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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Only if self driving cars are legally required and expensive. If self driving cars are not legally required (ie because they are that much safer), or they are cheap people will continue to buy and own cars. The convenience of a personal car with your golf clubs in the trunk is worth it.

Don't forget that the self driving world you imagine is worse for the environment: all those cars going empty to a distant parking lot until you are done with work eat up a lot of energy.

If you want to solve environmental problems from cars invest in public transit. The biggest problem in modern cities is neighborhood designs that make public transit too slow. (you need to have a short walk to the stop, and then the vehicle not make many twists and turns along the way to where you want to be). Density is useful for transit, but suburbs already have the minimum density required, they lack the ability for transit to be fast though.

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> If self driving cars are not legally required (ie because they are that much safer), or they are cheap people will continue to buy and own cars.

They will be cheaper. No licensing, insurance, maintenance, fuel, but still almost all of the convenience of a personal vehicle requiring only a short wait time.

> Don't forget that the self driving world you imagine is worse for the environment: all those cars going empty to a distant parking lot until you are done with work eat up a lot of energy.

That's not how it would work. If parking becomes necessary because network capacity is too high and utilization too low, the car would park in its immediate vicinity. We have lots of parking everywhere to accommodate far more cars than would be needed in a world with mostly self-driving cars.

Why wouldn't their be licensing? Insurance maybe. Maintenance is a requirement - the tires will wear out if nothing else. Fuel is still a factor - it might not be liquid, but you need some sort of energy.

The advantage of a personal vehicle is 0 wait time. If you are willing to wait the bus is cheaper because you can share the ride with so many other people.

Sure we have parking everywhere. However at that point there is essentially one car per person anyway, so it may as well be your personal car so you can leave the golf clubs in the trunk.

> Why wouldn't their be licensing?

Do you need a license to hail an Uber? If that Uber became self-driving, why would you need a license? Certainly Uber cars would need to have some kind of inspection, but that's just an extension of whatever inspections exist for road-worthiness.

> Maintenance is a requirement - the tires will wear out if nothing else. Fuel is still a factor - it might not be liquid, but you need some sort of energy.

These are no longer costs born by the driver/rider, but are now aggregated by the car service. Aggregating yields considerable cost savings.

> The advantage of a personal vehicle is 0 wait time. If you are willing to wait the bus is cheaper because you can share the ride with so many other people.

A bus wait takes a minimum of 15 minutes. An Uber arrives within 5 minutes, and with self-driving cars and capacity planning, this can be brought down to some arbitrarily small number if needed. A bus also requires walking to and from stops, which also adds at least 5-10 minutes for most people. That's a big difference, not to mention these are multiplied considerably in rural areas or areas with considerable urban sprawl. And the first few minutes of waiting for an Uber I'm putting on my shoes, jacket, etc.

Walking down to your car takes at least 3 minutes in a condo. If you own a home with driveway, it will still take you 1 minute to walk to your car and start it up (and a few minutes to warm it up if it's winter).

So the advantage of ownership amounts to about 1 minute in winter climates, and maybe 2-3 minutes in warm climates. That's perfectly reasonable tradeoff considering the expected cost savings.

> However at that point there is essentially one car per person anyway

I don't know what this means. My point was that we don't need to build huge parking lots outside of the city for idle self-driving cars to which they would drive to/back when utilization is low, we already have a glut of parking available for a transition to a self-driving world, and all localized within our cities. A self-driving car service would just use all the parking scattered everywhere throughout the city and so have cars available nearby, no matter where you are.

There is still license fees on the car - aggregated, but still there.

I already aggregate the cost of maintenance across all my personal driving: there is no cost savings. (if you do your own work it is more expnesive)

A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max (q.5 minutes on average). If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership. Walking counts as exercise, like it or not your doctor wants you to get more.

Rural areas yes - but rural areas have a lot longer to wait for a shared car.

> I already aggregate the cost of maintenance across all my personal driving: there is no cost savings.

No, aggregated across all drivers, not just aggregated across your driving. As in, 1 million drivers insuring, licensing and maintaining 1 million cars costs far more than 1 million riders sharing 200,000 cars whose insurance, licensing and maintenance is aggregated by a riding sharing service like Uber, and those savings will show up in your final bill, ie. total cost of ownership of your own car will exceed using ride sharing services with self-driving cars for virtually all people.

> A bus wait can be as little as 3 minutes max

It can be as little as 0 minutes if you get there at the perfect time. That's irrelevant though. Worst case and average case wait times are what's important.

> If it isn't the is the fault of lack of ridership.

No, it's the lack of sufficient incentive and benefits to use transit. America is not Europe.

It won't be 1 million riders sharing 200,000 cars. It will be 1 million sharing 900,000 cars at best. There is a reason a single occupant car is by far the most common - for the individual it is the easiest, most convenient choice. No waiting for a shared car, leave when you want, keep your personal things in the car for latter.

The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.

That's all conjecture. Queueing theory can plan spare capacity for any level of utilization. The higher the utilization, the lower the cost to the individual rider, ie. the more sharing that's allowed or encouraged, the lower the cost. The sharing equilibrium is almost certainly not 10%.

> The same lack of incentive and benefits to use transit applies to shared cars.

Sure, but the increased convenience of not needing a shared meetup/dropoff of transit is considerable. The biggest cause of traffic into and out of a city is the 1 driver commute from the outlying regions. If car ownership were more expensive than ride sharing, most of these people would use ride sharing because it has the convenience benefits of car ownership with the efficiency benefits of transit. The ride sharing equilibrium in this model would be upwards of 70% for rush hour, at least.

Non-rush hour times would have fewer cars on the road because the cars would park themselves when utilization falls. This is more efficient and more convenient than transit.

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