Is your city getting ready for autonomous vehicles?
avsincities.bloomberg.org
avsincities.bloomberg.org
I think you're generally right though. I know if I had a self driving car, I'd move further out of the city. If it adds to my commute time, I won't care if I can do other things while I commute (work, read, write, sleep, etc...).
That last step is quite a doozy though.
When I worked for an Arab Company in London one of the messenger "boys" jobs was to when a traffic warden was spotted to drive the senior directors cars (seriously stepped on mercs and bmw's with the after market armour packages ) around the block few times and park it back outside the office :-)
I do question the idea of trying to use autonomous cars in cities first when limited access roads are a far better choice for early uses of the technology. Giving new purpose to HOV and Express lanes would be far simpler to develop for and easier for governments to accommodate. The idea of entering an limited access road or any road with a protected lane and being able to let the car do the driving has many advantages to both road use and over all trip times plus the previously mentioned ease of implementation
At least in Europe, public transportation is usually pretty good already and there is a lot of capacity left unused because while trains are going relatively deep into the suburbs and countryside, they only serve those living next to it. Self-driving cars could unlock this potential.
Edit: If you look at for example Munich, I don't think self-driving cars will be a challenge to the public transportation inside the city. But they can help getting completely rid of your own car (or alleviate the desire to buy one).
The trick is to cover every case but nudge people to take the less demanding option if they can. Easier said than done, though.
Some people will claim that the fact that autonomous vehicles can drive closely to one another will reduce congestion. Yeah, if they are the only cars on the road. I don’t see a future anytime soon in which 100% of our population (or even 80%) will be so enamored with autonomous vehicles that they’ll be wanting or willing to give up driving and car ownership.
>"...I agree that there are benefits for the last mile of the >suburbs and countryside, ..."
:)
A good solution would be great public transportation and ride sharing working together. It doesn't have to be black or white.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/driverless-car-test-ott...
Self driving cars, owned by faceless organizations can be silently converted after the fact, effectively subverting the psychological ploy of keeping-up-with-the-joneses style peer pressure, which has held a death grip on the lifestyles of puny materialistic mortals for decades now, as demonstrated by beer advertising, cigarette advertising, vacuous fashion trends and so on. In fact, apply this principle to pretty much every bad habit you can imagine.
I think most of us can't afford to take out $10,000-$250,000 loans to replace working assets we already own that have 5-10 good years left on them.
You could own shares in such a company, purchase a subscription to summon vehicles at a rate, or buy a vehicle and resell its autonomy, offsetting the expense. One might view some of these options as a form of collective ownership, and so it might not just be you owning one on your own, but maybe contributing to the partial ownership of one or more vehicles.
https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
You can argue that you want that rate of improvement increased, but progress is being made.
Autonomous vehicles can bring about a lot of good. They can also bring about massive consolidation of work and wealth in the hands of the few fleet owners that will inevitably emerge.
A society in which driving, one of the principal means of employment, no longer exists, is going to suffer a long list of negative externalities that the proponents never take into account.
A better solution would be to encourage the growth of autonomous vehicles but create an environment in which the ownership of said vehicles is largely distributed.
Also, cities (mostly) shouldn’t have to “get ready” for self-driving cars; self-driving cars should start self-driving in current cities.
People currently are willing to spend quite a bit more than necessary to own an extension of their home (and, in some cases, their ego) that brings them to work.
If self-driving cars become affordable, I am not sure that will change. For example, people who can afford to will still want to store stuff (sports equipment, spare sets of clothing, and baby seats) in their cars, just as they do now, so that they have to move it less often.
Also, for driving to work, I don’t see self-driving cars make more than one trip a day, and cities would likely prefer most self-driving cars to park during the day, rather than circle around town.
So, given that we don’t really know the effect self-driving cars will have, I don’t think cities can start guessing at the required infrastructure, given that it will be expensive and take decades to build.
On the other hand, cities can do one thing that is known to be good, regardless whether self driving cars will need less parking: build more and better cycling infrastructure.