Three areas where self-driving cars will bring new opportunities

It's true that self-driving cars will/would change a huge amount. But the article seems to make a lot of assumptions that may or may not be warranted. Will this facilitate population spread or population density? I think there are a lot of paradoxical factors which may come up.

One change someone pointed out here a while back is self-driving-ability increases the willingness of people to idle their cars in traffic. It stands to reason that an owner would have little disincentive to send their car out to idle in traffic and pick them up a few hours later, if it was convenient. It seems the final result would be gridlock.

Roads today are a free or low priced good whose use is limited by the ability by each person's ability and willingness to drive. Driverless cars could consume this good with fewer limits creating a "tragedy of the commons" type situation.

So it seems like either you will have regulation or you will have an unregulated situation where traffic grinds to even more of a halt than it is at today in major metropolitan areas.

If you have regulation, you may find eventually everyone forced into an Uber/Lyfte situation (self-driving cars become smart-buses) since that would optimize the use of street space. This would facilitate density imo.

If you have no regulation, you might find some folks going further out despite the time and because of the not having to do their driving. But that seems hard to know.

And generally, the change would be big enough that indeed predicting all the results seems hard. What level of autonomy is achieved when is a big factor, etc.

Even then I have a major issue with the concept that people are going to be reading Ulysses, or watching a movie on the drive. Car sickness is a real thing and affects a sizeable enough portion of the population that it's not going to overhaul entertainment.

I think what it is going to do is make people who drive for a living obsolete and have better flexibility in transportation for the working class and poor, making it into a better version of the bus.

That being said, I just don't think they're as close as many think.

What is coming and will continue coming is assisted driving. These cars will be designed for human drivers but the car will just do more of the driving. This will have an incremental increase in safety. I imagine too that bugs will cause deaths and even though this will pale in comparison to the number of motor vehicle deaths we have now, alarmist concerns will stymy automation here.

The holy grail here however isn't assisted driving. It's self-driving and you shouldn't confuse the two. A self-driving car in my mind will not be designed to be driven by a human at all.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit for this but the low hanging fruit isn't that low and there is a long tail of situations a car will need to deal with. I actually wonder if we can design a self driving car without first creating what I can only describe as a "general AI". Anticipating what the other meat bags will do is a huge part of this.

Once this happens (and, again, I think we're talking a long time still) I don't see private ownership of vehicles going away. People like to own things. What you'll see is car ownership disappear in highly urbanized places helped I'm sure by punitive taxing of car ownership ("punitive" here means not subsidizing car ownership like we do now).

I suspect such cars will allow people to live even further from cities when you can work in your car. More people doing it still means a lot of cars on the road.

Self-driving cars just aren't the end of private car ownership. If anything they'll likely be a death blow to taxis. It might be a huge problem for mass transit too.

Consider how much of the speed, size and load constraints of a lorry are driven by the needs of the tiny human at the front. Self-driving trucks make possible a slow-moving vehicle trucking super-heavy stuff across the country at cheap rates because it only operates at the most-efficient speed its engine drives at. Or very-small trucks. Or cars that seat configurations and numbers of people that don't make sense given the constraints imposed by a human driver (who must be entertained or paid for their time).

That seems to be off by about a factor of 5 - or it is too late for me to do math. The article seems to be using 21 sqft per space. A typical space might be 8'x14' or 112 sqft each.

If we can eliminate some parking spots that will free up alot of space for something else.

I looked at some other places like St. Louis but the long term economic prospects werent encouraging.

"A decade hence, we might find ourselves even more beholden to automotive infrastructure, as city streets swell with the dread “zero-occupancy” vehicles—empty cars roaming about running errands for their affluent owners. And those left behind by the first car revolution—those whose paychecks are already consumed by automotive expenses or who rely on increasingly shaky public transit networks—will be even more hopelessly marooned in the mobility deserts that remain." [0]

I'm growing more concerned that self-driving cars will actually increase traffic. There is an equilibrium found based on a driver's willingness to drive. Once we eliminate that need for a driver, that equilibrium disappears.

For example, if I have a sudden urge for ice cream and I see that my freezer is empty, I have to make a decision whether it's worth driving all the way to the grocery store just to buy a single item. Suppose I decide, no.. it's not worth the hassle.

Now introduce an app that allows me to send an autonomous car to the store, have the employee fulfill my order, and the car brings back my ice cream. What you'll have is a horrible gridlock of people using these cars to buy single items at a time, out of impulse. Before, the hassle of me having to drive to the store stifled that impulse. Without having to drive to get the items I want, I no longer have stake in that matter. Who cares if traffic has gotten worse? I'm not in it.

[Edit - add another scenario:] Consider another scenario. My friend wants to borrow an item X from me. He doesn't need it immediately, so I may decide to drop it off at his house next week when I drive over to visit. Now with a self-driving car, heck... why not just send the item X over to him now? It's no hassle to me since I don't have to drive, and he gets it sooner. But now I've just placed more burden on our roads and our environment.

This also spells a bad scenario for climate change, if it increases the amount of vehicle-miles traveled and CO2 emissions.

While it's possible for autonomous vehicles to reduce sprawl by eliminating vast parking lots and road space, I think a more plausible scenario is that people use self-driving cars as their own personal butler, picking up items here and there from stores, increasing the strain on our roads. After all, if you had an app on your phone that allowed you to order a vehicle to pick up items from a store, all in the comfort of your own home, wouldn't you make a butler out of this car?

[Edit] Perhaps what self-driving cars will enable is a plethora of what amounts to useless and wasteful voyages.

[0] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/biggest-ch... (the section titled "Self-driving cars")

Oh, and they're hell on Earth for walking, cycling, motorcycling, or vibrant, human-scale neighborhoods.

Is there anyone left who hasn't heard this Silicon Valley cliche ?

Even outside the SF, most people own bicycle and cars to get around. I lived in Oakland for 5 years and rarely took Lyft (never used Uber for known reasons). I can count a lot of reasons to own a car, for example, you would never call Lyft to go to a waterfall or visiting Yosemite.

If the case is owning car only for navigating in the city, bicycle combined with good public transportation solves that problem already in a much better and healthier way.

It's vaporware. People are getting themselves tied up into knots over vaporware.

Who said people want such an disruption? They want electric cars. They want self-driving cars. They want to own OR lease OR rent cars. Have you missed the "own car" portion? I for one want to own my car, as I can do the math, it's cheaper and I can sleep in peace. This smearing campaigns to lobby for change society to take them away cars and promote "cars as a service" (aka rent) as only option is very disgusting. I know it's their wet dream - just go away.