7 ms·

Driverless cars might not lead to a reduction in car use but they probably will lead to a reduction in the number of cars. Rather than people owning a car they'

Driverless cars might not lead to a reduction in car use but they probably will lead to a reduction in the number of cars. Rather than people owning a car they'll request one via an app, it'll turn up and drive them where they want to be, and then it'll go off to the next customer. Car utilization will go up significantly. It'll be like all cars are taxis. That will probably mean more car journeys. But... The manufacturing of a car is responsible for a very significant amount of the emissions it produces over its life. If we can greatly reduce the number of cars then there'll be a huge reduction in emissions simply because we won't make as many of them. That's always going to be a massive win for the environment, even if each individual car is being used more.

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
>Rather than people owning a car they'll request one via an app, it'll turn up and drive them where they want to be Which will mean turning up to the suburbs at 8am to drive downtown by 9am. Without a drastic, permanent change in working hours & commuting (or permanent WFH) the minimum number of cars will barely change.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Without a drastic, permanent change in working hours & commuting (or permanent WFH)... That's already happening.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > That's already happening. Because of a worldwide pandemic. There's no guarantee that these changes will last.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      It was happening long before Covid. Covid just accelerated it.
      - oblio 5y ago
        True, but there are also backlashes, especially when something is forced. And too many remote work enthusiast assume that the steady state for this is majority remote work. I don't buy it. I'd be surprised if we go over 25%, maaaaybe 40% best case scenario.
- amelius 5y ago
  It could also be a minivan or bus, which can be shared with workers from the same area.
  - kiliantics 5y ago
    something like this already exists and carries even more workers from the same area -- trains
    - amelius 5y ago
      Trains don't pick you up at your front door.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    Nothing is more enticing than a shared car with other people who are incentivized to push the cleaning and maintenance onto somebody else, while maximizing their own use of the vehicle. It'll be like a public bathroom but with wheels.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Just like rental cars are public bathrooms on wheels?
      - ARandomerDude 5y ago
        Rental cars have someone incentivized to clean and maintain them, namely the rental car company.
- shafyy 5y ago
  The key is to build cities and surroundings around people and not around cars. Of course people will use cars if it's the best mode of transportation. But, as shown by many cities around the globe, if you make public transit or biking the best modes of transportation, people will not use cars to commute. I think this is something people who have never lived in such cities inherently don't understand. Public transport and bike will always be a better mode of transport for most use cases (not for all, of course) if implemented properly - self-driving cars or not. And no, the solution is also not a hyper loop. Just good old buses, trains, trams, subways and bikes.
  - Steltek 5y ago
    It's hard to tell people "just take the bus" when the nearest suitable home to the bus stop starts at $1M. Alt transit is making slow but measurable progress but the housing situation is the real priority if you want people out of cars. Unless you're a believer in urban living, suburban costs are hard to beat, even when factoring in car ownership costs.
    - shafyy 5y ago
      That's why I'm saying in "cities and surroundings". You can absolutely build great public transportation infrastructure in rural areas. For example, in Switzerland public transportation is mostly public, and you can go to every nook and corner of the country reliably. As a stark contrast, in Ireland, a lot of the "public" transport is privatized and there transport options suck in rural areas. Now, I don't want to make this about private vs. public (even though I absolutely think public transport should be public), but just to show that it's just a matter of how you invest money and set incentives to build this infrastructure.
    - acdha 5y ago
      This very much depends on where you live. In SF or NYC, sure, housing is very expensive but that's not the entire country and even there it's exaggerating to say you can't live near transit for less than $1M. We definitely need more attention to urban housing availability and improving transit considerably (i.e. not treating it as a last resort for the poor / disabled) but there's also a lot of inertia and assumption driving those comparisons which leads people to think it's cheaper to live further out even when they end up spending the same amount or more (at least hopefully for a preferred lifestyle choice such as a large lawn).
skeletal88 5y ago
When everyone needs a car to get to work at the same time and you can't be sure thst you will get one when you request it - how can you plan your trip to work or anywhere, if getting a car is random?
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  You prebook your car in advance. This is certainly not a hard problem.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    I do not see how that solves the general problem. Either there are as many cars available for prebooking as their are rush-hour commuters who want them or we have to ration the supply using shortages and/or surge pricing. In the former case we haven't appreciably decreased the number of cars. In the latter case I anticipate that anyone who can afford to do so will continue to own a private vehicle to ensure they can get to work on time, so we also haven't appreciably decreased the number of cars.
    - Ma8ee 5y ago
      It solves the problem that you can plan your trip. The complaint was that you couldn’t plan your trip. Not everyone go to work at the same time, so every car will be available for several trips. And what would be wrong with prices that varies with demand? Isn’t that how market economy is supposed to work? It will still be cheaper than owning your own car.
      - asoneth 5y ago
        It is theoretically possible, sure. I'm trying to imagine a nontrivial number of people who currently own a private vehicle selling that vehicle to rely on prebooking both of their daily commuting trips with a flexibly-priced mode of transportation to save money. As a datapoint, I know many people who regularly take car services like Uber, but I don't know of anyone who actually sold their car to rely exclusively on a car service to commute. Perhaps if driverless cars halve the price of car service it might start to happen? I'm not saying it is not theoretically possible that driverless cars will reduce car ownership, I am saying that I am skeptical of the weak arguments and minimal evidence provided thus far for such a claim.
syshum 5y ago
More likely you will see people go from 2 car households to 1. I know alot of people that have 2 cars simply because one of them sits at a person place of work all day, if they could have to car return home then it would allow them to only have 1
- onion2k 5y ago
  I think it'll be more than that, but even if you're right that would still be a massive reduction in the number of cars.
Ma8ee 5y ago
Not to forget that if the cars don’t have to be parked next to their destination, towns and cities can be built much denser, so the distance travelled will be smaller. That might even lead to people start walking more since they don’t have to cross 400 meters of parking lots to get to Starbucks any more.
jcranmer 5y ago
> Rather than people owning a car they'll request one via an app, it'll turn up and drive them where they want to be, and then it'll go off to the next customer. Car utilization will go up significantly. It'll be like all cars are taxis. Traffic is quite bursty: there is a lot of generally unidirectional demand for trips during the morning rush hour, and then generally unidirectional demand in the opposite direction during the evening rush hour, and much less demand for anything in between.
asoneth 5y ago
I hope you are right but I am skeptical that the reduction in the number of cars will offset the increase in miles driven over the next couple decades where it matters most. Shared-use vehicles exist (the taxis you mention, as well as car shares and rental cars) and with the exception of cities that have extremely expensive car ownership costs most people still choose to own a personal vehicle for commuting. Would you rely on the availability of a shared vehicle during rush hour to meet your commuting needs? I have a very hard time imagining many Americans who live in a suburb or car-dependent city giving up their private vehicle no matter how cheap or reliable shared vehicles become. Perhaps if car ownership became two or three times more expensive (e.g. carbon taxes on new vehicles, no parking minimums, paying market rates for parking spaces, etc) people might switch, but I am skeptical that any of those will come to pass as long as most voters drive cars.
CalRobert 5y ago
But I can buy a self-driving car and sleep in it for my commute from Yosemite to San Francisco.
sudosysgen 5y ago
You have to take into account peak usage and depreciation. Cars are typically only discarded once they hit a certain distance. No matter if the car is a taxi or a personal car, it will be discarded after the same number of miles. You also need to buy enough cars for the worst possible scenario, which is the peakiest of peaks. Unlike a personal car, robotaxis will also be replaced as soon as it economically efficient to do so, whereas cars are typically eventually driven past the point at which they are economically viable by someone. I do not believe there will be a significant decrease in car manifacture. The only way it could be is if instead of robotaxis, we built robobuses that carry 5-6 people on average.
- pixl97 5y ago
  >No matter if the car is a taxi or a personal car, it will be discarded after the same number of miles. What? I'd disagree with just about everything there. In general fleet vehicles go much farther because of regular maintenance. The other factor that must be taken in effect is will the rate of accidents that total cars decrease, if so, the average total mileage will increase.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    The decreased rate of accidents is true. A newly built car can be expected to be retired after 250-300k miles. Rental car companies seem to be trying to sell their cars after around 60k miles : https://www.wsj.com/articles/rental-cars-with-higher-mileage-populate-lots-1377731770 https://www.wsj.com/articles/rental-cars-with-higher-mileage...
- qeternity 5y ago
  > No matter if the car is a taxi or a personal car, it will be discarded after the same number of miles. Is this actually true? My personal anecdata would suggest that most passenger vehicles are not driven nearly the number of miles that a taxi or commercial vehicle are driven. A quick google suggests passenger vehicles are typically salvaged at 100-150k miles whereas an average taxi might do 500k or more before retirement.
kiliantics 5y ago
> The manufacturing of a car is responsible for a very significant amount of the emissions it produces over its life. According to the Kurzgesagt video about climate change and how to stop it, what's even more significant is the carbon emmissions of road construction. Apparently a single meter of road is equivalent to one car. If we increase car use, we need more roads and those roads need more maintenance and all that has a big carbon budget. We simply need to move our society away from private car infrastructure. My opinion is that a well-designed urban environment built for a mix of electric trains, buses, and e-bikes, with dense housing and mixed use zoning would work really well, as shown in places like Scandinavia, Holland, etc.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  And all the food and goods you need will be delivered to you via helicopter? We need the roads for trucking, if nothing else. But ambulances and fire trucks can be pretty useful too.
  - kiliantics 5y ago
    Nowhere in my comment did I say we should do away with roads completely
jawns 5y ago
This model works well if you're a single person traveling alone and have relatively few things you need to transport with you. In other words, the current "hail a taxi" model. It becomes less workable when you need to travel as a family with kids, car seats, strollers, other equipment. Having a dedicated vehicle that belongs to you and is always at the place where you left it is immensely useful in these circumstances.
- natch 5y ago
  Yep. And as with many things there will be a mix of solutions for different needs.
Steltek 5y ago
I'm not optimistic that a significant number of people who need car transportation will give up personal vehicles. You would lose a lot of things: - Spontaneity: You need to wait for the car to show up - Independence: I would rather be able to do it myself than hire/rent out for the task. - Personal crap storage: Everyone keeps their Very Precious Crap in their car. For certain trips, it's beneficial to have a car nearby to store things temporarily at a destination. - Self expression: In America, a huge number of people express their character through their cars. And not just through bumper stickers. What you drive says who you are. People aren't driving absurdly big pickup trucks because they're all contractors and landscapers. You can argue the practically of these points but that's just like, your opinion man. I think the only way to reduce cars and car problems is by making cars totally unnecessary for daily life: Denser living with local work or WFH work. Diverse zoning so you're walking around the corner for your cup of coffee rather than a mile away. Urban life should rightfully be the most efficient and economical approach. The suburbs are subsidized all to hell and the common sense approach is unrecognizable to most people now..
- adventured 5y ago
  > Denser living with local work or WFH work. Diverse zoning so you're walking around the corner for your cup of coffee rather than a mile away. None of which is going to happen in the US in the next 50+ years no matter what. We're not rebuilding the entire superstructure of the US anytime soon. We can't even agree to put together funds or routine taxes to properly maintain basic infrastructure. Should it happen? It'd be great if the US had dozens of nice cities that were inviting to live in. It doesn't. It never will. It's not going to happen. People often don't want to live in cities in the US, because have you seen the state of most major US cities? Europeans think American cities are close to being of third world condition and it's not far off as an assessment. That's going to get worse, not better, as the US gradually decays toward being a richer version of Brazil. We're not going to have more money to spend on making things nice in the future (education, housing, infrastructure, social programs, etc), we're going to have a lot less - our skyrocketing debt and entitlement obligations guarantee that inevitable outcome, the US will rot. The political class isn't going to suddenly become amazing problem solvers, they're going to get worse too, as the culture continues to also rot (all of this is a direct product of a severe cultural decline in the US spanning many decades now). The globally stretched superpower, pre-occupied with so many things that it shouldn't be, that now can't even maintain its bridges properly, isn't going to rationally reimagine and successfully rebuild its urban superstructures. It's obvious what the next 20-30 years will look like.
floatrock 5y ago
> The manufacturing of a car is responsible for a very significant amount of the emissions it produces over its life. Nope. The embedded energy in manufacturing a gasoline car is maybe 1/8th or 1/10th its total lifetime emissions. This is why EV's are so much better cradle-to-grave than gasoline cars -- yes, EV's require extra energy to manufacture the batteries relative to a gasoline car, but even so, that extra energy cost is more than offset within the first few months of electricity-powered driving, even if your local grid is primarily coal powered. By far most of a car's lifetime emissions are from operating it, not manufacturing it. See chart on page 3 of this Union of Concerned Scientists report: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cleaner-Cars-from-Cradle-to-Grave-full-report.pdf https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...
- notriddle 5y ago
  Does anyone make a driverless car that isn’t a hybrid or an EV?
  - floatrock 5y ago
    EV's are better than fossil cars, but they too have most of their emissions in operation rather than manufacturing. So the significant question isn't "will driverless lead to fewer emissions because of fewer cars", the significant question is "will (electric) driverless lead to fewer emissions because of fewer miles driven?" It's no question that electric is more efficient on emissions per mile, but if the number of trip-miles increases because driverless cars eg are constantly circling the downtown waiting for passengers, or they make more low-occupancy trips possible so they induce demand of low-occupancy miles, well it could be worse emissions wise!
gjsman-1000 5y ago
Imagine you are a family with young children. You might live in a city right now - I live near Minneapolis where they've got a brand-new (like, less than 5 years old for most of it) lightrail system. It's shiny, it's fast, it's efficient, what's not to love? Assaults. A 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted 4 months ago. Less than a month ago someone got attacked with a knife. Less than a year ago, three teens were arrested for repeated racially-based attacks. In 2020 (because we don't have numbers for 2021 yet), there were 51 aggravated assaults and 239 "other assaults" despite 59% lower ridership from COVID. And it's not just assaults - drug use around (or sometimes even on) the lightrail is a significant problem (276 reported offenses 2020). Theft is yet another problem. I'm not bringing my family (or even myself) anywhere near the lightrail. I'd prefer to drive just for their safety and mine. I know it's worse for the environment but their safety is my first concern. And such is the problem with public transit. It's easy to think of it as reducing load on the environment while forgetting that lax law enforcement turns it into a somewhat scary place to be with family members.
- Steltek 5y ago
  These are significant and general problems with society right now but perhaps orthogonal to transportation. Being able to drive past the homeless encampment might be convenient(?) right now but we've graduated from ignoring our crumbling, unaffordable car infrastructure to ignoring the crumbling, unaffordable healthcare and housing.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    I don't understand how that is related to my argument at all. I'm saying that the lightrail is objectively not as safe or predictable as driving with my family, and for that reason, the reason to use the lightrail because it's better for the environment is of less importance to me.
    - staticman2 5y ago
      Some suburban people in wealthy neighborhoods would say it's too dangerous to ever visit a city. It's unpredictable due to crime. You've drawn the line at visiting the city but using a car, and maybe you are right, but I don't think listing incidents without context really makes your case.
nradov 5y ago
No thanks. It would be nice to have the car drive itself (although I doubt we'll achieve true SAE level 4+ capability on most roads in my lifetime). But I keep a lot of useful stuff in my car. I don't want to load and unload it every time. The car also serves as a reasonably secure storage locker at my destination. But your model might work in shithole cities like San Francisco. No one can leave stuff in their cars because they have to park on the street and auto burglaries are rampant.
RobLach 5y ago
Driverless cars de-incentivize carpooling and incentivize idling on public roads to avoid storage / parking costs (unless states implement fee structures for occupying roads). A taxi model means you can compete for market share by being fastest to respond, which means you can fill the roads to the brim with your vehicles to push your competitors out of the market with sheer capital expenditure. You would be further incentivized to do this through economies of scale. You only need to look at how taxi freelancer apps increased the number of vehicle miles on the roads in all major cities and how bike rental apps filled urban areas with bikes annoyingly scattered all over the place. Any car based transport vision of the future means more cars on the road, and consequently more car-focused infrastructure. To really be more efficient you need to focus on passenger miles / unit of energy, which very decidedly means mass transit.

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago

>Rather than people owning a car they'll request one via an app, it'll turn up and drive them where they want to be Which will mean turning up to the suburbs at 8am to drive downtown by 9am. Without a drastic, permanent change in working hours & commuting (or permanent WFH) the minimum number of cars will barely change.

onion2k 5y ago
Without a drastic, permanent change in working hours & commuting (or permanent WFH)... That's already happening.
- oblio 5y ago
  > That's already happening. Because of a worldwide pandemic. There's no guarantee that these changes will last.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    It was happening long before Covid. Covid just accelerated it.
    - oblio 5y ago
      True, but there are also backlashes, especially when something is forced. And too many remote work enthusiast assume that the steady state for this is majority remote work. I don't buy it. I'd be surprised if we go over 25%, maaaaybe 40% best case scenario.
amelius 5y ago
It could also be a minivan or bus, which can be shared with workers from the same area.
- kiliantics 5y ago
  something like this already exists and carries even more workers from the same area -- trains
  - amelius 5y ago
    Trains don't pick you up at your front door.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  Nothing is more enticing than a shared car with other people who are incentivized to push the cleaning and maintenance onto somebody else, while maximizing their own use of the vehicle. It'll be like a public bathroom but with wheels.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Just like rental cars are public bathrooms on wheels?
    - ARandomerDude 5y ago
      Rental cars have someone incentivized to clean and maintain them, namely the rental car company.
shafyy 5y ago
The key is to build cities and surroundings around people and not around cars. Of course people will use cars if it's the best mode of transportation. But, as shown by many cities around the globe, if you make public transit or biking the best modes of transportation, people will not use cars to commute. I think this is something people who have never lived in such cities inherently don't understand. Public transport and bike will always be a better mode of transport for most use cases (not for all, of course) if implemented properly - self-driving cars or not. And no, the solution is also not a hyper loop. Just good old buses, trains, trams, subways and bikes.
- Steltek 5y ago
  It's hard to tell people "just take the bus" when the nearest suitable home to the bus stop starts at $1M. Alt transit is making slow but measurable progress but the housing situation is the real priority if you want people out of cars. Unless you're a believer in urban living, suburban costs are hard to beat, even when factoring in car ownership costs.
  - shafyy 5y ago
    That's why I'm saying in "cities and surroundings". You can absolutely build great public transportation infrastructure in rural areas. For example, in Switzerland public transportation is mostly public, and you can go to every nook and corner of the country reliably. As a stark contrast, in Ireland, a lot of the "public" transport is privatized and there transport options suck in rural areas. Now, I don't want to make this about private vs. public (even though I absolutely think public transport should be public), but just to show that it's just a matter of how you invest money and set incentives to build this infrastructure.
  - acdha 5y ago
    This very much depends on where you live. In SF or NYC, sure, housing is very expensive but that's not the entire country and even there it's exaggerating to say you can't live near transit for less than $1M. We definitely need more attention to urban housing availability and improving transit considerably (i.e. not treating it as a last resort for the poor / disabled) but there's also a lot of inertia and assumption driving those comparisons which leads people to think it's cheaper to live further out even when they end up spending the same amount or more (at least hopefully for a preferred lifestyle choice such as a large lawn).

skeletal88 5y ago

When everyone needs a car to get to work at the same time and you can't be sure thst you will get one when you request it - how can you plan your trip to work or anywhere, if getting a car is random?

Ma8ee 5y ago
You prebook your car in advance. This is certainly not a hard problem.
- asoneth 5y ago
  I do not see how that solves the general problem. Either there are as many cars available for prebooking as their are rush-hour commuters who want them or we have to ration the supply using shortages and/or surge pricing. In the former case we haven't appreciably decreased the number of cars. In the latter case I anticipate that anyone who can afford to do so will continue to own a private vehicle to ensure they can get to work on time, so we also haven't appreciably decreased the number of cars.
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    It solves the problem that you can plan your trip. The complaint was that you couldn’t plan your trip. Not everyone go to work at the same time, so every car will be available for several trips. And what would be wrong with prices that varies with demand? Isn’t that how market economy is supposed to work? It will still be cheaper than owning your own car.
    - asoneth 5y ago
      It is theoretically possible, sure. I'm trying to imagine a nontrivial number of people who currently own a private vehicle selling that vehicle to rely on prebooking both of their daily commuting trips with a flexibly-priced mode of transportation to save money. As a datapoint, I know many people who regularly take car services like Uber, but I don't know of anyone who actually sold their car to rely exclusively on a car service to commute. Perhaps if driverless cars halve the price of car service it might start to happen? I'm not saying it is not theoretically possible that driverless cars will reduce car ownership, I am saying that I am skeptical of the weak arguments and minimal evidence provided thus far for such a claim.

syshum 5y ago

More likely you will see people go from 2 car households to 1. I know alot of people that have 2 cars simply because one of them sits at a person place of work all day, if they could have to car return home then it would allow them to only have 1

onion2k 5y ago
I think it'll be more than that, but even if you're right that would still be a massive reduction in the number of cars.

Ma8ee 5y ago

Not to forget that if the cars don’t have to be parked next to their destination, towns and cities can be built much denser, so the distance travelled will be smaller. That might even lead to people start walking more since they don’t have to cross 400 meters of parking lots to get to Starbucks any more.

jcranmer 5y ago

> Rather than people owning a car they'll request one via an app, it'll turn up and drive them where they want to be, and then it'll go off to the next customer. Car utilization will go up significantly. It'll be like all cars are taxis. Traffic is quite bursty: there is a lot of generally unidirectional demand for trips during the morning rush hour, and then generally unidirectional demand in the opposite direction during the evening rush hour, and much less demand for anything in between.

asoneth 5y ago

I hope you are right but I am skeptical that the reduction in the number of cars will offset the increase in miles driven over the next couple decades where it matters most. Shared-use vehicles exist (the taxis you mention, as well as car shares and rental cars) and with the exception of cities that have extremely expensive car ownership costs most people still choose to own a personal vehicle for commuting. Would you rely on the availability of a shared vehicle during rush hour to meet your commuting needs? I have a very hard time imagining many Americans who live in a suburb or car-dependent city giving up their private vehicle no matter how cheap or reliable shared vehicles become. Perhaps if car ownership became two or three times more expensive (e.g. carbon taxes on new vehicles, no parking minimums, paying market rates for parking spaces, etc) people might switch, but I am skeptical that any of those will come to pass as long as most voters drive cars.

CalRobert 5y ago

But I can buy a self-driving car and sleep in it for my commute from Yosemite to San Francisco.

sudosysgen 5y ago

You have to take into account peak usage and depreciation. Cars are typically only discarded once they hit a certain distance. No matter if the car is a taxi or a personal car, it will be discarded after the same number of miles. You also need to buy enough cars for the worst possible scenario, which is the peakiest of peaks. Unlike a personal car, robotaxis will also be replaced as soon as it economically efficient to do so, whereas cars are typically eventually driven past the point at which they are economically viable by someone. I do not believe there will be a significant decrease in car manifacture. The only way it could be is if instead of robotaxis, we built robobuses that carry 5-6 people on average.

pixl97 5y ago
>No matter if the car is a taxi or a personal car, it will be discarded after the same number of miles. What? I'd disagree with just about everything there. In general fleet vehicles go much farther because of regular maintenance. The other factor that must be taken in effect is will the rate of accidents that total cars decrease, if so, the average total mileage will increase.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The decreased rate of accidents is true. A newly built car can be expected to be retired after 250-300k miles. Rental car companies seem to be trying to sell their cars after around 60k miles : https://www.wsj.com/articles/rental-cars-with-higher-mileage-populate-lots-1377731770 https://www.wsj.com/articles/rental-cars-with-higher-mileage...
qeternity 5y ago
> No matter if the car is a taxi or a personal car, it will be discarded after the same number of miles. Is this actually true? My personal anecdata would suggest that most passenger vehicles are not driven nearly the number of miles that a taxi or commercial vehicle are driven. A quick google suggests passenger vehicles are typically salvaged at 100-150k miles whereas an average taxi might do 500k or more before retirement.

kiliantics 5y ago

> The manufacturing of a car is responsible for a very significant amount of the emissions it produces over its life. According to the Kurzgesagt video about climate change and how to stop it, what's even more significant is the carbon emmissions of road construction. Apparently a single meter of road is equivalent to one car. If we increase car use, we need more roads and those roads need more maintenance and all that has a big carbon budget. We simply need to move our society away from private car infrastructure. My opinion is that a well-designed urban environment built for a mix of electric trains, buses, and e-bikes, with dense housing and mixed use zoning would work really well, as shown in places like Scandinavia, Holland, etc.

dahfizz 5y ago
And all the food and goods you need will be delivered to you via helicopter? We need the roads for trucking, if nothing else. But ambulances and fire trucks can be pretty useful too.
- kiliantics 5y ago
  Nowhere in my comment did I say we should do away with roads completely

jawns 5y ago

This model works well if you're a single person traveling alone and have relatively few things you need to transport with you. In other words, the current "hail a taxi" model. It becomes less workable when you need to travel as a family with kids, car seats, strollers, other equipment. Having a dedicated vehicle that belongs to you and is always at the place where you left it is immensely useful in these circumstances.

natch 5y ago
Yep. And as with many things there will be a mix of solutions for different needs.

Steltek 5y ago

I'm not optimistic that a significant number of people who need car transportation will give up personal vehicles. You would lose a lot of things: - Spontaneity: You need to wait for the car to show up - Independence: I would rather be able to do it myself than hire/rent out for the task. - Personal crap storage: Everyone keeps their Very Precious Crap in their car. For certain trips, it's beneficial to have a car nearby to store things temporarily at a destination. - Self expression: In America, a huge number of people express their character through their cars. And not just through bumper stickers. What you drive says who you are. People aren't driving absurdly big pickup trucks because they're all contractors and landscapers. You can argue the practically of these points but that's just like, your opinion man. I think the only way to reduce cars and car problems is by making cars totally unnecessary for daily life: Denser living with local work or WFH work. Diverse zoning so you're walking around the corner for your cup of coffee rather than a mile away. Urban life should rightfully be the most efficient and economical approach. The suburbs are subsidized all to hell and the common sense approach is unrecognizable to most people now..

adventured 5y ago
> Denser living with local work or WFH work. Diverse zoning so you're walking around the corner for your cup of coffee rather than a mile away. None of which is going to happen in the US in the next 50+ years no matter what. We're not rebuilding the entire superstructure of the US anytime soon. We can't even agree to put together funds or routine taxes to properly maintain basic infrastructure. Should it happen? It'd be great if the US had dozens of nice cities that were inviting to live in. It doesn't. It never will. It's not going to happen. People often don't want to live in cities in the US, because have you seen the state of most major US cities? Europeans think American cities are close to being of third world condition and it's not far off as an assessment. That's going to get worse, not better, as the US gradually decays toward being a richer version of Brazil. We're not going to have more money to spend on making things nice in the future (education, housing, infrastructure, social programs, etc), we're going to have a lot less - our skyrocketing debt and entitlement obligations guarantee that inevitable outcome, the US will rot. The political class isn't going to suddenly become amazing problem solvers, they're going to get worse too, as the culture continues to also rot (all of this is a direct product of a severe cultural decline in the US spanning many decades now). The globally stretched superpower, pre-occupied with so many things that it shouldn't be, that now can't even maintain its bridges properly, isn't going to rationally reimagine and successfully rebuild its urban superstructures. It's obvious what the next 20-30 years will look like.

floatrock 5y ago

> The manufacturing of a car is responsible for a very significant amount of the emissions it produces over its life. Nope. The embedded energy in manufacturing a gasoline car is maybe 1/8th or 1/10th its total lifetime emissions. This is why EV's are so much better cradle-to-grave than gasoline cars -- yes, EV's require extra energy to manufacture the batteries relative to a gasoline car, but even so, that extra energy cost is more than offset within the first few months of electricity-powered driving, even if your local grid is primarily coal powered. By far most of a car's lifetime emissions are from operating it, not manufacturing it. See chart on page 3 of this Union of Concerned Scientists report: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cleaner-Cars-from-Cradle-to-Grave-full-report.pdf https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...

notriddle 5y ago
Does anyone make a driverless car that isn’t a hybrid or an EV?
- floatrock 5y ago
  EV's are better than fossil cars, but they too have most of their emissions in operation rather than manufacturing. So the significant question isn't "will driverless lead to fewer emissions because of fewer cars", the significant question is "will (electric) driverless lead to fewer emissions because of fewer miles driven?" It's no question that electric is more efficient on emissions per mile, but if the number of trip-miles increases because driverless cars eg are constantly circling the downtown waiting for passengers, or they make more low-occupancy trips possible so they induce demand of low-occupancy miles, well it could be worse emissions wise!

gjsman-1000 5y ago

Imagine you are a family with young children. You might live in a city right now - I live near Minneapolis where they've got a brand-new (like, less than 5 years old for most of it) lightrail system. It's shiny, it's fast, it's efficient, what's not to love? Assaults. A 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted 4 months ago. Less than a month ago someone got attacked with a knife. Less than a year ago, three teens were arrested for repeated racially-based attacks. In 2020 (because we don't have numbers for 2021 yet), there were 51 aggravated assaults and 239 "other assaults" despite 59% lower ridership from COVID. And it's not just assaults - drug use around (or sometimes even on) the lightrail is a significant problem (276 reported offenses 2020). Theft is yet another problem. I'm not bringing my family (or even myself) anywhere near the lightrail. I'd prefer to drive just for their safety and mine. I know it's worse for the environment but their safety is my first concern. And such is the problem with public transit. It's easy to think of it as reducing load on the environment while forgetting that lax law enforcement turns it into a somewhat scary place to be with family members.

Steltek 5y ago
These are significant and general problems with society right now but perhaps orthogonal to transportation. Being able to drive past the homeless encampment might be convenient(?) right now but we've graduated from ignoring our crumbling, unaffordable car infrastructure to ignoring the crumbling, unaffordable healthcare and housing.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  I don't understand how that is related to my argument at all. I'm saying that the lightrail is objectively not as safe or predictable as driving with my family, and for that reason, the reason to use the lightrail because it's better for the environment is of less importance to me.
  - staticman2 5y ago
    Some suburban people in wealthy neighborhoods would say it's too dangerous to ever visit a city. It's unpredictable due to crime. You've drawn the line at visiting the city but using a car, and maybe you are right, but I don't think listing incidents without context really makes your case.

nradov 5y ago

No thanks. It would be nice to have the car drive itself (although I doubt we'll achieve true SAE level 4+ capability on most roads in my lifetime). But I keep a lot of useful stuff in my car. I don't want to load and unload it every time. The car also serves as a reasonably secure storage locker at my destination. But your model might work in shithole cities like San Francisco. No one can leave stuff in their cars because they have to park on the street and auto burglaries are rampant.

RobLach 5y ago

Driverless cars de-incentivize carpooling and incentivize idling on public roads to avoid storage / parking costs (unless states implement fee structures for occupying roads). A taxi model means you can compete for market share by being fastest to respond, which means you can fill the roads to the brim with your vehicles to push your competitors out of the market with sheer capital expenditure. You would be further incentivized to do this through economies of scale. You only need to look at how taxi freelancer apps increased the number of vehicle miles on the roads in all major cities and how bike rental apps filled urban areas with bikes annoyingly scattered all over the place. Any car based transport vision of the future means more cars on the road, and consequently more car-focused infrastructure. To really be more efficient you need to focus on passenger miles / unit of energy, which very decidedly means mass transit.