Driverless cars aren't a fix for our transport woes
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
However if the real problem we want to look at is the overall stupidity of traffic congestion that is extremely a) energy inefficient, b) time consuming c) unenvironmental d) space intensive
the first real question to be asked really is, why does everyone need to commute to the same place in the same time? It seems that urban city planning has really gone horribly wrong with all the businesses and companies packing into the "business district". The direct consequences in terms of economy and environmental pollution not to mention direct impact on individual life (time wasted in a car...) are dire.
In order to really solve the problem of traffic congestion the ultimate solution is to disperse with this silly need. If people are really required at a place physically (i.e. cannot do their work remotely) urban cities should become decentralized with several business hubs closer to the suburbuan areas.
Failing that a secondary solution is to increase the efficiency of the transit. One derp sitting in his Ford Thunderfuck XL EarthDestroyer 5600 is incredibly stupid. Like the author of the commented a train is massively more efficient, has higher throughput and scales better. I know americans (and aussies) consider this to be an inferior mode of transport, they rather sit in their cars. But I personally don't really understand this. I'd never accept a commute that would take more than 15 minutes. My life and time is simply too precious for that.
> If people are really required at a place physically (i.e. cannot do their work remotely) urban cities should become decentralized with several business hubs closer to the suburbuan areas.
Yes, other business hubs are called "other cities" and "towns". There's a reason people pay a premium to pile into the same city, and you can't wish away the large benefits of density, both in terms of housing and in terms of businesses.
Driverless cars will be an enormous help in many ways, even to traffic congestion.
Having many small buses are a distinct possibility. They could be basically boxes filled with standing people with the motors and batteries underneath. They could be be much more granular and recharge on their own. They could even turn their wheels selectively to get around smaller spaces. Even a small one could hold 6-8 standing people.
You have to realize that there is a lot more to an advancement like this then just 'now you can take your hands off the wheel'
Don't forget carpooling. What if one car could take everyone home then return to it's owner?
Also how would public transportation lose its advantage? It could be cheap, more direct, and more granular.
Schools (K-12) are one of the biggest drivers of why at the same time. Schools start and end at specific times. This (usually) requires one adult to be around to drop them off and pick them up at school or the bus stop, especially K to at least early middle school. Because of this a lot of people in (sub)urban areas leave from home and from work around the same time. The difference in traffic congestion is drastic when you compare summer to the school year in larger cities with no meaningful mass transit.
Let's say employer can dictate when you arrive at work. Then your employer has to pay you salary for the time you spend commuting. The result should be either flexible hours or employers finding arrival times that don't overlap too much.
It's overly simplistic idea, but you get the point?
Company has to be within acceptable commute range for the employee. Lets say our company needs several employees. It is necessary to have critical mass of employable people living inside that range. The problem here is that 15min commute vs. 45min commute doesn't matter much to the employer.
So companies try to go near major traffic routes at the outskirts of big cities. There employable population and cheap property converges.
Yeah, schools are probably the culprit more than employers are. Many employers have flex schedules, but I've never seen a school that lets students learn starting at 11 a.m. Parents pick jobs that fit around their kids' school schedules; in that sense, schools have more power over when they commute than even their bosses do.
I also think you're too easy on employers. Many, many employers make decisions that affect commute length aside from when work hours take place. If McDonald's pays its employees minimum wage and then expects them to work in the expensive part of town, it has just mandated a longer commute since there is no way the employee could live in the neighborhood she works in. If that doubles the commute time of the employee, it doubles the stress on the transportation infrastructure.
I would argue that the current U.S. policy of giving employers zero responsibility when employees have hour-plus commute times gives them a huge pass on a negative externality, on both the community (transportation infrastructure) and on their employees (wasted hours on the train/highway, higher transportation costs). If it's not a good idea for the government to do something about this, we should at least apply social pressure to employers to be more responsible. It seems to be working a bit for improving carbon emissions and parental leave, and I think it could work for unreasonable commuting arrangements. Employers should brag about the low average commute times of their employees.
There was some article way back that stater short commute is one of the few things how you can spend money to be happier.
Yes! If employers had to pay more to compensate employees who insisted on living closer, this might start to solve the underlying problems. Here's some more food for thought:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
Get real. First off they cost so much more per mile they already bust the bank and then comes maintenance. Finally the end is they cannot respond to population movements.
Light rail is already a boondoggle of an expense in many cities trying to fit them in, with per passenger costs so many times that of alternate solutions only a politician could love it.
Trains are a romanticism that blinds people to their real cost. Heavy rail has many uses and sharing tracks can be a good solution. However when new heavy rail is proposed they don't want to take into account existing support infrastructure, they want to build all new end points; here is a hint start and end at an major airport where taxis and buses already provide service and parking is plenty
As for the safety canard, we don't have enough history on autonomous cars and buses with proper planning to make that call. If you want to even the playing field, instead of making a new train track you instead use that same space for dedicate autonomous vehicle travel. In this you can let cars and buses serve the same central points and at the end of the route there is no need to change vehicles. Bonus, no trains or tracks to maintain!
I'm honestly curious: what's the maintenance cost differential between train tracks and road? And between trains and other forms of public transport (buses, etc)?
Just for my city the estimated savings are in the amount of 19 million EUR for switching the main bus lines to light rail.
And it would improve quality.
Obviously, it depends on the actual situation.
Replacing routes where busses are running as rare as every 10 or 15 min, like suburban routes, makes no sense.
But downtown routes where articulated and bi-articulated busses are running every minute, and they still can’t cope with the demand? Well, that’s exactly what light rail was made for.
Second step, make controlled-access highways driverless-only. It's not necessary to upgrade /every/ vehicle to self-driving to start getting benefits, the change can happen one lane at a time.
That would decrease capacity for the rest of the road. Maybe you could allow single occupant self driven cars to also use the carpool lanes. But to move carpoolers out of the carpool lanes and make them exclusive for self driving cars will simply cause car poolers to stop pooling and will increase traffic.
Besides, the capacity increase from a pure self driving lane far outweighs the increase from a carpool lane. In fact, many argue that existing carpool lanes give less overall capacity.
With ownership of autonomous vehicles it will get even worse: http://www.humantransit.org/2015/11/self-driving-cars-a-comi...
What is the fix we're looking for? To alleviate traffic congestion? To spend less time on the road? Or maybe just to remove the necessity of having to focus all our attention on the act of driving itself?
I would say yes to at least these two; the only reason most people care about congestion is that it negatively impacts these two. Autonomous vehicles may not "fix" these issues, but they might be one step towards fixing the issues.
Strongly disagree with the professor here. I'm not saying they will fix all our problems, and wont bring some new ones in addition, but to insinuate that driverless cars will not have a disruptive impact on safety and time saving leads me to question the authors understanding of autonomous vehicles.
Actually there are several other "facts" that author states that I disagree with, or that are separate from autonomous vehicles.
I think this stuff is certainly important to evaluate and weigh the pros and cons, and I agree its not going to be a silver bullet for all our problems, but this reads like a wonk who doesn't believe the internet will ever go anywhere.
In addition, who knows what additional technological or social changes take place that would impact how, when and why we travel.
TL;DR: author's magic 8-ball needs another shake.
The issue is that everyone wants their own, big, car, and everyone wants to use them at the same time.
During the morning commute you have over a hundred times more cars on the road than in the late evening, at 10pm, for example.
The only solution that allows the streets not to be completely overwhelmed by cars is to put the cars underground, or on elevated roads, or use more efficient systems.
40 cars vs. one bus. Self-Driving cars don’t help in urban environments at all.
Many cities already suggest to just use P+R instead of using cars downtown.
I choose my mode of travel (including cars) as a function of the time it's going to take to get there, and how much stuff I'm lugging. If I am carrying a lot or travelling out of peak hour, I take a car. If I'm under time pressure, I'll probably take the metro.
In Paris we have Autolib, which is a wonderful car service where you can reserve a car at one station and drop it off at another. There are over a thousand if these stations in the city, so there's normally one near you and your destination. But the brilliance of this is that I can go to work using public transport (because peak hour), gi to the gym after work and then drive home. Or catch public transport to a restaurant in a Saturday evening, and drive home, or whatever. Self driving cars will make this type of system even better because I can use one without having a station near me, I just call a car.
At the moment city centres get clogged by cars because public transport in the suburbs is horrible. But if you can get a car to a transport hub and then commute into the centre, I think a lot of people would prefer that to being stuck in heavy traffic for hours. Maybe not you, but many people.
I’m trying to look at it from the american perspective, because I’ve long given up the hope that any non-american perspective is even considered relevant on here.
Actually, self-driving cars, while nice, won’t really improve your abilities inside the city – you’ll still use bus, metro, etc.
The "transport hub at edge of the city" is already a common concept over here, called "Park+Ride", with parking spots usually at places which have bus stations and train stations or metro stops.
That is actually the "first mile, last mile" concept the author of the article puts on the table as being an interesting problem to solve and considers autonomous cars to be, maybe, part of the solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_%28transportation%29
This is what happens in much of the US, it is utterly impractical to not have a car, so people make their choices in the context of having a car. Make the car less important and there is at least a chance they will make different decisions.
Well, you could perhaps do as the article does, and state what your arguments are, and put some facts and figures to them. In particular, if you're going to use scare quotes on a word like "facts", you really need to say why those "facts" are, in your opinion, false. So far, you've told us you disagree but not made any effort to say why.
Peter Newman's bio is here: https://theconversation.com/profiles/peter-newman-1858
I'm not trying to make an argument from authority, but that looks to me like someone who knows his subject and probably isn't in the habit of shaking a "magic 8-ball". You've just made a series of assertions with nothing to back them up.
Congestion is more a factor of tolerance than technology. As demand and tolerance for long commutes go up we might actually see less efficiency. [0]
It's still hard to match the human mind, especially without significant overhead. [1]
Cars are a compromise and aren't as efficient as pods or as fast as trains. [2]
Current electric vehicle technology can only drive you for about an hour at relativly slow train speed, at which point you'll have to charge for about as long. [3]
etc.
The car really is the weakest link in the "self-driving car". Which isn't unexpected because it's engineered around the driver.
[0] http://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/transport...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3ik5f3-2c
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit)
[3] http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/203/modelsrange...
I'm not an engineer but (having started as an optimist about autonomous vehicles) I detect the whiff of vapor-ware about them. It seems everyone's saying how amazing they are (which is true if they work) but nobody has yet made them work, at least as a consumer option.
Shame more people don't quote references as you have. Makes for a more interesting conversation and gives an opportunity to modify a viewpoint or two.
Self driving taxis could be used for the last mile in those cases where transit really is too far from home or work.
There are significant costs to public transport that the article hasn't addressed as well. The switching costs of using public transport, whether you stay with the same form of public transport or not, are significant. The time you spend waiting for connections; the time spent waiting for all the other people to board, and alight, at their connections; the bother of finding which platform your train is going to be on when under time pressures to make the connection; the incredible cost paid when a bus, or train, is overloaded or unavailable.
It's all very well to observe that a train can carry a particular number of passengers per mile per hour on a particular space of track, refer to the maximum theoretical capability of the system when trains are running within a certain safety distance. If you look at figures for energy costs, then public transport will similarly come out as the vastly superior option. But the cost of a form of transport is assessed in more than simply its use of space to move people through or its translation of energy into passenger miles.
Even when one is going to be stuck in traffic, it's often more reliable, faster, and certainly less bother, to drive to the destination. Especially since the bus is going to be sitting in traffic anyway, that's a tragedy of the commons problem going on there but it doesn't change the underlying trade-off. For some that trade-off is so great that when denied access to private transport they can't make the trips at all - I know people who don't own cars, who cannot work 10 miles away, because the buses don't run that early in the morning, or because there is one bus that runs that early in the morning and if it's unreliable they've taken on a financial liability in gaining the job that they'll be unable to effectively discharge because they'll lose their job.
None of which is to say that public transport is a bad idea. I love the idea of fast regular trains that are little bother to get on, despite the fact that most of the time I drive to work. But if one's in favour of it, perhaps it would be better to be in favour of it - in favour of improving it - rather than against something else.