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.
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.
And 83% was the first and only week. Maybe the number doesn't stay that high once indulging in the novelty wears off.
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.
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.
And, in the end, even a full car is still less dense than a bus or train.
Also normal cars spend most of their time parked. Driverless taxis wouldn't need to.
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?
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.
The cars will last much longer. 500k miles vs. 100k miles of a typical car for personal use. 500k is already a reality with Teslas (https://qz.com/1737145/the-economics-of-driving-seven-teslas...) and Tesla is working to make 1 million miles cars.
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.
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.
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.
So much computing is just to mitigate math education failures. More computing is solving the wrong problem.
Etc.
Thank goodness some people are willing to innovate.
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.
“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).
> This is a good thing.
Why? Wouldn't it be better if we could reduce our dependence on (mechanised) transportation overall?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is the answer. It just won't be a very popular one, because it will on the surface benefit wealthy people.
Use is always limited by cost. It’s not possible to separate demand from price, ie. demand only makes sense for a given price.
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.
How long, if ever, do you think it will be for that to happen?
If this is not the only problem, what is the problem...
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 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.
So, at 6pm a thousand people call up the efficient fast driverless cars to go home....
And that's just one office out of a dozen on that street.
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.
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.
And that is just the start.
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.
Doesn't work for a family of 4 with a busy schedule and volumes of stuff to haul around (dog included), sometimes on very short notice.
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.
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
They have busways in my local city (Brisbane, Australia) and special bus roads which remove the congestion problem https://translink.com.au/travel-with-us/bus-train-ferry-tram... and they are also built to be more comfortable to travel on. So yes Buses can be made better if they are designed to be. They're also introducing super buses https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/new-sup... maybe I live in a public transport hot spot - who knew.
This and if I didn’t have to stand outside in dangerous Florida thunderstorms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Better hope your mileage is good though.
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.
If your orders are really 30 and 10 minutes apart, Amazon will ship them together if it can.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_Positio...
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.
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.
Um, how do the roads get congested, then?
i'd love to have a full tank of gas but not be able to drive somewhere because my card's maxed out! fun end-of-month times
> Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road
[EDIT: removed - misunderstood the quote]
> If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route
how is that a good thing? it sounds like a black mirror episode.
How did they pick their sample?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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."
> The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83 percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior.
