4 ms·

Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owned. It's also extremely likely that it requires ride-sharing to be viable, wh

Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owned. It's also extremely likely that it requires ride-sharing to be viable, which will substantially reduce traffic as well as car ownership (I suspect there may be enough cost pressure that most self-driving vehicles are more like minibuses than cars, which would also help a lot with pollution and congestion, but this may require regulatory pressure). Every conversation about the transition to EVs should be caveated with 'assuming car ownership stays the same because self-driving doesn't work (and that most of the world still does not manage to provide traditional public transport options good enough to replace cars)'. (And yes, all of this means that Tesla and most other traditional automotive company's stated commercial strategy for self driving makes little sense)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nradov 3y ago
Autonomous driving is just another safety and convenience feature, like cruise control or anti-lock brakes. It won't fundamentally change anything. I see no reason to give up owning my own cars even if they can drive themselves. The biggest reason is that I use my cars like a rolling storage locker or mobile base of operations when I'm out doing stuff. There's no way I'm going to deal with the hassle of shared vehicles.
- afavour 3y ago
  You may not want to deal with the hassle but I wouldn’t assume that applies to everyone. A fully autonomous car (however unrealistic it may be) would be a game changer simply for the economics alone. Not paying full tax, insurance etc for a vehicle while retaining all of the transport possibility would be incredibly tempting to anyone on a budget. Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability. I’m not saying any of this will happen but fully autonomous cars definitely would open the door to a lot of opportunities.
  - nradov 3y ago
    The economics won't work outside some small niches. Any sort of car sharing service means a business is managing that service and charging high fees for it, in addition to passing on tax and insurance expenses to customers. The taxes and insurance on my own cars are cheap. Car sharing (short term rental) services already exist and can be a great option for childless young people who live in a dense city and seldom leave it. We don't need autonomous vehicles to make such services work. But they're totally unsuitable for how most Americans actually live. Like am I supposed to summon a shared vehicle every time I need to take one of my children to sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster? The whole concept is just totally impractical regardless of the economics.
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      What often gets forgotten is that demand is not equally distributed throughout the day, week, month or year. Everyone needs to go to school or sports practice at about the same time, everyone wants to go out on Friday nights and not Monday nights, everyone needs a car for monthly shopping at around the end of the month and everyone takes their vacation at around the same time each year due to school vacations. When demand goes up, not only will it cost more, but there is no guarantee that you'll even get a car on time. Uber and suchlike work currently because almost everyone uses them rarely, not four times a day.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > Car sharing (short term rental) services I would expect self driving car to have much higher utilization most of the time. In addition you have people who can't/don't want to drive and would be able to use the service. > practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? Effectively it would be a much cheaper (supposedly) Uber/Lyft/etc. alternative. > sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And That's a bit of corner case and generally I would expect it would reduce the number of households which have more than 1 car rather than a full replacement for car ownership.
      - 3y ago
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  How far off median income are you
fasthands9 3y ago
Autonomous driving would reduce car ownership but it almost would certainly make traffic worse. The cost to get driven around or have things delivered would be less while demand would stay the same.
- neuronic 3y ago
  Many traffic jams occur for no other reason than human behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qy6MrDcukk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qy6MrDcukk Autopilots immediately get rid of that so I would disagree and argue the less humans the better. Have fun playing around with the "politeness" lever for example: https://traffic-simulation.de/ https://traffic-simulation.de/
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    3x as many cars using infrastructure not made for that type of increase in demand will cause traffic jams. No matter what the auto-pilot friendly meter is set at. Traffic lights are a bitch, changing lanes is inevitable, incidents are inevitable.
  - Bluestrike2 3y ago
    Sure, but that's just one part of the traffic congestion problem. Add more cars, and whatever efficiency gains you gained from eliminating weird and inefficient human behavior rippling outward and causing random traffic jams will be more than outweighed by the presence of additional cars. Each additional car takes up ~15 feet plus the distance to the next car. That adds up very quickly, and when you consider the presence of intersections and traffic lights, you aren't dealing with an isolated roadway where cars just...drive. There are very real limits on how many cars you can stuff in a given stretch of road without radically redesigning roads in a way that makes them entirely unusable for pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. replacing traffic lights with slot-based intersections[0]), meaning there's an upper limit to how much self-driving cars can limit congestion under the most optimistic scenarios. When self-driving cars eventually manage to take hold, no one reasonably expects car traffic not to increase. Right now, you park your car and do things. There's no real opportunity cost, because you can't be two places at once. When your car can drive around on its own, there's now a real opportunity cost. If it can earn money for you with no human present, there's going to be a massive incentive to let it do so. Stores will use self-driving delivery vehicles--either their own or as part of their own delivery sharing services--for deliveries. Will there hopefully be big improvements in pedestrian safety and decreased accidents? I think so, though they certainly won't eliminate either. But there will be an incredible amount of increased traffic that goes along with it. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZc3erc_l4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZc3erc_l4
sgc 3y ago
Self driving fleets will be driving around to avoid parking while staying in the high use areas, and contributing a lot to traffic, perhaps more than if everyone just had their own car.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  This isn’t a weird thing if you live in a place with lots of taxis. Beijing, for example, 25% of the cars are taxis, and if it isn’t really busy, you’ll be able to get one just by raising your hand on a minorly busy street. Taxis are too expensive in most of the developed world to be that ubiquitous. But they aren’t uncommon in countries where labor is cheaper, which makes me wonder if robo-taxis in the developed world will be as common as human taxis in the developing world.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Yes, there are a some things that will push towards higher traffic, including induced demand as it becomes cheaper and easier to move around. This would need to be offset by ride-sharing (and perhaps to some extend by the reduced demand for parking, though I don't think this can really increase throughput much). Like I said, I think ride-sharing, especially with higher capacity vehicles, can offset this significantly, but it may require regulatory pressure to get everyone to play ball on it.
  - Bluestrike2 3y ago
    Ride-sharing isn't going to solve these problems. At most, you fit up to five people in a single car. Most will carry fewer people, perhaps only one or two. If you try to scale up ride sharing vehicles so they carry more people, you now have to build specialized vehicles that make multi-stop trips where you pick up multiple parties on-demand and drop them off at their individual locations. You've now eliminated the advantages of ride-sharing or taxis--they pick you up where you want and take you directly where you want to go--and managed to recreate a smaller bus. Let's call it a small, self-driving minibus that's not a bus system but a ride share system. Only it's much worse than a bus, because bus routes are optimized in a way that vehicles picking up and dropping off passengers at what amounts to random locations on-demand never can be. Plus, you're adding even more vehicles to the road in addition to all the other self-driving cars that are running around making deliveries, looking for parking or running off to the outskirts of the city to kill some time as they wait for their human passenger to summon them again, or hustling to try to pick up passengers to make some money for their owners. Heck, you can't even have them drive on access-limited busways or bus lanes because, by their very nature, they can't stick to dedicated routes. Consider this: the Siemens S700 streetcar carries over two-hundred people in its usual configuration[0] with a length of just under 95 feet, or the equivalent of around ~6 cars that are almost bumper-to-bumper and trams can be built to be autonomous. Self-driving cars have their benefits, but they're not an alternative to actual public transport solutions no matter how we try to dress them up. In the end, and as others have pointed out elsewhere in recent years, every new transit idea eventually boils down to a train. Or, in this case, an actual bus. 0. https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3ce5a359-5933-4f0b-8877-6e9aa3df13bd/low-floor-light-rail-vehicle-packet.pdf https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3ce5a...
PeterStuer 3y ago
"Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owened" I've only seen this as a 'just so' greenwash pr story from the automotive industry to offset the projected 300% increase in total road miles driven anually. Please explain why peole would be compelled to ditch their multidude of private cars just because they now come with a 24/7 free driver included?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Indeed, that's the elephant in the room. Self driving cars by virtue of being self driving can be sent on trips by themselves without requiring the driver to be present. The presence of a driver is a limiting factor, once that one drops away there will be many more trips. Suddenly kids can use the car and all kinds of pick up and delivery jobs become cost effective in a way that they are not today.
  - throwaway602088 3y ago
    Can’t wait for those human-less boxes rolling downtown carefree… what a fun time we’re gonna have painting and blasting their sensors.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - thebradbain 3y ago
    Ah yes! Would love to know how the crowd that protests better public transit, pedestrian paths and bike lanes as “taking away space from cars” will respond to roads being further clogged with… empty cars? We’re really going to spend billions and billions on further car infrastructure, more reduction in space-constrained cities towards pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and even the displacement of existing homes and communities for… empty cars?! If it weren’t so depressing, it’s a perfect indictment of the US’s car culture taken full circle.
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nradov 3y ago

Autonomous driving is just another safety and convenience feature, like cruise control or anti-lock brakes. It won't fundamentally change anything. I see no reason to give up owning my own cars even if they can drive themselves. The biggest reason is that I use my cars like a rolling storage locker or mobile base of operations when I'm out doing stuff. There's no way I'm going to deal with the hassle of shared vehicles.

afavour 3y ago
You may not want to deal with the hassle but I wouldn’t assume that applies to everyone. A fully autonomous car (however unrealistic it may be) would be a game changer simply for the economics alone. Not paying full tax, insurance etc for a vehicle while retaining all of the transport possibility would be incredibly tempting to anyone on a budget. Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability. I’m not saying any of this will happen but fully autonomous cars definitely would open the door to a lot of opportunities.
- nradov 3y ago
  The economics won't work outside some small niches. Any sort of car sharing service means a business is managing that service and charging high fees for it, in addition to passing on tax and insurance expenses to customers. The taxes and insurance on my own cars are cheap. Car sharing (short term rental) services already exist and can be a great option for childless young people who live in a dense city and seldom leave it. We don't need autonomous vehicles to make such services work. But they're totally unsuitable for how most Americans actually live. Like am I supposed to summon a shared vehicle every time I need to take one of my children to sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster? The whole concept is just totally impractical regardless of the economics.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    What often gets forgotten is that demand is not equally distributed throughout the day, week, month or year. Everyone needs to go to school or sports practice at about the same time, everyone wants to go out on Friday nights and not Monday nights, everyone needs a car for monthly shopping at around the end of the month and everyone takes their vacation at around the same time each year due to school vacations. When demand goes up, not only will it cost more, but there is no guarantee that you'll even get a car on time. Uber and suchlike work currently because almost everyone uses them rarely, not four times a day.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > Car sharing (short term rental) services I would expect self driving car to have much higher utilization most of the time. In addition you have people who can't/don't want to drive and would be able to use the service. > practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? Effectively it would be a much cheaper (supposedly) Uber/Lyft/etc. alternative. > sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And That's a bit of corner case and generally I would expect it would reduce the number of households which have more than 1 car rather than a full replacement for car ownership.
    - 3y ago
wahnfrieden 3y ago
How far off median income are you

fasthands9 3y ago

Autonomous driving would reduce car ownership but it almost would certainly make traffic worse. The cost to get driven around or have things delivered would be less while demand would stay the same.

neuronic 3y ago
Many traffic jams occur for no other reason than human behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qy6MrDcukk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qy6MrDcukk Autopilots immediately get rid of that so I would disagree and argue the less humans the better. Have fun playing around with the "politeness" lever for example: https://traffic-simulation.de/ https://traffic-simulation.de/
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  3x as many cars using infrastructure not made for that type of increase in demand will cause traffic jams. No matter what the auto-pilot friendly meter is set at. Traffic lights are a bitch, changing lanes is inevitable, incidents are inevitable.
- Bluestrike2 3y ago
  Sure, but that's just one part of the traffic congestion problem. Add more cars, and whatever efficiency gains you gained from eliminating weird and inefficient human behavior rippling outward and causing random traffic jams will be more than outweighed by the presence of additional cars. Each additional car takes up ~15 feet plus the distance to the next car. That adds up very quickly, and when you consider the presence of intersections and traffic lights, you aren't dealing with an isolated roadway where cars just...drive. There are very real limits on how many cars you can stuff in a given stretch of road without radically redesigning roads in a way that makes them entirely unusable for pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. replacing traffic lights with slot-based intersections[0]), meaning there's an upper limit to how much self-driving cars can limit congestion under the most optimistic scenarios. When self-driving cars eventually manage to take hold, no one reasonably expects car traffic not to increase. Right now, you park your car and do things. There's no real opportunity cost, because you can't be two places at once. When your car can drive around on its own, there's now a real opportunity cost. If it can earn money for you with no human present, there's going to be a massive incentive to let it do so. Stores will use self-driving delivery vehicles--either their own or as part of their own delivery sharing services--for deliveries. Will there hopefully be big improvements in pedestrian safety and decreased accidents? I think so, though they certainly won't eliminate either. But there will be an incredible amount of increased traffic that goes along with it. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZc3erc_l4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZc3erc_l4

sgc 3y ago

Self driving fleets will be driving around to avoid parking while staying in the high use areas, and contributing a lot to traffic, perhaps more than if everyone just had their own car.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
This isn’t a weird thing if you live in a place with lots of taxis. Beijing, for example, 25% of the cars are taxis, and if it isn’t really busy, you’ll be able to get one just by raising your hand on a minorly busy street. Taxis are too expensive in most of the developed world to be that ubiquitous. But they aren’t uncommon in countries where labor is cheaper, which makes me wonder if robo-taxis in the developed world will be as common as human taxis in the developing world.
rcxdude 3y ago
Yes, there are a some things that will push towards higher traffic, including induced demand as it becomes cheaper and easier to move around. This would need to be offset by ride-sharing (and perhaps to some extend by the reduced demand for parking, though I don't think this can really increase throughput much). Like I said, I think ride-sharing, especially with higher capacity vehicles, can offset this significantly, but it may require regulatory pressure to get everyone to play ball on it.
- Bluestrike2 3y ago
  Ride-sharing isn't going to solve these problems. At most, you fit up to five people in a single car. Most will carry fewer people, perhaps only one or two. If you try to scale up ride sharing vehicles so they carry more people, you now have to build specialized vehicles that make multi-stop trips where you pick up multiple parties on-demand and drop them off at their individual locations. You've now eliminated the advantages of ride-sharing or taxis--they pick you up where you want and take you directly where you want to go--and managed to recreate a smaller bus. Let's call it a small, self-driving minibus that's not a bus system but a ride share system. Only it's much worse than a bus, because bus routes are optimized in a way that vehicles picking up and dropping off passengers at what amounts to random locations on-demand never can be. Plus, you're adding even more vehicles to the road in addition to all the other self-driving cars that are running around making deliveries, looking for parking or running off to the outskirts of the city to kill some time as they wait for their human passenger to summon them again, or hustling to try to pick up passengers to make some money for their owners. Heck, you can't even have them drive on access-limited busways or bus lanes because, by their very nature, they can't stick to dedicated routes. Consider this: the Siemens S700 streetcar carries over two-hundred people in its usual configuration[0] with a length of just under 95 feet, or the equivalent of around ~6 cars that are almost bumper-to-bumper and trams can be built to be autonomous. Self-driving cars have their benefits, but they're not an alternative to actual public transport solutions no matter how we try to dress them up. In the end, and as others have pointed out elsewhere in recent years, every new transit idea eventually boils down to a train. Or, in this case, an actual bus. 0. https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3ce5a359-5933-4f0b-8877-6e9aa3df13bd/low-floor-light-rail-vehicle-packet.pdf https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3ce5a...

PeterStuer 3y ago

"Self driving cars are much more likely to be public transport than individually owened" I've only seen this as a 'just so' greenwash pr story from the automotive industry to offset the projected 300% increase in total road miles driven anually. Please explain why peole would be compelled to ditch their multidude of private cars just because they now come with a 24/7 free driver included?

jacquesm 3y ago
Indeed, that's the elephant in the room. Self driving cars by virtue of being self driving can be sent on trips by themselves without requiring the driver to be present. The presence of a driver is a limiting factor, once that one drops away there will be many more trips. Suddenly kids can use the car and all kinds of pick up and delivery jobs become cost effective in a way that they are not today.
- throwaway602088 3y ago
  Can’t wait for those human-less boxes rolling downtown carefree… what a fun time we’re gonna have painting and blasting their sensors.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- thebradbain 3y ago
  Ah yes! Would love to know how the crowd that protests better public transit, pedestrian paths and bike lanes as “taking away space from cars” will respond to roads being further clogged with… empty cars? We’re really going to spend billions and billions on further car infrastructure, more reduction in space-constrained cities towards pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and even the displacement of existing homes and communities for… empty cars?! If it weren’t so depressing, it’s a perfect indictment of the US’s car culture taken full circle.
  - 3y ago