10 ms·

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are b

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prioritization is already good enough to have automated busses cart people around. Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing". (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z) > The role of transportation network companies (TNCs) in the urban transport system is under intense debate. In this study, we systematically assess three aspects of the net impacts of TNCs on urban mobility in the United States—road congestion, transit ridership and private vehicle ownership—and examine how these impacts have evolved over time. Based on a set of fixed-effect panel models estimated using metropolitan statistical area level data, we find that the entrance of TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%) and duration (by 4.5%), an 8.9% decline in transit ridership and an insignificant change in vehicle ownership. Despite the ideal of providing a sustainable mobility solution by promoting large-scale car sharing, our analysis suggests that TNCs have intensified urban transport challenges since their debut in the United States. Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving personal vehicles.

valine 4y ago
The roads will be so gridlocked no one will drive on them anymore /s. Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem. DC fast charging price hikes will be especially effective at reducing robotaxi usage as unlike privately owned EVs, robotaxis will primarily rely on fast charging. Also don’t forget about how much traffic flow will improve because self driving cars don’t get impatient and tailgate.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  > Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem. Yes, this is why traffic is so minimal in the top 10 MSAs in America.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    It just means prices are not high enough. Make it $100 to travel at rush hour on a particular stretch of road, and congestion will go away very quickly.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      Reducing the congestion isn't the goal though. Increasing throughput is. Cars simply have worse throughput than a train, or a bus for that matter. Simple as that. Charging more money would be counterproductive unless that money served to build out transit since you would increase the congestion on the non-toll roads.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        It is one and the same. There will be no political will to invest in quality public transit unless there is lots of pain in using comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit. Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then means it makes sense to support initiatives that are contrary to public transit, such as mandated parking lot minimums and giant roads.
        endisneigh 4y ago
        in practice this doesn't make sense since people are broke. you're be punishing them for no reason, they would continue to drive on more and more congested roads, take longer to get to their destination and you wouldn't raise enough to build out public transit. everyone loses. well, actually, I guess rich people paying $100 a ride on underutilized roads would win. great for them I guess. this is already the status quo.
warning26 4y ago
You’re getting downvoted but you’re not necessarily wrong. I love the idea of self driving vehicles and I’m excited about them, but I harbor no illusions about them fixing traffic. The key question I would ask to self driving proponents is this - if you waved your magic wand and suddenly changed every car on the road to self driving…how would that impact traffic? At the very least traffic wouldn’t decrease. You could maybe marginally increase throughput by using tighter tolerances between cars, but I’m guessing the difference wouldn’t be substantial.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Traffic would get somewhat worse. People would be willing to commute somewhat farther because they could spend that time reading the paper or working instead of driving the car. Errands that used to be annoying enough to delay get more frequent as well for the same reason. If we get to a car share model, where you subscribe and pay per mile, that might offset some car use. Really we need all of the above - self-driving, less personal car ownership, and other transit options.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    You could have a full self driving only lane that’s allows speeds up to 200MPH. Self driving cars could have better reaction times allowing for higher highway density with faster speeds.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - CultMember001 4y ago
      [dead]
    - CultMember011 4y ago
      Yes, I believe that this was Elon’s plan all along and I believe that full autonomous self driving (FASD should be the new marketing term) will make traffic better because we will literally speed up traffics very significantly. Imagine going the speed of NASCAR race cars in your neighborhood streets. With FASD, every street becomes a German Autobahn. Elon is still the true visionary of our time and we should all help make his vision come true. I will start lobbying my city council to remove speed limits on our neighborhood streets. Thank you for this wonderful idea.
maxerickson 4y ago
Tens of millions of people live in places where frequent bus service simply isn't practical. It's probably reasonable for society to make choices that overall incentivize against living in those areas, but that isn't going to change where people live anytime soon. And you can just use taxes to control any induced demand that comes from lower costs or new behaviors. The vehicles have sophisticated tracking systems and telematics built right in.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Though you're not wrong, in a hypothetical world where most vehicles on the road were self driving busses, the frequency could be dynamically set and reasonable for everyone.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    I expect that "2 seat buses" would be quite popular in that scenario.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Adding transit makes people live around the transit - if you let them by not kneecapping them with zoning rules. All this is an emergent property of a system designed to prevent new construction.
- Symmetry 4y ago
  Buses are as large as they are because the driver's time is valuable. If self-driving cars were cheap you could a bunch of 8 person van/busses on the road that give you most of the environmental/traffic benefit of a bus but could really expand frequency and reach.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    If you shrink down 8 person busses to 5 people you have a normal passenger car.
    - 4y ago
ideamotor 4y ago
The metric to judge assisted driving technologies is primarily safety. Driving is not safe and I suspect will appear insane to a future generation. Which generation and how soon is another question. However, what the US needs to massive investments in rail, which address both safety and traffic.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  It's not that driving is unsafe, it's that cars are unsafe. Even if all cars were self driving, accidents happen, even with computers. A world without cars at all would be safer, albeit unrealistic. So the question is, would self driving put more or fewer cars on the road? I argue more. A lot more. So much more that it would offset the increase in marginal safety per vehicle. It would also discourage the true solution around urbanization and continue to fuel more and more sprawling madness.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  People always bring up this idea that future generations will think it is “insane” to drive your own car. Will everyone in the future be very scared children in a far left monoculture? I just think people are more complicated than that. I think if people are really like that we will have very fragile humans.
- astral303 4y ago
  Allowing FSD (in the next 20 years) to drive is unsafe, in my eyes. Investment in alternative transportation is the answer that doesn’t require driving from human or an algorithm.
  - mewpmewp2 4y ago
    It depends. It could be safe if it's self driving at 20mph on a constant pre-determined route.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Driving is not safe This only appears true because we've made our entire world so safe that we can call one fatality every 100 million miles dangerous. Given everything we use cars for and the immense utility of them, being driven almost exclusively by amateurs ... cars are remarkably safe. And if you could find a way to reliably remove the 1% that cause most of the problems, it would be even safer.
nullc 4y ago
Interesting point about induced demand. Though it can be easily fixed, particularly given the lack of user control over cars with FSD: For self driving cars all public roads are toll roads.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  > Though it can be easily fixed, particularly given the lack of user control over cars with FSD: For self driving cars all public roads are toll roads. I disagree. Politically it would be hard to convince the majority of people (which would be the default state until some inversion) that a vehicle that is capable of self-driving should have to a surcharge per mile, given that it could also be driven manually. The only recourse would be to make all roads toll roads, which obviously won't happen.
  - nullc 4y ago
    Depends on the public's perception of self driving. If it's perceived as some tool of the rich making roads unusable for the rest it might not be so hard to make the case. We already have the situation where EV's aren't paying road taxes that everyone else pays.
jimkleiber 4y ago
I assume if there were more self-driving cars, fewer people would own cars. I think more people would take Ubers, Lyfts, and other ride sharing services. So I think that could reduce the need for parking and the amount of traffic just by increasing the utilization rate of cars.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  read the study I linked - what you suppose does not and has not happened in practice.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    Ah ok, I'll check it out. I'm curious if self-driving Ubers would be a step change tho, or if we would observe the same thing. Edit: because if we half self-driving cars, do we also get self-driving buses and now we can have a lot more bus routes? Is lack (or cost) of labor one thing that holds back the number of buses we have? Could we have more mini buses? Just curious how much the labor factors into the transit options we have. Maybe it doesn't that much, I don't know.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I assume with autonomous driving, scheduled and computer dispatched minibuses/shuttle buses would be more common. Labor is a fairly large component of public transit. Of course, you don't remotely eliminate that for various reasons but reducing the need for drivers almost certainly makes alternative forms of transit more economical.
    - mewpmewp2 4y ago
      There could be a huge algorithm which will try to schedule vehicles with varying sizes from 2 seats to 30 seats to people all over the city. If you pay more you can get the exact N spots so you get privacy, if you are willing to pay the least, you might have to go 30m into a dedicated spot where a 30 seater will stop for you and some others, then it will make optimised stops based on what everyone has as their destinations.
Snowbird3999 4y ago
Is this true even if you account for the fact that cities can reclaim lanes and buildings dedicated for parking? I would think that a lot of congestion is related cars having to be parked near a specific venue such as a restaurant or an arena (especially in the latter case where there is a gathering of 1000+ people).
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  The thing about arenas is those 1,000 people all want to show up and leave at the same time.. so those 1,000 cars will all have the exact same demand and cause roving gridlock from wherever they are parked on the way to the arena.
arcticbull 4y ago
You’re correct, self driving cars are not going to reduce traffic. A car has an average of 1.5 passengers in it while driving and it spends some 95% of its time parked. Because they’re low/single occupancy vehicles and everybody is trying to get to and from work at approximately the same time you still need to have capacity for every single person at peak time. Any temporary reduction in traffic is immediately filled up by an increase in demand. Just look at the last 50 years of urban development of the United States and tell me adding a few more lanes it’s gonna fix anything. Lyft is basically a self driving car if you squint, and it did nothing. Throw in a couple trains and some busses people actually want to take, and you might actually solve the problem. I have yet to see a plausible explanation for how self-driving cars are to reduce traffic.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing" Fifteen minutes in an Uber is far more pleasant, productive, and I’d wager healthy, than ten minutes in gridlock. I can focus intensely on a task or thought or even take a nap. We should also build rail. But self-driving cars look more likely to complement rail than detract from it. (One can imagine multi-modal trains, onto which self-driving cars park so their owners can enjoy privacy and a custom interior alongside the economics and eco-friendliness of rail.)
- danhor 4y ago
  We had cars on rails. It doesn't really make sense: The train is much heavier, thus has much lower acceleration and lower max speeds. The mass & area needed per person is also much higher, increasing fares a lot. Terminals & stops need to be much larger and take longer. Self driving doesn't improve on any of this, even worse, it takes away the major advantage of not needing to drive. There's a reason loading cars on trains as a way of travel is basically dead and self driving makes it worse.
fallingknife 4y ago
>what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Why? The number of trips is governed by the demand for trips, not the supply of cars. There isn't sufficient demand for trips to put all the cars on the road all the time, or else they already would be. The inelasticity of demand for trips is right there in the data you cite. >TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%)
- endisneigh 4y ago
  self driving cars would create demand as they would presumably be cheaper than equivalent rideshare.
MonkeyClub 4y ago
> States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. I think this is the driving force behind the 15’ city concept.
richardw 4y ago
I don’t want a car. I’d happily share one. Uber where I live (Johannesburg) has kinda forced conversation and I always feel the need to tip. But honestly the drivers here are dangerous, speed around, ride their clutch, go through orange lights, don’t want to take short trips. I’d love a Uber that just does the job, doesn’t want to talk and drives sensibly so I can zone out. One my kid could ride in.
starkd 4y ago
> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road Where do you get that? FSD is not by itself going to compel people to drive more than they need to.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > FSD is not by itself going to compel people to drive more than they need to. What people "need" (or "want") changes: if you live in the city and want to partake in Nature, it may be a hassle to get out of the city. But if you can 'just' hop in a FSD car and have it drive overnight (while you sleep) to a nature reserve/park, people may do that. Whereas previously they may not desired it enough to deal with traffic in getting there. Imagine FSD recreational vehicles (RVs, UK: campers), or those live-in vans that are somewhat popular nowadays: go to sleep in one place, wake up in another.
- ericmay 4y ago
  We already do drive more than we need to because of how society is designed in America, but if the costs were lower as promised and you basically had an always-on-demand car with no driver, you could work or something while in the car, and take a nap wouldn't people take a lot more road trips or trips otherwise? I don't see how this wouldn't increase usage. That being said, increase in usage doesn't necessarily correlate to increased traffic.
kolbe 4y ago
> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing". Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple customers at once. But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was an entire network of FSD vehicles.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  you should read the study I linked. generally at a minimum self driving removes the need to drive, by definition, making the time more productive and removes downsides of driving, thus encouraging it.
drstewart 4y ago
>Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock Can you show your work here? > States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. No, see, mass transit is pointless since it would just create massive demand that would overwhelm the system and thus fall apart. Citation: trust me bro
- danny_codes 4y ago
  I think the FSD causes more traffic argument boils down to induced demand. More people on the road, finite road. Mass transit has been anecdotally shown to scale extremely well. If it can handle Hong Kong it's hard to imagine a density where it doesn't work.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    >it's hard to imagine a density where it doesn't work. It's really not https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2060212/tokyo-considers-drastic-measures-relieve-extreme-overcrowding https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2060212/tok...
ryukoposting 4y ago
> Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving personal vehicles. Your comment operates on the assumption that autonomous buses provide greater net utility than a "manned" bus - sure, without a driver's seat you might add a row of seats, but are two more seats worth the R&D money to design the bus, and all the cameras and sensors that have to be added to the bus and then maintained for years to come? To me, autonomous driving features are a luxury item - a convenience reserved for those who can afford it, until it becomes cheap enough to find its way into more affordable vehicles.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  you're thinking about it wrong. the utility gained is not in the space, but in the fact that you can run more frequent service
epgui 4y ago
> Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock I believe the opposite is the more likely outcome: I think we can expect much lighter traffic the more autonomous vehicles there are. Most traffic is caused by humans doing really irrational things, like following each other too closely, making unnecessary lane changes, and driving at inconsistent speeds. It's very rare that traffic congestion is actually caused by roads' lack of bandwidth.
- Tiktaalik 4y ago
  The sorts of Driving behaviors you mention are not a significant cause of traffic congestion. Traffic congestion is caused by there being too many cars on the road with limited space for cars. Anything that will increase the amount of cars will quickly dominate inefficient driving behaviors, and self driving cars will massively increase the amount of cars on the road, as it would drive down the cost of driving and enable many many people who currently can’t drive to get onto the road (eg. Disabled, elderly, unlicensed, children).
  - epgui 4y ago
    > "Traffic congestion is caused by there being too many cars on the road with limited space for cars." I mean in some sense this is always going to be true, and removing cars will always help alleviate traffic. But it's not true that driving behaviour is not a significant cause of traffic congestion: it's the cause in most cases. [1] For an extreme illustration, there's a well-known phenomenon where adding extra lanes of traffic to a highway or freeway actually worsens traffic: the added bandwidth interacts in weird/subtle ways with driver behaviour. [2] [1] https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7276027/traffic-jam https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7276027/traffic-jam [2] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
    - Tiktaalik 4y ago
      Yes these are real phenomenons that exist, but focusing on this marginal issue is fiddling at the edges of the real core problem. Roads are fixed in size, cars are very big and take up too much space. Fundamentally baked into the design this is an inefficient way to move people around and there's no fix to be found working within a car oriented framework. The only solution is in removing cars from the road. This is why self driving cannot fix traffic as it will only add more cars. Self driving buses, now that would be an improvement, but self driving cars no.
Nullabillity 4y ago
Traffic is _people_. "Induced demand" just means that more people are able to get around in a presumably less miserable way, rather than you (who are presumably already driving if gridlock is a problem to you) getting a better experience. And no, buses or rail won't provide a good experience until they're so frequent and have so many stops that they basically end up being ridiculously overbuilt taxis in all but the highest-density areas.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  10-minute bus service is totally achievable in pretty much every city. Toronto does it. And Toronto is not a dense city.
  - Nullabillity 4y ago
    In the outskirts? On every line? Connected to everything?
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      The whole city, on the majority of routes. Take a look at the system map. There's even 30-minute bus service through the night, from 1:30am to 6am. https://www.ttc.ca/routes-and-schedules#/ https://www.ttc.ca/routes-and-schedules#/
userabchn 4y ago
What makes you think that the self driving technology being developed (by, you claim, "burning tens of billions") is only for "personal vehicles"? The same technology is what can enable the large fleets of self-driving minivans that are necessary for what you describe. Cities can impose a charge per mile driven (that fluctuates depending on current traffic) and people can then decide whether they wish to use a "personal" vehicle or order a self-driving Uber/Waymo minivan pooled ride.
93po 4y ago
There is no evidence to support this theory, and in fact the opposite is likely true. Full self driving would lend itself tremendously to increased public transit options. And tremendously lower car ownership.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Like Uber? Real FSD would just give us the same result as ride sharing, but on a far grander scale. In other words, gridlock.
  - okwubodu 4y ago
    Isn’t most traffic caused by cascading human error? I assumed true FSD would be a mesh net where every car broadcasts its next move to its neighbors.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      Only if humans are banished altogether from the roads. In which case the current attempts at FSD are pointless anyway and we should focus on building the infrastructure for simpler automated cars. As it stands today, every current automated car in existence is quite a lot more timid than a typical human and will cause gridlock very quickly as a result. An awful lot of driving relies on behavior assumptions that computers aren't good at making yet.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nradov 4y ago
      The NHTSA has been working on vehicle-to-vehicle communication for some time but we're still many years away from having it widely implemented. https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/vehicle-vehicle-communication https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/vehicle-vehicle-...
    - freejazz 4y ago
      No, it's caused by the fact that too many cars are trying to go into places they don't all fit.
SilasX 4y ago
Great, but not relevant to this story. HN is a worse place when commenters use tangentially-related discussions as thin pretenses to spam their pre-written manifestos. Please stop. And everyone else, please stop encouraging this.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Seems silly to write such a comment. Place your vote, collapse the thread and move on. Btw the comment was a result of the article in the OP, not pre written.
  - SilasX 4y ago
    Or you could stop spamming HN with irrelevant comments. I’m not the only one hurt by you doing that, the entire site gets worse. Do you think the mods should just collapse toxic comments instead of flagging/killing them and warning the user?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
belorn 4y ago
One of the killer feature I expect to see in the future when we have FSD is that cities will take direct control of traffic in a central way. If cars can be distributed evenly over all roads with each driver getting an average distance/time-to-arrival the overall speed would significant increase, with car owners loosing the control to pick the shortest route in order to be allowed to use the roads in the city. Centrally controlled FSD cars would also allow for much faster intersection since all cars could accelerate and break simultaneous. Both would require quite tight control and coordination that only computer controlled cars could do.
- throwaway1851 4y ago
  > with car owners loosing the control to pick the shortest route in order to be allowed to use the roads in the city Positively dystopian to me.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > Positively dystopian to me. Indeed. Sure is interesting to hear some folks talk about all the things they'll do to other people when given the authority. Of course, in their head it's all justified for the greater good. What is it they say about the path to hell...
  - belorn 4y ago
    I expect people to feel like this (and the downvotes was thus expected). In concept it is no different from getting into a bus or taxi. You specify your destination and choose when to drive, but the passenger do not decide the exact route. A FSD is in concept no different from having your own personal taxi chauffeur. City engineers often uses one way roads to spread traffic out on multiple roads. By preventing people from using the shortest route they can force traffic to spread out and thus reduce congestion. An other common trick is to prevent left or right turns, so that the shortest route become artificially longer and thus force some part of the traffic to use alternative routes which is less congested. When there is some really nasty recurring congestion there is also other more extreme tools that get deployed to really discourage drivers from all choosing the same road, like excessive road tolls or speed bumps. Cities has a long history of using hostile design to shape traffic in order to address congestion. Naturally giving cities more direct control to shape traffic is something that will create new problems, among the biggest being privacy. The car has also very long been the symbol of freedom, so reduced congestion will likely take a while if people choose to do that trade. It is a steep price but the rewards are less congestion and replacing hostile design (which often also cost money to construct) with software.
olliecornelia 4y ago
Induced demand is a myth perpetuated by bus-pilled dorks.
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  Induced demand is a weird edge case that means the road network causes each trip to cover more distance. Usually what they mean is latent demand, which is the number of people who already wanted to go somewhere, but gave up and stayed home due to traffic on roads that haven’t kept up with population.
quonn 4y ago
I just want to be able to have a beer and still drive home. And that‘s the use case and it‘s a good one.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  Okay. But you are still driving under influence. You are at all times responsible for what the car is doing.
bruce511 4y ago
>>High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Mass transit systems only really work in high density areas. This is because the time taken to stop (pasengers on and off) then go is high. So the distance matters less than the number of stops. To be appealing your nearest stop should be within a half mile or so of your house. If a bus can carry 60 people, and only one or two people get in and off at a time, then it takes say 30 stops to fill up, or empty. That makes overall travel speed really slow. Contrast with a dense city - here big groups get on and off at every stop. So a bus needs fewer stops in a route, while being useful to lots of people. Cars work in low-density areas because they typically "stop" only twice, once to load, once to unload. So absolutely yes, we need better public transport, but that ideally means living and working in high density areas. (which for most(?) US people is undesirable.
- jasonhansel 4y ago
  In suburban areas, light rail can work quite well. Although you have to wait longer because of stops, the trains can also move much faster than cars--existing trains are fairly slow, but introducing higher-speed trains would make them competitive with cars. In rural areas, though, your point stands. For adults traveling alone, though, lightweight electronic vehicles like e-bikes may be better than electric cars. Ultimately, an "electric car" is like a "horseless carriage"--an attempt to shoehorn a new energy source into an old form factor where it doesn't fit particularly well.
  - api 4y ago
    It can work for long commutes when you have park and rides, but you still need cars to go the last 1-5 miles. Still nice to take a train the bulk of a long commute into a city core. A lot of people who think trains and buses can do it all are young and have never had kids. Nothing about the suburbs made sense to me before kids. Everything makes sense after kids.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
twblalock 4y ago
> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Why would that be the case? I would keep my self-driving car the same place I keep my normal car now. Why would it be driving around when I’m not in it? That would waste electricity. It would drive me somewhere, park, and wait — just like I do with my current car.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  When you have a self driving car, it should be able to pick you up--driverless-- at the airport when you are coming home from a trip. But logistically that's a challenge for the airports.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    If it wasn’t my own car doing that, it would be a friend using their own car, or a taxi, so I doubt I’d be increasing the total number of cars on the road.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  You might rent it out so that it's earning money for you when you're not using it. What the GP fails to understand is that if and when that happens, your car won't add to the traffic burden, it will replace another car that would otherwise be on the road. Also, if we ever get our act together and make these things talk to each other and to the infrastructure, we will have effectively built trains that can operate without fixed rail. The upside is obviously considerable. Bottom line is that FSD won't increase demand, but it has the potential to help us manage demand in ways that are completely unattainable with human drivers.
jasonhansel 4y ago
I think Elon's biggest problem with mass transit is just that he doesn't like the masses. As he once tweeted: > I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people[...]And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. Not the only problem he cites there (note the "[...]"). But I'm pretty sure there's a reason it's the most prominent. (Incidentally, given the demographics of those most reliant on mass transit, one wonders why exactly he thinks that they are so likely to be serial killers.)
- ironmagma 4y ago
  This is not something specific to Elon. Anyone who’s regularly ridden the 38 “Geary” in San Francisco knows there will be a minority of riders who make the experience, at the very least, annoying, if not scarring. Riding home every day with a screeching schizophrenic is not top on my list of preferred activities, nor anyone’s.

valine 4y ago

The roads will be so gridlocked no one will drive on them anymore /s. Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem. DC fast charging price hikes will be especially effective at reducing robotaxi usage as unlike privately owned EVs, robotaxis will primarily rely on fast charging. Also don’t forget about how much traffic flow will improve because self driving cars don’t get impatient and tailgate.

endisneigh 4y ago
> Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem. Yes, this is why traffic is so minimal in the top 10 MSAs in America.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  It just means prices are not high enough. Make it $100 to travel at rush hour on a particular stretch of road, and congestion will go away very quickly.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    Reducing the congestion isn't the goal though. Increasing throughput is. Cars simply have worse throughput than a train, or a bus for that matter. Simple as that. Charging more money would be counterproductive unless that money served to build out transit since you would increase the congestion on the non-toll roads.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      It is one and the same. There will be no political will to invest in quality public transit unless there is lots of pain in using comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit. Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then means it makes sense to support initiatives that are contrary to public transit, such as mandated parking lot minimums and giant roads.
      - endisneigh 4y ago
        in practice this doesn't make sense since people are broke. you're be punishing them for no reason, they would continue to drive on more and more congested roads, take longer to get to their destination and you wouldn't raise enough to build out public transit. everyone loses. well, actually, I guess rich people paying $100 a ride on underutilized roads would win. great for them I guess. this is already the status quo.

warning26 4y ago

You’re getting downvoted but you’re not necessarily wrong. I love the idea of self driving vehicles and I’m excited about them, but I harbor no illusions about them fixing traffic. The key question I would ask to self driving proponents is this - if you waved your magic wand and suddenly changed every car on the road to self driving…how would that impact traffic? At the very least traffic wouldn’t decrease. You could maybe marginally increase throughput by using tighter tolerances between cars, but I’m guessing the difference wouldn’t be substantial.

alistairSH 4y ago
Traffic would get somewhat worse. People would be willing to commute somewhat farther because they could spend that time reading the paper or working instead of driving the car. Errands that used to be annoying enough to delay get more frequent as well for the same reason. If we get to a car share model, where you subscribe and pay per mile, that might offset some car use. Really we need all of the above - self-driving, less personal car ownership, and other transit options.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  You could have a full self driving only lane that’s allows speeds up to 200MPH. Self driving cars could have better reaction times allowing for higher highway density with faster speeds.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - CultMember001 4y ago
    [dead]
  - CultMember011 4y ago
    Yes, I believe that this was Elon’s plan all along and I believe that full autonomous self driving (FASD should be the new marketing term) will make traffic better because we will literally speed up traffics very significantly. Imagine going the speed of NASCAR race cars in your neighborhood streets. With FASD, every street becomes a German Autobahn. Elon is still the true visionary of our time and we should all help make his vision come true. I will start lobbying my city council to remove speed limits on our neighborhood streets. Thank you for this wonderful idea.

maxerickson 4y ago

Tens of millions of people live in places where frequent bus service simply isn't practical. It's probably reasonable for society to make choices that overall incentivize against living in those areas, but that isn't going to change where people live anytime soon. And you can just use taxes to control any induced demand that comes from lower costs or new behaviors. The vehicles have sophisticated tracking systems and telematics built right in.

endisneigh 4y ago
Though you're not wrong, in a hypothetical world where most vehicles on the road were self driving busses, the frequency could be dynamically set and reasonable for everyone.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  I expect that "2 seat buses" would be quite popular in that scenario.
arcticbull 4y ago
Adding transit makes people live around the transit - if you let them by not kneecapping them with zoning rules. All this is an emergent property of a system designed to prevent new construction.
Symmetry 4y ago
Buses are as large as they are because the driver's time is valuable. If self-driving cars were cheap you could a bunch of 8 person van/busses on the road that give you most of the environmental/traffic benefit of a bus but could really expand frequency and reach.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  If you shrink down 8 person busses to 5 people you have a normal passenger car.
  - 4y ago

ideamotor 4y ago

The metric to judge assisted driving technologies is primarily safety. Driving is not safe and I suspect will appear insane to a future generation. Which generation and how soon is another question. However, what the US needs to massive investments in rail, which address both safety and traffic.

endisneigh 4y ago
It's not that driving is unsafe, it's that cars are unsafe. Even if all cars were self driving, accidents happen, even with computers. A world without cars at all would be safer, albeit unrealistic. So the question is, would self driving put more or fewer cars on the road? I argue more. A lot more. So much more that it would offset the increase in marginal safety per vehicle. It would also discourage the true solution around urbanization and continue to fuel more and more sprawling madness.
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
People always bring up this idea that future generations will think it is “insane” to drive your own car. Will everyone in the future be very scared children in a far left monoculture? I just think people are more complicated than that. I think if people are really like that we will have very fragile humans.
astral303 4y ago
Allowing FSD (in the next 20 years) to drive is unsafe, in my eyes. Investment in alternative transportation is the answer that doesn’t require driving from human or an algorithm.
- mewpmewp2 4y ago
  It depends. It could be safe if it's self driving at 20mph on a constant pre-determined route.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> Driving is not safe This only appears true because we've made our entire world so safe that we can call one fatality every 100 million miles dangerous. Given everything we use cars for and the immense utility of them, being driven almost exclusively by amateurs ... cars are remarkably safe. And if you could find a way to reliably remove the 1% that cause most of the problems, it would be even safer.

nullc 4y ago

Interesting point about induced demand. Though it can be easily fixed, particularly given the lack of user control over cars with FSD: For self driving cars all public roads are toll roads.

endisneigh 4y ago
> Though it can be easily fixed, particularly given the lack of user control over cars with FSD: For self driving cars all public roads are toll roads. I disagree. Politically it would be hard to convince the majority of people (which would be the default state until some inversion) that a vehicle that is capable of self-driving should have to a surcharge per mile, given that it could also be driven manually. The only recourse would be to make all roads toll roads, which obviously won't happen.
- nullc 4y ago
  Depends on the public's perception of self driving. If it's perceived as some tool of the rich making roads unusable for the rest it might not be so hard to make the case. We already have the situation where EV's aren't paying road taxes that everyone else pays.

jimkleiber 4y ago

I assume if there were more self-driving cars, fewer people would own cars. I think more people would take Ubers, Lyfts, and other ride sharing services. So I think that could reduce the need for parking and the amount of traffic just by increasing the utilization rate of cars.

endisneigh 4y ago
read the study I linked - what you suppose does not and has not happened in practice.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  Ah ok, I'll check it out. I'm curious if self-driving Ubers would be a step change tho, or if we would observe the same thing. Edit: because if we half self-driving cars, do we also get self-driving buses and now we can have a lot more bus routes? Is lack (or cost) of labor one thing that holds back the number of buses we have? Could we have more mini buses? Just curious how much the labor factors into the transit options we have. Maybe it doesn't that much, I don't know.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I assume with autonomous driving, scheduled and computer dispatched minibuses/shuttle buses would be more common. Labor is a fairly large component of public transit. Of course, you don't remotely eliminate that for various reasons but reducing the need for drivers almost certainly makes alternative forms of transit more economical.
  - mewpmewp2 4y ago
    There could be a huge algorithm which will try to schedule vehicles with varying sizes from 2 seats to 30 seats to people all over the city. If you pay more you can get the exact N spots so you get privacy, if you are willing to pay the least, you might have to go 30m into a dedicated spot where a 30 seater will stop for you and some others, then it will make optimised stops based on what everyone has as their destinations.

Snowbird3999 4y ago

Is this true even if you account for the fact that cities can reclaim lanes and buildings dedicated for parking? I would think that a lot of congestion is related cars having to be parked near a specific venue such as a restaurant or an arena (especially in the latter case where there is a gathering of 1000+ people).

mikeyouse 4y ago
The thing about arenas is those 1,000 people all want to show up and leave at the same time.. so those 1,000 cars will all have the exact same demand and cause roving gridlock from wherever they are parked on the way to the arena.

arcticbull 4y ago

You’re correct, self driving cars are not going to reduce traffic. A car has an average of 1.5 passengers in it while driving and it spends some 95% of its time parked. Because they’re low/single occupancy vehicles and everybody is trying to get to and from work at approximately the same time you still need to have capacity for every single person at peak time. Any temporary reduction in traffic is immediately filled up by an increase in demand. Just look at the last 50 years of urban development of the United States and tell me adding a few more lanes it’s gonna fix anything. Lyft is basically a self driving car if you squint, and it did nothing. Throw in a couple trains and some busses people actually want to take, and you might actually solve the problem. I have yet to see a plausible explanation for how self-driving cars are to reduce traffic.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing" Fifteen minutes in an Uber is far more pleasant, productive, and I’d wager healthy, than ten minutes in gridlock. I can focus intensely on a task or thought or even take a nap. We should also build rail. But self-driving cars look more likely to complement rail than detract from it. (One can imagine multi-modal trains, onto which self-driving cars park so their owners can enjoy privacy and a custom interior alongside the economics and eco-friendliness of rail.)

danhor 4y ago
We had cars on rails. It doesn't really make sense: The train is much heavier, thus has much lower acceleration and lower max speeds. The mass & area needed per person is also much higher, increasing fares a lot. Terminals & stops need to be much larger and take longer. Self driving doesn't improve on any of this, even worse, it takes away the major advantage of not needing to drive. There's a reason loading cars on trains as a way of travel is basically dead and self driving makes it worse.

fallingknife 4y ago

>what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Why? The number of trips is governed by the demand for trips, not the supply of cars. There isn't sufficient demand for trips to put all the cars on the road all the time, or else they already would be. The inelasticity of demand for trips is right there in the data you cite. >TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%)

endisneigh 4y ago
self driving cars would create demand as they would presumably be cheaper than equivalent rideshare.

MonkeyClub 4y ago

> States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. I think this is the driving force behind the 15’ city concept.

richardw 4y ago

I don’t want a car. I’d happily share one. Uber where I live (Johannesburg) has kinda forced conversation and I always feel the need to tip. But honestly the drivers here are dangerous, speed around, ride their clutch, go through orange lights, don’t want to take short trips. I’d love a Uber that just does the job, doesn’t want to talk and drives sensibly so I can zone out. One my kid could ride in.

starkd 4y ago

> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road Where do you get that? FSD is not by itself going to compel people to drive more than they need to.

throw0101c 4y ago
> FSD is not by itself going to compel people to drive more than they need to. What people "need" (or "want") changes: if you live in the city and want to partake in Nature, it may be a hassle to get out of the city. But if you can 'just' hop in a FSD car and have it drive overnight (while you sleep) to a nature reserve/park, people may do that. Whereas previously they may not desired it enough to deal with traffic in getting there. Imagine FSD recreational vehicles (RVs, UK: campers), or those live-in vans that are somewhat popular nowadays: go to sleep in one place, wake up in another.
ericmay 4y ago
We already do drive more than we need to because of how society is designed in America, but if the costs were lower as promised and you basically had an always-on-demand car with no driver, you could work or something while in the car, and take a nap wouldn't people take a lot more road trips or trips otherwise? I don't see how this wouldn't increase usage. That being said, increase in usage doesn't necessarily correlate to increased traffic.

kolbe 4y ago

> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing". Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple customers at once. But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was an entire network of FSD vehicles.

endisneigh 4y ago
you should read the study I linked. generally at a minimum self driving removes the need to drive, by definition, making the time more productive and removes downsides of driving, thus encouraging it.

drstewart 4y ago

>Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock Can you show your work here? > States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. No, see, mass transit is pointless since it would just create massive demand that would overwhelm the system and thus fall apart. Citation: trust me bro

danny_codes 4y ago
I think the FSD causes more traffic argument boils down to induced demand. More people on the road, finite road. Mass transit has been anecdotally shown to scale extremely well. If it can handle Hong Kong it's hard to imagine a density where it doesn't work.
- drstewart 4y ago
  >it's hard to imagine a density where it doesn't work. It's really not https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2060212/tokyo-considers-drastic-measures-relieve-extreme-overcrowding https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2060212/tok...

ryukoposting 4y ago

> Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving personal vehicles. Your comment operates on the assumption that autonomous buses provide greater net utility than a "manned" bus - sure, without a driver's seat you might add a row of seats, but are two more seats worth the R&D money to design the bus, and all the cameras and sensors that have to be added to the bus and then maintained for years to come? To me, autonomous driving features are a luxury item - a convenience reserved for those who can afford it, until it becomes cheap enough to find its way into more affordable vehicles.

endisneigh 4y ago
you're thinking about it wrong. the utility gained is not in the space, but in the fact that you can run more frequent service

epgui 4y ago

> Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock I believe the opposite is the more likely outcome: I think we can expect much lighter traffic the more autonomous vehicles there are. Most traffic is caused by humans doing really irrational things, like following each other too closely, making unnecessary lane changes, and driving at inconsistent speeds. It's very rare that traffic congestion is actually caused by roads' lack of bandwidth.

Tiktaalik 4y ago
The sorts of Driving behaviors you mention are not a significant cause of traffic congestion. Traffic congestion is caused by there being too many cars on the road with limited space for cars. Anything that will increase the amount of cars will quickly dominate inefficient driving behaviors, and self driving cars will massively increase the amount of cars on the road, as it would drive down the cost of driving and enable many many people who currently can’t drive to get onto the road (eg. Disabled, elderly, unlicensed, children).
- epgui 4y ago
  > "Traffic congestion is caused by there being too many cars on the road with limited space for cars." I mean in some sense this is always going to be true, and removing cars will always help alleviate traffic. But it's not true that driving behaviour is not a significant cause of traffic congestion: it's the cause in most cases. [1] For an extreme illustration, there's a well-known phenomenon where adding extra lanes of traffic to a highway or freeway actually worsens traffic: the added bandwidth interacts in weird/subtle ways with driver behaviour. [2] [1] https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7276027/traffic-jam https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7276027/traffic-jam [2] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
  - Tiktaalik 4y ago
    Yes these are real phenomenons that exist, but focusing on this marginal issue is fiddling at the edges of the real core problem. Roads are fixed in size, cars are very big and take up too much space. Fundamentally baked into the design this is an inefficient way to move people around and there's no fix to be found working within a car oriented framework. The only solution is in removing cars from the road. This is why self driving cannot fix traffic as it will only add more cars. Self driving buses, now that would be an improvement, but self driving cars no.

Nullabillity 4y ago

Traffic is _people_. "Induced demand" just means that more people are able to get around in a presumably less miserable way, rather than you (who are presumably already driving if gridlock is a problem to you) getting a better experience. And no, buses or rail won't provide a good experience until they're so frequent and have so many stops that they basically end up being ridiculously overbuilt taxis in all but the highest-density areas.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
10-minute bus service is totally achievable in pretty much every city. Toronto does it. And Toronto is not a dense city.
- Nullabillity 4y ago
  In the outskirts? On every line? Connected to everything?
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    The whole city, on the majority of routes. Take a look at the system map. There's even 30-minute bus service through the night, from 1:30am to 6am. https://www.ttc.ca/routes-and-schedules#/ https://www.ttc.ca/routes-and-schedules#/

userabchn 4y ago

What makes you think that the self driving technology being developed (by, you claim, "burning tens of billions") is only for "personal vehicles"? The same technology is what can enable the large fleets of self-driving minivans that are necessary for what you describe. Cities can impose a charge per mile driven (that fluctuates depending on current traffic) and people can then decide whether they wish to use a "personal" vehicle or order a self-driving Uber/Waymo minivan pooled ride.

93po 4y ago

There is no evidence to support this theory, and in fact the opposite is likely true. Full self driving would lend itself tremendously to increased public transit options. And tremendously lower car ownership.

rootusrootus 4y ago
Like Uber? Real FSD would just give us the same result as ride sharing, but on a far grander scale. In other words, gridlock.
- okwubodu 4y ago
  Isn’t most traffic caused by cascading human error? I assumed true FSD would be a mesh net where every car broadcasts its next move to its neighbors.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Only if humans are banished altogether from the roads. In which case the current attempts at FSD are pointless anyway and we should focus on building the infrastructure for simpler automated cars. As it stands today, every current automated car in existence is quite a lot more timid than a typical human and will cause gridlock very quickly as a result. An awful lot of driving relies on behavior assumptions that computers aren't good at making yet.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nradov 4y ago
    The NHTSA has been working on vehicle-to-vehicle communication for some time but we're still many years away from having it widely implemented. https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/vehicle-vehicle-communication https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/vehicle-vehicle-...
  - freejazz 4y ago
    No, it's caused by the fact that too many cars are trying to go into places they don't all fit.

SilasX 4y ago

Great, but not relevant to this story. HN is a worse place when commenters use tangentially-related discussions as thin pretenses to spam their pre-written manifestos. Please stop. And everyone else, please stop encouraging this.

endisneigh 4y ago
Seems silly to write such a comment. Place your vote, collapse the thread and move on. Btw the comment was a result of the article in the OP, not pre written.
- SilasX 4y ago
  Or you could stop spamming HN with irrelevant comments. I’m not the only one hurt by you doing that, the entire site gets worse. Do you think the mods should just collapse toxic comments instead of flagging/killing them and warning the user?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

belorn 4y ago

One of the killer feature I expect to see in the future when we have FSD is that cities will take direct control of traffic in a central way. If cars can be distributed evenly over all roads with each driver getting an average distance/time-to-arrival the overall speed would significant increase, with car owners loosing the control to pick the shortest route in order to be allowed to use the roads in the city. Centrally controlled FSD cars would also allow for much faster intersection since all cars could accelerate and break simultaneous. Both would require quite tight control and coordination that only computer controlled cars could do.

throwaway1851 4y ago
> with car owners loosing the control to pick the shortest route in order to be allowed to use the roads in the city Positively dystopian to me.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Positively dystopian to me. Indeed. Sure is interesting to hear some folks talk about all the things they'll do to other people when given the authority. Of course, in their head it's all justified for the greater good. What is it they say about the path to hell...
- belorn 4y ago
  I expect people to feel like this (and the downvotes was thus expected). In concept it is no different from getting into a bus or taxi. You specify your destination and choose when to drive, but the passenger do not decide the exact route. A FSD is in concept no different from having your own personal taxi chauffeur. City engineers often uses one way roads to spread traffic out on multiple roads. By preventing people from using the shortest route they can force traffic to spread out and thus reduce congestion. An other common trick is to prevent left or right turns, so that the shortest route become artificially longer and thus force some part of the traffic to use alternative routes which is less congested. When there is some really nasty recurring congestion there is also other more extreme tools that get deployed to really discourage drivers from all choosing the same road, like excessive road tolls or speed bumps. Cities has a long history of using hostile design to shape traffic in order to address congestion. Naturally giving cities more direct control to shape traffic is something that will create new problems, among the biggest being privacy. The car has also very long been the symbol of freedom, so reduced congestion will likely take a while if people choose to do that trade. It is a steep price but the rewards are less congestion and replacing hostile design (which often also cost money to construct) with software.

olliecornelia 4y ago

Induced demand is a myth perpetuated by bus-pilled dorks.

erik_seaberg 4y ago
Induced demand is a weird edge case that means the road network causes each trip to cover more distance. Usually what they mean is latent demand, which is the number of people who already wanted to go somewhere, but gave up and stayed home due to traffic on roads that haven’t kept up with population.

quonn 4y ago

I just want to be able to have a beer and still drive home. And that‘s the use case and it‘s a good one.

rad_gruchalski 4y ago
Okay. But you are still driving under influence. You are at all times responsible for what the car is doing.

bruce511 4y ago

>>High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Mass transit systems only really work in high density areas. This is because the time taken to stop (pasengers on and off) then go is high. So the distance matters less than the number of stops. To be appealing your nearest stop should be within a half mile or so of your house. If a bus can carry 60 people, and only one or two people get in and off at a time, then it takes say 30 stops to fill up, or empty. That makes overall travel speed really slow. Contrast with a dense city - here big groups get on and off at every stop. So a bus needs fewer stops in a route, while being useful to lots of people. Cars work in low-density areas because they typically "stop" only twice, once to load, once to unload. So absolutely yes, we need better public transport, but that ideally means living and working in high density areas. (which for most(?) US people is undesirable.

jasonhansel 4y ago
In suburban areas, light rail can work quite well. Although you have to wait longer because of stops, the trains can also move much faster than cars--existing trains are fairly slow, but introducing higher-speed trains would make them competitive with cars. In rural areas, though, your point stands. For adults traveling alone, though, lightweight electronic vehicles like e-bikes may be better than electric cars. Ultimately, an "electric car" is like a "horseless carriage"--an attempt to shoehorn a new energy source into an old form factor where it doesn't fit particularly well.
- api 4y ago
  It can work for long commutes when you have park and rides, but you still need cars to go the last 1-5 miles. Still nice to take a train the bulk of a long commute into a city core. A lot of people who think trains and buses can do it all are young and have never had kids. Nothing about the suburbs made sense to me before kids. Everything makes sense after kids.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago

twblalock 4y ago

> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Why would that be the case? I would keep my self-driving car the same place I keep my normal car now. Why would it be driving around when I’m not in it? That would waste electricity. It would drive me somewhere, park, and wait — just like I do with my current car.

kzrdude 4y ago
When you have a self driving car, it should be able to pick you up--driverless-- at the airport when you are coming home from a trip. But logistically that's a challenge for the airports.
- twblalock 4y ago
  If it wasn’t my own car doing that, it would be a friend using their own car, or a taxi, so I doubt I’d be increasing the total number of cars on the road.
CamperBob2 4y ago
You might rent it out so that it's earning money for you when you're not using it. What the GP fails to understand is that if and when that happens, your car won't add to the traffic burden, it will replace another car that would otherwise be on the road. Also, if we ever get our act together and make these things talk to each other and to the infrastructure, we will have effectively built trains that can operate without fixed rail. The upside is obviously considerable. Bottom line is that FSD won't increase demand, but it has the potential to help us manage demand in ways that are completely unattainable with human drivers.

jasonhansel 4y ago

I think Elon's biggest problem with mass transit is just that he doesn't like the masses. As he once tweeted: > I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people[...]And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. Not the only problem he cites there (note the "[...]"). But I'm pretty sure there's a reason it's the most prominent. (Incidentally, given the demographics of those most reliant on mass transit, one wonders why exactly he thinks that they are so likely to be serial killers.)

ironmagma 4y ago
This is not something specific to Elon. Anyone who’s regularly ridden the 38 “Geary” in San Francisco knows there will be a minority of riders who make the experience, at the very least, annoying, if not scarring. Riding home every day with a screeching schizophrenic is not top on my list of preferred activities, nor anyone’s.