breaking the rules. Ps. We do similar stuff for cities at our company. So I don't need an externzl source for this currently.
BurningFrog 7y ago
If valuable, common and practical use breaks parking laws, the laws should be changed.

lostlogin 7y ago

> Most of the value is in taxi services I’m imagining how gross a taxi would be that doesn’t have a driver to provide passengers a low level of behaviour moderation.

maxerickson 7y ago
It'll probably just be smooth, hard plastic.
- connicpu 7y ago
  Hard plastic covered in the last rider's vomit :/
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Doesn't happen on GetAround.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  BART went with vinyl because the riders were really uncomfortable with the old wool ones: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/how-bart-finally-decided-replace-its-bacteria-covered-gross-old-seats/1679/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/how-bart-fina...
judge2020 7y ago
This isn't much a problem in terms of self-driving, but solutions to this aren't hard; eg. someone could use the app before they enter a self-driving taxi to report that the car has stains, trash, food, etc. left in it. The company behind it could then queue it to be cleaned.
johannes1234321 7y ago
Well, considering that these won't allow anonymous usage this can be mitigated by kicking out "bad" users and big fines. Also cars can visit the cleaning zone frequently. For "free floating car sharing" (DriveNow/ShareNow, Yandex.Drive, ...) this seems to work quite well.

mlazos 7y ago

The margins on taxi services are so incredibly thin I find it difficult to believe there is any value in autonomous taxis. Especially when you take into account all the edge cases that will have to be accounted for, and the traffic that will be generated. Shipping and trucking are a massive industry, and I think automating highway driving has a much much better cost/benefit. Not to mention being safer.

femto113 7y ago

> It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle. This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. The more I use them the more I wish for a world where every car was shareable: you need to go somewhere? you simply get into the nearest parked car and drive it to where you want to go. And, unlike autonomy, there are no technical barriers to this, only the will to do it and the economic model to sustain it. Sadly these services seem to be in full retreat now but I will miss them and still hope they'll rise again soon.

acdha 7y ago
> This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. This is not the conclusion I would draw from car2go failing out of North America. They still had the problem that you are required to find a legal parking spot and there's no guarantee that there will be a car available anywhere near you. Taxis and private vehicles solve the latter and former respectively but they all suffer from the inefficiencies inherent to the system design.
- femto113 7y ago
  In the end the availability comes down to fleet size. car2go worked best here when they blanketed Seattle with Smart Cars, the fleet peaked around 750 and they were easy to find. After they switched to Mercedes exclusively the fleet was smaller and it became harder (though not impossible) to find them close by. My guess is that 2,500 cars would be enough to make them feel ubiquitous. A small fleet of autonomous cars won't mean it's likely one will be available to pick you up, and nobody has figured out how to deploy & maintain them at scale yet (I think Waymo in Phoenix is only running around a hundred vehicles).
  - acdha 7y ago
    The catch is the cost of parking: they weren’t hard to find here in DC but if you’re seeing lots of available cars nearby that means they’re paying a fair amount for all of that unused capacity. The Uber/Lyft model shifts that cost to the drivers so it looks cheaper as long as you don’t factor in congestion.

ThrustVectoring 7y ago

A car also functions as a usually-secure place to store a good chunk of stuff, rather than taking it with you. This is more relevant if you have children (carseats) or take multiple-destination trips.

kortex 7y ago
This is such an under-mentioned point. Cars are fantastic for logistics and storage. Though I imagine if we can automate people-moving, we can figure out logistics bots as well.

Tiktaalik 7y ago

Having every parked, idle car driving around aimlessly around looking for fares is going to create incredible traffic congestion. Studies have shown that the growth in Uber/Lyft has increased traffic congestion. This system autonomously will be even worse.