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Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

This is why cities are gonna have to regulate the hell out of autonomous vehicles to reduce congestion.

The induced demand from affordable autonomous cars is going to be incredible, as the set of available drivers expands to include those below 16, the elderly currently unable to drive, and the unlicensed.

If everyone starts sending their kid to school via their own autonomous car its going to be a disaster.

A much better idea that doesn't run into issues of limited road space is of course is autonomous public transit.

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Hopefully this regulation materializes as a regulation on personal transit, rather than a regulation on autonomous transit. There's no reason a self-driving car with one occupant is any less efficient than a manually-driven car with one occupant.

If everybody starts sending their kid to school in a private waymo it's going to be a disaster, but right now everybody drives themselves to work in a private car and it already is a disaster.

The Phoenix public transport director who hopes that waymo can bring people to the high-capacity bus lines and the lrt has the right idea. If the waymo (or Uber, or Lyft) app can integrate with public transit networks, that's the ideal solution. I look forward to a day where you open your ride-hailing app and you see options for "Uber all the way: $14, 18 minutes journey, pickup in 5 minutes" or "Uber+bus, $10, 20 minutes journey, pickup in 10 minutes" where the Uber+bus option syncs with the bus schedules and schedules your pickup with just enough time to catch a bus and schedules a pickup at the end of the bus segment of the journey.

Hopefully this regulation materializes as a regulation on personal transit, rather than a regulation on autonomous transit.

That's the most sensible way to do things certainly. But the huge public resistance to regulation of this sort may mean th self-driving cars wind-up with no regulation and thus with the vast mess we can imagine. I mean, the average driver is going to get pretty angry with the idea that the coming of self-driving cars means they have to drive less. I mean, they spent their relatively scarce money on their car.

So what happens? The US has shown a willingness to ignore the need for basic regulation even the results are miserable chaos. I can't think of a more likely circumstance to continue that tradition than the coming of self-driving cars.

> The Phoenix public transport director who hopes that waymo can bring people to the high-capacity bus lines and the lrt has the right idea.

This is a nice hope to have, but so far all the evidence I've seen is that Lyft/Uber competes with public transit, driving down public transit use and making the streets more congested. I would expect autonomous ride hailing would have an even greater effect.

It's about pricing. If automated driving gets perfected then a ride with an automated bus can be cheaper than with an automated taxi, because a bus have less cost per seat than a car.

If we leave it up to the free market to decide how they should be deployed and regulated it'll be a shitshow, no doubt about that. Of course, our roads are already a shitshow, because we let the car industry decide how we should design our cities, and then enshrined the resulting dysfunctions in law.

Waymo at least is signalling responsible deployment, they announced today a partnership with the Phoenix Valley transit authority to help encourage greater transit use.

One valid point they made was that while mass transit is great in high demand areas and along major transit corridors, out on the feeder routed the suburban sprawl it isn't so effective. Service is infrequent and off-peak busses run mostly empty. Robotaxis will be great for getting suburbanites from their homes to major transit hubs.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/07/waymo-pilot-program-sho...

> Waymo at least is signalling responsible deployment, they announced today a partnership with the Phoenix Valley transit authority to help encourage greater transit use.

Meh, my guess is they're just trying to get their grubby mitts on some Dial-a-Ride dollars...

If I went around criticizing people for trying to make money I wouldn't have any friends.

I'm not sure how much difference there will be between autonomous ride hailing and autonomous public transit.

Surely you'll have "Uber Pool" for these services, basically from the outset. Some may pay a premium to give their kids a safe ride alone, etc. etc., but pooling rides makes complete sense.

Also, in my experience, school busses are somewhat a thing of the past. Parents line up for blocks dropping kids off, acting as individual chauffeurs.

I agree it will increase trip demand, but it could also easily decrease demand for parking in busy areas.

Long-term, it's easy to imagine that autonomous vehicles could provide much higher passenger throughput for a given road-area. Without human drivers to worry about, they only need narrow lanes, could talk to each other and draft, etc.

Even Uber Pool is making traffic congestion worse.

https://jalopnik.com/even-uberpool-is-making-traffic-worse-i...

> Long-term, it's easy to imagine that autonomous vehicles could provide much higher passenger throughput for a given road-area

No this is nonsense. The gains, marginal as they are, would only exist in places like highways outside of cities where you can assume nothing is going to walk out in front of a car.

It seems like such a service could fairly easily coordinate car and van pools during high-traffic times? Private and public transportation might not be all that different in the end.

look I always get downvoted for saying mandatory school busses for k-12. But seriously its summer now, and theres no traffic in my Bay Area town. you can go where ever you need to in the mornings.

My theory is that parents who drive their kids to school stay on the streets to do chores. This puts a lot more traffic on the roads at peak traffic times. During the summer, these extra people spread their chores out during the day. Thus, per day, the car total on the road is approximately the same during school, and not, but school hours change the distribution, and the school distribution is exponentially worse.

That might be a good chunk of it, but what I was thinking about was the traffic lighting that is around the schools and how that is oriented. It becomes highly congested due to the time that it takes for people to get into cars, and the lines that form for people that are trying to get into the lots. This backs its self onto main corridors.

Busses would address this due to the density of students per square foot.

Well functioning SDCs should be able to fit 2-5 times as much throughput onto the same roads as human driven ones.

The solution to congestion is entirely independent of who's driving though: Road Pricing!

> gonna have to regulate the hell out of autonomous vehicles to reduce congestion

They could just have some sort of road pricing - The cars send their movements to a government server and it sends a bill based on so much per mile or similar. You could do the same with Ubers - it just really needs an app to transmit the movements and the pricing could vary with time and congestion.

> A much better idea that doesn't run into issues of limited road space is of course is autonomous public transit.

I suspect you could argue that for metros and trains it already is largely automated. Surely the scheduling is at the very least supported by computer algorithms, or perhaps even automatically planned and then only manually overridden by human elements as needed?

Vancouver's skytrain light rail is fully automated (and thus achieves crazy short headways). Buses however aren't elevated from traffic and so of course they currently require a driver. If we had autonomous buses then a transit system would lower its labour costs, but I don't know what other potential gains there could be.

I'm actually in Vancouver right now for a public transit conference and have been incredibly impressed. Such a great system!

No "need" for a separate train track, I suppose. I wonder if that would be a net savings in the long run though.

Congestion pricing.

Why should we allocate a scarce public resource (roads) to prioritize the needs of able bodied adults who are driving non-autonomous vehicles?

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