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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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
> 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).
[+] [-] kjksf|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amarshall|6 years ago|reply
And, in the end, even a full car is still less dense than a bus or train.
[+] [-] Someone|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] cookie_monsta|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] viburnum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfk13|6 years ago|reply
> This is a good thing.
Why? Wouldn't it be better if we could reduce our dependence on (mechanised) transportation overall?
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] l3robot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajuc|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bbatha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
I think this is the answer. It just won't be a very popular one, because it will on the surface benefit wealthy people.
[+] [-] whoisthemachine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runeks|6 years ago|reply
Use is always limited by cost. It’s not possible to separate demand from price, ie. demand only makes sense for a given price.
[+] [-] em-bee|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kps|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beamatronic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justicezyx|6 years ago|reply
If this is not the only problem, what is the problem...
[+] [-] modeless|6 years ago|reply
AVs will make traffic a whole lot more tolerable, though. And they will dramatically reduce parking needs, freeing up space for other uses.
[+] [-] chadcmulligan|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] randcraw|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coding123|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kingludite|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] im3w1l|6 years ago|reply
Better hope your mileage is good though.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abyssin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlthoughts2018|6 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
[+] [-] shkkmo|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ben509|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mmanfrin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unethical_ban|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neaanopri|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uryga|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jellicle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balt_s|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
How did they pick their sample?
[+] [-] idoh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rladd|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kamakazizuru|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zenbit_UX|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] em-bee|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] adrianmonk|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zer00eyz|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Merrill|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] awinter-py|6 years ago|reply
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).