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Yay, 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

Yay, 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 ago
I 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.
- umsm 13y ago
  You are assuming a society where everyone shares everything. I don't think that's likely with the introduction of cars that drive themselves. Most early adopters may not be "sharers" either, so they may not push the technology in that direction. I think jellicle is right, that this invention can cause just as much harm as good. When intelligent people make decisions, they consider the worst and best possible outcomes.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    I don't consider Uber a "sharing service." Uber's model will probably be the model for the future, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be, with the difference that they may maintain the fleet themselves. What is the upside to owning a car if you can dispatch one to your house to take you anywhere in a few minutes, or if you can have micro-rentals of a few days at a time where the car will not return back into the network if you really want "instant gratification" of hopping in the car the instant you want to go somewhere. Look at what Uber is done in cities if you want evidence that this model can have a massive effect on the incentives of car ownership. Add to this that the public will probably be incentivized to tax or otherwise limit car owners, and the value proposition gets even worse. It could turn out waiting for an automated vehicle from a network to arrive is still faster door-to-door, since it may have privileged access to high-speed roads or lanes that owned vehicles may not, due to regulation a la HOV, etc. edit: Also I don't disagree that in the early adopter phase autonomous cars may introduce inefficiencies. But the autonomous car is a 100, or even 1000 year invention, not a 10 year one. In many ways it may just be a single one-time event, when ground-based personal transportation for a civilization becomes automated, so it may have no shelf life at all.
    - teek 13y ago
      > 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 delivering other packages or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Because they won't most of the time? Let's say that during peak rush hour, N people + M packages need to be transported. That means that in order to satisfy peak demand efficiently, we need N+M cars and road capacity. During off-peak hours, lets say that only 20% of the population needs to travel. That means you've got the other 80% of the cars sitting around doing nothing just like they are today. If the average distance to nearby parking is say 2 miles, then we have 80% of the cars just driving empty 2 extra miles to prevent themselves from taking up road capacity (while today we trade off by creating parking lots). Despite that, I do think there will be some improvement in terms of car use. Namely: * the average car size will shrink to probably that of a smart car (2 seats, little cargo room) * parking lots will shrink (but not disappear) due to effective stacked parking * vehicle efficiency will increase (human drivers are inherently bad at maintaining fuel/energy efficiency with acceleration/deceleration) The danger is that this once again will make car use "cheap" and like the article suggests, extends sprawl yet again. So we'll just have another half a century of poor land use just it might be slightly more efficient this time around.
apsec112 13y ago
This is silly. Key points: - Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars. If people share cars, we only need one car per five or ten people. NYC has only 13,000 taxis for eight million people. - Having cars drive around in circles wastes lots of expensive gasoline, which someone has to pay for. If gas is $4/gal., the car gets 20 mpg and it drives at 60 mph, we're talking $12 per hour, or $150 to drive around all night. - Right now, there is nothing illegal, or even difficult, about renting a van, driving out to the middle of nowhere and living in it. Almost no one does so, because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient. Where would you shower, cook, do laundry, etc.?
- danielweber 13y ago
  I'm a fan of driverless cars but I enjoyed 'jellicle's take. Applied in their most selfish mode, driverless cars could really suck. Sharing cars might work for people currently using taxis, but 1) why aren't they using taxis right now already, and 2) there are things people like having in their own car. Car seats are a big example for families. And LATCH doesn't work anywhere near as good as it does on paper.
  - apsec112 13y ago
    Re taxis, right now you have to pay for the human driver's wages, and for the driver's medallion. This makes taxis much more expensive. Re car seats, obviously if there's a lot of demand for them, driverless car companies will pre-install them on some of their fleet. This is a bit of a tangent, but also, Selfishness Does Not Work Like That. When you look at a totally "selfish" part of the economy (eg. consumer electronics, or sports cars), it often works beautifully efficiently - every year, we get better stuff for less money. When you look at "selfless" parts (eg. education, health care), they are often giant clusterfucks. Are there exceptions? Certainly. But one can hardly say it's axiomatic that "selfishness" = "bad". (Re healthcare, yes, in America it's unusually bad, but in Germany/Canada/Switzerland/etc. the price we pay per suffering alleviated still keeps going up and up and up.)
    - 13y ago
dclowd9901 13y ago
So negative! Driverless cars allow for the ultimate carpool: Centralized car ownership. I pay a company a determined amount of money every month (say $50, because why the fuck not?), and I have access to a car. Think the best parts of City Car Share + cars that you don't need to somehow find your way to. Car ownership itself, I can imagine would evolve based on this. Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up. The first users of driverless cars aren't going to be general public; it's going to be exactly what I'm talking about here, and that's going to set the tone of the whole driverless car conversation.
- jellicle 13y ago
  > Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up. Well, I don't know, everyone? Is it the case that everywhere people are yearning for more taxi service, or to own their own vehicles? Why does "making cars better" result in lowered demand for cars? Is that how it worked for cellphones? Microwaves? Televisions? Anything? Let's try your argument for cellphones: they're so good and cheap now that people can share them. We could put one in a booth on every corner, and people could just rent them when they needed one. We could call them "payphones". Maybe we'll try it for washing machines: As washing machines got better and cheaper, people yearned to have fewer of them, shared, in a centralized facility. That's why no one owns a washing machine nowadays and we all just go to laundromats when necessary. Right?
  - larubbio 13y ago
    I think you are confusing "demand for cars" with "demand for what a car provides", i.e. transportation from one location to another. A driverless car isn't necessarily "making cars better" but rather making transportation easier. So the demand for transport may increase while demand for individual car ownership may decrease. Personally I don't think I'm in favor of a driverless car, and I certainly can't imagine the impact it they will have.
sksksk 13y ago
To counter your (valid) points... 1. What if self-driving cars ends the idea of car ownership as we know it. Self driving cars turn the concept of driving from one place to another, into getting from one place to another. You could book your commute to work the night before, and a self driving minibus will come and pick you, and 15 other people up. 2. With self driving cars, an existing car park could potentially fit way more cars; cars could just park themselves in super tight, because they don't need to worry about leaving space to give humans access to the cars. So they wouldn't have to "circle around" while you're watching a movie.
Joeri 13y ago
Human nature is such that carpooling does not work unless you make it 'very' financially attractive. We've had decades to figure out a way to make it work, and it hasn't happened, nor will it. The only workable schemes of carpooling i can think of involve driverless cars. The average users per car matters less than the total usage per car. The bulk of the environmental cost of a car is production. A car once made must be used instead of parked. Dual-purpose vehicles that move people during the commute and goods outside of it will boost usage a great deal, cutting down on the number of vehicles needed.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Oh, it's not human nature so much as complexity. Carpooling is most popular for regular commutes at set times, for exactly this reason. When I decide to visit the hardware store on Saturday, there is probably someone I have never met that I could carpool with. But how do I contact them and arrange a carpool in minutes? If I have to post a listing a week in advance, it just isn't worth it.
will_asouka 13y ago
Surely it will only be a minority that will actually own a personal car when a self-driving taxi will be cheap and without the hassle of insurance, servicing etc. I envisage a variable pricing system where a journey booked earlier is cheaper as it can be fitted in more efficiently, and a significant discount for a vehicle shared with other passengers with similar journeys. I don't see cars circling with no passengers, I see cars in constant use, only stationary to pick-up/drop-off or recharge. Way more efficient than what we have currently.
- greedo 13y ago
  Actually, the prices will be cheaper when booked later, as the value diminishes to zero as time runs out. As the airlines and hotels have learned, an empty seat/suite is zero revenue.
DannoHung 13y ago
Why wouldn't there just be on-demand car rentals? Wanna go to the movie? Request a car 5 minutes in advance and the nearest ones with capacity for your passengers show up. Let the car go right after you get to the theater and make another rental call afterwards. Far fewer cars will be in much more use. Sure there'll be some negative aspects to just renting on demand, but it'll probably be a lot less than the negative aspects of everyone owning a car. The biggest net negative is the continual replacement of labor with capital, putting more power into the hands of a few.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  You are describing ZipCar. Think carefully- what about your described usage is truly distinct from what ZipCar offers? What significant value-add would an autonomous car provide? I argue that ZipCar is already a perfect model of what it would be like, because ZipCar already does what you describe.
  - DannoHung 13y ago
    * The car would come to you * An area that has heavy usage could see cars called in from lower utilization areas * I don't really enjoy driving * Ride sharing could reduce customer cost. I mean, seriously, if busses would just show up when I was ready to leave and went pretty much where I want with only a few stops, I'd just ride busses all the time.
- toasterlovin 13y ago
  So, this request a car and it shows up 5 minutes later only works in the densest urban areas. In less dense cities and suburban areas, I don't see how there's any chance. Try ordering a taxi from the suburbs, see how long it takes to show up.
atburrow 13y ago
> Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down. How so? Who's to say that the driverless car doesn't pick up another passenger once it drops you off at your destination? Who says consumers even have to be the ones who own the car? There could definitely be a taxi-based system put in place to keep cars efficiently moving people around. I agree that all of this speculation is wild, but why add artificial constraints on a system that's still in an infancy stage?
roc 13y ago
I think the assumption is that the cars won't literally circle the streets forever and that some parking will remain, just that it can be more efficiently allocated when the proximity from parking-space to destination isn't as-critical. [1] Though, like you, I am highly skeptical about the curb-side-pickup fairy tale, due exactly the same sorts of situations you describe: concerts, theaters, last call -- even something as routine as picking the kiddies up from school. People don't seem to realize that if automated cars delivered themselves to the curb at the end of a concert, a 200 space lot would more than wrap an entire city block. [2] [1] Some breathless fantasists seem to think automated parking will somehow result in more-cars-per-structure, simply assuming valet stands translate into efficiency -- though almost certainly never having been a car porter or valet and knowing it's primarily just a convenience. You're just not going to see the 50-100% space-efficiency gains they seem to imagine. [2] Assuming a city block of 1/8 of a mile and 20' per parallel space. That's 33ish spots per side of the block, not counting curb-cuts, hydrants, padding for intersections, etc. In reality, a 200 space lot would probably wrap a block twice or more.
- apendleton 13y ago
  I think the assumptions in the article are most applicable to an urban context, where car ownership is already nowhere near 100%, and alternative modes already exist that accommodate concerts, movies, etc. I'm reasonably certain, for example, that none of the movie theaters in the city where I live (Washington, DC) have surface parking lots. People are already used to not driving here, and I don't think the sudden arrival of self-driving cars will mean every single person will want curb-side pickup from the movie theater that's already half a block from a metro station.
- jellicle 13y ago
  Why would I pay for parking? The streets are free. "Only SUCKERS pay for parking" will be the motto. People will be hacking their vehicles, right? They can program any behavior they want, right? NYC's off-street parking rates can easily exceed $20/hour. It is CHEAPER to tell your car to drive around aimlessly waiting for you than for it to park. Sure, traffic is miserable. But you aren't in it, so it's okay. Find 15-minute loading zones. Park there for 15 minutes. Move to another one (your spot immediately taken by another empty vehicle). Repeat. Park next to fire hydrants at no cost. Use the same visual scanners you use to navigate to detect approaching police and parking enforcement, and if one is detected, drive away. There are limitless opportunities for self-serving behavior that ends up being hugely anti-social when any significant portion of the population does it. Basically there are three choices: 1. self-driving cars are locked down as all hell, The Man controls them all (proactive enforcement) 2. all the bad stuff is fined out the wazoo - Arab sheiks and Steve Jobs just pay the tickets, but no one else does - (reactive enforcement) 3. self-driving cars create a miserable traffic situation for everyone, in a massive tragedy of the commons problem (no enforcement)
saraid216 13y ago
I'd treat this criticism as a list of issues to resolve, rather than an argument for your conclusion. One thing I'd be interested in hearing explored: if we manage to reach a critical mass of driverless cars, can we start orchestrating their timing and pathing so that traffic light usage can be minimized? Traffic is modeled as a flow, but AFAIK there isn't another flow out there where we actually have near-total control over the movement of individual particles.
deleted 13y ago
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larubbio 13y ago
Couldn't that "location" be a parking lot? The article did mention that some 25 - 30% of a city is devoted to the car today. Some of that is the street, street parking and parking lots. Why would the car circle instead of 1) returning home 2) performing a secondary function (delivery, driving another family member) or 3) parking?
ramblerman 13y ago
You're correct that the article is a puff piece, twisting the notion that suddenly all streets are going to be parking free. Your vision of cars endlessly circling events and houses day and night is even more absurd and completely disregards the cost of petrol. But, somehow you then end your argument with: "therefore driverless cars are bad". As if this stupid future envisioned by the article is now the only possible future for driverless cars.
fudged71 13y ago
Highways and empty parking spots will be used for driverless car parking during off-hours. When leaving a movie theatre, you will need to enter a digital queue.
greedo 13y ago
Some of the hype we're hearing about driverless cars reminds me of the hoopla surrounding the Segway. Other than niche cases, neither will have much impact in the next 20 years.
CBC440 13y ago
Wouldn't that location be those distant lots that are always empty now? That real estate is mostly wasted today because nobody wants to walk 2-3 miles and transportation options are either slow, expensive, or unavailable. You call your car right when the show lets out (maybe you can even set an alarm 10 minutes before its over if you're a good planner) and it's there after a comparatively short wait. Even overly congested airports like JFK have abandoned lots within a 10 minute drive. I also don't see the point about traffic jams. How would they be any worse than a parking garage hemorrhaging visitors at the end of every event like we have today? I can't see the situation being anything but improved by having the cars already out on the side of the main road ready to head in the right direction.

gfodor 13y ago

I 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.

umsm 13y ago
You are assuming a society where everyone shares everything. I don't think that's likely with the introduction of cars that drive themselves. Most early adopters may not be "sharers" either, so they may not push the technology in that direction. I think jellicle is right, that this invention can cause just as much harm as good. When intelligent people make decisions, they consider the worst and best possible outcomes.
- gfodor 13y ago
  I don't consider Uber a "sharing service." Uber's model will probably be the model for the future, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be, with the difference that they may maintain the fleet themselves. What is the upside to owning a car if you can dispatch one to your house to take you anywhere in a few minutes, or if you can have micro-rentals of a few days at a time where the car will not return back into the network if you really want "instant gratification" of hopping in the car the instant you want to go somewhere. Look at what Uber is done in cities if you want evidence that this model can have a massive effect on the incentives of car ownership. Add to this that the public will probably be incentivized to tax or otherwise limit car owners, and the value proposition gets even worse. It could turn out waiting for an automated vehicle from a network to arrive is still faster door-to-door, since it may have privileged access to high-speed roads or lanes that owned vehicles may not, due to regulation a la HOV, etc. edit: Also I don't disagree that in the early adopter phase autonomous cars may introduce inefficiencies. But the autonomous car is a 100, or even 1000 year invention, not a 10 year one. In many ways it may just be a single one-time event, when ground-based personal transportation for a civilization becomes automated, so it may have no shelf life at all.
  - teek 13y ago
    > 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 delivering other packages or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Because they won't most of the time? Let's say that during peak rush hour, N people + M packages need to be transported. That means that in order to satisfy peak demand efficiently, we need N+M cars and road capacity. During off-peak hours, lets say that only 20% of the population needs to travel. That means you've got the other 80% of the cars sitting around doing nothing just like they are today. If the average distance to nearby parking is say 2 miles, then we have 80% of the cars just driving empty 2 extra miles to prevent themselves from taking up road capacity (while today we trade off by creating parking lots). Despite that, I do think there will be some improvement in terms of car use. Namely: * the average car size will shrink to probably that of a smart car (2 seats, little cargo room) * parking lots will shrink (but not disappear) due to effective stacked parking * vehicle efficiency will increase (human drivers are inherently bad at maintaining fuel/energy efficiency with acceleration/deceleration) The danger is that this once again will make car use "cheap" and like the article suggests, extends sprawl yet again. So we'll just have another half a century of poor land use just it might be slightly more efficient this time around.

apsec112 13y ago

This is silly. Key points: - Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars. If people share cars, we only need one car per five or ten people. NYC has only 13,000 taxis for eight million people. - Having cars drive around in circles wastes lots of expensive gasoline, which someone has to pay for. If gas is $4/gal., the car gets 20 mpg and it drives at 60 mph, we're talking $12 per hour, or $150 to drive around all night. - Right now, there is nothing illegal, or even difficult, about renting a van, driving out to the middle of nowhere and living in it. Almost no one does so, because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient. Where would you shower, cook, do laundry, etc.?

danielweber 13y ago
I'm a fan of driverless cars but I enjoyed 'jellicle's take. Applied in their most selfish mode, driverless cars could really suck. Sharing cars might work for people currently using taxis, but 1) why aren't they using taxis right now already, and 2) there are things people like having in their own car. Car seats are a big example for families. And LATCH doesn't work anywhere near as good as it does on paper.
- apsec112 13y ago
  Re taxis, right now you have to pay for the human driver's wages, and for the driver's medallion. This makes taxis much more expensive. Re car seats, obviously if there's a lot of demand for them, driverless car companies will pre-install them on some of their fleet. This is a bit of a tangent, but also, Selfishness Does Not Work Like That. When you look at a totally "selfish" part of the economy (eg. consumer electronics, or sports cars), it often works beautifully efficiently - every year, we get better stuff for less money. When you look at "selfless" parts (eg. education, health care), they are often giant clusterfucks. Are there exceptions? Certainly. But one can hardly say it's axiomatic that "selfishness" = "bad". (Re healthcare, yes, in America it's unusually bad, but in Germany/Canada/Switzerland/etc. the price we pay per suffering alleviated still keeps going up and up and up.)
  - 13y ago

dclowd9901 13y ago

So negative! Driverless cars allow for the ultimate carpool: Centralized car ownership. I pay a company a determined amount of money every month (say $50, because why the fuck not?), and I have access to a car. Think the best parts of City Car Share + cars that you don't need to somehow find your way to. Car ownership itself, I can imagine would evolve based on this. Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up. The first users of driverless cars aren't going to be general public; it's going to be exactly what I'm talking about here, and that's going to set the tone of the whole driverless car conversation.

jellicle 13y ago
> Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up. Well, I don't know, everyone? Is it the case that everywhere people are yearning for more taxi service, or to own their own vehicles? Why does "making cars better" result in lowered demand for cars? Is that how it worked for cellphones? Microwaves? Televisions? Anything? Let's try your argument for cellphones: they're so good and cheap now that people can share them. We could put one in a booth on every corner, and people could just rent them when they needed one. We could call them "payphones". Maybe we'll try it for washing machines: As washing machines got better and cheaper, people yearned to have fewer of them, shared, in a centralized facility. That's why no one owns a washing machine nowadays and we all just go to laundromats when necessary. Right?
- larubbio 13y ago
  I think you are confusing "demand for cars" with "demand for what a car provides", i.e. transportation from one location to another. A driverless car isn't necessarily "making cars better" but rather making transportation easier. So the demand for transport may increase while demand for individual car ownership may decrease. Personally I don't think I'm in favor of a driverless car, and I certainly can't imagine the impact it they will have.

sksksk 13y ago

To counter your (valid) points... 1. What if self-driving cars ends the idea of car ownership as we know it. Self driving cars turn the concept of driving from one place to another, into getting from one place to another. You could book your commute to work the night before, and a self driving minibus will come and pick you, and 15 other people up. 2. With self driving cars, an existing car park could potentially fit way more cars; cars could just park themselves in super tight, because they don't need to worry about leaving space to give humans access to the cars. So they wouldn't have to "circle around" while you're watching a movie.

Joeri 13y ago

Human nature is such that carpooling does not work unless you make it 'very' financially attractive. We've had decades to figure out a way to make it work, and it hasn't happened, nor will it. The only workable schemes of carpooling i can think of involve driverless cars. The average users per car matters less than the total usage per car. The bulk of the environmental cost of a car is production. A car once made must be used instead of parked. Dual-purpose vehicles that move people during the commute and goods outside of it will boost usage a great deal, cutting down on the number of vehicles needed.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Oh, it's not human nature so much as complexity. Carpooling is most popular for regular commutes at set times, for exactly this reason. When I decide to visit the hardware store on Saturday, there is probably someone I have never met that I could carpool with. But how do I contact them and arrange a carpool in minutes? If I have to post a listing a week in advance, it just isn't worth it.

will_asouka 13y ago

Surely it will only be a minority that will actually own a personal car when a self-driving taxi will be cheap and without the hassle of insurance, servicing etc. I envisage a variable pricing system where a journey booked earlier is cheaper as it can be fitted in more efficiently, and a significant discount for a vehicle shared with other passengers with similar journeys. I don't see cars circling with no passengers, I see cars in constant use, only stationary to pick-up/drop-off or recharge. Way more efficient than what we have currently.

greedo 13y ago
Actually, the prices will be cheaper when booked later, as the value diminishes to zero as time runs out. As the airlines and hotels have learned, an empty seat/suite is zero revenue.

DannoHung 13y ago

Why wouldn't there just be on-demand car rentals? Wanna go to the movie? Request a car 5 minutes in advance and the nearest ones with capacity for your passengers show up. Let the car go right after you get to the theater and make another rental call afterwards. Far fewer cars will be in much more use. Sure there'll be some negative aspects to just renting on demand, but it'll probably be a lot less than the negative aspects of everyone owning a car. The biggest net negative is the continual replacement of labor with capital, putting more power into the hands of a few.

sliverstorm 13y ago
You are describing ZipCar. Think carefully- what about your described usage is truly distinct from what ZipCar offers? What significant value-add would an autonomous car provide? I argue that ZipCar is already a perfect model of what it would be like, because ZipCar already does what you describe.
- DannoHung 13y ago
  * The car would come to you * An area that has heavy usage could see cars called in from lower utilization areas * I don't really enjoy driving * Ride sharing could reduce customer cost. I mean, seriously, if busses would just show up when I was ready to leave and went pretty much where I want with only a few stops, I'd just ride busses all the time.
toasterlovin 13y ago
So, this request a car and it shows up 5 minutes later only works in the densest urban areas. In less dense cities and suburban areas, I don't see how there's any chance. Try ordering a taxi from the suburbs, see how long it takes to show up.

atburrow 13y ago

> Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down. How so? Who's to say that the driverless car doesn't pick up another passenger once it drops you off at your destination? Who says consumers even have to be the ones who own the car? There could definitely be a taxi-based system put in place to keep cars efficiently moving people around. I agree that all of this speculation is wild, but why add artificial constraints on a system that's still in an infancy stage?

roc 13y ago

I think the assumption is that the cars won't literally circle the streets forever and that some parking will remain, just that it can be more efficiently allocated when the proximity from parking-space to destination isn't as-critical. [1] Though, like you, I am highly skeptical about the curb-side-pickup fairy tale, due exactly the same sorts of situations you describe: concerts, theaters, last call -- even something as routine as picking the kiddies up from school. People don't seem to realize that if automated cars delivered themselves to the curb at the end of a concert, a 200 space lot would more than wrap an entire city block. [2] [1] Some breathless fantasists seem to think automated parking will somehow result in more-cars-per-structure, simply assuming valet stands translate into efficiency -- though almost certainly never having been a car porter or valet and knowing it's primarily just a convenience. You're just not going to see the 50-100% space-efficiency gains they seem to imagine. [2] Assuming a city block of 1/8 of a mile and 20' per parallel space. That's 33ish spots per side of the block, not counting curb-cuts, hydrants, padding for intersections, etc. In reality, a 200 space lot would probably wrap a block twice or more.

apendleton 13y ago
I think the assumptions in the article are most applicable to an urban context, where car ownership is already nowhere near 100%, and alternative modes already exist that accommodate concerts, movies, etc. I'm reasonably certain, for example, that none of the movie theaters in the city where I live (Washington, DC) have surface parking lots. People are already used to not driving here, and I don't think the sudden arrival of self-driving cars will mean every single person will want curb-side pickup from the movie theater that's already half a block from a metro station.
jellicle 13y ago
Why would I pay for parking? The streets are free. "Only SUCKERS pay for parking" will be the motto. People will be hacking their vehicles, right? They can program any behavior they want, right? NYC's off-street parking rates can easily exceed $20/hour. It is CHEAPER to tell your car to drive around aimlessly waiting for you than for it to park. Sure, traffic is miserable. But you aren't in it, so it's okay. Find 15-minute loading zones. Park there for 15 minutes. Move to another one (your spot immediately taken by another empty vehicle). Repeat. Park next to fire hydrants at no cost. Use the same visual scanners you use to navigate to detect approaching police and parking enforcement, and if one is detected, drive away. There are limitless opportunities for self-serving behavior that ends up being hugely anti-social when any significant portion of the population does it. Basically there are three choices: 1. self-driving cars are locked down as all hell, The Man controls them all (proactive enforcement) 2. all the bad stuff is fined out the wazoo - Arab sheiks and Steve Jobs just pay the tickets, but no one else does - (reactive enforcement) 3. self-driving cars create a miserable traffic situation for everyone, in a massive tragedy of the commons problem (no enforcement)

saraid216 13y ago

I'd treat this criticism as a list of issues to resolve, rather than an argument for your conclusion. One thing I'd be interested in hearing explored: if we manage to reach a critical mass of driverless cars, can we start orchestrating their timing and pathing so that traffic light usage can be minimized? Traffic is modeled as a flow, but AFAIK there isn't another flow out there where we actually have near-total control over the movement of individual particles.

deleted 13y ago

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larubbio 13y ago

Couldn't that "location" be a parking lot? The article did mention that some 25 - 30% of a city is devoted to the car today. Some of that is the street, street parking and parking lots. Why would the car circle instead of 1) returning home 2) performing a secondary function (delivery, driving another family member) or 3) parking?

ramblerman 13y ago

You're correct that the article is a puff piece, twisting the notion that suddenly all streets are going to be parking free. Your vision of cars endlessly circling events and houses day and night is even more absurd and completely disregards the cost of petrol. But, somehow you then end your argument with: "therefore driverless cars are bad". As if this stupid future envisioned by the article is now the only possible future for driverless cars.

fudged71 13y ago

Highways and empty parking spots will be used for driverless car parking during off-hours. When leaving a movie theatre, you will need to enter a digital queue.

greedo 13y ago

Some of the hype we're hearing about driverless cars reminds me of the hoopla surrounding the Segway. Other than niche cases, neither will have much impact in the next 20 years.

CBC440 13y ago

Wouldn't that location be those distant lots that are always empty now? That real estate is mostly wasted today because nobody wants to walk 2-3 miles and transportation options are either slow, expensive, or unavailable. You call your car right when the show lets out (maybe you can even set an alarm 10 minutes before its over if you're a good planner) and it's there after a comparatively short wait. Even overly congested airports like JFK have abandoned lots within a 10 minute drive. I also don't see the point about traffic jams. How would they be any worse than a parking garage hemorrhaging visitors at the end of every event like we have today? I can't see the situation being anything but improved by having the cars already out on the side of the main road ready to head in the right direction.