Driverless cars won’t be good for the environment if they lead to more auto use

Which will mean turning up to the suburbs at 8am to drive downtown by 9am. Without a drastic, permanent change in working hours & commuting (or permanent WFH) the minimum number of cars will barely change.

Traffic is quite bursty: there is a lot of generally unidirectional demand for trips during the morning rush hour, and then generally unidirectional demand in the opposite direction during the evening rush hour, and much less demand for anything in between.

Shared-use vehicles exist (the taxis you mention, as well as car shares and rental cars) and with the exception of cities that have extremely expensive car ownership costs most people still choose to own a personal vehicle for commuting. Would you rely on the availability of a shared vehicle during rush hour to meet your commuting needs?

I have a very hard time imagining many Americans who live in a suburb or car-dependent city giving up their private vehicle no matter how cheap or reliable shared vehicles become. Perhaps if car ownership became two or three times more expensive (e.g. carbon taxes on new vehicles, no parking minimums, paying market rates for parking spaces, etc) people might switch, but I am skeptical that any of those will come to pass as long as most voters drive cars.

Cars are typically only discarded once they hit a certain distance. No matter if the car is a taxi or a personal car, it will be discarded after the same number of miles.

You also need to buy enough cars for the worst possible scenario, which is the peakiest of peaks.

Unlike a personal car, robotaxis will also be replaced as soon as it economically efficient to do so, whereas cars are typically eventually driven past the point at which they are economically viable by someone.

I do not believe there will be a significant decrease in car manifacture.

The only way it could be is if instead of robotaxis, we built robobuses that carry 5-6 people on average.

According to the Kurzgesagt video about climate change and how to stop it, what's even more significant is the carbon emmissions of road construction. Apparently a single meter of road is equivalent to one car. If we increase car use, we need more roads and those roads need more maintenance and all that has a big carbon budget.

We simply need to move our society away from private car infrastructure. My opinion is that a well-designed urban environment built for a mix of electric trains, buses, and e-bikes, with dense housing and mixed use zoning would work really well, as shown in places like Scandinavia, Holland, etc.

It becomes less workable when you need to travel as a family with kids, car seats, strollers, other equipment. Having a dedicated vehicle that belongs to you and is always at the place where you left it is immensely useful in these circumstances.

- Spontaneity: You need to wait for the car to show up

- Independence: I would rather be able to do it myself than hire/rent out for the task.

- Personal crap storage: Everyone keeps their Very Precious Crap in their car. For certain trips, it's beneficial to have a car nearby to store things temporarily at a destination.

- Self expression: In America, a huge number of people express their character through their cars. And not just through bumper stickers. What you drive says who you are. People aren't driving absurdly big pickup trucks because they're all contractors and landscapers.

You can argue the practically of these points but that's just like, your opinion man.

I think the only way to reduce cars and car problems is by making cars totally unnecessary for daily life: Denser living with local work or WFH work. Diverse zoning so you're walking around the corner for your cup of coffee rather than a mile away.

Urban life should rightfully be the most efficient and economical approach. The suburbs are subsidized all to hell and the common sense approach is unrecognizable to most people now..

Nope.

The embedded energy in manufacturing a gasoline car is maybe 1/8th or 1/10th its total lifetime emissions. This is why EV's are so much better cradle-to-grave than gasoline cars -- yes, EV's require extra energy to manufacture the batteries relative to a gasoline car, but even so, that extra energy cost is more than offset within the first few months of electricity-powered driving, even if your local grid is primarily coal powered. By far most of a car's lifetime emissions are from operating it, not manufacturing it.

See chart on page 3 of this Union of Concerned Scientists report: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...

Assaults. A 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted 4 months ago. Less than a month ago someone got attacked with a knife. Less than a year ago, three teens were arrested for repeated racially-based attacks. In 2020 (because we don't have numbers for 2021 yet), there were 51 aggravated assaults and 239 "other assaults" despite 59% lower ridership from COVID. And it's not just assaults - drug use around (or sometimes even on) the lightrail is a significant problem (276 reported offenses 2020). Theft is yet another problem.

I'm not bringing my family (or even myself) anywhere near the lightrail. I'd prefer to drive just for their safety and mine. I know it's worse for the environment but their safety is my first concern.

And such is the problem with public transit. It's easy to think of it as reducing load on the environment while forgetting that lax law enforcement turns it into a somewhat scary place to be with family members.

But your model might work in shithole cities like San Francisco. No one can leave stuff in their cars because they have to park on the street and auto burglaries are rampant.

A taxi model means you can compete for market share by being fastest to respond, which means you can fill the roads to the brim with your vehicles to push your competitors out of the market with sheer capital expenditure. You would be further incentivized to do this through economies of scale.

You only need to look at how taxi freelancer apps increased the number of vehicle miles on the roads in all major cities and how bike rental apps filled urban areas with bikes annoyingly scattered all over the place.

Any car based transport vision of the future means more cars on the road, and consequently more car-focused infrastructure.

To really be more efficient you need to focus on passenger miles / unit of energy, which very decidedly means mass transit.

Is that true? I expected the exact opposite.

edit: This seems to be true for buses (see replies), but what about for trains? I'd be very surprised.

I object, although I know this is a side point. Trucking is one of the largest sectors of employment in America. If driving a large vehicle was so inherently undesirable that nobody would train into it, how do you explain... that?

I'll grant that being a bus driver isn't as romanticized as being a truck driver. But at least part of that is because the companies that hire truck drivers market the profession as a lifestyle and the cities that hire bus drivers generally do not.

If we existed as a species at only slightly higher density and energy efficiency there would be a lot more space for wilderness - the good news is that climate change mitigation is also consistent with that goal!

I really question whether that will happen. Floating car-sharing does not seem to have affected car ownership significantly, and it provides similar benefits. People obviously still want to own their specific car.

Is there some solid research out there that indicates that the footprint of this mining practice is much worse?

Uhaul is really optimized for what they do and doing it cheaply. Unless Ford and GM start making driverless vehicles Uhaul won't be going driverless.

I claim without evidence that the greater contributor to inefficient fuel use is needlessly abrupt acceleration and deceleration, rather than top speed, and hopefully self driving cars do help with that.

Roads require materials & energy to maintain. They also take up a LOT of space and slice up the natural world in a way that wrecks ecosystems.

Personal autos as the default method of transportation requires sprawly, inefficient land use. When every destination is build to accomodate the car, every errand comes to require the car. This is a bad thing, even if your car isn't directly burning gasoline.

Building roads everywhere in and of itself is a pretty dramatic change to our natural habitat.

Whether that's a positive or not is I think an undecidable problem.

Similarly, electric cars in areas were power generation primarily comes from fossil fuels are worse for the environment currently. At some point in the future they might all be green energy, but most places around the world that is not the case yet.

There is a lot of nuance to these problems. Electric cars will be very important in the future for emissions saving, but currently are in the negative.

For getting cars around a city electric makes sense. For longer highway trips it is questionable for cars (I know people do it, but they spend a lot more time recharging).

OTOH, if electric is enough cheaper maybe trucking companies will be willing to have their loads take longer. I'm guessing a mix, cargo that needs to be there fast will run diesel fuel, less time sensitive cargo will run electric (but trains still compete well on cost for this)

Electric cars still produce greenhouse gases since our grid is not 100% renewable yet. Brake dust and asphalt also contribute to local air pollution.

I have already noticed in my own household that an electric car has reduced bicycle usage because it's perceived as less polluting than an ICE car, so for certain borderline trips where we might have previously opted for bicycles we opt for the e car.

And of course there are the romantics who think we'll be able to convince people to give up individual car ownership and therefore do away with parking.

Clearly "relax and enjoy" is problematic. Maybe there should be regulations for comfort offsets in vehicles with automation capability. Maybe seats that are unadjustable and too upright, reduced sound damping or reduced audio offerings.

Uncomfortable chairs would become known in the restaurant industry as “15-minute chairs.” Charles Eames’ fiberglass scoop chair (shown above) might be an example, offering little possibility of posture realignment.

https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/2012/04/09/eat-and-...