I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
Never seen a self-driving-car in person, but I assume it's the standard 4-seater sedan layout, right?
I was in a Jaguar. The one they show on their site [1].
Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.
Re traffic: with robot-driven cars, congestion pricing would be technically easy. This is an example of not considering possibilities created by the new tech.
In fact, today the area around elevated freeways is often much cheaper than the surrounding area for several blocks.
People with lower income benefit from having a decent bus system that doesn’t require them to pay $10K a year on a car.
Could you pick a worse example?
Realistically, what breaks efficiencies in the US is city design: Places of work mostly detached from activities and housing, pretty much guaranteeing inefficiency. The robotaxis don't make a difference here: The max number of people looking to travel at once doesn't change, and neither does their destination. This makes the number of vehicles actually on the road not change very much at all: The best you can do is hope for people being comfortable (and not inconvenienced) by carpooling with strangers, not unlike what lyft and uber offer already. In the middle of the day, there's no new demand for robotaxis: They'd be parked somewhere, and every mile they move is a car/mile of congestion they create. So you either park the cars where the jobs are, getting, in practice, the same results as private vehicles, or you park them somewhere else, increasing total congestion. It's not just robotaxis that would park: See what happens in all the train commuter lines in American cities, where most trains just get parked in a yard.
The miracle of cities with top transit (See, for instance, Madrid), is that a relatively high percentage of the network is about equally busy in both directions. Trains might stop in rush hour, but route 6 will be useful in either direction most of the time, with little waste compared to US cities. This is the real weakness of the argument of just adding more transit: What we need to make it work is basically urban rebuilds. IMO still a good idea, bit it's a far slower, and more expensive problem than it might appear.
They make not taking your car with you a bit more feasible, and that’s a start at least.
Think about uses like DoorDash. Instead of (in a city) walking to nearby restaurants, we now replace a larger share of those dinners with ones where cars are driving back and forth across the city to pick up the food and deliver it. This will only become more common when the cost drops by not having to pay a human being, and so we can expect a much greater volume of traffic from this one example use.
Other currently-marginal use cases will see equivalent growth due to the similar economics.
Delivering on this requires some sort of "Uber Pool" like algorithm to put a few people together in a vehicle, but doesn't require large busses.
Average occupancy of a car is 1.5 in the US, and that number shrinks as household size declines.
(It’s also worth noting that there’s no reason that automated technologies wouldn’t also spread to buses and trains. In fact, you can already automate trains. The big win there, is that buses represent massive fleet commonality.)
It depends. For example, you can theoretically fit more people into crowded bike lanes than you can into crowded streets. But around here at least, bike lanes don't get a lot of people. I lived by one for years that I don't think I ever saw a bicycle on once. But even when not in use, all of that space is still being set aside for cyclists.
Where a wide high-quality network is deployed quickly, you do often see high ridership increases, but usually in the US what you see is a bunch of scattered lanes that barely reach anywhere in an unbroken link, and no one wants to ride a journey that is even 5% dangerous.
But for example, London has seen 25% growth since pre-COVID by deploying more lanes widely: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-cycling-covid-...
Also, there was that case with the Uber self-driving car hitting the person crossing the street with a bicycle in Phoenix, because they had turned off the bicycle detection resulting in automatic braking.
Car-like vehicles have massive inefficiencies, because the act of merging into and out of other lanes is inefficient.
A train line can carry up to 80k people per direction per hour. The FHWA’s estimate of a car lane car capacity is 2k people per direction per hour. And because cars have to eventually dump onto a surface network that requires timed cycles so that pedestrians and cyclists can cross the street, these low capacity segments are actually the bottleneck.
However, a bus can carry a hundred people comfortably. Ten buses instead of a thousand cars results in much leas congestion.
They cannot.
> I don’t see how self driving cars would take up significantly more space than mass transit while on the road.
They would take up more space because they're cars. Cars can't get to similar efficiencies of space compared to buses unless you compared packed private cars with sparsely ridden buses. And then of course, there's trains.
Perhaps someday we'll have all self driving cars that can safely coordinate and pack themselves into smaller spaces on the road, but that's decades away at a minimum, since you'd first need to get rid of all manually driven cars.