So I think that could reduce the need for parking and the amount of traffic just by increasing the utilization rate of cars.
I could see a scenario where instead of (or in addition to) vehicles being pooled between "x" random people (taxis, Uber/Lyft, ZipCar), you could purchase a fractional share of a car (Cf. NetJets): you get semi-exclusive use of (particular?) vehicles.
They do reduce parking requirements, though.
And when you're not?
And couldn't the car assist in the calculation?
People with kids, especially suburban ones, seem to use the vehicle as a sort of mobile operating base. So the car isn't just a taxi. It's where the kids' sports stuff goes. Plus the folding chairs for the games. Plus snacks and water on hand. Plus it gets used as a storage locker when they're out somewhere. And it has assorted useful stuff, like charging cables and wet wipes and sunglasses and spare napkins and and and...
So I expect fractional ownership will not be particularly popular for a lot of people because a) they're already used to owning a vehicle, and b) they don't want to have to take everything out of the car all the time.
Maybe it's different in other parts of the world, but that seems to be the way it works here in Chicago.
Originally, growing up in St Louis, I avoided driving because I saw lots of friends wasting their time in shit jobs to pay for their shit cars; cars were supposed to provide freedom, but were really a gateway to the shackles of work. I suppose that's another reason beyond 'it's inconvenient,' though.
Personally, I hate owning vehicles and desperately want a self-driving taxi service that I can order via an app to get me and my family around.
And I think it would be cheaper. The optimal use for a product that is depreciating in value whether you use it or not, is to use it as much as possible. We are paying for our cars for sit in place all day and night.
This is the real reason ppl will own cars for the foreseeable future. Same reason I prefer a detatched home with a private/fenced yard. I'd probably get used to high-density living, but I doubt if I'd ever really prefer it.
Labor is about half of the cost of a hired ride. We know this is true for Uber because there is a lot of public discussion about the budget of a rideshare driver. Not sure about taxis.
Given those premises and assumptions, a person who doesn’t want to drive would care about self-driving tech because it could eventually lower the cost of hiring a ride, potentially by 50%.
This future sounds great until you consider what it really means to let “someone else” become the arbiter of you being able to get around.
If I have a car in my driveway, I can make sure it is charged/fueled for whenever I need it and I can just turn it on and go. Compare that to a system who’s goal is not specifically moving you, but keeping cars/assets always on paid trips. Sure, you may in luck if you live in a well-off areas where many trips are taken, but I fear peak hours will become something of a bidding war where nobody wins.
If you do not control your means of transport, someone else does and they can take it away from you at any time. This “rent seeking” is one of the biggest cancers on our society and I will be no part of it given the choice.
Assuming we're discounting things like bicycles, family member's vehicles and company-owned vehicles, this is present day reality for the overwhelming majority of people on this planet.
(It's also debatable whether a car truly eliminates other people from being an arbiter of "being able to get around" if you are still reliant on a fossil fuel supply chain. By comparison an EV charged with a domestic solar array would probably more liberating.)
By comparison, yes. But where are you going to go, or what are you going to do, that isn't dependent on other ppl in some way? I like the idea of being self-supporting as much as anyone, but that doesn't change the fact that we're all interdependent in modern society.
Yes, bikes and other things may exist, but if all high-powered transport is outside of our control, how much control do we have over our movements?
That being said, I think a lot of people in the US purchase cars through auto loans, and those loans while not physically limiting one's day-to-day mobility, can restrict one's job mobility. Maybe it only applies to certain economic classes, yet I imagine some people may be afraid to leave their job or lose their job because if they do, they lose their car and therefore lose their ability to move. And the safety net for physical movement in some places if one doesn't have a car is close to zero.
The car does provide "freedom of movement" in a libertarian fantasy way, but in reality one gives up your privacy with a drivers license. Speed traps and cameras track license plates, police can stop you, and you need to be sober. You are paying rent in the form of license fees and parking tickets; and you are paying for fuel which relies upon a long and complicated supply chain.
In urban areas, one might imagine other types of freedom. Such as the choice of walking/biking/bus/taxi/tram/subway in addition to driving, or some combination of those.
> I fear peak hours will become something of a bidding war where nobody wins.
If only there was a public option that wasn't surge-priced.
I think self-driving cars could (and probably will) net worsen the traffic problem, but the above is not necessarily correct. If we ever get them working properly, self-driving cars can collaborate in ways that humans can't. E.g., imagine a busy freeway. In theory, cars going similar ways could form a sort of peoloton, communicating with one another about intention and circumstance. So you could have a group of cars going from one city to another traveling at high speed very close together, saving fuel and space.
But yes, generally anytime we make something easier, people do it more, so I expect any road efficiency gains to be swamped by increased demand.
So what I'm more curious about is if self-driving enables more options for ride sharing, just as Uber had Uber pool, at a cheaper price, perhaps it could open up more options (at different prices) between riding with 50 strangers on a bus or taking a 4-seat car by myself?
Overall, I don't know if cars on road at time X will go up or down. Heck, if there aren't cars parking on the streets, then some roads in cities may even add two extra lanes for traffic, which could reduce traffic further.
But as others have pointed out, ridesharing companies with drivers haven't really reduced traffic, so maybe self-driving cars won't either, however I seem to think it'll be more of a step change when cars drive themselves.
Well, yes it is.
Cars are expensive: lease ($200+/month), maintenance ($100/mo), gas ($50/mo), insurance ($120/month), garage ($200/month). WAG of $670/month. That's 15 to 40 short-ish Uber rides/month.
Commute an hour each way every day, and have free parking? Buy that car. Have it available for occasional trips to the grocery store? Uber is almost certainly cheaper. And, if autonomous taxis become real then the price will go down even further.
This is all moot because, if driving places gets cheaper, traffic will get worse, which was the original point.
If we go to first principles, I think what would matter the most is at least how often someone uses a car, how one uses it, and where one lives, to determine whether ownership or renting (Uber is just very short-term rental with a driver included, no?) is cheaper in total cost.
Just how would owning a car be cheaper than getting an uber that one time per year?
Now do the same math for driving 5 times a day.
Do you see why you can’t just say “Car ownership is cheaper than Uber”, unqualified?
So there was a recent article (in Slate, I believe?) by someone who had driven for Lyft ten years ago and who did it a little bit this year just to see how it changed. They said that the chief thing was that Lyft's take was significantly larger than it used to be, about 40% of the total fares collected.
Which, like, you're looking at that and it seems reasonable, right? Let's step into our time machine, though, and look at fare breakdowns in the taxi era, where the way you got a ride was by calling up a dispatcher who would send out a car. In that era, drivers got to take home about 85% of the total fares.
So: we've gone from a non-automated system where the driver makes a supermajority of the money, to a more-automated system where the driver is taking in significantly less.
And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "A ha! The driver is taking in more than half the money! You are simply proving my point~!!1!"
Here's the deal:
* Less importantly: the cost of auto maintenance, something that would have to be carried by the company if the car were self-driving, falls upon the driver
* More importantly: for some reason I cannot begin to intuit, rideshare companies have managed to introduce vastly more overhead costs, even though one would expect that going from a human-dispatch to an automatic-dispatch system would cut overhead.
I suspect that if one of the rideshare companies actually rolled out working self-driving cars (so Waymo, not Tesla), they would somehow find a way to make rides actually more expensive.
And it’s not like there isn’t competition, we have both Lyft and Uber overlapping in many places and people can chose between them.
I’d really like to see a chart or something shows where Lyft/Uber fees goes.
There has to be a lot of inefficiencies. My suspicion is there is a lot of white collar bloat.
Previously customer service was non-existent. If a taxi didn’t show up, we just got screwed. There wasn’t even anyone to call for the issue. On the apps I instantly get a credit to help ease the burden and the driver has their rating reduced.
For many reasons customer service is very expensive and it’s not yet automated. That’s one big additional variable to keep in mind.
And that's not the first time I've had such poor service recently. Lyft used to be pretty good a few years ago but not it's just garbage.
You could call the dispatcher, who was physically local to you. Today's apps, maybe you get some ZenDesk type thing, or in-app chat to some large, faceless corporation, and my admittedly limited experience is these things tend to be very dismissive of customers, viewing support mainly as cost and trying to get rid of customers rather than addressing issues.
At least in my town, Ubers are more expensive than that. I can't seem to find a trip anywhere for under $15, even if its a few miles away, or like $3 per mile. Longer trips are more economical, but for example, my airport (40 miles away) is quoting me $80 at the moment, or $2 per mile. Also, these prices don't include tip.
I think if you lived in a big city with public transportation and occasionally took Uber, it would be more economical than a car. But as a 100% replacement, Ubers appear to be 3 to 5 times more expensive than having your own car.
And by the way, that AAA data is from a brand new car. You can easily go cheaper by getting a reliable used car.
source: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
Prefer bikes, then fail to public transit (there's typically more options than you expect, once you start exploring; also you can often bring your bike...), and only then fail to Uber.
Edit: because if we half self-driving cars, do we also get self-driving buses and now we can have a lot more bus routes? Is lack (or cost) of labor one thing that holds back the number of buses we have? Could we have more mini buses? Just curious how much the labor factors into the transit options we have. Maybe it doesn't that much, I don't know.
Cars were largely a mistake.
Right now if you are rich you can just hire a driver and a luxury car, and be much more wasteful with your resources, so I don't see the difference in terms of inequality.
I don't think that necessarily means adding more self-driven taxis would increase traffic.
Perhaps, but I don't think it's a given.