6 ms·

I think this particular protest is counterproductive. AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc. But protes

by Zigurd 3y ago

I think this particular protest is counterproductive. AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc. But protest isn't meant to be convenient.

ajuc 3y ago
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc Highly doubt it. 1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho. Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :) 2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :) It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop). If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.
- ghaff 3y ago
  As someone who lives far enough out of the nearest major city that I don't really pop in casually for a meal or drink. (It's very doable but I end up being on the road for a good two hours total around whatever activity I'm doing.) An AV wouldn't be free to travel that distance but I would absolutely do that and other activities requiring 1+ hour drives each way more frequently if I didn't need to do the driving myself.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    I mean you could just use public transport? I lived in a small village 40 minutes from a big city half my life. There are buses going every 30 minutes each way between around 06:00 and 20:00. They cost under 1 USD per trip. Lots of people use them - kids going to schools, people commuting for work, grandmas who don't have driving licence. I probably used them over 1000 times through my life. That city isn't even that big - 350 000 people. And the buses are profitable. Why can't cities over million people afford public transport is beyond me. BTW notice how old people who can't drive still might want to go to a cinema/theater/doctor/whatever without asking their family or paying for a taxi. It's a huge benefit to everybody that these buses are available. I doubt you can get AV profitable transporting 1 person where buses transport 10-20 people.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      The only public transit option for me is commuter rail which would require me to drive to and park at the (relatively) nearby station. (I'm well outside the city's local bus and subway transit system.) It takes 60-90 minutes to go the 50 miles depending upon whether I need to connect to the subway at my destination or not. It runs no more frequently than hourly and the last couple of trains at night are more like 90+ minutes apart. It's utterly impractical to take in for an evening event. (And it's about $30 round-trip with parking; I do take it in the rare times when I'm going in for the day to work because driving in and back at rush hour is awful.) The commuter rail is "fine" but its schedule doesn't really work outside of commuting hours--and even that is significantly worse than pre-COVID.
      - ajuc 3y ago
        Yeah for me it was like 500 meter walk to the bus stop :) And bus stops were every 2 km or so :) I'm wondering why there are no such buses where you live? It it a matter of population density, different road network architecture (here most villages are build along the roads so you can put bus stops every 1-2 km and you'll get enoguh passangers to get by), or just a chicken-and-egg problem of customers not being used to it so it's not profitable if you create it?
- uoaei 3y ago
  Imagine, for a moment, accepting the consequences of your choices. You could drive to the nearest transit hub, use public transit for the last 10-30 miles, and still experience a transit without friction.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  AV cars could be programmed to never stop in bike lanes or bus lanes or do anything else to disrupt transit. They could automatically get out of the way of buses. AV buses and AV cars could coordinate to move people around faster making the public transit more efficient. And all the emotional stress and conflict between buses and cars could be eliminated.
X6S1x6Okd1st 3y ago
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic Or will reduce use of public transit & make traffic worse because the negative effects of traffic will be less felt & the cost of private transit via an AV will be lower
htrp 3y ago
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic AV adoption will probably be comparable to the effect of Uber. It'll create more traffic on the roads at the expense of gutting the public transit infrastructure and probably create significantly problems than it solves. On the bright side, parking may become cheaper.
- joker_minmax 3y ago
  Through just supply and demand curve, or is there another reason parking would possibly become cheaper?
klyrs 3y ago
The goal of AVs is to undermine high-density public transportation in favor of privately owned low-density transportation. The approach is to beta-test murder-capable robots amid unwilling living humans. That will neither reduce traffic nor make pedestrians safer. Counterpoint: pedestrians may be made safer by blockading the roads with unwitting AVs.
slavik81 3y ago
Once cars can drive themselves, parking lots no longer need to surround businesses since everyone will have a free valet that can drop you off and park your car in a distant lot. The parking lot surrounding the business can be redeveloped into more commercial or residential space. Ironically, self-driving cars may make commercial areas denser and more walkable. The parking lots for self-driving vehicles can also be significantly more dense than lots for normal vehicles. Current parking lots must reserve half the overall lot for aisles, since every car must be able to leave without any other vehicle moving. A parking lot for autonomous vehicles won't be limited by that restriction and can achieve a higher utilization of the space by filling the aisles with more vehicles. However, some people will probably decide to commute much longer distances when they no longer need to drive themselves and residential areas will probably end up sprawling even more than they do already.
- seadan83 3y ago
  Car ownership in the US today is really high (recently was over 90% [1]) Why would 90% of people forego paying approximately $1~$5 to travel a dozen miles in their already payed for car vs paying a taxi-cab like fare for an AV? I'm not sure how much it costs to go 10 miles in an AV taxi, but I'm guessing it's $20-$30. The effect of AVs with respect to strip malls and commercial spaces seems like it'll be a pretty low traffic flow. Asked another way, how many people take conventional taxis (being Uber/Lyft, or a legit taxi) today to go such places? It seems like the prices are similar, why then would the lack of a human driver make an AV taxi that much more attractive (like, to the point where the 90% of car owners decided to stop driving their own car, which is far cheaper - and then this pattern plays out for long enough that the parking lot situation changes! [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-statistics/# https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    The US car fleet is also unusually old. If transit worked better, using AVs or not, it's a pretty good hypothesis that people keeping old cars on the road would find using better transit saves them money.
  - 3y ago
FreshStart 3y ago
? The size of the pipe does not change, the substance in it does not get much more denser or faster.. I just don't see it. Maybe in combination with a turn towards public transport as ride & drive..
jacquesm 3y ago
No, AVs will increase traffic. The only thing that holds traffic back from yet another explosion is that it requires a licensed driver to operate a vehicle. If that requirement goes away there will be much more traffic than there is today. Kids, packages, empty cars sent from one spouse to another...
mcpackieh 3y ago
AVs, like Uber, will give the affluent class in cities an alternative to public transit (and inconvenient personal car ownership), thereby reducing the pressure from this politically influential segment of society to keep mass transit clean and safe, and with good schedules and routes. Mass transit quality drops to the detriment of the majority, further reinforcing the affluent class's reliance on cars, creating a vicious cycle of destruction.

by Zigurd 3y ago

I think this particular protest is counterproductive. AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc. But protest isn't meant to be convenient.

ajuc 3y ago

> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc Highly doubt it. 1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho. Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :) 2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :) It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop). If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.

ghaff 3y ago
As someone who lives far enough out of the nearest major city that I don't really pop in casually for a meal or drink. (It's very doable but I end up being on the road for a good two hours total around whatever activity I'm doing.) An AV wouldn't be free to travel that distance but I would absolutely do that and other activities requiring 1+ hour drives each way more frequently if I didn't need to do the driving myself.
- ajuc 3y ago
  I mean you could just use public transport? I lived in a small village 40 minutes from a big city half my life. There are buses going every 30 minutes each way between around 06:00 and 20:00. They cost under 1 USD per trip. Lots of people use them - kids going to schools, people commuting for work, grandmas who don't have driving licence. I probably used them over 1000 times through my life. That city isn't even that big - 350 000 people. And the buses are profitable. Why can't cities over million people afford public transport is beyond me. BTW notice how old people who can't drive still might want to go to a cinema/theater/doctor/whatever without asking their family or paying for a taxi. It's a huge benefit to everybody that these buses are available. I doubt you can get AV profitable transporting 1 person where buses transport 10-20 people.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    The only public transit option for me is commuter rail which would require me to drive to and park at the (relatively) nearby station. (I'm well outside the city's local bus and subway transit system.) It takes 60-90 minutes to go the 50 miles depending upon whether I need to connect to the subway at my destination or not. It runs no more frequently than hourly and the last couple of trains at night are more like 90+ minutes apart. It's utterly impractical to take in for an evening event. (And it's about $30 round-trip with parking; I do take it in the rare times when I'm going in for the day to work because driving in and back at rush hour is awful.) The commuter rail is "fine" but its schedule doesn't really work outside of commuting hours--and even that is significantly worse than pre-COVID.
    - ajuc 3y ago
      Yeah for me it was like 500 meter walk to the bus stop :) And bus stops were every 2 km or so :) I'm wondering why there are no such buses where you live? It it a matter of population density, different road network architecture (here most villages are build along the roads so you can put bus stops every 1-2 km and you'll get enoguh passangers to get by), or just a chicken-and-egg problem of customers not being used to it so it's not profitable if you create it?
uoaei 3y ago
Imagine, for a moment, accepting the consequences of your choices. You could drive to the nearest transit hub, use public transit for the last 10-30 miles, and still experience a transit without friction.
lamontcg 3y ago
AV cars could be programmed to never stop in bike lanes or bus lanes or do anything else to disrupt transit. They could automatically get out of the way of buses. AV buses and AV cars could coordinate to move people around faster making the public transit more efficient. And all the emotional stress and conflict between buses and cars could be eliminated.

X6S1x6Okd1st 3y ago

> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic Or will reduce use of public transit & make traffic worse because the negative effects of traffic will be less felt & the cost of private transit via an AV will be lower

htrp 3y ago

> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic AV adoption will probably be comparable to the effect of Uber. It'll create more traffic on the roads at the expense of gutting the public transit infrastructure and probably create significantly problems than it solves. On the bright side, parking may become cheaper.

joker_minmax 3y ago
Through just supply and demand curve, or is there another reason parking would possibly become cheaper?

klyrs 3y ago

The goal of AVs is to undermine high-density public transportation in favor of privately owned low-density transportation. The approach is to beta-test murder-capable robots amid unwilling living humans. That will neither reduce traffic nor make pedestrians safer. Counterpoint: pedestrians may be made safer by blockading the roads with unwitting AVs.

slavik81 3y ago

Once cars can drive themselves, parking lots no longer need to surround businesses since everyone will have a free valet that can drop you off and park your car in a distant lot. The parking lot surrounding the business can be redeveloped into more commercial or residential space. Ironically, self-driving cars may make commercial areas denser and more walkable. The parking lots for self-driving vehicles can also be significantly more dense than lots for normal vehicles. Current parking lots must reserve half the overall lot for aisles, since every car must be able to leave without any other vehicle moving. A parking lot for autonomous vehicles won't be limited by that restriction and can achieve a higher utilization of the space by filling the aisles with more vehicles. However, some people will probably decide to commute much longer distances when they no longer need to drive themselves and residential areas will probably end up sprawling even more than they do already.

seadan83 3y ago
Car ownership in the US today is really high (recently was over 90% [1]) Why would 90% of people forego paying approximately $1~$5 to travel a dozen miles in their already payed for car vs paying a taxi-cab like fare for an AV? I'm not sure how much it costs to go 10 miles in an AV taxi, but I'm guessing it's $20-$30. The effect of AVs with respect to strip malls and commercial spaces seems like it'll be a pretty low traffic flow. Asked another way, how many people take conventional taxis (being Uber/Lyft, or a legit taxi) today to go such places? It seems like the prices are similar, why then would the lack of a human driver make an AV taxi that much more attractive (like, to the point where the 90% of car owners decided to stop driving their own car, which is far cheaper - and then this pattern plays out for long enough that the parking lot situation changes! [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-statistics/# https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
- Zigurd 3y ago
  The US car fleet is also unusually old. If transit worked better, using AVs or not, it's a pretty good hypothesis that people keeping old cars on the road would find using better transit saves them money.
- 3y ago

FreshStart 3y ago

? The size of the pipe does not change, the substance in it does not get much more denser or faster.. I just don't see it. Maybe in combination with a turn towards public transport as ride & drive..

jacquesm 3y ago

No, AVs will increase traffic. The only thing that holds traffic back from yet another explosion is that it requires a licensed driver to operate a vehicle. If that requirement goes away there will be much more traffic than there is today. Kids, packages, empty cars sent from one spouse to another...

mcpackieh 3y ago

AVs, like Uber, will give the affluent class in cities an alternative to public transit (and inconvenient personal car ownership), thereby reducing the pressure from this politically influential segment of society to keep mass transit clean and safe, and with good schedules and routes. Mass transit quality drops to the detriment of the majority, further reinforcing the affluent class's reliance on cars, creating a vicious cycle of destruction.