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Comment by yostrovs | Hacker News Reader

It's not expensive to install electric chargers in existing building. "Planning" for Uber involves what? Having a drive in in front of the building? How do you plan for non-existent self driving cars? Any practical advice you can share with the architects here?

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You can't install more than a handful of chargers without needing to run new circuits back to the main panel. Installing a hundred (not unreasonable for future needs!) would probably double the power consumption of the entire building, and require upgrading the utility connection, maybe even running new lines to the closest substation.

Not to mention that with such an increase in overall electricity consumption in the garage, one might want to charge the residents for use of it. Doing so might require changes to architecture (e.g., putting electric cars on a different floor or section). There are lots of things to consider and real estate investors/developers are not thinking of any of them.

It is certainly more expensive to install electric chargers into an existing inert concrete structure than it is to design them in from the beginning. The building I am in is working this out right now, as are many others.

Planning for Uber and autonomous cars includes architecting porticos and pickup/dropoff points in favor of garages. Many buildings are hostile to use of Uber in my daily experience.

> Many buildings are hostile to use of Uber in my daily experience.

if there's already a taxi rank, then uber should be using that space to pick-up/drop-off. If there isn't, then the current building is _already_ unfriendly to taxis.

Except taxi ranks are a queue of fungible vehicles; uber/lyft's are "bespoke" so the exact same structure won't work quite as well.

But it wouldn't be hard to make a pickup/dropoff area. I suspect there already is one at most places, it's just a pissy, petty policy that doesn't allow ridesharing (etc) to use it.

It’s more than policy. It is architecture. As I described above, I live in a new building. I step out into traffic to get into an Uber. This was an obvious thing to consider during this building’s design.

In SF planning meetings, I have seen buildings explicitly discouraged from accommodating pickup/dropoff on the theory that it would make traffic impacts worse (this is backwards) and undermine the “transit oriented” argument (harder to argue).

There's no reason why rideshare queues and car-rider assignments couldn't be fungible up to the point the passenger steps into the vehicle, special needs excepted.

Those are called taxis. Even then they only line up at major locations, not residential buildings.

No.

Rideshare still behaes ona requ basis. But the vehicle at the head of the queue serves the passenger first requesting a ride, special needs excepted. Out-of-order arrival of rides is addressed that way.

That means the rider wouldn't know what vehicle is coming and when, which goes against the whole experience.

Also it's unlikely for there to be that many rides queued up at a single residential location which is why they aren't queued up there in the first place.

it's unlikely for there to be that many rides queued up at a single residential location

The premise of this thread was that there were.

I think it's about having a pickup/dropoff area, not necessarily a queuing system, especially because ridesharing does not use traditional waiting queues.

Again, specifically not the case here. You are having a different discussion.

"if there's already a taxi rank, then uber should be using that space to pick-up/drop-off. If there isn't, then the current building is already unfriendly to taxis."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19596930

Yes, they are already unfriendly to taxis. In Orlando and many other places we didn’t use taxis as much as we use Uber now. When we get to fully autonomous vehicles this will be an even greater problem as it will not make sense to park the car. Real estate investors should be planning for that now in the buildings they are designing that will still be standing in 30 years.

> "Planning" for Uber involves what?

In Central Florida, this means having a safe place for people to stand and wait. That area gets frequent and often nasty thunderstorms.

> Any practical advice you can share with the architects here?

Could they at least run one regular (120v/15a) circuit + wall outlet to each parking spot? Is that too much to ask?

That's enough electricity to give every EV car an extra 60 miles of EV range overnight. And would be plenty for any other use (ebikes and the like)

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