Comment by jnw2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnw2 | Hacker News Reader

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There may also be some pressure on the busier roads to force the use of the automated mode, once it can reliably space cars closer than can safely be done with manual driving, and once a large enough fraction of the cars on the road support automated driving. (Presumably we will see a gradual decrease in following distance in automated mode, with lots of careful investigation of near misses along the way.)

I've found myself wondering if Google will solve the capacity problems from New Jersey into Manhattan faster than the new rail tunnel(s) that may or may not be getting built; the existing tunnels are pretty full, but it looks like Google has figured out how to dramatically increase the capacity of the existing road tunnels.

But the other question is how parking will work out. Certainly adding lots of parking spaces in Manhattan will be expensive. What will happen if there is an argument that New Jersey income tax revenues can be maximized by maximizing the number of New Jersey residents who can commute to Manhattan, and that the way to accomplish this with the lowest infrastructure cost to taxpayers is to allow the cars to drive themselves back to New Jersey to park for the day?

Google shouldn't sell these cars to people. They should provide a sort of automated taxi service. You request a specific destination at a specific time and the car picks you up and takes you there. Then the parking question could be avoided entirely. Having thousands of cars sitting doing nothing all day is a waste.

An automated taxi service is certainly one of the things we ought to get out of this navigation technology (but you don't want to call it a taxi service, because you don't want to be subjected to the limits and fees placed on taxis by municipalities), but apparently if you look at commuter rail systems, you find that people tend to commute from suburbs to downtown in the morning, and back out in the evening. Commuter rail systems usually want to have separate overnight layover facilities on the outbound ends of routes, vs mid-day layover facilities in the downtown areas. You can force the cars to rack up empty miles, but it's probably more energy efficient to have separate mid-day and overnight parking.

The other thing the automated taxis should offer as an option is cars with multiple compartments, where if you wanted to get from one compartment to another you'd have to get out of the car. People who are impatient but don't care too much what their trip costs could request that they get one compartment of the car and it get routed so that they aren't delayed by other people in sharing the car, and then people who want cheap transportation and don't care so much how long it takes could book the other compartments. You could also have a hybrid option where the impatient would allow up to 5 minutes (or any number of minutes of the rider's choosing) delay to allow others to be picked up/dropped off, and there could be transfer points along major roads, and people wanting cheap travel could express a willingness to deal with N transfers. That could go a long way towards increasing the number of people in the average vehicle.

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