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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Self driving taxis will be a lot cheaper than normal taxis and self driving electric taxis will be cheaper still. Basically that takes the two most expensive cost factors out of the equation (humans and petrol). This could become so cheap that even people owning a car might prefer it for short distances; or for their daily commute.

Self driving cars potentially also increase the road capacity as cars would be able to coordinate their moves and make more efficient use of the road.

So, that's two ways electrical and autonomous vehicles could contribute to reducing road congestion, which is what this article seems to be about.

People letting their car drive around for hours because they can't find a parking space sounds a bit far fetched. Self parking cars could park on the edge of a city though and pick the driver up when needed. This would also enable autonomous charging and address that issue.

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Petrol is cheap, taxes make it expensive. I see, you are in Berlin: https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Standardar...

At the end state will tax electricity same way to keep this wonderful tax income. No way to have cheap fuel, hydrogen, gas, etc will be taxed same way due to political reasons.

I don’t see a chance to ditch my car having family. It is clean, clean children seat, toys for travel, snacks for next trip, some water, some bad weather clothing. It is available all the time for me, no waiting, known condition.

> At the end state will tax electricity same way to keep this wonderful tax income. No way to have cheap fuel, hydrogen, gas, etc will be taxed same way due to political reasons.

But not clean electricity. The gas is taxed for the environmental reasons: it is endangering our planet. I don't know of any government taxing clean electricity.

>The gas is taxed for the environmental reasons

Then why was it highly taxed before carbon emissions were considered a problem at all? I can tell you: because it's easy to tax (very much like estates).

Depends where you live I suppose but in the UK there are two taxes on fuel.

Fuel duty which has nearly always been on fuel, but left in place and manipulated as a tax on hydrocarbons - £0.5795 per litre

VAT is then added on top of this price, which has been around since 1973 - currently 20%

Currently there is no tax on electricity used for road vehicles, but we do pay VAT on our Electricity bills so it's fair to assume that the government isn't losing out a huge amount of money by people switching to electric vehicles.

At the end state will tax electricity same way to keep this wonderful tax income.

It's not so much the wonderful tax income, but the necessary acquiring of funds in order to maintain the roads.

This is paid by taxes on fuel. Somebody has to pay for new roads and maintenance, when that string of revenue falls away.

Oh, but it is a wonderful tax income. Around here, only a fraction (about 1/8) of car-related taxes are spent on maintaining the roads.

Then there's something wrong with the tax allocation.

Herearound fuel taxes are earmarked for roads and potentially public transport projects. It can't be siphoned off into the general revenue bucket.

I agree with your second point (self-driving cars might make more efficient use of roads), but I don't see how cheaper taxis is going to reduce road congestion?

It gets rid of parked cars, people looking for parking, etc. Also, you can service a dense city with a relatively small amount of taxis ensure they are not ridiculous SUVs, etc. And of course they can coordinate their actions and make better use of the roads as well. Then finally, if people would share rides, it gets even better.

But if taking a car gets cheaper, people who now walk, cycle, or take a bus will start taking cars.

Also, with self-driving cars that are cheaper, I expect that people who now drive a car to the suburbs will move further out of town to get cheaper housing because a) driving is cheaper and b) self-driving would mean they can do things on their commute (work, watch Netflix, etc)

I think the uncomfortable truth is that, to fight climate change, we must give up some luxuries. Flying, driving a car, electricity, low priced almost disposable clothing, electronics gadgets, etc. must get more expensive.

True, but there's a difference between owning a car and taking a car. Flying and driving will be a lot more sustainable once that goes electric. If lots of people take autonomous vehicles to get from A to B and we can find ways where that is sustainable; I have nothing against building more infrastructure to support that.

In any case this article was about road congestion; not about saving the planet. When it comes to that, I don't really believe in technical martyrdom where people voluntarily choose to not do lots of things they would like to do as a solution. And making you feel good about you through voluntarily declining to do certain things is nice and nobel but more of a form of hedonism than a practical solution. Nothing wrong with that but it's not a scalable solution in the sense that in the bigger picture of 7-9 billion people not following your lead, it's going to be statistically meaningless/irrelevant unless you convince them otherwise at unprecedented scale.

Assuming most travel occurs in the morning and evening rush hour, in your scenario some proportion of taxis only ever get used for those commutes. So at the extreme you have taxis that are used as much as private cars. So I would guess a self driving taxi fleet would have a higher cost than you, and there would definitely be room for buses and trains etc too.

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