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Driverless car could take us (almost) there. The coordination would allow traffic to flow incredibly smoothly, meaning a single one-way lane would be enough for

Driverless car could take us (almost) there. The coordination would allow traffic to flow incredibly smoothly, meaning a single one-way lane would be enough for most streets. They could more easily be shared, significantly lowering the need for parking. Even privately-owned cars could find their parking spot in i. e. an underground garage a few blocks away. Therefore: no need for parking spaces along the road. So you go from four lanes (2 driving, 2 parking) to just a single one. Sidewalk area increases from "two-lane width" to four and one lane is free for bicycles. It's going two be a revolution comparable to the invention of the internet, completely changing the quality of living in cities. And I get to see it, yeah. (Unless I end up being one of the world's last traffic fatalities)

michaelbuckbee 12y ago
I think the big change with driverless cars will be more on demand "right size" vehicles. A two seat smart car or one seat scooter type vehicle makes much more sense for commuting (typically) than a larger vehicle.
jerf 12y ago
I'd also suggest that efforts to try to "remove cars" prior to this technology are likely to amount to wastes of time. There's a lot of people who want this, which makes me somewhat suspicious that the studies are just finding what they want to find, and I rather suspect what Hamburg is going to discover is that they spend a lot of money making it so cars can't penetrate their "city", only to discover, oops, we can't actually remove them after all. You may dislike passenger cars (and I detect more than a faint whiff of Puritanism around that whole attitude, but that's a discussion for another day), but to entirely remove roads requires you to also solve the problem that motor vehicles are also the general circulatory system of a city. Now I think there are solutions to that problem... but they're all about 10 years away, minimum. We aren't there yet. And then, when we do get there, it won't need to be helped along by governments or modern-day Puritans... it'll just happen, faster and better than any premature attempt to make it happen before the tech is there ever could make it happen.
- lovemenot 12y ago
  Why the ad hominems? Such people may not be to your taste, fine. But theirs is as nothing to the whiff from a tailpipe. Live and let live.
  - matt4077 12y ago
    It's fine – I probably have a puritanical side. More than that though: I believe cities just aren't the right place for cars. It's a tragedy of the commons that car usage creates a situation where public transport cannot be funded to an adequate amount and traffic conditions scare away people who would otherwise take a bike. Cities also suffer because cars encourage a structure of big, centralised shops that are easily accessible by car, but nothing else. I do get the convenience of a mall (and the economics), but, wow, how much would I miss the social environment of a lively city. It's possibly a cultural thing … you prefer whatever environment you grew up in, and that just happens to be 'old Europe' for me. OTOH there's nothing better than a curvy mountain road or the Arizona desert in a convertible. I'm not a complete Luddite.
  - jerf 12y ago
    When I use the term Puritanism, it's not an ad hominem. It is a description of a mentality that the United States imported in quantity, and despite what people may like to believe, it is not isolated to one side or another. This is still not the best summary I know, but one half-decent summary is that Puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun, or perhaps something more like, "I don't like cars and have no use for cars and therefore neither should anybody else." Objective reasons that car traffic is "bad" is in short supply. It is more a taste issue than anything else. But the proles might be having fun with their cars, and we can't have that....
    - lovemenot 12y ago
      It is unreasonable to require a person, albeit implicitly, to justify their motives, when the thing they are objecting to has a material impact on their life. In this thread people are talking about noise, pollution, safety and more. Yet you side-swipe his/her motivation. Your fun is yours alone. Their motivation is theirs alone. A vehicle's aforementioned externalities are common though. We can just focus on those.
Houshalter 12y ago
I think that driverless cars would make up for it by increasing the total amount of traffic. If driving has little cost as an activity, people will drive much more and be ok with much longer commutes.
- breischl 12y ago
  Right now much of the true cost of commuting is spread out in periodic costs like vehicle purchase, maintenance, licensing fees, paying for parking/storage, etc. But all anybody looks at is the time and gas. If you're taking a car service of some sort, all the other stuff will getg figured into the per-mile cost and presented for payment each day when you get to work. I'm guessing once people are hit in the face with the full cost, they will make different (and arguably more rational) decisions.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    There may be some truth to that but look at a city which has a large number of taxis and car services like Manhattan. It's not exactly a car-less paradise. This is one of the things I find somewhat strange about how so many people go gaga whenever optimistic dates for self-driving cars get thrown out. If you live in a city, you already have a "self-driving" option. Maybe someday it will be possible to create autonomous cars (that can put all those drivers out of a job). But basically the only thing that you're doing that you can't do today is dropping the price by, I don't know, $10/hr?
    - breischl 12y ago
      It's not exactly carless, but IIRC the article mentioned 56% of Manhattanites don't own a car. Plus they have a massive influx of work commuters, of whom I'm guessing a vast majority don't drive. So it definitely does work, at least to some extent and when the conditions are right. I thought cabbies made more than that when you count in tips, but you might be right. Living in a city that's not very well served by cabs, I don't use them much because when I call for one they only show up 50% of the time, and give very poor information about time-to-pickup. I like to imagine that the "car cloud" would be much better about both of those, and hence more useful. But that may just be wishful thinking.
nilkn 12y ago
Yep, this is definitely the future. In major cities, self-driving cars will be available in fleets to summon on-demand Uber-style at $.50/mile or less (which is similar to the total cost of ownership of an average relatively new vehicle in the city). The value proposition will be so strong that many urban dwellers will no longer need to own cars at all. Roads will be more efficient and safer; parking lots will be smaller and fewer in number. In sparser areas of the country driverless cars will have less of an effect, but those are also the areas where parkings lots and roads constitute a much smaller percentage of surface area.
gaius 12y ago
It's going two be a revolution comparable to the invention of the internet The funny thing is, the revolution of the internet, being able to click on Amazon and just have a thing delivered (or from a million other websites) assumes a ubiquitous road network. Let's say you cut the number of cars on the road tenfold... Who pays for this now? Just for some figures, taxes on motorist in the UK, which are mainly fuel, raise about £50Bn/year. Government spending on all forms of transport is about £25Bn/year. So let's say through self-driving cars, carpooling, more working from home, etc etc we do achieve a tenfold reduction, now far from paying for everything twice over, cars only pay for a fifth. Where does the money come from? And if it doesn't, how much of the "internet revolution" still works?

michaelbuckbee 12y ago

I think the big change with driverless cars will be more on demand "right size" vehicles. A two seat smart car or one seat scooter type vehicle makes much more sense for commuting (typically) than a larger vehicle.

jerf 12y ago

I'd also suggest that efforts to try to "remove cars" prior to this technology are likely to amount to wastes of time. There's a lot of people who want this, which makes me somewhat suspicious that the studies are just finding what they want to find, and I rather suspect what Hamburg is going to discover is that they spend a lot of money making it so cars can't penetrate their "city", only to discover, oops, we can't actually remove them after all. You may dislike passenger cars (and I detect more than a faint whiff of Puritanism around that whole attitude, but that's a discussion for another day), but to entirely remove roads requires you to also solve the problem that motor vehicles are also the general circulatory system of a city. Now I think there are solutions to that problem... but they're all about 10 years away, minimum. We aren't there yet. And then, when we do get there, it won't need to be helped along by governments or modern-day Puritans... it'll just happen, faster and better than any premature attempt to make it happen before the tech is there ever could make it happen.

lovemenot 12y ago
Why the ad hominems? Such people may not be to your taste, fine. But theirs is as nothing to the whiff from a tailpipe. Live and let live.
- matt4077 12y ago
  It's fine – I probably have a puritanical side. More than that though: I believe cities just aren't the right place for cars. It's a tragedy of the commons that car usage creates a situation where public transport cannot be funded to an adequate amount and traffic conditions scare away people who would otherwise take a bike. Cities also suffer because cars encourage a structure of big, centralised shops that are easily accessible by car, but nothing else. I do get the convenience of a mall (and the economics), but, wow, how much would I miss the social environment of a lively city. It's possibly a cultural thing … you prefer whatever environment you grew up in, and that just happens to be 'old Europe' for me. OTOH there's nothing better than a curvy mountain road or the Arizona desert in a convertible. I'm not a complete Luddite.
- jerf 12y ago
  When I use the term Puritanism, it's not an ad hominem. It is a description of a mentality that the United States imported in quantity, and despite what people may like to believe, it is not isolated to one side or another. This is still not the best summary I know, but one half-decent summary is that Puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun, or perhaps something more like, "I don't like cars and have no use for cars and therefore neither should anybody else." Objective reasons that car traffic is "bad" is in short supply. It is more a taste issue than anything else. But the proles might be having fun with their cars, and we can't have that....
  - lovemenot 12y ago
    It is unreasonable to require a person, albeit implicitly, to justify their motives, when the thing they are objecting to has a material impact on their life. In this thread people are talking about noise, pollution, safety and more. Yet you side-swipe his/her motivation. Your fun is yours alone. Their motivation is theirs alone. A vehicle's aforementioned externalities are common though. We can just focus on those.

Houshalter 12y ago

I think that driverless cars would make up for it by increasing the total amount of traffic. If driving has little cost as an activity, people will drive much more and be ok with much longer commutes.

breischl 12y ago
Right now much of the true cost of commuting is spread out in periodic costs like vehicle purchase, maintenance, licensing fees, paying for parking/storage, etc. But all anybody looks at is the time and gas. If you're taking a car service of some sort, all the other stuff will getg figured into the per-mile cost and presented for payment each day when you get to work. I'm guessing once people are hit in the face with the full cost, they will make different (and arguably more rational) decisions.
- ghaff 12y ago
  There may be some truth to that but look at a city which has a large number of taxis and car services like Manhattan. It's not exactly a car-less paradise. This is one of the things I find somewhat strange about how so many people go gaga whenever optimistic dates for self-driving cars get thrown out. If you live in a city, you already have a "self-driving" option. Maybe someday it will be possible to create autonomous cars (that can put all those drivers out of a job). But basically the only thing that you're doing that you can't do today is dropping the price by, I don't know, $10/hr?
  - breischl 12y ago
    It's not exactly carless, but IIRC the article mentioned 56% of Manhattanites don't own a car. Plus they have a massive influx of work commuters, of whom I'm guessing a vast majority don't drive. So it definitely does work, at least to some extent and when the conditions are right. I thought cabbies made more than that when you count in tips, but you might be right. Living in a city that's not very well served by cabs, I don't use them much because when I call for one they only show up 50% of the time, and give very poor information about time-to-pickup. I like to imagine that the "car cloud" would be much better about both of those, and hence more useful. But that may just be wishful thinking.

nilkn 12y ago

Yep, this is definitely the future. In major cities, self-driving cars will be available in fleets to summon on-demand Uber-style at $.50/mile or less (which is similar to the total cost of ownership of an average relatively new vehicle in the city). The value proposition will be so strong that many urban dwellers will no longer need to own cars at all. Roads will be more efficient and safer; parking lots will be smaller and fewer in number. In sparser areas of the country driverless cars will have less of an effect, but those are also the areas where parkings lots and roads constitute a much smaller percentage of surface area.

gaius 12y ago

It's going two be a revolution comparable to the invention of the internet The funny thing is, the revolution of the internet, being able to click on Amazon and just have a thing delivered (or from a million other websites) assumes a ubiquitous road network. Let's say you cut the number of cars on the road tenfold... Who pays for this now? Just for some figures, taxes on motorist in the UK, which are mainly fuel, raise about £50Bn/year. Government spending on all forms of transport is about £25Bn/year. So let's say through self-driving cars, carpooling, more working from home, etc etc we do achieve a tenfold reduction, now far from paying for everything twice over, cars only pay for a fifth. Where does the money come from? And if it doesn't, how much of the "internet revolution" still works?