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Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

So, do taxis cause a parking problem? No... taxi's are on the roll because if they are parked they do not generate revenue. Every sensible self-driving car company out there is pursuing a ride service model. I don't see people taking a self-driving car that they own down into the city center and parking it there while they work 9 to 5.

Once self-driving ride services become competitive, people will own far fewer daily commuters. They will put their money into a 4WD that can take them skiing, and leave it in the driveway on work days.

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I remember when movies first started coming out on VHS and Beta (yes I'm that old). The video store that quickly popped up in my town quickly realized that renting a VHS player would help with sales and rentals; costing something like $10 a day (with 1 movie rental included). The problem was that they only had 10 players, so that if you didn't reserve one ahead of time, you were playing the lottery on high demand days. On weekdays there were plenty of players available, but on Fri/Sat nights it was crazy. The owner didn't have enough capitol to have players idle on the slow nights, so the problem wasn't resolved until everyone who could, bought their own player.

I see the same issue happening with any ride service model. Unless some part of it is being subsidized, I find it hard to see how a company will be able to have enough capacity for peak demand while not wasting a ton of capital. And if people have issues with getting a ride service, they'll buy their own, further complicating the profitability margins of ride service companies.

Same way as Uber and Lyft do it – they charge demand pricing.

In which case no one with a limited budget (i.e. most people) is going to rely on this for commuting.

The big difference is that existing ride sharing and driverless ride sharing are compatible with each other. Ride sharing companies can slowly increase their number of driverless vehicles as it makes financial sense for them. Even if they only need them one or two days a week, there is still a balance that can be struck and that balance should increase over time as more people continue to utilize ride sharing services.

Even further a self-driving car can relocate itself to meet ad-hoc demand. This means privately owned vehicles (assuming they are self-driving) could be enlisted to service this additional demand.

Most vehicles sit idle in a parking lot but could be doing meaningful work.

(Queue SitCom script where someone tries to leave a party but forgot to turn off the feature and their car won't be back for 30 minutes...)

> while not wasting a ton of capital

Easy, only companies with absurd amounts of cash will be able to compete, and won't mind burning through billions to dominate the market. The economics of Uber and Lyft don't work right now, but that isn't stopping them.

Google, Uber, GM, and whoever else will compete with one or two heavily funded startups, until one wins and the rest fail because of the dynamics you describe.

And this is...good?

No it's obviously bad.

Rich people fighting each other to decide who will subsidize my transportation forever? Sounds good. It also sounds like something that won't happen, or at least won't last.

So I think the GP has the wrong picture.

Forever?

No until they control the market at which point you will pay all the subsidy back with interest.

Only if they somehow create a barrier to entry that doesn't exist today.

It's not impossible, but if they go into corrupt regulation (how else could they do it?) there is no reason they can't get the same without the throwing a lot of money away first. So, again, they won't.

I think the barrier to entry is inherent in the "rich people..." part of your idea. Industries that have a huge financial requirement in order to lay down the technologies needed have historically been the WORST monopolies (at least in the US, we have examples in Oil, Railroads, telecoms, etc).

Also, you make it sound like corrupt, industry protecting regulation is the exception and not the norm. Where do you live, and does this fantasy place accept immigrants?

I don't understand how power, internet and retail companies deal with peak demand ! /s

You deal with peak demand by having a supply that is equal to the peak. Automatic Rideshare companies can self balance over a large area, watch the predictable trends that show up during a year and so on and will print money and thus have a lot of capital.

> Automatic Rideshare companies can self balance over a large area, watch the predictable trends that show up during a year [...]

That assumes that nearby places have different peak times, which is probably a flawed assumption.

Over a city they definitely do. Such as rush hours. Move the cars to the residential hours in the morning, move the cars to the schools & commercial areas in the afternoon & evenings.

At which point, your costs = costs of owning a car for each commuting user in your area + overhead + profit. So unless you are offering subsidized prices, it will be cheaper for everyone to just own their own car for commuting.

Only if you assume everyone commutes to work at exactly the same time. Rush hour _is_ a thing, but even during rush hour you're no where near the point of having 100% of cars on the road at the same time.

You're also forgetting that most existing cars on the road have way more seating capacity than needed, since they need to account for the maximum number of people who will use that car at once. A family of four needs a car with four seats, even if most of the time that car will only be carrying one person to work and back throughout the week. Self driving cars will be much more efficient in that respect.

You can also vary your pricing. Planes and trains charge more at peak times when services are in the most demand. Uber has "surge pricing" when there are unusual demand spikes.

By offering discounted fares at off-peak times, and charging premium fares at the busiest times, you can smooth out the peaks while optimising profitability.

Let's replace peak time with commute. So that's one service you can cover. But there's no reason whatsoever self driving cars can't do cargo duty when less passengers are available.

Can the same vehicles handle both tasks? I don't want to commute in a truck, and I bet shipping depot workers don't want to load cars.

Can't see a problem here, the car folds down its seats, the warehouse loads a de facto standard mini shipping container before the car arrives, throws it in the car, off it goes. It might even ascend to an ISO standard, not just a de facto one, such things happened before.

Perhaps, but now the standard shipping container slips a little bit, and gauges a scratch into my seats and sidewall on the first of 4 deliveries. I notice two days later when I'm next using the back. Who pays for the cost of re-upholstering my seats, and for my car-sharing costs during the repair?

My seats?? Noone owns a self driving car, you rent one when you need it. As for the fleet owner, I bet they will solve this in any number of ways somehow including the risk in the cargo fee

I predict plenty of people will own self-driving cars, at least at first. Habits don't die easily, and car ownership is seen as a key part of independence and self sufficiently in America. Some people will want to own them, whether or not it makes sense.

>I find it hard to see how a company will be able to have enough capacity for peak demand

I would guess that in most cities the capacity is not limited by capital to buy cars, but capacity of the street network, which cars, autonomous or not, are notoriously bad at utilizing.

I think this is what Uber/Lyft surge pricing does -- I've never been unable to find an Uber when I want one, but sometimes it costs more than I want to pay.

Many rides aren't so time sensitive that they can't be shifted to another time if the price is right (or wrong).

Car sharing companies will likely come up with a subscription service where you pay $X/month for your normal commute, then they can make sure they have enough base capacity for the regular rides and the on-demand rides can use demand pricing to ensure that everyone can get a car when they need it.

Most of the people go to work around the same time. Additionally, people most go in the same direction. Therefore, self driving car won't be able to serve 10 commuters per day. 2-3 is the max. I suspect, most of owned cars are used to drive to work. So, I don't see how self driving taxi/sharing will solve commuting issue and therefore, owning a car will be still popular.

If people are going at the same time in the same direction, then take more than one person.

Now you're heading home. There are 4 people in the car. Who gets dropped off first? My carpool partner lives less than a mile from me. It still takes almost 10 minutes to divert and drop her off. If you're the last drop off, you lose 60 minutes a day to these drop-offs and pickups.

A problem that doesn't exist in a high frequency mass transit system with lots of transfer options!

Commute traffic is very bursty and very unidirectional. People generally don't commute by taxi today, so replacing commute trips with taxis would both increase the number of taxis and cause the pattern of these new taxis to not match current patterns.

>Commute traffic is very bursty and very unidirectional.

Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale, as Uber/Lyft pool is already demonstrating.

There will be self driving (mini)buses too cheaper than a self driving car ride (more stops because of more passengers carried).

Bus vs car is just a miniature version of hub-and-spoke vs direct flight. Outside of very dense cities (Seoul, Tokyo, New York, etc.), mass transit isn't a very good idea because humans care about trip latency. A lot.

That being said, there's probably still a place for busses during rush hour in a lot of places.

Humans care about trip latency, but there are different components. One person walking five minutes to a designated corridor may save ten people on a minibus three minutes on their trip each by avoiding unnecessary diversion. And this can add up quite a bit depending on how many passengers you are avoiding diverting for. There's a reason why (good) bus lines tend to be direct and on main roads.

The main reason why non-dense places don't see good bus service is because of labor costs. In developed countries labor is easily the biggest source of cost when it comes to a bus, so agencies will run one 40-passenger bus every half hour rather than three 15-passenger buses every ten minutes. Removing labor makes the latter scenario affordable, and if buses are coming every ten minutes average wait time is about five minutes, which is comparable to Lyft or Uber today in some places.

We are used to busses going at set times from set positions. Why can't I request a $STARTUP ride from A to B, at about 30 minutes from now and let them try to calculate a route based on who else is going now? You could run that when you get out of bed and see what comes up, so that by the time you had showered it would be clear when you could go and then you could make the go/no-go decision.

I mean today it is a no-go decision from be, simply because it takes a minimum of twice as long to go to work by bus as by my car, but with a smarter route, that may not be an issue.

How is that different than just... taking the bus?

Lack of pre-defined and centrally-planned route.

Is that a good thing, though? In practice the lack of a pre-planned schedule means that rideshare vehicles have to divert to get to you, being as much as 10-15 minutes away, which is not much better than just waiting for a bus.

Quickly catching a bus that isn't going where I want to go isn't ideal either.

That doesn't seem like a positive. People like predictability. They know their drive home takes X minutes, give or take Y, which is a small number. Having a different route every day makes the value of Y a lot more variable.

There's another aspect to "predictability." Back when I was a bus commuter, it was comforting to see the same faces every day. Even without chatting or acknowledging each other, there was a sort of familiarity to the strangers.

It can pick you up at your house.

The difference is huge.

To take a bus from point A to point B, I have to walk to point C, wait for the bus, get on, wait to be dropped of at point D, cross the intersection to point E, wait for a transfer bus, get on, wait to be dropped off at point F, and finally walk to point B.

With this system I call a cab, wait for it at point A, get on, get dropped of at point B. Rather than my time being fragmented into 3 periods of walking interspersed with 4 periods of waiting, it is just 2 periods of waiting, which makes it much easier to make use of the time. In my experience riding buses, only about a third of the time spent is usable (except for long distance commuter routes), while nearly all the time spent in a cab is usable.

Even if the shared cab took a bit longer than a bus, I would still choose it over a bus for the improved productivity / enjoyment.

> Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale

Like busses and trains? Seriously. Public transit.

The issue is a geometric one. There is only a fixed road capacity. Consuming that road capacity with deadheading vehicles is the worst usage.

Public transit has other significant drawbacks.

IE, it can't go point to point, and is instead stuck in a movement pattern that isn't changing.

A self-driving taxi might help that a lot. Call up a self-driving uber to take you from your home to the nearest train station, and take the light rail into downtown.

I think it would be feasible for the self-driving taxi companies to have a small fleet of cars in each neighborhood that could respond rapidly to take people for short trips.

That would still significantly increase commute times.

By definition, public transit can only serve a specific segment of the commuting population.

> IE, it can't go point to point, and is instead stuck in a movement pattern that isn't changing.

That's not inherent to public transport. You can easily imagine a public network of bus transit where users send in a request for transit an hour or two beforehand; software coalesces the set of requests into a dynamic set of routes and stops; and tells the user to turn up at a stop (relatively) near the origination point and drops them off at a stop (relatively) near their destination point.

Whether it's economic or feasible is a separate issue. But funding mechanism, transport form factor, and autonomy are all distinct parts of a transportation method, and it's a mistake to think of "private autonomous cars" as competing with "legacy human-driven buses with set routes."

What you described still has significant drawbacks. I don't want to have to input into an app, an hour ahead of time to get where I need to go.

If "on demand mass transit via large multipeople vehicles (IE busses)" were feasible, then you'd already see companies like Uber doing it.

On demand point to point, where you don't have to wait a dozen stops to get where you want, is just strictly better than the alternatives in many many ways.

> I don't want to have to input into an app, an hour ahead of time to get where I need to go.

Sure. Get around this by having preset schedules. Or infer it. These details matter, but you can point out similar issues for public transit as it exists today and for private car ownership as it exists today: both are commonly used, despite drawbacks.

> If "on demand mass transit via large multipeople vehicles (IE busses)" were feasible, then you'd already see companies like Uber doing it.

Not at all. Uber and Lyft are premised on having a large base of independent contractors to perform all the labor and provide all the capital. "Large multipeople vehicles" would require complicated integrations with different municipalities, or for Uber/Lyft to purchase their own fleet of buses. Neither aligns well with their current businesses.

> On demand point to point, where you don't have to wait a dozen stops to get where you want, is just strictly better than the alternatives in many many ways.

Sure. And shared rides is strictly better in one very important way: cost. I'm much less cost-sensitive than the average American, and I take Lyft Line far more often than a regular Lyft.

It's not about what's best, but best in certain situations. I value latency sometimes, and cost sometimes.

Precisely.

Current public transportation is rigidly designed for capturing massive economies of scale (still good), while a dynamic swarm of self-driving vehicles can fulfill last-mile demand with the benefits of economies of scale (market opportunity).

Neither can Lyft, Uber, etc. if there is not available GEOMETRIC capacity.

There is a fixed road area to work with.

Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale, as Uber/Lyft pool is already demonstrating.

Links? I haven't found any way to practically share Lyfts for long-ish trips. I don't see any evidence Lyft or Uber will ever do much with shared-rides.

For self-driving cars, people wanting to save money will drive their own cars before they share rides. If you have a car, you've sunk a lot of money into it and so the per-ride cost is fairly small. Even a self-driving car has to price-in wear-and-tear.

It's a shame, that would probably solve a lot of their problems with the ratting system.

The existence of self-driving cars isn't going suddenly dematerialize existing automobiles. It would be, at the least, a long transition process for everyone to switch.

Not only do many people have significant capital sunk into their cars but a lot of people would have trouble affording the cost of using a self-driving taxi and some number of others would simply object for whatever reason.

Moreover, maintaining a car and using a self-driving taxi is even more expensive - cars sitting around still decay and require maintenance as well as insurance.

There are different parking problems. For example, today we can have a long line of taxis waiting for people to arrive at an airport.

I suspect these are more easily solvable since there is more flexibility about parking spots (the cars don't need to be within walking distance and only a few need to be close by). But there will still be idle cars that need to be put somewhere during off-peak times.

Why would self driving taxis behave different than human driven taxis? I mean, the same argument (cars don't need to be in walking distance) applies to taxis whether a human drives it or a computer?

Yes. I drove a taxi for a time during college and I remember drivers would camp at the airport for hours to get a $100 trip but would resent “short trips” despite you actually making more money on multiple short trips than a single airport run. Many of those drivers would use the airport wait time to take a shower, play poker, socialize, sleep. (For those not familiar, taxis at major airports wait in a slow moving off-site queue before you actually ever see them arrive at the terminals; that off-site often resembles a third-world village with everything from laundry, food vendors, ping pong, etc.) Drivers line up their cars, and they do their thing, returning to the vehicle from time to time to move it forward in the queue.

Autonomous vehicle “drivers” don’t need to shower, use the bathroom, eat or sleep, so instead they can be constantly moving rather than camping at airports. A car in motion is generating revenue, so I think autonomous taxis would be fewer in number than human taxis as well as behaving in revenue-optimizing ways (i.e. not camping at the airport.) Theoretically, those airport taxi villages would likely turn into charging stations with a few employees to provide necessary services.

> A car in motion is generating revenue

Not necessarily. A lot of the self-driving taxi utopia is based on the idea that self-driving taxis will serve commuter traffic. And the major facet of commuter traffic is that you're going to have a high-volume, unidirectional traffic flow--once that car drops off its worker, there is no demand for it make any trips nearby. So if that car is in motion, it's still not carrying anybody, so it's not generating revenue.

Assuming a rational market (never guaranteed), there would be low fares during off-peak hours, and in the reverse direction, with higher fares at peak. So, you'd get some "induced demand" and shift in demand by travel being sometimes being very cheap.

It's sort of like congestion pricing.

Uber has done some of this already.

And the reason there's a long line of taxis at the airport is because the drivers wants the fare. If there was one or a few companies that owned all the cars, they would make sure there always would be close to an optimum amount of cars at the airport. Cars not in use during low demand hours are either just parked somewhere where the parking is dirt cheap or in for service.

Well, that's not the real issue, the real issue is that unloading and loading of taxis at airports is at best chaotic.

The local airport has similar issues with Lyft or Uber, which are in a separate zone from the taxis, so if it were possible to optimize better they probably would've tried already.

Taxis do park. (Hotels, airports, train stations)

Not parking means excess capacity is creating traffic jams. So to avoid paying for storage, self driving cars are going to consume energy and space in travel lanes.... cities should charge the f out this.

There was recently a segment on NPR with a researcher for future automation. I’ll try to dig up a link but he made the opposite point of you. He claimed self-driving cars will give us more traffic but it will be much more efficient thanks to software. The lanes would be able to get shrunk from 12ft to 6ft due to better control and by doing that, you’re now able to possibly double your available lanes on a single road for the increase in cars.

No, let’s use the 6ft freed up for a protected bike lane.

a sibling comment is imagining a future where automated cars will be so good (and pervasive) that we no longer design cars to survive catastrophic crashes and can build them in any size, down to a single seat. I am going to take it a step further and say that lanes will become obsolete at this point, and we just pack them together as close as allowed by width.

in this vision for the future, is it still necessary to chisel out 6ft on every surface street for humans to ride self-propelled bicycles?

There can be single passenger cars too instead of the current 4-5 seaters, which will take up less space than current cars.

good luck passing the crash tests

The crash test standards are passed by humans. If we get to a point where self-driving has dramatically (>95%) reduced crashes, crashworthiness becomes less of a pressing issue and we may be well advised to reduce the standards.

(I'm fairly bearish on the prospects/likelihood of self-driving cars in my lifetime, but that's orthogonal to the point above. If they exist, we might not need to build mini-tanks anymore.)

This is an often overlooked point. Once near zero accidents are proven, all types of vehicle design options become feasible. Super narrow, super light, etc. It may even be feasible to change the roads. I fear we’re a long way away though.

It seems that slightly over 10 feet may be better for current cars, rather than the common 12 feet. https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2015/07/10-foot-traffic-la... . See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet#Lane_diets .

It's tough to see how to get down to 6 foot wide lanes when there are so many vehicles on the road which are wider than 6 feet. A Ford F-150 (thirteenth generation), which is the best selling pickup in the US, has a width of 79.9 in = 6.6 feet.

Or, consider a family with 2 parents and 3 kids, where all three need car seats, plus room for strollers, extra clothes, and so on. I looked at top DDG hits for "car for three kids" and all of them were over 6 feet in width.

Then there are service vehicles, like garbage trucks, which are well wider than 6 feet. (https://www.reference.com/vehicles/size-typical-garbage-truc... says a popular model is "approximately 102 inches" = 8.5 feet). Where do they drive without blocking two lanes of traffic.

It would also be impossible to use by any RVs. https://campergrid.com/average-rv-length-width/ says "Travel trailers or a camper trailer on an average are around 20 feet in length and 8 feet in width". Others are larger; "Class A RV width stands at an average of 9.5 feet".

Or conversion vans for people in wheelchairs.

These are all solvable, but there's a lot of existing - and expensive - systems in place which would need to be changed to make that vision come true. At the very least you need to wait until people who don't have narrow self-driving cars no longer have the political influence to keep others from kicking them off the road.

I imagine that on a more free market economy probably Ubers would have QR codes, username handles, or some other way for you to just scan your phone (or type a code) near the door of the ride-sharing vehicle and the driver agree to the ride in the spot. This would be very nice to reduce queues and traffic at airports or other agglomeration places. It just doesn't make sense to wait 5-10min at a large airport like SFO, JFK, LAX, or ATL for a Uber ride while you see just many people being dropped off in front of you. This only happens thanks to the taxi monopoly.

It'd be better for everyone if you could just walk in any car in these scenarios.

No its just what really rich people used to do in London have an employee drive their car around the block when the traffic wardens showed up.

The partners at one place I worked at in London did this.

> I don't see people taking a self-driving car that they own down into the city center and parking it there while they work 9 to 5.

Maybe we'll have a AirBnB type of service where you would rent your self-driving car to others from 9 to 4 and the "AirBnB car" company would make sure it goes where there's demand.

This way people owning the cars are still sure to have their own ride even when there's high demand.

I could not even imagine the headache of such a system. For example, I drive what I like to call beater cars. They are paid for fully in cash and generally are not worth more then a couple thousand if that and we are talking Canadian dollars. I like this because I have kids and they are hard on my car and I am also hard on my car. I like to eat in my car as I work in the community and do a lot of driving around so often grab food to go and park and eat. I have spilled countless times despite my best intentions. I have had a bottle of soap leak on my floor not realizing somewhere from the till to car the cap flipped up. I have had a kid fall asleep in the back and pee their pants. Coffee down the dash. Found old fruit under kids seats. You name it. It will be a big headache if you get some kid who rideshares with his mom in your autonomous car while you work that pees all over your seat. Or tracks mud in. Or pukes. Or every other thing I would like to not deal with. I just have a hard time seeing how we get past all that without some insurance covering issues like these.

I would have mine continuously drive around the block.

Another option is to have the car drive out into the suburbs in search of free parking to abuse.

For a family, the car would drive home to be available for other users. Each trip thus turns into two trips, one to drop a person off and another to pick a person up.

The ride service model doesn't work except for the people already tolerating ride services. Lots of us want to keep our junk in our cars. We haul around our snacks, spare shoes, and raingear. Our cars might get dirty, but at least it's our own filth, not a puddle of a stranger's vomit.

You can presumably still keep your own car even if everyone else is renting one for each single trip. It won't make sense financially, but it won't be more expensive than today. It will be more clearly a leisure expense, as in, you'll know which part is your transportation cost and which part is the extra you choose to pay for keeping your junk and having the filth be your own. Who knows, it may be a fairly popular alternative. I certainly value those things, just not enough to pay thousands of dollars extra for them.

The car as a service option won't be the solution for most families, because they have a lot of nonhuman cargo they need to store in their car: strollers, diaper bags, sporting equipment, etc.

I agree that families with small children have a need for car-as-storage, but that passes after a couple years (per child). I'm not so sure about sports. For hardcore athletes, then yeah. But for your weekly biking or skiing or surfing trip, the equipment can be hauled on and off larger car-as-service's hired for the purpose. The rest of the time, store the equipment in a fraction of the space you would use to store a car with the equipment in.

Disclaimer: I was never a regular in any big-equipment sports.

If I'm wrong, well, like I said owning a car might still be fairly popular when they self-drive.

Any sport that requires an external rack for equipment like bikes, kayaks, or skis is a major hassle with rental vehicles. Sure some rental agencies already offer vehicles with racks but dealing with all the various options and configurations becomes a huge problem for logistics and inventory management. So they often don't have what you want when you actually need it. I'll keep my personally owned vehicles regardless of cost.

With regards to sporting equipment I was specifically thinking about baseball, but football and hockey can also tend to have lots of equipment.

Parents already unload and load the stroller and diaper bag at their destination, what's the big deal about doing it at the origin?

Some people will pay extra for car storage, other people will opt for the discount of not owning a car.

Think about all the transitions of "stuff" that an average family with 2 kids will need. Maybe one of those kids is a toddler, maybe another one is a little older and plays baseball. Somehow you gotta pick up the toddler from day care after work (diaper bag, maybe a stroller, car seat), and the older kid from school (books, projects, instruments) and get the older kid to baseball practice (bat, glove, maybe a couple balls). Plus you have your own stuff, maybe a laptop bag. You've gotta transition all this stuff all over the place without ever leaving anything in a car? You're gonna carry your laptop bag, your kid's school stuff, and all the toddler equipment to baseball practice? God forbid you have to do some grocery shopping on the way home after baseball practice. That sounds like a nightmare.

> Another option is to have the car drive out into the suburbs in search of free parking to abuse.

This doesn't sound like abuse, it sounds like a good idea.

The point of expensive parking is to reduce the contention for parking spaces. If the car drives a long way away to park where parking is less contested, that seems like a win.

It's abuse because in suburbs the parking is provided at the expense of the property owner, intended for the benefit of those using the property.

Neither I nor Walmart would be pleased to have empty cars showing up to park on our property.

Maybe we're thinking of different things.

I had in mind just the side of a road that doesn't have parking restrictions. Anybody is allowed to park there.

Perhaps you are talking about a free car park outside a supermarket or similar? In which case, yeah, fair enough, that would be abusing the free parking.

It's still an issue for the road owner, which will generally be a town. The town pays for that road surface, with the expectation that it will be mostly used by those with some other purpose for being in the town.

It's a bit like the complaints about Waze sending cars down minor little suburban streets. The town hadn't intended to be paying for the transportation infrastructure of a nearby major city.

I like this future.

The driveway...

That nust be a different planet than the one I live in.

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