Taxi medallions are licenses by the city for taxi companies, to prevent abuse. But if the software is certified, you don't really need the medallions. Drop $500,000 off the cost of a taxi.
You don't have to pay the 2 drivers that normally share a cab. Drop $80,000 a year off.
Assuming the cars no longer crash (version 2.0?), drop $10,000/year off for taxi insurance.
Combine that with Google-quality routing, and smart-phone taxi ordering, and you're looking at a major price drop for taxi service, assuming some sort of competition. I'm guesstimating a 50-75% drop.
Most people in cities will opt out of owning their own car, and use robo-taxis.
You are looking at an 80-85% drop in the required number of cars in cities (even accounting for current peak traffic volumes. see the KPMG report. I also came to the same number back-of-the-envelope).
Obviously, this will destroy GM and Toyota. Might be good for Tesla as they are still tiny, and I'm sure Elon and Larry have discussed this.
Some other interesting outcomes:
- should increase the total number of trips and miles driven, as lower prices lead to higher quantity demanded, so more wear and tear on cars, and more gas consumed (though less for idling).
- with many driverless cars, they can communicate with each other, driving faster and closer together, and co-ordinating intersection crossing. price of oil change is ambiguous.
- fewer deaths and injuries from accidents, or none at all. The organ transplant industry dies.
- more trees and less concrete lead to cooler cities?
- you can probably get away with more single-lane streets, with no parking, increasing usable land areas in cities by 25%, significantly dropping housing prices.
- in your driverless car, you can talk on your cell, use your laptop, read a book, not be stressed from driving. people may be willing to drive farther to work, increasing sprawl, and also dropping the quantity demanded for housing near the core, dropping prices.
- public transit disappears? though driverless buses would be cheaper too.
- more people bike to work, as it's much safer
- software requirement: interior management for driverless taxis. some video or image recognition for lost purses, people having heart attacks, people throwing up in the back seat.
"There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl."
Gotta love the NYTimes for the tendentious moralizing. People having more choice, and exercising it, is a risk! Attempts to have a backyard or extra bedrooms, or just pay less for real estate, are dangerous and wrong. Worse, if you can buy extra bedrooms you might be tempted to have kids and we wouldn't want any of those consuming the Earth's precious resources would we :P
(Not that there isn't anything to be said in support of that point. But it's tendentious and moralizing all the same.)
The problem is that the costs of sprawl aren't effectively conveyed to the commuter. The increased costs of infrastructure, road maintenance, etc aren't remotely made up for in vehicle, property or fuel taxes.
In which case, yes, it's a risk if it continues. Hell, it's a risk if it doesn't decline as the US approaches a GDP-growth situation not-unlike Japan's.
(Where per-capita GDP may continue growing, but net GDP barely moves due an aging populace and declining birth-rate.)
"People exercising their choice" sounds nice, but there will always be limits imposed by the society. You cannot "exercise your choice" to commute in a school bus today.
Zoning restrictions in the cities exist for the same reason: people just don't respect each other enough to trust them with their choices. Personally I cannot stand HOAs, yet another level of bureaucracy and taxation to deal with, but I will not argue with the fact that HOA buildings/neighborhoods are nicer than "free" ones.
Decentralization is horrible from environmental standpoint. It also makes cities much less pleasant, it hurts the ability to create useful schools, it horribly limits the pool in which those kids you mentioned can find friends. It makes it almost impossible to provide good public transportation (which is the sensible way to achieve things from this article, see my fav snark at electric cars as well: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=552497834771072&set=...). Backyards? We have parks! Bedrooms? Unless you're in Paris or a teenager stuck up on living in the Pijp, you will get bedrooms. Together with places to go out into, for example.
It would only increase choice for people who can afford a car, the cost of operating a car, and the extra travel time. For people who cannot, urban sprawl is a severe limit to their choice.
If you honestly think that urban sprawl is anything other than an inefficient allocation of fixed resources, you aren't looking at the big picture.
Having a backyard is not needed if you have lots and parks to play in and walk dogs; the American suburb idea of a little villa for each person is stupid and wasteful and wouldn't confer any advantages if you fixed the underlying insecurities people had about the hospitality of their own community.
If I could snooze in my driverless car overnight, I would ride instead of subjecting myself to the current flying experience for any such trip of 10 hours or less.
Lots of people jump to the notion that if driverless cars are available, we will go to a dominantly short-term-hire model of car ownership. By why?
Yes, taxis would be cheaper in a world of driverless cars. But they would still be dubiously clean (perhaps even dirtier without a human there to make the passengers clean up). You would still not be able to leave your crap in them. And they would still be only intermittently available at times of high demand (or else they'll be quite expensive).
In contrast, if you privately owned a car, it would have all its present advantages and also it would be usable even if you intended to get drunk; you could use the time that you were driving to read or use the computer or watch TV or whatever; you wouldn't need to circle around and try to park; you could still potentially utilize the car more than the present situation (for example: your car could drop the kids off at school while you get an hour of work in, and then come back and take you to the office), giving a cost savings.
By the way: does anyone who has kids young enough to require car-seats think that they could get away with a taxi-approach to cars, even if taxis were arbitrarily cheap? Don't underestimate the value of a personally owned car as a mobile receptacle of your stuff.
I don't know which of those models would be more dominant in a driverless car world. They both have advantages over the present state of the art. But I'm pretty sure that the people who jump immediately to believe that the taxi model would become massively dominant are basing this more on their wishes than the facts.
Self-driving cars can completely change our cities, here in America, because our cities are designed around cars. When I don't have to fight for a parking space, I don't need vast car parks around everything. When the cars drive as members of the same team instead of playing cutthroat, we don't need more lanes, more automotive bandwidth. We can remake our cities on our scale instead. Whether we will or not is the question.
How about "How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Car Ownership"?
Why bother owning a car at all? Couldn't I just subscribe to some service that will have a car drive to me when I need it? And when I need a two seater, or a five seater or a seven seater I just tell the smartphone app that? And when the car is dirty is just drives somewhere to be cleaned?
I make a fair number of "quick trips" that are within maybe 5 miles of my house.
Like most suburbs, we have no public transportation. It's not practical for me to bike to these destinations, due to either weather, or bulk/size of items being purchased.
I wouldn't want to have to wait around for as long as the total trip takes just for a car to arrive. I see no problem with owning private vehicles, it would be nice, at times, if my vehicles were more autonomous though.
This is already the case in urban environments. Many people do not own cars but just use taxis. I think there are even some subscription taxi services too.
As for why this will probably never take on in less urban environments:
- 5-10 minute wait times (people are inpatient)
- Can't leave belongings in car
- Keeping the car clean would add cost to the service
I dunno. In well developed cities people used bikes and public transport instead since decades now. Driverless cars sounds so silly, if I ever used a car, it wouldn't be in the city, be to go out somewhere outside the normal infrastructure.
I don't know why people are expecting this to happen so soon (if at all). Even if we have the technology for driverless cars sometime in the next few decades (QAed for all possible conditions and failures, of course), there will be no way that they'll be street legal without a (sober) driver at the wheel. We have fully automated TRAINS -- vehicles that only have to go back and forth along a single axis -- that still require conductors. Airlines, despite being 99% automatic, are very, very strict about pilot safety and training. How could you possibly expect something that's an order of magnitude more complicated to be any different? Top it off with some of the most advanced AI (yet to be) invented and you have a problem with a solution much farther into the future than one might think. Me, I'd rather stick with good old fashioned public transit.
> Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports.
What location is that? The magic one? Just "some" location that apparently will magically appear when the magic cars come.
Actually, your driverless car takes up the same room on the road or in the parking lot as everyone else's. YOU don't drive in loops, but your car still does.
Imagine a theatre at 10PM. The show is letting out. Traffic is snarled for five miles in all directions because a theatre's-worth of empty cars have been circling the block for an hour, making sure they are ready to pick up their ever-so-important passengers.
In effect, adding traffic to roads no longer imposes a personal cost on your time - it's only a financial cost on your bank account, which is highly affordable to some people. The same people who currently have 14 cars in the garage of their mansion can now take all 14 cars with them to the Hamptons for the weekend, in case they want to drive one. Just order them to circle the block near your beach house - well, not your block of course, the neighbors would complain, but someone else's block. Maybe the traffic on the Long Island Expressway is terrible, but your 14 empty cars don't care, they'll make it out to the beach house eventually.
Cost of housing getting you down? Just buy a van and a sleeping bag, and order it to drive around randomly all night and arrive at your work at 9AM. Now you've effectively perma-rented a 9'x14' spot on the nation's roads, without paying a cent.
The push for carpooling is a way to use our limited road space more efficiently, by increasing the number of persons per car up from the current average of 1.59. Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down.
Driverless cars are a net negative for the way the world is going, not a net positive.
I have to say, this is one of the most cynical and unimaginative posts I've ever read on HN. I think you should save it somewhere so you can laugh at yourself if someday driverless cars become prevalent.
The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate. You seem to falling into the trap of thinking that infrastructure will not be updated around the assumption that cars are autonomous, and clever people will not exploit this new reality in ways that benefit the world. To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by servicing other passengers or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Why do you assume people will own cars in general, when a service which provides on-demand autonomous transportation in clean, well-maintained, up-to-date vehicles will be more convenient, less work, safer, and will be cheaper? Why does the car that drops you off need to be the car that picks you up? Why do you think highways will not become wildly more efficient and safe even if the average passenger per car (one of several metrics of efficiency) goes up? Why do you think parking garages and cars themselves will not be able to be packed in more efficiently and quickly when they can autonomously coordinate their insertion and removal from a fixed area? Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible?
When the assumptions of society change in such a dramatic way (that a human must navigate a road-based vehicle manually) the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting, and more productive use of time and energy. When you're dealing with something as ingrained and as prevalent as the automobile, you're talking about a massive boost in these things across the entire world.
- Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars. If people share cars, we only need one car per five or ten people. NYC has only 13,000 taxis for eight million people.
- Having cars drive around in circles wastes lots of expensive gasoline, which someone has to pay for. If gas is $4/gal., the car gets 20 mpg and it drives at 60 mph, we're talking $12 per hour, or $150 to drive around all night.
- Right now, there is nothing illegal, or even difficult, about renting a van, driving out to the middle of nowhere and living in it. Almost no one does so, because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient. Where would you shower, cook, do laundry, etc.?
I think the assumption is that the cars won't literally circle the streets forever and that some parking will remain, just that it can be more efficiently allocated when the proximity from parking-space to destination isn't as-critical. [1]
Though, like you, I am highly skeptical about the curb-side-pickup fairy tale, due exactly the same sorts of situations you describe: concerts, theaters, last call -- even something as routine as picking the kiddies up from school.
People don't seem to realize that if automated cars delivered themselves to the curb at the end of a concert, a 200 space lot would more than wrap an entire city block. [2]
[1] Some breathless fantasists seem to think automated parking will somehow result in more-cars-per-structure, simply assuming valet stands translate into efficiency -- though almost certainly never having been a car porter or valet and knowing it's primarily just a convenience. You're just not going to see the 50-100% space-efficiency gains they seem to imagine.
[2] Assuming a city block of 1/8 of a mile and 20' per parallel space. That's 33ish spots per side of the block, not counting curb-cuts, hydrants, padding for intersections, etc. In reality, a 200 space lot would probably wrap a block twice or more.
1. What if self-driving cars ends the idea of car ownership as we know it. Self driving cars turn the concept of driving from one place to another, into getting from one place to another. You could book your commute to work the night before, and a self driving minibus will come and pick you, and 15 other people up.
2. With self driving cars, an existing car park could potentially fit way more cars; cars could just park themselves in super tight, because they don't need to worry about leaving space to give humans access to the cars.
So they wouldn't have to "circle around" while you're watching a movie.
Driverless cars allow for the ultimate carpool: Centralized car ownership. I pay a company a determined amount of money every month (say $50, because why the fuck not?), and I have access to a car. Think the best parts of City Car Share + cars that you don't need to somehow find your way to.
Car ownership itself, I can imagine would evolve based on this. Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.
The first users of driverless cars aren't going to be general public; it's going to be exactly what I'm talking about here, and that's going to set the tone of the whole driverless car conversation.
Some of the hype we're hearing about driverless cars reminds me of the hoopla surrounding the Segway. Other than niche cases, neither will have much impact in the next 20 years.
Why wouldn't there just be on-demand car rentals? Wanna go to the movie? Request a car 5 minutes in advance and the nearest ones with capacity for your passengers show up. Let the car go right after you get to the theater and make another rental call afterwards. Far fewer cars will be in much more use.
Sure there'll be some negative aspects to just renting on demand, but it'll probably be a lot less than the negative aspects of everyone owning a car.
The biggest net negative is the continual replacement of labor with capital, putting more power into the hands of a few.
I'd treat this criticism as a list of issues to resolve, rather than an argument for your conclusion.
One thing I'd be interested in hearing explored: if we manage to reach a critical mass of driverless cars, can we start orchestrating their timing and pathing so that traffic light usage can be minimized? Traffic is modeled as a flow, but AFAIK there isn't another flow out there where we actually have near-total control over the movement of individual particles.
You're correct that the article is a puff piece, twisting the notion that suddenly all streets are going to be parking free. Your vision of cars endlessly circling events and houses day and night is even more absurd and completely disregards the cost of petrol.
But, somehow you then end your argument with: "therefore driverless cars are bad". As if this stupid future envisioned by the article is now the only possible future for driverless cars.
Wouldn't that location be those distant lots that are always empty now? That real estate is mostly wasted today because nobody wants to walk 2-3 miles and transportation options are either slow, expensive, or unavailable. You call your car right when the show lets out (maybe you can even set an alarm 10 minutes before its over if you're a good planner) and it's there after a comparatively short wait. Even overly congested airports like JFK have abandoned lots within a 10 minute drive.
I also don't see the point about traffic jams. How would they be any worse than a parking garage hemorrhaging visitors at the end of every event like we have today? I can't see the situation being anything but improved by having the cars already out on the side of the main road ready to head in the right direction.
Human nature is such that carpooling does not work unless you make it 'very' financially attractive. We've had decades to figure out a way to make it work, and it hasn't happened, nor will it. The only workable schemes of carpooling i can think of involve driverless cars.
The average users per car matters less than the total usage per car. The bulk of the environmental cost of a car is production. A car once made must be used instead of parked. Dual-purpose vehicles that move people during the commute and goods outside of it will boost usage a great deal, cutting down on the number of vehicles needed.
Surely it will only be a minority that will actually own a personal car when a self-driving taxi will be cheap and without the hassle of insurance, servicing etc.
I envisage a variable pricing system where a journey booked earlier is cheaper as it can be fitted in more efficiently, and a significant discount for a vehicle shared with other passengers with similar journeys.
I don't see cars circling with no passengers, I see cars in constant use, only stationary to pick-up/drop-off or recharge. Way more efficient than what we have currently.
> Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down.
How so? Who's to say that the driverless car doesn't pick up another passenger once it drops you off at your destination? Who says consumers even have to be the ones who own the car? There could definitely be a taxi-based system put in place to keep cars efficiently moving people around.
I agree that all of this speculation is wild, but why add artificial constraints on a system that's still in an infancy stage?
Couldn't that "location" be a parking lot? The article did mention that some 25 - 30% of a city is devoted to the car today. Some of that is the street, street parking and parking lots. Why would the car circle instead of 1) returning home 2) performing a secondary function (delivery, driving another family member) or 3) parking?
Highways and empty parking spots will be used for driverless car parking during off-hours. When leaving a movie theatre, you will need to enter a digital queue.
"And the regulatory issues to be addressed before much of this could come true are, to put it mildly, forbidding."
Yeah, how about the massive laundry list of liability issues that come around without a human controlling the wheel? What happens if the car hits a biker? A pedestrian? Another car with a driver? Another driver-less car? The driver causes an accident and then blames it on the car (surely logs of some sort will prevent this, but this all has to be established). So. Many. Scenarios. And bloggers always seem to avoid this topic because no one wants to deal with all this necessary clout must be sorted out before these things ever become an actual thing. To me, they have a looonnnggg way to go before I feel comfortable behind a 2 ton moving death machine and have no control whatsoever.
This is not unrelated to last week's discussion "Why Green Architecture Hardy Ever Deserves the Name"[1]. The urban form that allows and requires the car is an obsolete artifact of the "oil interval" which is passing into history. In the future you will neither need nor want a car, driverless or otherwise.
I would like to add some more interesting changes that will happen with driverless car (sounds familiar..um horseless carriage?)
You don’t need drivers license, so no more DMV lines.
Fewer parking lots means more parks,house and office space for people.
No more DUI
Car theft will go significantly down because there is no one to drive and steal it.
Car will be smaller and lighter because it will not need drivers seat and steering wheel and other driver related gears. This change will make cars more fuel efficient.
Less Pollution
More comfortable rides. The car will know when to gracefully slow down and speed up because it knows the "shake map" of the entire city at a very minute details. For example, it can remember in what area it experiences bumps and can slow down in those areas.
No road rage. All cars will be driven by machines so no need to show aggression.
By my rough estimate, 180 billion hours of time americans spend driving their car every year. These hours will become free to do basically anything. Another wave of Cognitive Surplus!
In car entertainment will mature to the level of in-home entertainment industry, because of more room and free time in the car.
In car office model will pop up. Professionals that rely on heavy traveling will prefer their offices right in their car.
As others have mentioned the commercial possibilities of driverless taxis seem to be the biggest positive from this. The issues around the infrastructure to support driverless cars I think is a bit questionable. Eliminating traffic lights, self-aware parking spots etc sound a long way off, especially in poorer municipalities. I'm also really skeptical that the general public will adopt driverless cars the way they are expecting, I can definitely see the general populace rejecting them out of fear and frustration for a long time.
But in the case of taxis that are subject to city-wide mandates a bit of urban planning and infrastructure to facilitate an automated city-wide taxi network sounds like a realistic scenario and kind of exiting. And for other commercial applications as well, the efficiency advantages are obvious. Any business with a fleet of vehicles will suddenly get enormous cost savings in terms of fuel, salaries, and insurance premiums.
The biggest changes are that we will suddenly have a lot of old box trucks and taxis to deal with disposing of, and an entire workforce of drivers left unemployed.
parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.
Unintended consequences spew from: "then what?"
How much traffic (and energy waste) will come from parked cars deciding "I'm not supposed to be here any more, the 0.5 hour max parking time has expired, now I must leave and find another parking spot until Master summons me"? What "strange attractors" may arise from the chaos of dozens/hundreds/thousands of cars programmatically cycling thru "go park yourself" scenarios? Will parking spaces likewise be self-managing, negotiating with driverless cars over "first come first served" vs "reservations" vs "highest bidder" pricing & availability? How well will a self-parking car deal with grocery carts left in otherwise available spots? How will people game/abuse the system? People regularly leave cars illegally parked because they know the odds of being ticketed in the couple minutes overage costs less than completing what they're doing; how annoyed will you be when returning to your parked car, only to find it left 30 seconds ago to find another parking spot (location as yet unknown), and summoning it will require another 5-10 minutes for it to get back to you? What of "can't get there from here" scenarios: the car reserves a parking spot, and along the way gets trapped in a one-lane road behind a stopped (breakdown, double parked, unloading) vehicle...now what?
Sure, the problems will be solved. Getting to the point where they need solving will enjoy much schadenfreude, and solving them will be interesting - and profitable. Eventually it will all sort out, akin to us living today what Clifford Stoll decried as inane to expect from 1995. In the meantime, I'll be looking for a manual-transmission manual-drive Jeep to get around the strange attractors of flocks of low-IQ vehicles.
[ROM][LineSkipper v3.0.1][Now fixes crash bug when joining line behind Audi's]
Although perhaps ridiculous at face value, I wonder how automobile manufacturers and legislators will prevent modders from tweaking driving algorithms to win the prisoner's dilemma of traffic.
I'm just hoping I'll be able to drink in a driverless car before I can use electronics in an airplane. If the same safety-at-all-costs model applies to driving these cars, they won't be nearly as fun as we dream.
I can certainly see driverless cars leading to longer commutes all else being equal. If you can workout, read a book, work on your laptop, watch tv, etc. while your car drives you to work, you probably will care a bit less about the time involved. All else will not be equal however. Nothing in this scenario alleviates concerns relating to gas prices, which are likely to be the dominant consideration for most people. Your driverless car might be better at sipping gas than you, but not by much.
I don't understand why anyone thinks that driverless cars will reshape existing cities -- it seems to me much more likely that they'll just shape how cities are built in the future. (Judging by the way modern-day suburbs are built, I suspect that it won't be for the better -- at least, not at first.)
Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic.
I wonder how motorcycles would fare.
I'd hate to give mine up, unless driverless cars were faster and cheaper than motorcycles. Perhaps cheaper by means of a partial ownership model, a la netjets.
You'd move the signaling to the vehicle. I too own a motorcycle, and could see a day when the bike warns me at intersection approaches that I have to give way to an automated vehicle.
Driverless cars will increase miles driven, so let's hope they're efficient. Reduce the cost of something and people will use it more and find new uses of it -- and by far the largest cost of driving is the driver's attention.
[+] [-] elchief|12 years ago|reply
Taxi medallions are licenses by the city for taxi companies, to prevent abuse. But if the software is certified, you don't really need the medallions. Drop $500,000 off the cost of a taxi.
You don't have to pay the 2 drivers that normally share a cab. Drop $80,000 a year off.
Assuming the cars no longer crash (version 2.0?), drop $10,000/year off for taxi insurance.
Combine that with Google-quality routing, and smart-phone taxi ordering, and you're looking at a major price drop for taxi service, assuming some sort of competition. I'm guesstimating a 50-75% drop.
Most people in cities will opt out of owning their own car, and use robo-taxis.
You are looking at an 80-85% drop in the required number of cars in cities (even accounting for current peak traffic volumes. see the KPMG report. I also came to the same number back-of-the-envelope).
Obviously, this will destroy GM and Toyota. Might be good for Tesla as they are still tiny, and I'm sure Elon and Larry have discussed this.
Some other interesting outcomes:
- should increase the total number of trips and miles driven, as lower prices lead to higher quantity demanded, so more wear and tear on cars, and more gas consumed (though less for idling).
- with many driverless cars, they can communicate with each other, driving faster and closer together, and co-ordinating intersection crossing. price of oil change is ambiguous.
- fewer deaths and injuries from accidents, or none at all. The organ transplant industry dies.
- more trees and less concrete lead to cooler cities?
- you can probably get away with more single-lane streets, with no parking, increasing usable land areas in cities by 25%, significantly dropping housing prices.
- in your driverless car, you can talk on your cell, use your laptop, read a book, not be stressed from driving. people may be willing to drive farther to work, increasing sprawl, and also dropping the quantity demanded for housing near the core, dropping prices.
- public transit disappears? though driverless buses would be cheaper too.
- more people bike to work, as it's much safer
- software requirement: interior management for driverless taxis. some video or image recognition for lost purses, people having heart attacks, people throwing up in the back seat.
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|12 years ago|reply
Gotta love the NYTimes for the tendentious moralizing. People having more choice, and exercising it, is a risk! Attempts to have a backyard or extra bedrooms, or just pay less for real estate, are dangerous and wrong. Worse, if you can buy extra bedrooms you might be tempted to have kids and we wouldn't want any of those consuming the Earth's precious resources would we :P
(Not that there isn't anything to be said in support of that point. But it's tendentious and moralizing all the same.)
[+] [-] roc|12 years ago|reply
In which case, yes, it's a risk if it continues. Hell, it's a risk if it doesn't decline as the US approaches a GDP-growth situation not-unlike Japan's.
(Where per-capita GDP may continue growing, but net GDP barely moves due an aging populace and declining birth-rate.)
[+] [-] old-gregg|12 years ago|reply
Zoning restrictions in the cities exist for the same reason: people just don't respect each other enough to trust them with their choices. Personally I cannot stand HOAs, yet another level of bureaucracy and taxation to deal with, but I will not argue with the fact that HOA buildings/neighborhoods are nicer than "free" ones.
[+] [-] johnrob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlwarren|12 years ago|reply
I think what they're getting at is the environmental risks and not implying that the benefits you described are anything bad.
[+] [-] LaGrange|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oftenwrong|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
Having a backyard is not needed if you have lots and parks to play in and walk dogs; the American suburb idea of a little villa for each person is stupid and wasteful and wouldn't confer any advantages if you fixed the underlying insecurities people had about the hospitality of their own community.
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aetherson|12 years ago|reply
Yes, taxis would be cheaper in a world of driverless cars. But they would still be dubiously clean (perhaps even dirtier without a human there to make the passengers clean up). You would still not be able to leave your crap in them. And they would still be only intermittently available at times of high demand (or else they'll be quite expensive).
In contrast, if you privately owned a car, it would have all its present advantages and also it would be usable even if you intended to get drunk; you could use the time that you were driving to read or use the computer or watch TV or whatever; you wouldn't need to circle around and try to park; you could still potentially utilize the car more than the present situation (for example: your car could drop the kids off at school while you get an hour of work in, and then come back and take you to the office), giving a cost savings.
By the way: does anyone who has kids young enough to require car-seats think that they could get away with a taxi-approach to cars, even if taxis were arbitrarily cheap? Don't underestimate the value of a personally owned car as a mobile receptacle of your stuff.
I don't know which of those models would be more dominant in a driverless car world. They both have advantages over the present state of the art. But I'm pretty sure that the people who jump immediately to believe that the taxi model would become massively dominant are basing this more on their wishes than the facts.
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgrahamc|12 years ago|reply
Why bother owning a car at all? Couldn't I just subscribe to some service that will have a car drive to me when I need it? And when I need a two seater, or a five seater or a seven seater I just tell the smartphone app that? And when the car is dirty is just drives somewhere to be cleaned?
[+] [-] brk|12 years ago|reply
Like most suburbs, we have no public transportation. It's not practical for me to bike to these destinations, due to either weather, or bulk/size of items being purchased.
I wouldn't want to have to wait around for as long as the total trip takes just for a car to arrive. I see no problem with owning private vehicles, it would be nice, at times, if my vehicles were more autonomous though.
[+] [-] vecinu|12 years ago|reply
Owning a car is completely different from renting one temporarily.
[+] [-] randyrand|12 years ago|reply
As for why this will probably never take on in less urban environments:
- 5-10 minute wait times (people are inpatient)
- Can't leave belongings in car
- Keeping the car clean would add cost to the service
[+] [-] LaGrange|12 years ago|reply
I dunno. In well developed cities people used bikes and public transport instead since decades now. Driverless cars sounds so silly, if I ever used a car, it wouldn't be in the city, be to go out somewhere outside the normal infrastructure.
[+] [-] archagon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jellicle|12 years ago|reply
> Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports.
What location is that? The magic one? Just "some" location that apparently will magically appear when the magic cars come.
Actually, your driverless car takes up the same room on the road or in the parking lot as everyone else's. YOU don't drive in loops, but your car still does.
Imagine a theatre at 10PM. The show is letting out. Traffic is snarled for five miles in all directions because a theatre's-worth of empty cars have been circling the block for an hour, making sure they are ready to pick up their ever-so-important passengers.
In effect, adding traffic to roads no longer imposes a personal cost on your time - it's only a financial cost on your bank account, which is highly affordable to some people. The same people who currently have 14 cars in the garage of their mansion can now take all 14 cars with them to the Hamptons for the weekend, in case they want to drive one. Just order them to circle the block near your beach house - well, not your block of course, the neighbors would complain, but someone else's block. Maybe the traffic on the Long Island Expressway is terrible, but your 14 empty cars don't care, they'll make it out to the beach house eventually.
Cost of housing getting you down? Just buy a van and a sleeping bag, and order it to drive around randomly all night and arrive at your work at 9AM. Now you've effectively perma-rented a 9'x14' spot on the nation's roads, without paying a cent.
The push for carpooling is a way to use our limited road space more efficiently, by increasing the number of persons per car up from the current average of 1.59. Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down.
Driverless cars are a net negative for the way the world is going, not a net positive.
[+] [-] gfodor|12 years ago|reply
The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate. You seem to falling into the trap of thinking that infrastructure will not be updated around the assumption that cars are autonomous, and clever people will not exploit this new reality in ways that benefit the world. To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by servicing other passengers or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Why do you assume people will own cars in general, when a service which provides on-demand autonomous transportation in clean, well-maintained, up-to-date vehicles will be more convenient, less work, safer, and will be cheaper? Why does the car that drops you off need to be the car that picks you up? Why do you think highways will not become wildly more efficient and safe even if the average passenger per car (one of several metrics of efficiency) goes up? Why do you think parking garages and cars themselves will not be able to be packed in more efficiently and quickly when they can autonomously coordinate their insertion and removal from a fixed area? Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible?
When the assumptions of society change in such a dramatic way (that a human must navigate a road-based vehicle manually) the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting, and more productive use of time and energy. When you're dealing with something as ingrained and as prevalent as the automobile, you're talking about a massive boost in these things across the entire world.
[+] [-] apsec112|12 years ago|reply
- Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars. If people share cars, we only need one car per five or ten people. NYC has only 13,000 taxis for eight million people.
- Having cars drive around in circles wastes lots of expensive gasoline, which someone has to pay for. If gas is $4/gal., the car gets 20 mpg and it drives at 60 mph, we're talking $12 per hour, or $150 to drive around all night.
- Right now, there is nothing illegal, or even difficult, about renting a van, driving out to the middle of nowhere and living in it. Almost no one does so, because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient. Where would you shower, cook, do laundry, etc.?
[+] [-] roc|12 years ago|reply
Though, like you, I am highly skeptical about the curb-side-pickup fairy tale, due exactly the same sorts of situations you describe: concerts, theaters, last call -- even something as routine as picking the kiddies up from school.
People don't seem to realize that if automated cars delivered themselves to the curb at the end of a concert, a 200 space lot would more than wrap an entire city block. [2]
[1] Some breathless fantasists seem to think automated parking will somehow result in more-cars-per-structure, simply assuming valet stands translate into efficiency -- though almost certainly never having been a car porter or valet and knowing it's primarily just a convenience. You're just not going to see the 50-100% space-efficiency gains they seem to imagine.
[2] Assuming a city block of 1/8 of a mile and 20' per parallel space. That's 33ish spots per side of the block, not counting curb-cuts, hydrants, padding for intersections, etc. In reality, a 200 space lot would probably wrap a block twice or more.
[+] [-] sksksk|12 years ago|reply
1. What if self-driving cars ends the idea of car ownership as we know it. Self driving cars turn the concept of driving from one place to another, into getting from one place to another. You could book your commute to work the night before, and a self driving minibus will come and pick you, and 15 other people up.
2. With self driving cars, an existing car park could potentially fit way more cars; cars could just park themselves in super tight, because they don't need to worry about leaving space to give humans access to the cars.
So they wouldn't have to "circle around" while you're watching a movie.
[+] [-] dclowd9901|12 years ago|reply
Driverless cars allow for the ultimate carpool: Centralized car ownership. I pay a company a determined amount of money every month (say $50, because why the fuck not?), and I have access to a car. Think the best parts of City Car Share + cars that you don't need to somehow find your way to.
Car ownership itself, I can imagine would evolve based on this. Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.
The first users of driverless cars aren't going to be general public; it's going to be exactly what I'm talking about here, and that's going to set the tone of the whole driverless car conversation.
[+] [-] greedo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannoHung|12 years ago|reply
Sure there'll be some negative aspects to just renting on demand, but it'll probably be a lot less than the negative aspects of everyone owning a car.
The biggest net negative is the continual replacement of labor with capital, putting more power into the hands of a few.
[+] [-] saraid216|12 years ago|reply
One thing I'd be interested in hearing explored: if we manage to reach a critical mass of driverless cars, can we start orchestrating their timing and pathing so that traffic light usage can be minimized? Traffic is modeled as a flow, but AFAIK there isn't another flow out there where we actually have near-total control over the movement of individual particles.
[+] [-] ramblerman|12 years ago|reply
But, somehow you then end your argument with: "therefore driverless cars are bad". As if this stupid future envisioned by the article is now the only possible future for driverless cars.
[+] [-] CBC440|12 years ago|reply
I also don't see the point about traffic jams. How would they be any worse than a parking garage hemorrhaging visitors at the end of every event like we have today? I can't see the situation being anything but improved by having the cars already out on the side of the main road ready to head in the right direction.
[+] [-] Joeri|12 years ago|reply
The average users per car matters less than the total usage per car. The bulk of the environmental cost of a car is production. A car once made must be used instead of parked. Dual-purpose vehicles that move people during the commute and goods outside of it will boost usage a great deal, cutting down on the number of vehicles needed.
[+] [-] will_asouka|12 years ago|reply
I envisage a variable pricing system where a journey booked earlier is cheaper as it can be fitted in more efficiently, and a significant discount for a vehicle shared with other passengers with similar journeys.
I don't see cars circling with no passengers, I see cars in constant use, only stationary to pick-up/drop-off or recharge. Way more efficient than what we have currently.
[+] [-] atburrow|12 years ago|reply
How so? Who's to say that the driverless car doesn't pick up another passenger once it drops you off at your destination? Who says consumers even have to be the ones who own the car? There could definitely be a taxi-based system put in place to keep cars efficiently moving people around.
I agree that all of this speculation is wild, but why add artificial constraints on a system that's still in an infancy stage?
[+] [-] larubbio|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fudged71|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|12 years ago|reply
Yeah, how about the massive laundry list of liability issues that come around without a human controlling the wheel? What happens if the car hits a biker? A pedestrian? Another car with a driver? Another driver-less car? The driver causes an accident and then blames it on the car (surely logs of some sort will prevent this, but this all has to be established). So. Many. Scenarios. And bloggers always seem to avoid this topic because no one wants to deal with all this necessary clout must be sorted out before these things ever become an actual thing. To me, they have a looonnnggg way to go before I feel comfortable behind a 2 ton moving death machine and have no control whatsoever.
[+] [-] Techpope|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|12 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995141
[+] [-] 31reasons|12 years ago|reply
You don’t need drivers license, so no more DMV lines.
Fewer parking lots means more parks,house and office space for people.
No more DUI
Car theft will go significantly down because there is no one to drive and steal it.
Car will be smaller and lighter because it will not need drivers seat and steering wheel and other driver related gears. This change will make cars more fuel efficient.
Less Pollution
More comfortable rides. The car will know when to gracefully slow down and speed up because it knows the "shake map" of the entire city at a very minute details. For example, it can remember in what area it experiences bumps and can slow down in those areas.
No road rage. All cars will be driven by machines so no need to show aggression.
By my rough estimate, 180 billion hours of time americans spend driving their car every year. These hours will become free to do basically anything. Another wave of Cognitive Surplus!
In car entertainment will mature to the level of in-home entertainment industry, because of more room and free time in the car.
In car office model will pop up. Professionals that rely on heavy traveling will prefer their offices right in their car.
[+] [-] rwhitman|12 years ago|reply
But in the case of taxis that are subject to city-wide mandates a bit of urban planning and infrastructure to facilitate an automated city-wide taxi network sounds like a realistic scenario and kind of exiting. And for other commercial applications as well, the efficiency advantages are obvious. Any business with a fleet of vehicles will suddenly get enormous cost savings in terms of fuel, salaries, and insurance premiums.
The biggest changes are that we will suddenly have a lot of old box trucks and taxis to deal with disposing of, and an entire workforce of drivers left unemployed.
[+] [-] ctdonath|12 years ago|reply
Unintended consequences spew from: "then what?"
How much traffic (and energy waste) will come from parked cars deciding "I'm not supposed to be here any more, the 0.5 hour max parking time has expired, now I must leave and find another parking spot until Master summons me"? What "strange attractors" may arise from the chaos of dozens/hundreds/thousands of cars programmatically cycling thru "go park yourself" scenarios? Will parking spaces likewise be self-managing, negotiating with driverless cars over "first come first served" vs "reservations" vs "highest bidder" pricing & availability? How well will a self-parking car deal with grocery carts left in otherwise available spots? How will people game/abuse the system? People regularly leave cars illegally parked because they know the odds of being ticketed in the couple minutes overage costs less than completing what they're doing; how annoyed will you be when returning to your parked car, only to find it left 30 seconds ago to find another parking spot (location as yet unknown), and summoning it will require another 5-10 minutes for it to get back to you? What of "can't get there from here" scenarios: the car reserves a parking spot, and along the way gets trapped in a one-lane road behind a stopped (breakdown, double parked, unloading) vehicle...now what?
Sure, the problems will be solved. Getting to the point where they need solving will enjoy much schadenfreude, and solving them will be interesting - and profitable. Eventually it will all sort out, akin to us living today what Clifford Stoll decried as inane to expect from 1995. In the meantime, I'll be looking for a manual-transmission manual-drive Jeep to get around the strange attractors of flocks of low-IQ vehicles.
[+] [-] gbadman|12 years ago|reply
Although perhaps ridiculous at face value, I wonder how automobile manufacturers and legislators will prevent modders from tweaking driving algorithms to win the prisoner's dilemma of traffic.
Food for thought!
[+] [-] trout|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arbuge|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbhl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cj|12 years ago|reply
I wonder how motorcycles would fare.
I'd hate to give mine up, unless driverless cars were faster and cheaper than motorcycles. Perhaps cheaper by means of a partial ownership model, a la netjets.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Flenser|12 years ago|reply
"Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."