Uber Wants to Make It Illegal to Operate Your Own Self-Driving Car in Cities | Hacker News Reader

Uber Wants to Make It Illegal to Operate Your Own Self-Driving Car in Cities

cei.org

49 pointsctoth47 comments

I suppose someone will call me out as alarmist, but this sounds almost like the first step into a dystopian movie.

Ban personal self driving cars, then when the fleets outnumber personal non-self-driving cars, ban them too.

Presto...big brother now knows where you are, all the time. (Yes, I get that cell phones serve that purpose now, but the workaround is pretty easy)

I think that's a bit overly alarmist, there could certainly be competition in this space. _But_ this is an absolutely despicable move on Uber's part that would slow the adoption of self-driving vehicles to prop up their own (at that point failing) business model.

"there could certainly be competition in this space"

I was assuming governments forcing all fleets to share data. Probably via some "safety / think of the children / OMG terrorists" bill.

Hi, it's called V2V in the automotive space. The US Dept. of Transportation has a thing called RITA (https://www.itscosts.its.dot.gov/ITS/benecost.nsf/SummID/SC2...).

As an aside, Federal Transportation guys don't bother invoking terrorism, they just go with "yeah these are two ton things moving around and we are the rule makers."

I think for safety you might get benefit out of cars communicating intent to neighbors. Pervasive tracking and reporting would be unnecessary - but that is the logic, of course various governments could require all sorts of stuff in the name of anything. So yea, good point.

Beyond uses of local comms, N Non-local coordination could improve long-range routing, and even support automated allocation of infrastructure (like the way some roads—especially expensive-to-build-and-maintain ones like tunnels—reconfigure lanes for different directions of travel at different times of day to match traffic patterns, but dynamically and in more places.)

I think non-local comms will end up going through more pedestrian modes.

Road usage configuration is something that external systems will already force self-driving cars to obey, a lot of bridges are 3 or 5 lanes with a middle that switches directions, or have some partitioned third lane group that switches similarly. Broadcasting that information over the web/whatever may help car co-ordination, especially it may help with route planning and traffic analysis, but these systems should be rather strongly isolated from the car itself and be offered from a source open to the general public.

There is a lot of interesting stuff here, especially when you get into traffic balancing, but none of it would need to pass through a car relay network or anything of the sort - there may be economy in doing so, but that sort of a propriety (or open yay) caching of state wouldn't impact or impose requirements on car-to-car communications.

If there are no data sharing then these people will come up with an idea to necessary monopoly.

How ridiculous.

At some point you drive enough to warrant not having a middle man between you and a car. This really does not need to be regulated. Just let people make their own economic decisions.

Not to forget, some people also like or need to keep belongings in their car.

Why couldn't people have personal pods with their stuff in it, with their preferred upholstery, sound system, etc. that got moved by a third-party owned motor unit?

Why was Uber mostly singled out in this article? If anyone reads the article, it makes it seem like there is some agenda behind it, especially when seeing the full list of signatories for the initiative [1].

The article also reads with some bias as the initiative itself seems to make some sense, based on my cursory review.

[1] https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/signatories/

Consider the source.

"The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty."

"...CEI crafts advocacy campaigns in order to reach policy makers..."

Oldest trick in the crony-cap playbook. Convince the gov that a special licence is required because think of the children, bribe and lobby your way to being the only one who can practically get one. Profi... Rent-seek.

i want to say something along the lines of, “Oh how quickly the disruptor becomes the regulator,” but really isn’t it a bit early in the autonomous vehicle game to pull the proverbial ladder up behind you? Besides, given the likely cost of such vehicles, even when they really exist, they’re not going to be in most households.

Killing competition that doesn’t exist in a tech space that may be decades away from bearing fruit. Uber.

Agreed, wouldn't it match their business model to just demand interoperability, and maybe subsidies to get autonomous vehicles into the hands of people who'd take the risk of buying and insuring them to ferry Uber fares around?

> Agreed, wouldn't it match their business model

I think you've confused “cultivated PR image” with “business model”.

At least they're proactive. >.<

If you open the link SMPLC is actually Zipcar’s NGO and basically every mobility startup signed this proposal. Full list of signatories: “BlaBla Car, CityMapper, Didi, Cityway, Jetty, Keolis, LimeBike, Lyft, Mobike, Motivate, Ofo, Ola, Scoot, Transit, Uber, Via and ZipCar”

So every mobility startup wants to ban consumers from owning what the mobility companies want to try to get people to rent.

Surprise, surprise.

There needs to be a planned phase-out of human-driven vehicles. Supporting legacy incumbents can hugely hamstring automated technology.[1] It's a double-whammy: (1) enormous investment must go into designing around human drives in the first place, and (2) the existence of human-driven vehicles dramatically reduces the traffic mitigation advantages of self-driving vehicles (reducing the incentive to make the investment in (1) and adopt self-driving vehicles).[2]

[1] I spent the beginning of my career working on radios that dynamically share spectrum among themselves, instead of relying on FCC central planning. The need to support incumbents like television stations has probably set the technology back a decade or two, not to mention cost millions upon millions of dollars.

[2] E.g. https://readwrite.com/2017/06/06/hyperlane-self-driving-tl4/

Is the government going to mandate that all self driving car software be open source? Otherwise, Hell no. I'm not putting my life in the hands of a proprietary, corporate, spyware ridden death trap.

Just to be clear, you’re worrying about the arrival of a technology which, hype aside, shows no sign of appearing anytime soon. The downsides of your plan on people who are already disadvantaged is enormous, in favor of benefits which simply don’t exist outside of the minds of some engineers.

I’m not saying that I can’t see the benefits of completely autonomous vehicles. If the technology were impending rather than in early R&D this conversation could even make sense. As it is however, it’s fighting over slices of a pie which may appear in a decade, or five decades, or more. A lot of harm can be done in the name of an imagined automated utopia, but the worst could be done when it’s still only a dream.

You can pry my human-driven gas-burning vehicle out of my cold dead hands.

You can keep the car and drive it on your farm. But as to public roads, they're a limited public resource, and the government has an obligation to ensure they are utilized as efficiently as possible. That will be achieved by only allowing self-driving cars.

Unfortunately this is the kinda stuff that creates red/blue divides.

I used to live somewhere I could drive the 12 miles to work without seeing another car. Telling people around there that they can't have their trucks because roads are a limited resource, would go over like a fart in a spacesuit.

> like a fart in a spacesuit

relevant quora discussion [1] - doesn't seem too bad since the suit has a carbon filter and the helmet is well-sealed & separated from the rest of the suit. (breathable air is prioritized for the head of course, not so much the rest of the suit)

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when-astronauts-fart-in-t...

"as efficiently as possible"

There is no such obligation.

Or rather, how do you define "utilize"?

In terms of transport efficiency, buses and light rail carry more people than cars.

And if only self-driving cars are allowed on the roads, what of bicycles, pedestrians, people on wheelchairs, and horses?

We used to play on the roads when I was a kid, being careful to watch out for cars. That's part of "utilize", is it not?

There are also other categories of roads, like scenic highways, which have a different utility function than efficiency. Some neighborhoods have back alleys for garage access, garbage pickup, and the like.

I don't see how it can be true that "In terms of transport efficiency, buses and light rail carry more people than cars.", particularly for the light rail.

The first problem, shared by both, is that in many locations they run nearly empty. Smaller vehicles would be far less wasteful.

Light rail is a horrifically inefficient use of land. Use (passengersdistance)/(timeland) to score it. Another way to look at this: on average, what percent of the time is there a person above a physical location that is dedicated to transportation?

The bus, if operating in mixed traffic, is somewhat efficient for land use. (more so if full) The train wastes most of the land most of the time. At best it might share with freight service, but that degrades passenger service.

"I don't see how it can be true ..."

Because if the goal is efficiency then we would have a completely different transport system. We would not have large amounts of paved roads which are lightly used (and you see many places in the US moving away from paved roads to gravel roads for exactly that reason).

If we are talking about efficiency then a lane of traffic carries about 3,000 people per hour per lane. Light rail at grade is about 4,000/hour and grade separated is about 8,000. Wikipedia says "light rail vehicles can travel in multi-car trains carrying a theoretical ridership up to 20,000 passengers per hour in much narrower rights-of-way, not much more than two car lanes wide for a double track system". Subways can handle 30,000 people per hour. Numbers from https://www.thoughtco.com/passenger-capacity-of-transit-2798... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail .

The thing is, the goal is not efficiency, at least not in any simple sort of sense.

The big problem is that the transport system affects where people go and live, and vice versa. Many places in the US are built with the expectation that people will have cars, which is why buses and light rails are run nearly empty. But in places like NYC or central London, which were built before cars and which can't waste the space on car infrastructure, it's more efficient to have mass transit.

Look at all the people who use light rail to commute into London, rather than drive. Can you really make the blanket statement that "Light rail is a horrifically inefficient use of land"?

Much of what you describe makes sense in the US historical context. However, the US system was not built with efficiency in mind. It was built with growth in mind, with the idea that new growth would be able to fund the maintenance of the old system. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ is what convinced me of that.

If the goal is really for efficient use of limited public resources, then it needs to be done by redesigning our cities and towns so that bicycles, walking, and mass transit are more useful.

(Bear in mind too that when you see unused parking spaces - and most zoning laws require far more parking spaces than are usually needed - then that is also a waste. And a waste which makes is harder to walk, bike, or have an effective mass transit system.)

Other countries have done that, like cities in the Netherlands in the 1970s (see https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/it-takes-more... ).

You proposed "on average, what percent of the time is there a person above a physical location that is dedicated to transportation?" Isn't that a way of saying "how long does it take to go from X to Y"?

I don't think your proposal is that useful. If it takes 10 minutes to walk and 5 minutes to drive, but the drive requires available parking on both ends, then shouldn't you also include the infrastructure needed to support the transportation, in addition to the simple time that the person is above a physical location dedicated to transportation?

And since the car takes up more space, including a larger safety margin ("two second rule"), shouldn't that also be included?

The grade separation is a strange distinction to make, since trains do not stop for at-grade crossings. Perhaps the distinction you meant to make is between trains that run in city traffic and those that do not. But anyway...

I'll pick a couple examples that I have actually used. They are effectively random; I'm not choosing them to make rail look bad.

EXAMPLE ONE

The commuter rail between Lowell and Boston runs 26 trains on weekdays. This carries 11,965 people a maximum distance of 25.4 miles (40.9 km) within a window of 17.53 hours. Most people don't actually go the full distance.

This is a pitiful 498 to 683 people per hour per lane, depending on if you count the nightly shutdown or not. The reality is far worse, since most people don't make the full 25.4 mile trip.

Now consider the linear space occupied. On average, there are 19 to 27 people per mile. On average, they are spaced 196 to 269 feet apart. Again though, most people aren't making the whole trip. Normal highway traffic is denser than that and the lanes are narrower too.

EXAMPLE TWO

The commuter rail between West Palm Beach and Miami runs 50 trains on weekdays. This carries 14,800 people a maximum distance of 70.9 miles (114.1 km) within a window of 16.67 hours. Most people don't actually go the full distance.

This is a pitiful 617 to 888 people per hour per lane, depending on if you count the nightly shutdown or not. The reality is far worse, since most people don't make the full 70.9 mile trip.

Now consider the linear space occupied. On average, there are 8 to 13 people per mile. On average, they are spaced 421 to 607 feet apart. Again though, most people aren't making the whole trip. Normal highway traffic is denser than that and the lanes are narrower too.

CONCLUSION

We can fit 2 to 5 times as many humans in that land distance if we use single-occupancy vehicles on a normal highway instead. This would save land for wildlife, housing, or whatever.

By switching to a normal highway, average speeds would double. (the train may peak at 80 MPH, but with all those stops it averages less than 40 MPH) The saved time can be put to use for sleeping, earning income, or spending time with family.

Now, putting those together with the extra width of a rail line, we're looking at 8 to 20 times as many people moved for a given amount of land. The land wasted by rail is obscene.

A grade-separated junction, in the context of trains, is discussed in more detail at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_junction .

> A flying junction or flyover is a railway junction at which one or more diverging or converging tracks in a multiple-track route cross other tracks on the route by bridge to avoid conflict with other train movements. A more technical term is "grade-separated junction". A burrowing junction or dive-under occurs where the diverging line passes below the main line.

> The alternative to grade separation is a level junction or flat junction, where tracks cross at grade, and conflicting routes must be protected by interlocked signals.

The examples you gave are all from the US, which as I mentioned has been designed around cars for almost a century.

We (in the US) are a local minimum where it is hard to switch to a mass transit system because we've spent so much time optimizing for cars.

That doesn't mean that mass transit systems are inherently less efficient. We have only to look to NYC (to say nothing of other countries) to see numbers far in excess of what you mentioned.

So if rayiner's assertion is correct, that the government has an obligation to optimize the limited use of public land - which I disagree with - then I still argue that it means we should be doing a transition to a different way of organizing our cities and towns so they are better optimized for mass transit instead of personal vehicles.

Like what The Netherlands started in the 1970s.

Once self-driving cars are proved to be able to support the entire population at reasonable levels of safety, privacy, efficiency, reliability, etc., over a long enough period of time (I'd say a couple decades), I would accept the _beginning_ of a conversation about only allowing self-driving cars (even then the only sane thing is to have specific areas like certain highways devoted to self-driving cars). Unfortunately, I don't really see how that can be proven without them actually doing it. If self-driving cars require 100% penetration before they are viable they are and should be dead in the water. I will not support the dismantling of our main transportation network on a pipe dream.

The government has many ways to ensure that public roads are utilized more efficiently. A first step could simply be to increase taxes on gasoline (with increased equivalent taxes on electric cars). This would decrease the roads' utilization. They could also increase road-usage taxation that increases at higher levels of utilization. There are also many other actions that can be taken and none of them require a 100% conversion to an untested complete electric fleet of vehicles.

I used to think the song "Red Barchetta" was far-fetched.

Have you read the story it's based on, 'A Nice Sunday Drive'?

Well if you're one of the (un)lucky 1.3 million people a year, that is certainly possible

In the US, the # is just over 37,000 driving deaths per year, or about 35 times less than 1.3 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

I actually expect this to happen naturally.

Pretty much the instant it becomes provable in a court of law that self-driving cars are safer than human-driven ones, it will become impossible to buy insurance for human-driven cars (at least not at any rate most of us could afford).

"So...Mr. Smith. You knew that using the autonomous driving software was safer than operating the car manually, yet you deliberately turned it off. Your faulty driving then killed Mr. Johnson and his entire family."

No sane insurance company is going to defend that in court.

Why does uber get to have government regulations on their side when they violate local laws constantly? They have been banned by several governments entirely. https://www.google.com/search?q=uber+banned&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-...

> Due to the transformational potential of autonomous vehicle technology, it is critical that all AVs are part of shared fleets, well-regulated, and zero emission. Shared fleets can provide more affordable access to all, maximize public safety and emissions benefits, ensure that maintenance and software upgrades are managed by professionals, and actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, in line with broader policy trends to reduce the use of personal cars in dense urban areas.

Sounds reasonable to me, imagine how much premium land could be unlocked if car parks were relegated to a thing of the past? Not to mention adding more throughput on smaller urban streets choked with parking.

Or god forbid, more cycling lanes . . .

> it is critical that all AVs are part of shared fleets, well-regulated, and zero emission.

Nope.

> Shared fleets can provide more affordable access to all, ...

Nope. Dressing up a monopoly as more efficient, is not fooling anyone anymore.

I love self driving cars, but more and more it seems when they will arrive, the cons might outweigh the pros if we're not careful. With thinking like this, I think I'll keep driving myself and seriously consider voting against any legislation that might lead to this outcome. Uber should rethink what its ultimate strategy is. If we can't deter Uber because it's a giant US corporation, we can certainly deter self-driving car technology. And that would be a giant loss for all of humanity, including the greedy Uber execs.

Stupid idea. Just get rid of all parking minimums and the favorable tax treatment of parking lots in commercial areas and the problem of having too many personal cars in city centers will take care of itself without heavy-handed regulation.

All these companies should burned for pushing for state sanctioned monopolies.

The sidebar suggested I read another CEI article entitled "stop forcing unions on your workers".

Uh huh. This article sure seems like it represents facts in an unbiased way..

Look, you don't like CEI? Fine, me neither, from the looks of it.

Are they spinning a libertarian agenda? Yes they are.

Is this article mostly an attack on uber and "shameless, greenwashed crony capitalism"? Yes it is.

BUT

Is it true that a group outlined those 10 proposals? Yes it is.[0]

Is it true that proposal #10 is about only permitting fleets to operate EVs? Yes it is.

Is it true that Uber (and Lyft, and Bla Bla Car, and...) signed this proposals? Yes it is.[1]

Will those companies greatly profit from that kind of regulation? You betcha!

That is the gist of the article, and that is what we should be discussing about.

[0] https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/

[1] https://www.sharedmobilityprinciples.org/signatories/

EDIT: OT, but is your name a reference to Snow Crash? Because if it is, good job! :)

I give three years after the IPO for Ackman to short the fuck out of UBER. What a disgusting company.

Incredible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com