Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

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I can see that during a relatively short transition period but hope it won't remain that way. Once all cars are autonomous we can do incredible things. For example traffic lights to regulate traffic between cars will be obsolete. Cars can just adjust their speed way before the intersection so that they just miss each other at the intersection. Likewise we can avoid congestion by cars registering for their route in advance. We could raise the speed limits on freeways and other roads that only have cars on them or even remove them entirely since the cars will know better what their limits are than some blanket regulation. It also will be much safer, since self driving cars are likely to quickly become safer drivers, but we will also remove erratic behavior that humans display. For example there won't be no more people who cannot zip properly (currently the majority of US Americans), no more cars not speeding up properly on the freeway on-ramp and then slowing everyone down on the freeway, no more weird stopping and slow driving by drivers who are lost. This will make the overall traffic situation much more predictable and safer.

Your description of how things would work with no traffic lights would scare me to death. One errant car (mechanical failure, software bug or hacked) could cause multiple fatalities. Systems need to be resistant to disaster from perturbations like these.

Not to mention the fact that non-autonomous cars will continue to exist en-masse. People value the experience of driving a car (especially sports cars or classic cars, but even just the every day sedan) and I don't think that the advent of autonomous cars will eliminate that for a very, very long time.

Unfortunately you are probably right with that, especially in the US where people value individual freedom over pretty much anything else. I expect Japan and China to be first with having meat driven cars and the US and Germany to ban them last. Not banning them will come with a tremendous economic cost.

"One errant car" already kills scores of people today. It really isn't that much different with autonomous vehicles. A stop light isn't going to prevent a distracted driver from entering an intersection. Mechanical or software problems already cause fatalities today.

That said I would still prefer to have a hands-on option with my car. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood looking for someplace to eat or maybe house hunting are examples of when you can't just pick a destination ahead of time. You want to drive slowly and decide where to go turn-by-turn.

Hands-on? You'll just tell your car, like a passenger would tell a hired driver.

Sometimes stop lights are there so that people can walk across the street.

That's why I said "traffic lights to regulate traffic between cars"

Sorry I'm being a bit glib. What I'm poking at here is what I feel to be undue optimism about self driving vehicles. It almost appears as if people are describing the Beetle from Fahrenheit 451, with no irony intended.

What I'm getting at is that there seems to be a lack of critical thinking about the potential negatives of self driving cars. We know for example that transit by car is extremely price elastic, and it is easy to infer that a self driving car imposes a very low cost on drivers, so we should expect trips by car to increase if cars are self driving. Is this good or bad? Its hard to say. But we do know that more car trips increase demand for roads. Is this good or bad? If all self driving cars are going to and from similar locations, eg exurbs to job centers, will congestion decrease? If one no longer suffers the penalty of having to drive in congestion, will more people voluntarily sit in traffic, thereby saturating infrastructure?

All was said is that traffic will be more predictable and safer, not that it won't have any possible negative effects.

I totally agree that those are all valid concerns.However, I am confident we will get those things figured out. Maybe the congestion won't be that bad because autonmous driving services might encourage ride sharing. I for one already sometimes use Lyft Ride for longer trips. Maybe we can increase incentives for that? Communities could create a fee for single passenger rides. In a way car pool lanes are similar to that and already might accomplish something like that. On the less punitive side I can see something like convoys decrease fuel consumption. My university in Paderborn, Germany was working on something like that for self driving trains over ten years ago. Of course it's much harder with cars, but we also have come a long way.

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