Here's what this research tells me: demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation.
Current use is limited by cost and convenience.
Self-driving car is likely to fix both so it'll lead to more use of transportation.
This is a good thing. We're currently deprived and if things go well, we'll get more of what we want.
The congestion problem is mostly overblown.
First, maybe with rare exceptions like L.A., the traffic is only bad during rush hour, when people are going to work and getting back home. Other times there's plenty.
Second, the way we drive currently is very inefficient. Just last weak I was walking in San Diego along a street at ~5:30 PM i.e. rush hour.
I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person.
Not to mention that ~40% cars were gigantic, because it looks that if people can afford gigantic cars, they'll buy them. And in US they can afford it.
Robotaxis would fix those 2 issues.
The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol but a utility operated by an organization focused on practicality and cost, like buses and trains.
It's also very easy to use pricing to force people to use the available resources efficiently during congestion.
Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people.
If that pricing delta is not enough, increase the price of to $20 (vs $3) or to $50.
Or provide commuting passes tho employers (kind of like Google buses) where a company pays a $100 to robotaxi company per month and the employee gets to use it for free for commute, but only in shared mode.
The future with robotaxis is much brighter than those doomsday prediction of traffic.
It's really not. Congestion is a huge problem already, and increasing the current road utilization by 83% will bring entire cities to a standstill for the entirety of waking hours.
> I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person.
Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants, so things will get much, much worse as far as how many people are actually being transported vs road utilization.
You then go on to talk about robotaxis, but that supposes that most people will give up the idea of personal car ownership entirely instead of just buying their own AVs; this doesn't seem likely.
We're going to have to slowly shift to more usage-based pricing if we want autonomous cars to work. Start off charging tolls per mile for zero occupancy vehicles when they drive in congested areas, then expend it to single occupancy vehicles in congested areas, etc.
A bit more controversial, but I personally love the idea of a congestion-free fast lane (say, 100+ mph) exclusively for autonomous vehicles, with prices that fluctuate based on supply and demand. We already have this for a couple freeways in Southern California and it's lovely to have as an option.
If you’re talking gas tax in the US, I’d say that’s laughable. Using eia.gov[1] as a reference, the prices are half of what we have in the EU. We’ve observed a steady increase in the prices (mostly due to taxes). But it didn’t have the effect, people just deal with the higher price and carry on. There’s even more cars than there used to be. And the average living standard in the east/SE EU is lower of that in the US.
When I was in Göteborg, Sweden, I saw this system where the toll increases based on the time, and it’s highest (~30 SEK = ~3€) in the rush hour. There was no price in the off hours. Maybe if it costs more to drive in the rush hour, one might think about not doing it or finding someone else to split the cost.
To rely on the “tax system” to take care of the congestion/traffic pollution problem, we’d have to bump the taxes and tolls by 10x to see any effect.
EV is a step in the right direction, but only by a small amount. We need incentive to drive less, something that forces everyone to think before they drive. And by everyone I have in mind the person who is driving and also the person who is making them drive to the office to have their physical presence to do the same work they can do from anywhere. Make it more expensive for a company to have car riders and make them count commute as part of the workday. I believe remote work is a part of the solution to this and making it more expensive to get everyone to the HQ every day might make more managers reconsider if it’s necessary.
The number of people who need to commute during rush hour can't increase 83%. Maybe some transit commuters will switch to cars, but maybe some car commuters will finally be able to switch to transit if these make the first and last mile feasible.
And 83% was the first and only week. Maybe the number doesn't stay that high once indulging in the novelty wears off.
It probably could increase quite a lot because more people might be willing to live far away and enjoy cheaper / more housing if it means that commuting won't be dead time. With self driving cars you could actually work during your commute. As you point out, a number of existing commuters might also transfer from train to car travel.
You're forgetting the unoccupied trips. There will be unoccupied trips running errands even at rush hour, because why not, you're not sitting in traffic, just your car.
Also you seem to be thinking more of the robotaxis model, but the article is talking about the more likely future of everyone continuing to own their own car, only now it can drive. If cars are driving back empty after a commute then rush hour will have roughly twice the traffic.
One way to prevent congestion would be to instead of paying for the distance traveled, you simply paid for the time the car is on the road, giving a financial incentive to send the car outside of rush hours. Would probably also cause people to use alternative routes rather than everyone trying to use the shortest one when is congested.
Wouldn't that be a trip that someone would normally be driving anyway? Also wouldn't it make sense to have a store deliver to lots of people on one circuit, this reducing traffic?
What are you basing that on? In dense cities with good transportation infrastructure people don't own cars nearly as much and the people that do own cars use them less.
If the future is car as a service, then yes congestion does not automatically get worse, you call an automated car to pick you up, and another one to take you home, it might also mean that more ride sharing happens too
Think Uber carpooling, minus drivers, much cheaper, and short pickup times. Maybe 6-10 person shuttles instead of sedans/SUVs in denser areas. To a car service, moving an empty vehicle is inefficient and a waste of money.
> Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants
Where do you get that idea from? or maybe, how did you come to that conclusion? It's not evident that would be the case. Traffic mirrors demand. Demand goes both ways, unevenly. Prior to the end-of-the-work-day, you would see an increase in empty vehicles consolidating for the imminent exodus of a city, but that would hardly be the common case.
> that supposes that most people will give up the idea of personal car ownership entirely instead of just buying their own AVs
There are multiple ways to ensure this occurs. The same reason horse carriages aren't allowed on Freeways (legal/safety barriers), or almost nobody uses gliders or natural gas cars to commute (impractical), etc. US Society is subject to change/more malleable than you might imagine. Maybe not in our lifetime, but ubiquitous phone booths disappeared in mine, so I hold out hope.
So here's a hypothetical scenario. Car drives kids to school (in my experience, school tends to start before work). Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work. In the afternoon, car drives (empty) to pick up kids and drive them home, then drives (empty) back to work to pick up the parent. Half the time it's empty.
> Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work.
This implies there are no other people for which a rideshare would be suitable in either direction at any given time. This seems, like an unreasonable way to predict how mass AV would work. Again, demand is asymmetrical, which means there are opportunities for aggregation and overlap, when talking about mass adoption to the point that "the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants".
There's the issue with demand for AV availability (ie traffic), which can never be reduced to zero. This would incentivize better judgement than "I'll stagger the school and work times"
Logically, why would AVs be 1-4 occupant vehicles? Once you have AV, you have AV vans and buses, similar to airport shuttling.
We're not talking about rideshares, we're talking about autonomous personal vehicles. Most people are not likely to give up their personal vehicles; they'll just have self-driving ones.
This seems like an odd argument to me: "enabling efficiency isn't useful if you assume people's habits won't adapt to the new status quo". Once you've moved personal vehicle use of the sort you describe from essential to luxury, I don't see why you couldn't make users bear the cost of their frivolous externalities.
There is no way people would give up owning their own car outside of very dense urban centers. Everywhere else it would neither be practical nor desirable to wait for a rental car to arrive.
People also tend to store lots of personal items in their car.
There are any number of things that seemed utterly critical and timeless to the myopic of their time that are either anachronisms or at best optional today. "There's no ways people will live in apartment buildings", "there's no way people will give up their horses", etc etc
For the same reason I use a combination of transit, Ubers, and rental cars to get a far better experience than car owners at a fraction of the cost. For the same reason that the average person gave up horses and large plots of land and indoor woodfires for heating and cooking: if something is horribly inefficient and costly relative to an alternative, eventually society stops subsidizing it, and the only ones left doing it are the highly irrational or the highly passionate (compare horse ownership 150 years ago to now).
There are obviously advantages to owning a car that transport-as-a-service doesn't offer, but the point is that once an alternative is available that's better from a global utility perspective, it doesn't make any sense to subsidize the costly decisions of the irrational (barring interest groups that we as a society choose to explicitly subsidize, like families or the disabled).
Well, obviously. This isn't something you turn off overnight if the alternative infrastructure doesn't yet support it. But you could make the same argument if pretending it's a necessity about any of a million things that don't exist in modern society today. If your definition of what you're entitled to is no different from the status quo, you're barely even coherently engaging with conversations about how society can and should evolve, improve, or maintain its normz and policies.
> We're not talking about rideshares, we're talking about autonomous personal vehicles
> they'll just have self-driving ones.
That won't last long, because of market inefficiency. Why pay for maintenance and energy on a vehicle? It's just as unrealistic as saying we'll keep personal vehicles running on gasoline, to me.
people who can afford it value exclusive ownership of an item. a good example is the vacation home. it's possible to defray the cost of ownership of the second home by a lot if you are willing to rent it out to others while you aren't using it, but most people don't seem to do this. [0]
I suspect that unless it gets banned outright, wealthy people will be happy to pay whatever it costs to guarantee strangers can't leave a bad smell in the vehicle that takes them to work.
> It's really not. Congestion is a huge problem already, and increasing the current road utilization by 83% will bring entire cities to a standstill for the entirety of waking hours.
That's not how equilibria work though. Currently congestion is the primary bottleneck on personal consumption of transportation in major metro areas in the US. That will not change with AVs. That is to say, we will probably reach a similar congestion equilibrium as we have now, there will just be more transportation happening, which is a net good thing provided there are not also negative externalities (such as emissions) from that transportation bump.
Driverless private cars (which the article is about) and driverless taxis aren’t the same thing. The former does nothing to solve the traffic density or vehicle size problem. Even focusing on driverless taxis, Uber and Lyft have offered for some time options for nicer cars, larger cars, and nicer larger cars, so presumably there’s a market for taxis to still be a status symbol, unlike you state. Finally, your economic incentives have nothing to do with driverless cars; it’s just a tax or toll on non-pooled taxi rides—that could be implemented right now.
And, in the end, even a full car is still less dense than a bus or train.
The uber/lyft/limo large cars vs standard cabs/cars are usually used for a trip when there are more passengers or cargo. With private cars, the larger ones are bought when there might ever be a trip with more passengers or cargo, even if 99% of the time they just have a single occupant.
Also normal cars spend most of their time parked. Driverless taxis wouldn't need to.
”The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol”
You’re not the only one claiming that, but I don’t think it automatically follows. People can currently afford to buy cars for themselves, so unless self-driving cars will be (much) more expensive, people still would be able to afford them. So, in this case, the question is what else, if anything, people would want to use their money on instead of on owning a car.
If, on the other hand, self-driving cars will be much more expensive, there’s a risk that they will be too expensive. That may be offset by having self-driving cars make more hours each day, but I don’t think that’s a given.
One reason people own cars is that it guarantees a car is available when they need it. If people value that highly, self-driving cars will have to cater for that. I think that would mean the number of self-driving cars would have to be fairly similar to the number of cars now on the road. If that’s the end-game, why wouldn’t many people own a self-driving car, or lease one for their personal use?
When you use X and then a substitute Y arrives that is 10x cheaper and more convenient, you'll switch to it.
Using robotaxi network will be much cheaper than total cost of owning a car, mostly because cars are dramatically underutilized.
On average a car is used 1-2 hrs a day out of 12-16 hrs it could be used as a robotaxi. To start off we have 5-7x price difference.
Then most use is not shared. Assuming robotaxis will be used by 2 people on average, it's another 2x cost difference, 10-14x combined.
The cars will be much cheaper. Think $25k Toyota corolla, not $45k SUV or pick up truck. Fleet operators will ask for cars that are cheap and reliable, not for luxurious interior.
Not to mention that GM spends 3 billion dollars on advertising each year, which goes to increase the cost of your car.
It'll be a no-brainer to pay $200-$300 per month for (effectively) unlimited robotaxi service than $400 per month for a lease + $100 month for insurance + fuel + cost and inconvenience of refueling.
Furthermore, you won't be able to buy those cars.
Consider the following scenario to its logical conclusion:
Tesla (or whoever) introduces a robotaxi service.
A car that costs $30k to make can be sold for $40 k to you or put to use as a robotaxi and make $100k - $300k over its lifetime (big spread because it's hard to predict how the pricing will pan out).
Why would Tesla sell a car to you for $10k profit if they can make $70k profit?
For the first 10 years they'll be busy making cars exclusively for robotaxis and they'll prioritize grabbing market share. There will be no $40k self-driving Teslas to buy.
But won't GM or Ford or Toyota sell me that car?
In 2008 car companies went bankrupt because of 20% drop in car sales.
If robotaxis take off, they'll shrink car market by way more than 20%, permanently.
I can't see how this won't end up in bankrupting pretty much every car maker as we know them.
Those that will have self-driving technology will also switch to making robotaxis exclusively.
Those that don't will either become OEMs to the kinds of Waymo (and eventually be bought by them when they vertically integrate) or go bankrupt.
Privately owned cars might become like yachts: sold in very low numbers to multi-millioners.
”On average a car is used 1-2 hrs a day out of 12-16 hrs it could be used as a robotaxi.”
…assuming demand for cars is flat 12-16 hours per day, and that you could somehow, make all their operating hours useful operating hours. For example, society would have to change for commuter cars to end up in places where they immediately can be used productively.
”Why would Tesla sell a car to you for $10k profit if they can make $70k profit?”
Because, if they don’t, somebody else (e.g, a Chinese car manufacturer) will sell me a car for that $10k profit, and Tesla will make zilch.
If cars become that much cheaper, and wouldn’t need a driver’s license to use them, I don’t see why, by necessity, fewer people would own cars.
Your scenario assumes some manufacturer will gain a near-perfect monopoly. That might happen, but it’s not a given.
Also, I don’t think it is a given that the government wouldn’t break up such a monopoly.
> Why would Tesla sell a car to you for $10k profit if they can make $70k profit?
Because there is a niche that is profitable and if Tesla doesn't fill it, someone else will? After all, Tesla has had no motivational difficulties trying to fill that niche right now, so someone will be willing.
I also question the 70K profit part. Assuming robotaxis actually become a thing, why do you think the cars will make much profit at all? There will be a race to the bottom. I know a lot of Model 3 owners trying to justify their FSD purchase by suggesting they will eventually make back all of that money and more, but I can't figure out why they think this time they will be immune to market dynamics.
> It'll be a no-brainer to pay $200-$300 per month for (effectively) unlimited robotaxi service than $400 per month for a lease + $100 month for insurance + fuel + cost and inconvenience of refueling.
It's already possible: a monthly transit pass is often in the $100-150 range. The fact that people have been choosing to forego viable transit options in favor of a much more expensive personal vehicle option for a long time is strongly suggestive of the fact that people really don't want to give up their cars.
That sounds like someone who has never even attempted to make that work.
Transit is least effective in suburbs, where you have to try very hard and basically live in exactly the right location to make a transit-only experience work. But in both large urban conglomerations and even in many small rural cities, it is actually quite effective to do all of your transportation needs using local transit.
First of all, thank you for an interesting article! Looking at it quickly though, if I make some rough extrapolations from their data, it seems like most Teslas will have lost about 40% of their battery life by 500,000 miles. So I really think it's disingenuous to say that a Tesla can drive that long, when its range starts to make it significantly less useful, when replacing the batteries would cost more than buying a cheap car. Basically I think you are just exaggerating the benefit of longevity for electric cars.
That said though, the Tesla batteries are holding up better than I thought and I agree with you electric cars are better for higher mileage applications!
Why wouldn’t there be different classes of cars? If I’m going to work every day in an autonomous car and the price is not that expensive, there’s a chance I’ll decide to pay 25% or 40% more of what you say will be a dirt cheap price, to be in a nicer car with better seating and amenities. Especially if it becomes standard to pop open an iPad or laptop during your commute.
Others have already covered how any potentially profitable niche will be covered.
> It'll be a no-brainer to pay $200-$300 per month for (effectively) unlimited robotaxi service than $400 per month for a lease + $100 month for insurance + fuel + cost and inconvenience of refueling.
My car costs 1.800 € ( I'm not the first owner of that Mercedes), I barely use it as I live in a big city.
I bought my car at 2000miles for $8000. It now has 100000 miles after 5 years, presumably it will turn into dust in another 10 years which kills the underutilization argument. I see no reason why it would be cheaper to use a self driving taxi.
This would be ok if the rush hour actually lasted 60 minutes. In my city (pop ~6M) it goes from somewhere between 7-10am and 4-7pm with a little spike around lunchtime.
I don't work downtown and have the luxury of scheduling most of my driving as I please, so I nearly always opt for around 8pm. Being that my city is playing catch up trying to ease rush hour congestion, I often find myself alone on 4 lane arterials.
I am literally King of the Road.
Robotaxis aren't going to fix this, nor, sadly is throwing any other type of monetisable product at it. What we need to do is decentralise where people work away from downtowns, stagger work and school starting times so that the entire city isn't running around trying to hit the same 30 minute window and set up incentives for companies to accommodate remote workers.
Anything else smells to me like the auto industry trying to sell more cars and the infrastructure industry trying to sell more roads. They're free to do that, but under the guise of easing congestion? No.
I was thinking you were talking about Atlanta until you mentioned traffic being light at 8pm. A lot of times it takes later here, even out to the suburbs.
Um, you could solve most congestion simply by staggering working hours.
The problem is that even the Bay Area can't seem to pull this off.
Single people are generally fine. But the moment you have kids, you are now on regimented schedules that force you into some semblance of 9-5 ... and now you're part of the problem.
The point they're making is that the only possible solution is to solve the land use problem, so that the majority of people can live lives that don't require individual automobiles. Broadly speaking, this means building densely enough that walking, biking, and mass transit are suitable for most trips.
I disagree, I think the politics of land use are more easily solvable than the simple physics problem of too many cars, not enough space. Plenty of other countries in the world (and even some US cities) have solved the land use problem to the point that most people don't use space-inefficient private vehicles to get around. It's solvable and there are working models to emulate. This is not true of your alternative.
It's not financially possible to fix this quickly. You're talking about tens of trillions of dollars in new housing, at a minimum. Then all the commercial, infrastructure, etc. on top of it.
That's the part I'm missing with this land use discussion. This isn't Sim City. Yes, mistakes were made, but shit's there now and nobody's moving unless they really get paid for it.
How would robotaxis fix the ~80% of cars being single person? It seems like it would make it even worse, replacing some of those with zero people in the car.
Network of robotaxis has a wonderful quality of increasing utilization with density.
It's a self-healing system: the more people use it, the more efficiently we can use it. Efficiency, it this context, is number of people we can transport per hour on a given stretch of the road.
It's important, so i'll emphasize it: high utilization of roads is a good thing. Roads are a fixed resource that have already been paid for. High utilization means we're providing more transportation value for the same, fixed price.
Most of the time roads are empty. Case in point: it's 1 PM in a busy part of San Diego. I just looked out of the window and the road is empty.
Even if there were 10 more, single occupancy cars on that road it would not degrade transportation service for anyone. Plenty of capacity.
The bad part is congestion caused by going over capacity. That's the friday night scenario in my neighborhood or commute to/from work traffic during weekdays.
Robotaxis give us obvious tools to combat that.
When the need for transportation at a given time is so hight that it would cause bumper-to-bumper traffic, it implies that a lot of people are sharing their route with other people.
It is the case today but we have no practical way of arranging for those people to share the car.
With robotaxis, the fleet can see that 4 people on the same block want to go to roughly the same place so it can direct them to the same car, so that they can more efficiently utilize fixed resource of cars and roads.
What if they don't want to share a car with other people?
Make them with congestion pricing.
Make them pay $10 for a single person ride vs $3 for shared. If $10 doesn't work, then jack it up to $20, $50 or $100. There is a price that will make 90% choose shared ride during congestion.
Or if things are really that bad and the trip is non-essential, they'll choose to shift their trip. Maybe 5:30 PM is not the best time for trip to walmart.
We can certainly do better than what we do today during congestion: mostly empty, overly big cars.
Today we buy cars for presentations of status, personal expression, enjoyment and “the worst case” I.e. family and kids all need to go somewhere at the same time.
“I’m a truck person”,
“I’m a hybrid person”,
“I’m outdoors-y”
Then we use it 95% of the time for single person use, to commute (not enjoy) with zero recognition of personal expression.
Even if people don’t share the robotaxis, they will be optimized for pragmatic use. Taxi sizes will scale with number of people (think enclosed, self driving motorcycles, etc).
In practice, I don't expect to see it. Economically, there's value in having whatever cars are closest to you be ones that fit your group. I expect that value will exceed the savings of a smaller car. I bet we'll see something like uber vs uber-xl, rather than something as granular as you're suggesting.
Because in all of human history humans have shown zero interest in depriving themselves of things they want.
I want transportation. You want transportation. Everyone wants transportation.
You, me and everyone else wants to go to the beach, get food delivered, get 1 day shipping from Amazon, eat bananas grown in Chile, drink coffee harvested in Africa, drink wine grown in France, go to a baseball game or visit relatives for Thanksgiving.
All are optional activities you can do without. Are you doing without them?
I need transportation. You need transportation. Everyone needs transportation.
You, me and everyone else needs to go to work, go to a hospital etc.
Reducing transportation is not an option. You'll not give up on things enabled by transportation.
So the next best thing is making transportation cheaper and more efficient.
We've optimized food production to produce 10x more food using the same amount of land. It was a good thing because the option of starving or killing 9 out of 10 people is not very appealing.
Robotaxis will allow us to optimize transportation to better use the roads and cars. High utilization of the roads (as long as it doesn't become a crippling congestion) is a good thing. It means we're using a fixed resource to provide as much of what people want at the lowest possible price.
And since people bring buses as some alternative to robotaxis: a self-driving bus is also vastly superior to regular bus and when we have density of 100k robocars in a city the size of SF, it'll be a no brainer for fleet operators to have part of the fleet be minivans and buses, taking 16+ people, for the times of congestion.
> Because in all of human history humans have shown zero interest in depriving themselves of things they want.
Any malignant cancer shows zero interest in moderating its growth, until its host dies.
I agree with your description of reality, but I think fundamentally we need to price in ecological and medical externalities before I can be quite as optimistic as you are.
With margin, the services are always more expensive. I drive a fancyish SUV, and my average per-trip cost is around $3. I can Uber for $8-10 minimum or ride a bus for $1.5.
Robot cars are going to be more like Uber, as you won’t have the driver losing money on depreciation.
Robotaxis should roughly drop the cost of “Uber’s” to 1/3.
Currently Uber only collects 25% of the fair for itself. The rest is for the human driving.
Robotaxis can also be used 24/7 so better capital utilization on the initial investment for the car.
Maintenance costs reduce with scale (+in house mechanics to improve margins). Maintenance costs reduce with electric drive trains. Maintenance costs reduce with better initial manufacturing (to optimize overall car costs rather than optimizing for initial sale costs to sell to individuals).
Increased scale can mean reduced margins i.e. Amazon.
And this is all before the tech is democratized. Once there is competition, Uber’s 25% cut of current fairs (for software engineering and support) starts to drop too.
Remember that Uber doesn’t make money. And they pay their drivers less than the driver is losing to depreciation. Also, the robot isn’t free. Software isn’t free — it’s really expensive actually.
All of the cost savings that you describe also don’t require a robotaxi to realize. The cost per trip of my wife’s Nissan Leaf is about 60% of the SUV.
Even the durability can be addressed by buying a Toyota or Honda vs a Jeep or whatever.
What will be an issue for the Ubers of the world is accounting. Without some sucker wasting his car away, Uber needs to invest billions in assets and infrastructure. That capital structure is more like an airline than Google. Not something Wall St rewards.
> That capital structure is more like an airline than Google. Not something Wall St rewards.
This is the part we are disconnected on. It is the hardest part to guess about.
If the accounting works out like an airline, I agree with you that costs will remain high and will not change transportation significantly.
However, unlike an airline, the variable cost per ride is low. The way I see it, the economics will work out more like a data center (relative to an airline). Which is something Wall St does reward.
If you believe Elon Musk the Model 3 currently sold for $50-60k USD will be worth $100k USD as a robotaxi. For us in 2019 it really is hard to imagine the worth of a car that is used 99% of the time rather than parked 95% of the time.
When robotaxis have been real for a decade, car manufacturers will build and run robotaxi fleets.
Unlike today, vertical integration of manufacturing, maintenance, recycling and operating the fleet of cars creates a lot of consistent demand and can bring significant economic advantages even more than Musk’s current estimate.
Even the car manufacturers goals change. Rather than optimizing to sell cars (have them degrade and sell more), cars will be optimized for durability, maximum materials reuse, lowest variable cost per ride, ergonomic rides.
> Rather than optimizing to sell cars (have them degrade and sell more)
People often talk about cars being afflicted by this style of planned obsolescence, but the facts are that cars last far longer now than they did 50 years ago. What planned obsolescence does exist is in the form of trying to shame you for running an "old" car as opposed to knowingly making the manufacturing quality of cars utter shit.
I agree, as a non-professional driver the lifetime of the car is measured in years/aesthetics.
Meanwhile, a professional driver can put on 25k-50k miles per year[1]. Compared to 10k-15k miles per year on average[2]. Meaning professional drivers hit the car’s mileage limit, 200k-300k in 6-8 years. Already it would be better for them to have cars that are optimized for cleaning, maintainability, and longer lifespans. And this doesn’t even talk about lifespans of wheels or the expedited cost of maintenance.
Taking this math further: This is targeting 40 hour work weeks for professional drivers. If we targeted 75% (a lower bound) of the total hours in a week 168, we see robotaxis will drive 3-4x the miles of today’s Uber drivers. Setting lifespans of 2-4 years per taxi.
Large robotaxi fleet operators will likely become manufacturers but regardless they will change the mental model of how car manufacturing currently operates.
Robotaxis will not only absorb the profits of the taxi industry but also the profits from the car manufacturing industry, car maintenance industry, car rental industry, last-mile delivery (including food delivery) industry, rental housing industry, and more. The scale will eventually be unimaginable allowing the margins to be astonishingly low.
P.S. Fleet operators will also optimize the cars for most recycling ability.
Just look at the trend with a manufacturing company like Apple. Metal frames not only look good but also recycle better and are better for business as a whole.
Apple has an iPhone tradein program because recycling materials can be cost effective for them.
Apple has also added the subscription program where customers are always upgraded to the newest iPhones but somehow it’s better business for Apple than force them to use secondary markets to sell old phones and constantly buy new phones. It’s more cost effective for these type of customers and good business for Apple (in large part because of their effective recycling ability).
Not also to mention something often oversight. An autonomous car can park far away from it's user, meaning we could drastically reduce de number of space taken by parking in the city. First, giving back this spaces to the people as green parks and services places. Second, lower one of the biggest problem in our current city: urban heat island.
But then you’ll likely have a bunch of extra traffic created from the cars going to and from their owner to parking, rather than just to and from their destination. Or from the car just circling the block because the owner would rather not have to wait long for its return.
Right. You go to the opera, you order the car to drive around the block for two hours and then pick you up. Cost of gas is cheaper than parking and by definition, you're not affected by any traffic congestion caused as you're sitting watching your show. Sure, 1000 other people in the theater are also doing it, but that's not your problem.
30 minutes before the show is over, you order the car to wait in the "no stopping" zone in front of the theater for easy access. You exit the theater and find your car is tangled in a mess of traffic that takes 45 minutes to clear as most of the cars are double-parked and blocking traffic, waiting for their owners. For the duration of the show, no useful traffic has been able to move for a mile in any direction, as empty cars are just idling around and are content to wait, fully stopped.
There's a big limit on how bad it can be with Uber though because each Uber is currently driven by an actual person. That person costs money and places a natural limit on how many unutilized Ubers there will be.
With AVs, this limit no longer exists, and people will start using AVs for runs that currently are prohibitively expensive with care that require drivers.
> Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people.
This is overly complicated, hard to implement and to prevent abuse. There's a much simpler way already in place - tax on fuel. And it's much harder to circumvent or abuse. You can hope they won't catch you driving alone and paying as if you drove with 3 people in car. You can't hope to drive without fuel.
Increase the fuel prices 10 times and people will be much more efficient with their use of transportation. You use almost the same amount of fuel no matter if you move 4 people or 1. And public transport uses slightly more to move 20 or 50 people. With high enough fuel prices we can reduce traffic jams to 0.
The problem is - it will suck and people will complain. Ultimately people spend time in traffic jams because that's what their least sucky option is.
Another point on smaller cars. Robotaxis allow tuning the size of the car to the workload. Commuting? Two person car. Shopping with the family? Sedan. No need to make everyone pick a car that meets their general needs any longer.
It's also highly possible that robotaxi companies would incentivize efficient use of their vehicles in order to drive costs down (and increase profits).
They'll optimize profit by being able to respond instantly to hails, capturing as much market share as possible. So, the entire idle fleet will orbit downtown all the time.
Is that necessary? Couldn't such companies also have many cars parked around downtowns, ready to be activated for a ride at any time? Remember, without a driver, there's no need for someone to "orbit", looking for riders, rather the riders call the cars themselves.
demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation.
this is an important observation.
and the demand will only increase.
because as it is easier to get around we are more likely to meet people at further distances, leading to families that are connected across these distances and thus increasing the demand for travel even more.
Cars are a dead end. No matter who drives them. We need subways like Manhattan. Or at least like the DC metro. Eminent domain and political willpower is all it takes.
I imagine the bigger problem for road maintenance is the off rush hour trucks driving from 1am to 5am that are tearing up the road at 70mph. Not as much damage when they are stuck at 35mph. So different problems.
It has been obvious to me for a long time that AVs will not reduce traffic. Reducing the cost of driving will cause more driving to happen. While AVs will use the road slightly more efficiently, the increase in driving will more than make up for it.
AVs will make traffic a whole lot more tolerable, though. And they will dramatically reduce parking needs, freeing up space for other uses.
It's a complete nobrainer. Right now the bulk of the cars are single occupant. That's because it is the occupants going places, not the cars. As soon as self-driving cars are a reality it will be the cars going places that get added to all the other traffic already there.
Once AVs become commonplace it's entirely possible that the majority of the cars on the road will have zero occupants, either because they're running errands or doing the deadhead leg of an occupied trip.
It's absurd to think that transit buses containing dozens of riders are going to be held up behind zero-occupancy vehicles. The roads are going to get much much worse.
There are some rays of sunshine hidden in there though. Transit buses are awful and expensive because they must pack the maximum riders per driver to economical and politically viable. With zero-emission self driving vehicles they will be obsolete because you can redesign buses around passenger convenience and comfort, and you can make each journey much cheaper than the privately owned vehicles can manage. Think self-driving Uber Pool / Lyft Line, but the journey cost is 1/10th of the cost of driving your own vehicle. And you can give occupied vehicles priority over unoccupied ones in software.
> Transit buses are awful and expensive because they must pack the maximum riders per driver to economical and politically viable.
Source? Buses actually work very well in many places (and are much more economical and efficient than cars). The simplest way to make buses work well is to give them their own lanes; there's no reason a vehicle holding dozens of people should be held up behind single-occupancy vehicles.
Buses are the best blend of resource efficiency and cost efficiency in transportation, full stop. And that's today, no additional inventions necessary.
This is why I keep a keen eye on single occupancy vehicles. They will be the ultimate form of transportation and we haven't decided upon a good model design yet (think Renault twizy)
I own a couple 2 seaters, and even that amount of reduced functionality with similar emissions seems dumb. This would only work if you did not value proximity to your friends and family.
And you won’t need to park cars on valuable street area. Ideally they’d only stop to load/unload passengers, or to charge. That would free up many more lanes on city streets.
A lane, maybe, some of the time. And don't underestimate the impact of pick up/drop off. Uber was supposed to bring the same change, but not it just takes twice as long to get through Capitol Hill because it's crowded with ubers waiting on pickups.
Those 1000 people don't have to be served by 1000 privately owned single occupancy vehicles. When they are inputting their destination before departure, a robo taxi can deliver 6-8 people with similar destinations door-to-door for a fraction of the cost of a private vehicle, the same comfort level, but occupy hardly more road space then 70-80 seat transit buses.
- somehow find other people "with similar destinations"
- somehow synchronise the time they leave work
- figure out who calls and pays for the robo-taxi
How is that effecient?
And, once again, that's just one office on a street of a dozen or so office buildings. Across is a building that houses 10 or so different companies. So I guess those people should also somehow group themselves across companies?
I used chauffeured cars yesterday, I just shared them with other people. I went to the beach, and had no real plan, I thought I'll go here, clicked on my app and it told me where to go, usually walk a couple of hundred metres. I spent the day travelling and walking around cost about $20 and travelled a couple of hundred kilometres. I took my laptop and worked in between scenic spots.
I was thinking about this yesterday, I prefer catching trains and trams to buses - because trains don't throw you around when they turn corners, because the tracks can't have sharp corners. I was thinking if buses were made to be a little bit nicer - something like tour coaches then car usage would go down.
Self driving cars have a very real chance of becoming a nightmare scenario (and I used to think the future with them would be amazing), a world of roads everywhere always full of cars half of them empty going backwards and forwards all day every day.
Do other places have an app available like this - https://translink.com.au ?, there's a phone version to. If more people used public transport then it would become better. The system is also tied into a card which you can just tap on to travel, so if you change buses etc the final charge is just the number of "zones" you go through, there are 5 zones in the local couple of hundred kilometres.
One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams (and busways) have to include the cost of the rails. This distorts the relative costs and leads to suburbs created a long way from cities with ever increasing highways and highway costs.
> One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams have to include the cost of the rails.
Lots of costs aren't factored into cars.
Cars in the USA kill 40,000 people every year and seriously injure or disable over 4 million. No one really cares about the deaths, unless it happens to someone you know, and then they still keep driving. But that has a huge financial cost as well. Think of all the extra hospitals, equipment, staff, vehicles required to look after those people.
Then the pollution they cause is not costed, and that also kills people and makes them sicker.
Anyone is welcome to move to a low-pollution low-vehicle area and live a no-car life. There's a whole lotta such space in the US.
Yes, cars cause "unfactored costs". They also improve life, making the lives of hundreds of millions possible & prolonged. You can't complain about the costs without comparing the savings.
> Anyone is welcome to move to a low-pollution low-vehicle area and live a no-car life. There's a whole lotta such space in the US.
No there isn't. In fact, I can't think of a single one. Living in rural areas means being super dependent on cars. The center of major cities are less car dependent, but still there's plenty of cars around in every city in the US. There's nowhere in the US like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Tokyo.
> They also improve life, making the lives of hundreds of millions possible & prolonged.
Hardly anyone wants to get rid of cars entirely. But you can look at societies with substantially fewer cars and they have higher lifespans, and generally higher quality of life.
Almost like it's better to have options, rather than America's extreme car dominance.
>Living in rural areas means being super dependent on cars.
You say that because you're unwilling to give up the comforts that car use provides. Do you think that people elsewhere didn't have to give up anything when they decided against car use? You might think that it's fine to mandate bikes, buses and walking instead of cars, but pretty much everybody would rather have a car during a cold winter.
> You say that because you're unwilling to give up the comforts that car use provides.
Nope. I don't have a car. For a family of 3.
> You might think that it's fine to mandate bikes, buses and walking instead of cars, but pretty much everybody would rather have a car during a cold winter.
I'm not mandating anything; you are. I want options that make not-driving viable, while you're for the side that wants to force everyone to drive.
I don't even mind driving, I just hate being required to drive, which is the case in most US cities, because they were designed to make everything else worse.
Yes indeed, my days of carting kids around are behind me. Some thoughts on that -
Maybe introduce a group travel cost, some places do have family travel passes, so that would reduce costs.
Hauling junk (and dog) becomes difficult, asian and some European countries seem to do this, how do they do it?
There should be answers for this, like automate the cars maybe is a solution, but maybe its introducing new problems (it is). Has anyone done a cost benefit analysis? Automating cars is definitely cool, but is there a better way?
Cheaper and better public transport is definitely possible, and the cost maybe is a lot less than a world full of cars.
The arrival of the phone and apps for public transport is a game changer, in the past random travel wouldn't really be possible because you had to learn bus routes and carry timetables with you, not so any more.
If you think about it vehicles on asphalt/tyres (not buses as we know them) are superior to vehicles on tracks/steel wheels in every way (except rolling resistance). Vehicle to vehicle dista CE on the road can be as little as a few seconds, where on train tracks it is usually one to several minutes. Deadweight per passenger is in the range of 5-10x more for trainers vs buses. If a train breaks down, everything is blocked, on the road you just pull over and let others pass. I like to think that passenger rail is just an artifact of history/sunken cost phallacy, except maybe for underground high volume metro systems.
When looking over the vast 20 or so track wide rail intersection with multiple fly overs at Utrecht Central Station easily a minute can go by with not a single train passing, even in rush hour. And this is the busiest train station in the Netherlands. There is also a bus platform underneath which in a fraction of the space fits perhaps 20 (much smaller though) bus platforms.buses come and go continuously, largely over a single (two way) dedicated bus lane. This single road probably has a similar capacity as the twenty or so train tracks above, with extra long buses going by with minimal space between. If we were to pave the railway tracks we could have an incredibly safe and reliable transport system. Its actually quite a thing buses are already quite safe even though drivers make to long hours, share the road with many kinds of vehicles with mostly amateur (as in non professional) drivers, no central traffic control etc. Of course buses as we know it are not pleasant modes of transport, but that is probably only because they can also run on normal roads with sharp turns and traffic lights etc. I don't have the numbers to do a proper comparison but I think paving railroads could be quite an interesting business case
In my city, the subway trains can carry ~1400 people. During peak commuting times, a train comes every 5 minutes or so. Even our largest buses only carry ~100 people. You would need a bus to stop every ~21 seconds to match that capacity. That rate probably can be achieved. Stops would have to be designed to reduce the overhead of disembarking/boarding cycles, since there would be ~14x as many as with a train.
trains travel at a much higher speed than cars. and they carry many more people at that speed. what you say may make sense for street trains or trams that have to share traffic with cars, but the comfort of a fast train on a dedicated rail is no comparison to any bus alternative today.
Yes nice bus shelters too. I can't help but feel if a fraction of the energy currently devoted to cars was focused on public transport then all the problems from cars would go away.
> because trains don't throw you around when they turn corners
Trains are way bigger jerks than buses. They definitely throw you back when you they start after stopping at a station or stop sign. And, they definitely throw you back at turns. So, double whammy.
First, nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip? Making a new service free when the current service costs money is a poor way to assess how the novelty will change car use.
A better study design would have estimated the cost per mile of future AV use, then charged participants accordingly.
Second, no AV comes with a human who can run errands for you, like enter a grocery and push a cart around buying goods. At most, future AVs will only drive up and wait for a preordered purchase to be loaded aboard.
If the study's AVs included any service more than moving passengers around, it crossed well outside the foreseeable use for AVs, especially short term. It's at least as likely that companies like Amazon will offer the same delivery service much more efficiently at lower cost to the customer.
It sounds like the virtual AVs in this study delivered more than real AVs ever will.
> nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip?
What is the future of self-driving cars (SDCs)? Are they going to be deployed as a service, or are they going to be privately owned by individuals and sold as an option when you buy the car?
If SDCs are a service, then a study needs to charge a fee to match that.
If SDCs are individually owned, then the incremental cost of an extra trip is just fuel plus wear and tear. In this study, the chauffeurs used the study participants' own cars, so the participants presumably had to pay fuel costs and wear and tear. So this seems to match closely what they'd pay.
Another major issue, beyond the comment in the article about how people may have shifted around usage temporarily to take advantage of the service, is the all-you-can eat effect. Compare how much you eat and drink your first few days at an all-inclusive resort versus how much you'd consume each day after a couple weeks there. The novelty of gorging wears off, and if you were paying gas and maintenance per trip that would happen especially fast.
I'm certain lowering the cost (and opportunity cost) of driving will mean more driving, but the magnitude of the change can't be predicted from a short study.
Just a crazy aside, it seems like current policy as well as the potential ones in this thread seem to tax or affect poor more. For example: the way we tax road use is through gas - rich people in EVs don't pay this tax.
Some people in this thread are suggesting to just make cars with self driving capability prohibitedly expensive, forcing them to rent an Uber instead of owning. Sounds just like our current housing market. Some suggestions are to charge for the mile and time of day... Again restrictions against poor from driving when rich people want to do so.
Another suggestion is to have more private roads, presumably again owned by rich people, with little regard for the poor already paying rent on everything else.
Every time roads or cars got improved people used the extra time to live further from work. Its oddly similar to the way every time computers and networks got faster we used it to make development easier. Perhaps if we design a crappy car (like a phone is a crappy computer) we will see more efficient implementation. The sum of collective desires doesn't always make sense.
Pretty much ignores the fact that once society adapts to having driver less cars they will lapse back into their standard habits and pattern on use fairly quickly.
let alone ignore the fact that many services will pop up doing the driving for many different people across all hours of the day freeing many from own the vehicle in the first place. you might even have the modern day equivalent of time sharing where you pay to have priority access to a vehicle.
the test was so bad as to be laughable, seriously, drawing such conclusions from such a small control set is only useful for proving something a select group wants to believe.
Imagine a job where you work for 3h out of an autonomous office-furnished RV, have meetings and lunch for 2.5h and then work for 3h in the car again. You could live where land is really cheap! And you wouldn't need to sit in an open office.
That seems incredibly wasteful. You spend 6 hours in a car for 2.5 hours at the office. Just come to the office for a whole day once a week and stay home the other days,
This reminds me of how my own behavior changed when Amazon Locker arrived. I could order what I wanted, and have it delivered up the street without having it stolen off of my porch!
Now I'll order something off Amazon, then 30 minutes later think of something else I need, then 10 minutes after that get another item, and then I've got 3 separate shipments taking up 3 spaces in the lockers, because to me there's no cost to the lack of planning.
When Amazon tells me the lockers are full, I become furious.
Or the Lewis–Mogridge Position[0] which is that "traffic expands to meet the available road space", i.e. building more roads (thinking it will improve traffic congestion) usually ends up making the traffic congestion worse.
It seems flagrantly obvious that congestion pricing is necessary to allow us to have the benefits of self-driving cars without shooting ourselves in the foot traffic wise.
That being said, OF COURSE driving goes up when you tell someone: "here, have this luxury that you can't normally afford for free for JUST one week". The novelty factor alone will lead to unnecessary trips and over consumption. Not to mention the guilt factor of having a chauffeur sitting in your driveway doing nothing.
There's a solution to the congestion problem that works even without AVs: private ownership of roads and automated pricing.
Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road. If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route and time to drive, people can make better decisions.
And people living nearby should be able to collect nuisance fees from road operators by measuring traffic volume. The operators can build baffling to reduce the volume, or simply increase the cost of using that road to offset the fees paid. (And, of course, the operator has to pay to maintain the road, and it's a lot easier to sue a private entity if potholes damage your vehicle.)
And if data on the cost of commuting is readily available, employers can be required to pay for it as part of a standard labor contract, and they can offer employees incentives to move, adjust schedules to minimize costs, work remotely, etc.
Privatizing roads is absolutely not a solution. People do not choose to drive congested roads, they already have traffic information available to them in the form of google maps. All your solution would do is make it prohibitively infeasible foe many to drive, cutting them off from jobs. A few at the top would see less traffic, but roads only for the 1% aren't really something we should be aiming for.
Congestion pricing would work quite well (and is finally gaining traction in some city centers), private ownership not so much. Most roads are essentially a natural monopoly, plus there are holdout problems where one private operator charging too much for road traffic screws other road owners, not just users. There's no easy alternative to public ownership.
To be clear, the pricing and compensation models you describe here do not require private ownership. Government could (and should, IMO) be the operator of transit routes.
Switching to flat fees up front to substitute for 'pay-as-you-go' will encourage more driving, not less. Once you've got a multi-thousand investment per year in having a car you may as well drive it. Gas taxes are flawed but at least relate somewhat to use.
I bought the road in front of your office building and now I'm charging $10,000/trip for you to use it. Sorry. I'd be happy to buy the building from you, at a slight discount.
I would like to live in a world where people are good-faith coordinated enough to make this possible, but I think we don't live in anything like that world.
An interesting take on the problem, but a week isn't enough time to really know. If I had a chauffeur for a week I'd use the heck out of it, just out of principle.
We are going to give you this great, free, novel thing, You can use it as much as you want, but for just 1 week. It’s a surprise people actually took advantage of this limited time free opportunity and used it a lot? No kidding. It is a garbage study, of course that’s the outcome.
I think the conclusion is probably right, but the experiment seems problematic.
If I was told that a chauffeur was waiting for me to tell them where to take me, I might feel a little obligated to keep them busy rather than just waiting around for me. So I might take more rides than I would have otherwise, out of some sense of politeness.
A better experiment might be to give people an unlimited Lyft or Uber account for a week. It might also help to tell them that a randomly selected driver will be paid for any time they are not taking rides, so they don't feel like they will be helping someone out if they take more rides.
I think that there would still be an increase in rides, but maybe not quite as large an increase.
The study has a major flaw in that it ignores the grouping effect that makes self-driving cars & fleets completely different from chauffers. Shared usage will:
- most definitely happen in the case of "errand" like rides. The request to "pick up my shopping from Target" will be clubbed with 5-10 other similar requests and delivered at the same time.
- lead to single rides being a rarity, and at best a perk like "first / business class"
- bigger cars on the road with more seats, driving autonomously vs the nightmare equivalent of everyone having a chauffeur
A well reasoned rebuttal but it only works if people renting or timesharing vehicles for just single jobs. If things remain in their current ownership model (I buy a car and keep it in my driveway when not in use) their study holds merit.
The fleet prediction is indeed a game changer and should be prioritized over single ownership in order to curb VMT but it would be a large paradigm shift and those don't always go as planned.
that sounds like wishful thinking to me. coordinating with other people is hard. and if the ride is free, why bother. also people want to stay independent and not have to share.
the option to share an uber or equivalent for example is already there. every time i used it the trip took longer than had i not shared. missed a train because of it once too.
so i doubt that sharing will happen as much as you think
Only when you're driving around humans. When you're using automated cars to replace errands, it becomes a lot easier to coordinate a set of grocery pickups, laundry dropoffs, and so on.
With concepts like Amazon Lockers in apartment complexes, you can pick up their laundry from one locker, deliver cleaned goods to another, all while they're at work.
that may work with services that manage this, but not if i use the car to manage my own. those are two entirely different kind of uses of self driving cars.
> For example, the chauffeur could bring the kids to soccer practice and back or drive a friend home and then return to the house. They could even pick up groceries and make a Target run to simulate a driverless car future where items could get bought online and loaded into your AV by a store employee before returning home.
The survey measured the additional faux-SDC trips, but did it also measure the trips that did not need to happen as a result of this?
Would the friend have taken an Uber home? Would the study participant have just driven their own kids to soccer practice or driven themselves to Target? Some of these trips probably would not have happened, but surely at least some of them would have happened, just in a different car or with the car owner doing the driving.
They've already acknowledged the study is imperfect, but I think this is an important question to consider when interpreting the data.
Another issue is that this study simulates what happens when one person has access to a SDC but all their friends do not. If all my friends have SDCs too, they won't usually need to borrow mine. The friend is likely to take use their own SDC to get to my place and ride home in it, so that wouldn't count against my SDC's ride total.
The issue is that everyone is looking at the problems and no one is looking at the solutions.
Congestion charges, and utilization taxes are going to be in our future (and we should have them now). Sure I can send my car to the store and have someone tuck the gallon of milk I need in the trunk but does utilization make me decline that use right now? Can I tell my car to go pick up the milk at 5am so its waiting for me when I wake up to pour in my coffee or cereal and have those charges be drastically lower?
Do we deliver vehicles with "compartments" for commuting? Where I have my own, isolated, seat to take me to and from work with stops in between for other drop offs and pick ups? Is this a service people are willing to use (ridesharing to get in carpool lanes is already a thing in many metro areas).
What happens when amazon/usps/fedex can send a truck with "lockers" on it to my neighborhood and I can "summon it" (last mile) when I'm available? Sure I have to walk to the curb to pick up my stuff, but it going to be safer than leaving it on my porch all day. Lower loss rates. It came to my neighborhood in the dead of night, and is driving a minimal distance during peak hours.
Does an always connected world let us change the notion of "delivery". The idea that "3 people in your neighborhood are waiting on orders this evening, do you want us to bring your groceries then" is new. Now we are sharing the charges for congestion and use.
It isn't a question of will there be problems its a question of what new solutions do we put in place and do they make our lives better. I suspect that the answer is yes, there is a lot to be gained with the technology.
Rather than use an AV for the entire trip, might AVs solve the problem of getting to/from mass transit?
For example, your personal AV could get you from home to the station and return to your garage. After the train or bus ride, your employer's AV buses could pick up groups of employees and shuttle them to work. This might redefine what it means to be "close to mass transit" for both residents and employers.
> Knowing how much gridlock and traffic those rideshare cars have added to the city, imagine six and a half times as much car driving as that is almost impossible.
An 83% increase isn't 6.5x more than a 12% increase, it's 71% more = less than 2x
Still bad but '6x greater increase' is the wrong way to describe this. (Also there's a grammar mistake in the sentence).
These are some interesting results. That said, fully self-driving cars almost certainly won't exist any time in the next 100 years anyway, so I don't think this will be an issue. By the time, if it ever happens, that fully self-driving technology is created, society will likely be so different from what it is now that the issues this article raises will no longer be valid. Fully self-driving cars require artificial general intelligence, so to me a bigger issue if they ever exist would be whether it is ethical, given that most likely in principle no objective test for sentience is possible, to use more-or-less human-level intelligences as slaves.
This study (and the fact that you're reading it) tells you there is an underserved demand for studies that give rich people luxuries to normal people and then find negative effects. In the future people will be enormously wealthy, as we are enormously wealthy compared to our ancestors. Inequality will be massive because zero will remain zero while the ceiling gets ever higher. Find novel ways to complain about this and you will be treated to thunderous applause by those who don't want this future.
> During just the single week people had chauffeurs for his study, he saw people already getting comfortable with their AV future. When the study ended, people begged him to keep the chauffeur longer and wondered how they could possibly go back to running their own errands again.
This entitlement happened with flying. Try to suggest people fly less and they call it impossible.
As driving becomes easier we will drive more. Yes.
Yes. I see no reason why people won't spend 3 hours each way commuting and live in rural utopias. Like the suburbs but won't suck.
When everything which has to be delivered, which is everything, becomes cheaper perhaps we can spend that on traffic taxes. This is not an issue for now.
PHDs are now let's assume a lie and prove its not true?
Fix congestion by charging for use of the network. Automated cars make automated road use charges trivial.
All this ignores the largest issue with vehicles which is that humans are lousy drivers who kill many people. Even if the roads get clogged automated vehicles could save many lives.
The weakest part about the conclusions in this study is the assumption that regulation does not change. If the limitation of driving disappears and the roads become a tragedy of the commons, then regulation will have to step in to limit how much people drive. We already do this with tolls, car pool lanes, taxes, etc.
You can't take it as a given that our society will not seek to reorganize itself around the new paradigm. It's like someone in 1990 saying "once content is on the internet piracy will be out control and nobody will make money with content ever again, check out this experiment we did."
Current use is limited by cost and convenience.
Self-driving car is likely to fix both so it'll lead to more use of transportation.
This is a good thing. We're currently deprived and if things go well, we'll get more of what we want.
The congestion problem is mostly overblown.
First, maybe with rare exceptions like L.A., the traffic is only bad during rush hour, when people are going to work and getting back home. Other times there's plenty.
Second, the way we drive currently is very inefficient. Just last weak I was walking in San Diego along a street at ~5:30 PM i.e. rush hour.
I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person.
Not to mention that ~40% cars were gigantic, because it looks that if people can afford gigantic cars, they'll buy them. And in US they can afford it.
Robotaxis would fix those 2 issues.
The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol but a utility operated by an organization focused on practicality and cost, like buses and trains.
It's also very easy to use pricing to force people to use the available resources efficiently during congestion.
Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people.
If that pricing delta is not enough, increase the price of to $20 (vs $3) or to $50.
Or provide commuting passes tho employers (kind of like Google buses) where a company pays a $100 to robotaxi company per month and the employee gets to use it for free for commute, but only in shared mode.
The future with robotaxis is much brighter than those doomsday prediction of traffic.