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How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities
- thrownaway2424 13y agoThis is not unrelated to last week's discussion "Why Green Architecture Hardy Ever Deserves the Name"[1]. The urban form that allows and requires the car is an obsolete artifact of the "oil interval" which is passing into history. In the future you will neither need nor want a car, driverless or otherwise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995141
- fennecfoxen 13y agoReplaced by the natural-gas interval, no doubt. ;) :P
- sukuriant 13y agoWell, I might still want a car, personally. Remember horses. They went from tools of transportation to pets and recreational 'vehicles'
- toomuchtodo 13y agoUntil everything or everyone I interact with is within walking or public transit distance of me, I'll still require a car. Not everyone I know wants to live in the city with me. Not all of my service providers will be in the city with me.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago"There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl." Gotta love the NYTimes for the tendentious moralizing. People having more choice, and exercising it, is a risk! Attempts to have a backyard or extra bedrooms, or just pay less for real estate, are dangerous and wrong. Worse, if you can buy extra bedrooms you might be tempted to have kids and we wouldn't want any of those consuming the Earth's precious resources would we :P (Not that there isn't anything to be said in support of that point. But it's tendentious and moralizing all the same.)
- johnrob 13y agoUrban sprawl is bad from an energy (and consequently environmental) perspective because people and supplies require longer trips.
- old-gregg 13y ago"People exercising their choice" sounds nice, but there will always be limits imposed by the society. You cannot "exercise your choice" to commute in a school bus today. Zoning restrictions in the cities exist for the same reason: people just don't respect each other enough to trust them with their choices. Personally I cannot stand HOAs, yet another level of bureaucracy and taxation to deal with, but I will not argue with the fact that HOA buildings/neighborhoods are nicer than "free" ones.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago"Nicer" is relative.
- dclowd9901 13y agoI don't know about you, but my neighbor with the 5 beat-up old jalopies in his yard is a bit of a fucking eyesore.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoIf we're going to be all hyperbole, my old HOA president who had someone booted from their home over the wrong shade of white exterior paint should be dragged out of his home by an angry mob. Show me someone who has an eyesore, and I'll show you some asshole who is abusing their power.
- mlwarren 13y ago"There are [environmental] risks, of course" I think what they're getting at is the environmental risks and not implying that the benefits you described are anything bad.
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- elchief 13y agoSo driverless taxis will be cheap. Taxi medallions are licenses by the city for taxi companies, to prevent abuse. But if the software is certified, you don't really need the medallions. Drop $500,000 off the cost of a taxi. You don't have to pay the 2 drivers that normally share a cab. Drop $80,000 a year off. Assuming the cars no longer crash (version 2.0?), drop $10,000/year off for taxi insurance. Combine that with Google-quality routing, and smart-phone taxi ordering, and you're looking at a major price drop for taxi service, assuming some sort of competition. I'm guesstimating a 50-75% drop. Most people in cities will opt out of owning their own car, and use robo-taxis. You are looking at an 80-85% drop in the required number of cars in cities (even accounting for current peak traffic volumes. see the KPMG report. I also came to the same number back-of-the-envelope). Obviously, this will destroy GM and Toyota. Might be good for Tesla as they are still tiny, and I'm sure Elon and Larry have discussed this. Some other interesting outcomes: - should increase the total number of trips and miles driven, as lower prices lead to higher quantity demanded, so more wear and tear on cars, and more gas consumed (though less for idling). - with many driverless cars, they can communicate with each other, driving faster and closer together, and co-ordinating intersection crossing. price of oil change is ambiguous. - fewer deaths and injuries from accidents, or none at all. The organ transplant industry dies. - more trees and less concrete lead to cooler cities? - you can probably get away with more single-lane streets, with no parking, increasing usable land areas in cities by 25%, significantly dropping housing prices. - in your driverless car, you can talk on your cell, use your laptop, read a book, not be stressed from driving. people may be willing to drive farther to work, increasing sprawl, and also dropping the quantity demanded for housing near the core, dropping prices. - public transit disappears? though driverless buses would be cheaper too. - more people bike to work, as it's much safer - software requirement: interior management for driverless taxis. some video or image recognition for lost purses, people having heart attacks, people throwing up in the back seat.
- oftenwrong 13y agoOr they might keep the prices high and keep the difference in operational cost as profit.
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- lifeisstillgood 13y agoUuurrghh - we have no idea the real practicality of driver-less cars, small technical / political issues such as needing own lanes for the first ten or more years, processing power and cost, all make this kind of stuff guesswork. Add to that the combination of other shifts - a move away from everyone into the office at the same time, distributed remote working, shifts in employment vs freelancing - and it all adds up to massive change, but not predicatable change at this level of detail Fasten your seatbelts, its going to be a bumpy ride, but no-one can tell which bumps we will hit first.
- jgrahamc 13y agoHow about "How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Car Ownership"? Why bother owning a car at all? Couldn't I just subscribe to some service that will have a car drive to me when I need it? And when I need a two seater, or a five seater or a seven seater I just tell the smartphone app that? And when the car is dirty is just drives somewhere to be cleaned?
- vecinu 13y agoThis argument often pops up and I am confused as to why people think everyone can subscribe to this kind of service. Owning a car is completely different from renting one temporarily.
- ebiester 13y agoIt works in some places and not in others. In San Francisco, it would work pretty well. In larger metropolitan areas, it may work with a hub-like form of public transportation. An autocar takes you to the train, which takes you to the destination city, where you can use another autocar or other public transportation to get to your destination. Will it work in rural areas? Of course not. The sun belt cities may have trouble utilizing it. But the Boston - DC corridor opportunity would be enough to make it worthwhile. Add to that many European cities and there's enough of a market.
- randyrand 13y agoThis is already the case in urban environments. Many people do not own cars but just use taxis. I think there are even some subscription taxi services too. As for why this will probably never take on in less urban environments: - 5-10 minute wait times (people are inpatient) - Can't leave belongings in car - Keeping the car clean would add cost to the service
- Dewie 13y ago> This is already the case in urban environments. Many people do not own cars but just use taxis. I think there are even some subscription taxi services too. There are people that share a small garage of vehicles, or are members of a club that rents out a lot of vehicles on an hourly or daily basis. It seems like an economical choice for people that don't need a car every day, but sometimes. Plus, the assortment of cars is varied so they can probably get things like a van if they are going to move out of their apartment or something.
- cj 13y agoTraffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. I wonder how motorcycles would fare. I'd hate to give mine up, unless driverless cars were faster and cheaper than motorcycles. Perhaps cheaper by means of a partial ownership model, a la netjets.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoYou'd move the signaling to the vehicle. I too own a motorcycle, and could see a day when the bike warns me at intersection approaches that I have to give way to an automated vehicle.
- enf 13y agoHorribly. Even worse for pedestrians and bicyclists.
- CapitalistCartr 13y agoSelf-driving cars can completely change our cities, here in America, because our cities are designed around cars. When I don't have to fight for a parking space, I don't need vast car parks around everything. When the cars drive as members of the same team instead of playing cutthroat, we don't need more lanes, more automotive bandwidth. We can remake our cities on our scale instead. Whether we will or not is the question.
- jellicle 13y agoYay, the weekly driverless car puff piece. > Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. What location is that? The magic one? Just "some" location that apparently will magically appear when the magic cars come. Actually, your driverless car takes up the same room on the road or in the parking lot as everyone else's. YOU don't drive in loops, but your car still does. Imagine a theatre at 10PM. The show is letting out. Traffic is snarled for five miles in all directions because a theatre's-worth of empty cars have been circling the block for an hour, making sure they are ready to pick up their ever-so-important passengers. In effect, adding traffic to roads no longer imposes a personal cost on your time - it's only a financial cost on your bank account, which is highly affordable to some people. The same people who currently have 14 cars in the garage of their mansion can now take all 14 cars with them to the Hamptons for the weekend, in case they want to drive one. Just order them to circle the block near your beach house - well, not your block of course, the neighbors would complain, but someone else's block. Maybe the traffic on the Long Island Expressway is terrible, but your 14 empty cars don't care, they'll make it out to the beach house eventually. Cost of housing getting you down? Just buy a van and a sleeping bag, and order it to drive around randomly all night and arrive at your work at 9AM. Now you've effectively perma-rented a 9'x14' spot on the nation's roads, without paying a cent. The push for carpooling is a way to use our limited road space more efficiently, by increasing the number of persons per car up from the current average of 1.59. Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down. Driverless cars are a net negative for the way the world is going, not a net positive.
- gfodor 13y agoI have to say, this is one of the most cynical and unimaginative posts I've ever read on HN. I think you should save it somewhere so you can laugh at yourself if someday driverless cars become prevalent. The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate. You seem to falling into the trap of thinking that infrastructure will not be updated around the assumption that cars are autonomous, and clever people will not exploit this new reality in ways that benefit the world. To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by servicing other passengers or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Why do you assume people will own cars in general, when a service which provides on-demand autonomous transportation in clean, well-maintained, up-to-date vehicles will be more convenient, less work, safer, and will be cheaper? Why does the car that drops you off need to be the car that picks you up? Why do you think highways will not become wildly more efficient and safe even if the average passenger per car (one of several metrics of efficiency) goes up? Why do you think parking garages and cars themselves will not be able to be packed in more efficiently and quickly when they can autonomously coordinate their insertion and removal from a fixed area? Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible? When the assumptions of society change in such a dramatic way (that a human must navigate a road-based vehicle manually) the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting, and more productive use of time and energy. When you're dealing with something as ingrained and as prevalent as the automobile, you're talking about a massive boost in these things across the entire world.
- Techpope 13y agoI always hated cars, maybe not having humans be in charge of them will decrease my hate.
- Dirlewanger 13y ago"And the regulatory issues to be addressed before much of this could come true are, to put it mildly, forbidding." Yeah, how about the massive laundry list of liability issues that come around without a human controlling the wheel? What happens if the car hits a biker? A pedestrian? Another car with a driver? Another driver-less car? The driver causes an accident and then blames it on the car (surely logs of some sort will prevent this, but this all has to be established). So. Many. Scenarios. And bloggers always seem to avoid this topic because no one wants to deal with all this necessary clout must be sorted out before these things ever become an actual thing. To me, they have a looonnnggg way to go before I feel comfortable behind a 2 ton moving death machine and have no control whatsoever.
- elchief 13y agoRight, except they won't crash. Google has driven almost a million km without an accident. The car takes in a gigabyte of data a second to analyze. It knows the biker is behind it. It will slow down if the situation is risky and stop if something is imminent. The car has 360° cameras and LIDAR and records everything.
- danielweber 13y agoGoogle has driven almost a million km without an accident What's the latest on this? Last I heard they were only at 250,000 miles.
- civilian 13y agoAs of April 20th it was 700,000 km or ~430,000 miles http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21576224-one-day-every-car-may-come-invisible-chauffeur-look-no-hands http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21576224-one-da...
- Dirlewanger 13y agoCmon, you and I both know software is never perfect. You can spout all the facts you want about how safe it is but it would be ludicrous of both the government and Google not to take into account what happens when something goes haywire and the panoply of scenarios that could occur.
- ctdonath 13y agoparking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be. Unintended consequences spew from: "then what?" How much traffic (and energy waste) will come from parked cars deciding "I'm not supposed to be here any more, the 0.5 hour max parking time has expired, now I must leave and find another parking spot until Master summons me"? What "strange attractors" may arise from the chaos of dozens/hundreds/thousands of cars programmatically cycling thru "go park yourself" scenarios? Will parking spaces likewise be self-managing, negotiating with driverless cars over "first come first served" vs "reservations" vs "highest bidder" pricing & availability? How well will a self-parking car deal with grocery carts left in otherwise available spots? How will people game/abuse the system? People regularly leave cars illegally parked because they know the odds of being ticketed in the couple minutes overage costs less than completing what they're doing; how annoyed will you be when returning to your parked car, only to find it left 30 seconds ago to find another parking spot (location as yet unknown), and summoning it will require another 5-10 minutes for it to get back to you? What of "can't get there from here" scenarios: the car reserves a parking spot, and along the way gets trapped in a one-lane road behind a stopped (breakdown, double parked, unloading) vehicle...now what? Sure, the problems will be solved. Getting to the point where they need solving will enjoy much schadenfreude, and solving them will be interesting - and profitable. Eventually it will all sort out, akin to us living today what Clifford Stoll decried as inane to expect from 1995. In the meantime, I'll be looking for a manual-transmission manual-drive Jeep to get around the strange attractors of flocks of low-IQ vehicles.
- danielweber 13y agoHonestly, they'll just drive 10 minutes out of the city to where land is cheap and parking plentiful.
- rwhitman 13y agoAs others have mentioned the commercial possibilities of driverless taxis seem to be the biggest positive from this. The issues around the infrastructure to support driverless cars I think is a bit questionable. Eliminating traffic lights, self-aware parking spots etc sound a long way off, especially in poorer municipalities. I'm also really skeptical that the general public will adopt driverless cars the way they are expecting, I can definitely see the general populace rejecting them out of fear and frustration for a long time. But in the case of taxis that are subject to city-wide mandates a bit of urban planning and infrastructure to facilitate an automated city-wide taxi network sounds like a realistic scenario and kind of exiting. And for other commercial applications as well, the efficiency advantages are obvious. Any business with a fleet of vehicles will suddenly get enormous cost savings in terms of fuel, salaries, and insurance premiums. The biggest changes are that we will suddenly have a lot of old box trucks and taxis to deal with disposing of, and an entire workforce of drivers left unemployed.
- elchief 13y agoI don't think you need any infrastructure changes for robo-taxis. You don't need to eliminate traffic lights, they understand them. You don't need to do anything with parking spots, the car can find its own, or pick up someone else.
- gbadman 13y ago[ROM][LineSkipper v3.0.1][Now fixes crash bug when joining line behind Audi's] Although perhaps ridiculous at face value, I wonder how automobile manufacturers and legislators will prevent modders from tweaking driving algorithms to win the prisoner's dilemma of traffic. Food for thought!
- aetherson 13y agoLots of people jump to the notion that if driverless cars are available, we will go to a dominantly short-term-hire model of car ownership. By why? Yes, taxis would be cheaper in a world of driverless cars. But they would still be dubiously clean (perhaps even dirtier without a human there to make the passengers clean up). You would still not be able to leave your crap in them. And they would still be only intermittently available at times of high demand (or else they'll be quite expensive). In contrast, if you privately owned a car, it would have all its present advantages and also it would be usable even if you intended to get drunk; you could use the time that you were driving to read or use the computer or watch TV or whatever; you wouldn't need to circle around and try to park; you could still potentially utilize the car more than the present situation (for example: your car could drop the kids off at school while you get an hour of work in, and then come back and take you to the office), giving a cost savings. By the way: does anyone who has kids young enough to require car-seats think that they could get away with a taxi-approach to cars, even if taxis were arbitrarily cheap? Don't underestimate the value of a personally owned car as a mobile receptacle of your stuff. I don't know which of those models would be more dominant in a driverless car world. They both have advantages over the present state of the art. But I'm pretty sure that the people who jump immediately to believe that the taxi model would become massively dominant are basing this more on their wishes than the facts.
- LockeWatts 13y agoI think there will be a hybrid model. Owning a driverless car will still be a very commonplace thing, car ownership is too ingrained in the American mindset to just let it go. However, I believe owning a car will also come to be seen as an investment option, like owning property. What if your car was loaned out to a taxi service while you're at work every day? The taxi service has no drivers, no cars, no real capital. It's just a website with a server coordinating cars to people and to destinations. As a vehicle owner, you are given a share of the profits for the utilization of your capital. Sure there are a lot of kinks to work out, but I could see this being a very common thing.
- karamazov 13y agoRenting out your car while you're not using it negates the advantages of owning one that GP points out. In addition, you're now taking on the risk of damage and the onus of maintenance for a car that's used as a taxi. I don't think this will be a popular option.
- arbuge 13y agoI can certainly see driverless cars leading to longer commutes all else being equal. If you can workout, read a book, work on your laptop, watch tv, etc. while your car drives you to work, you probably will care a bit less about the time involved. All else will not be equal however. Nothing in this scenario alleviates concerns relating to gas prices, which are likely to be the dominant consideration for most people. Your driverless car might be better at sipping gas than you, but not by much.
- everyone 13y agopls ignore!!<br/> noob<br/> testing<br/> whether html is allowed in HN comments
- everyone 13y agowell damn your eyes! this is not relevant but how the dickens doesnt one insert a line break here??
- trout 13y agoI'm just hoping I'll be able to drink in a driverless car before I can use electronics in an airplane. If the same safety-at-all-costs model applies to driving these cars, they won't be nearly as fun as we dream.
- Dewie 13y agoThere is nothing I dislike more about big cities then the cars they are home to. Walking in the busy parts of town, waiting every 100 meters for my signal to pass, sometimes eight lanes wide roads, the never ending noise... I think how can people live right in the middle of this? I welcome the day that driver-less cars make a mainstream entrance into my society, but it seems like this will just make the urban car drivers more indulgent in their car habits. "why take the subway, we can just drive right up to the avenue because parking is not a problem! We rule this land!" A very, very good taxi-like system, or very flexible car sharing might alleviate this.
- cbhl 13y agoI don't understand why anyone thinks that driverless cars will reshape existing cities -- it seems to me much more likely that they'll just shape how cities are built in the future. (Judging by the way modern-day suburbs are built, I suspect that it won't be for the better -- at least, not at first.)
- Tloewald 13y agoDriverless cars will increase miles driven, so let's hope they're efficient. Reduce the cost of something and people will use it more and find new uses of it -- and by far the largest cost of driving is the driver's attention.
- pscheufele 13y ago> or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work the future!
- 31reasons 13y agoI would like to add some more interesting changes that will happen with driverless car (sounds familiar..um horseless carriage?) You don’t need drivers license, so no more DMV lines. Fewer parking lots means more parks,house and office space for people. No more DUI Car theft will go significantly down because there is no one to drive and steal it. Car will be smaller and lighter because it will not need drivers seat and steering wheel and other driver related gears. This change will make cars more fuel efficient. Less Pollution More comfortable rides. The car will know when to gracefully slow down and speed up because it knows the "shake map" of the entire city at a very minute details. For example, it can remember in what area it experiences bumps and can slow down in those areas. No road rage. All cars will be driven by machines so no need to show aggression. By my rough estimate, 180 billion hours of time americans spend driving their car every year. These hours will become free to do basically anything. Another wave of Cognitive Surplus! In car entertainment will mature to the level of in-home entertainment industry, because of more room and free time in the car. In car office model will pop up. Professionals that rely on heavy traveling will prefer their offices right in their car.
- archagon 13y agoI don't know why people are expecting this to happen so soon (if at all). Even if we have the technology for driverless cars sometime in the next few decades (QAed for all possible conditions and failures, of course), there will be no way that they'll be street legal without a (sober) driver at the wheel. We have fully automated TRAINS -- vehicles that only have to go back and forth along a single axis -- that still require conductors. Airlines, despite being 99% automatic, are very, very strict about pilot safety and training. How could you possibly expect something that's an order of magnitude more complicated to be any different? Top it off with some of the most advanced AI (yet to be) invented and you have a problem with a solution much farther into the future than one might think. Me, I'd rather stick with good old fashioned public transit.
- Flenser 13y agoReshaped by driverless car bombs... "Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."