Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars. I think the US should strive to reduce car ownership by 75% over the next 20 years, at least in cities over a certain population size. I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars. But I'm also a grown-up of a certain age and realize the bright-eyed 20-somethings don't understand the meaning of the word "consequences".
(And yes, all of this means that Tesla and most other traditional automotive company's stated commercial strategy for self driving makes little sense)
I've only seen this as a 'just so' greenwash pr story from the automotive industry to offset the projected 300% increase in total road miles driven anually. Please explain why peole would be compelled to ditch their multidude of private cars just because they now come with a 24/7 free driver included?
We’re really going to spend billions and billions on further car infrastructure, more reduction in space-constrained cities towards pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and even the displacement of existing homes and communities for… empty cars?! If it weren’t so depressing, it’s a perfect indictment of the US’s car culture taken full circle.
Presumably the car is going to pick someone up. That means it isn't parked being useless. If this starts working at scale, supply and demand will pull ridesharing costs down in a way that reduces ownership.
- regarding my city (Paris) most sides are literally full of parked empty cars. I don't have the data but anywhere you go - apart the biggest boulevards and walkable very-inner-center - you'll see way more parked cars than driving ones. Indeed, 50% of space is allocated to cars while they represent 13% of the commutes [1].
- Vehicle occupancy was 1.5 in 2019 and is declining (US) [0].
0 https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/perso...
1 (fr) https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2016/11/30/a-pa...
"Because owning a car is expensive."
That hasn't stopped families from getting multiple cars thus far, so why should that change?
"And owning a self-driving car is likely to be even more expensive."
I sincerely doubt that. Just think of all the potential for selling services and preload deals on what is basically a rolling networked computer with the user literally captured inside. You might have to pay more if you want the non-add supported version or the one without the bundled subscriptions.
1. Renting a car will become much more convenient. I can summon a car instead of having to search one 3 blocks away.
2. Selling a car with an L5-autopilot will have to include a manufacturer warranty/insurance in cases of crashes resulting from a fault of the autopilot. Tesla is already charging 10k (or 15k?) for their shitty self-driving-gimmick without a warranty. I expect L5-autopilots to cost much more and even come at a yearly subscription (which basically offsets the insurance and the required continued development). I don't expect the average person will (be able to) pay that subscription, when the far more reasonable solution is to rent a car.
A fully autonomous car (however unrealistic it may be) would be a game changer simply for the economics alone. Not paying full tax, insurance etc for a vehicle while retaining all of the transport possibility would be incredibly tempting to anyone on a budget. Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability.
I’m not saying any of this will happen but fully autonomous cars definitely would open the door to a lot of opportunities.
Car sharing (short term rental) services already exist and can be a great option for childless young people who live in a dense city and seldom leave it. We don't need autonomous vehicles to make such services work. But they're totally unsuitable for how most Americans actually live. Like am I supposed to summon a shared vehicle every time I need to take one of my children to sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster? The whole concept is just totally impractical regardless of the economics.
Everyone needs to go to school or sports practice at about the same time, everyone wants to go out on Friday nights and not Monday nights, everyone needs a car for monthly shopping at around the end of the month and everyone takes their vacation at around the same time each year due to school vacations.
When demand goes up, not only will it cost more, but there is no guarantee that you'll even get a car on time.
Uber and suchlike work currently because almost everyone uses them rarely, not four times a day.
I would expect self driving car to have much higher utilization most of the time. In addition you have people who can't/don't want to drive and would be able to use the service.
> practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly?
Effectively it would be a much cheaper (supposedly) Uber/Lyft/etc. alternative.
> sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And
That's a bit of corner case and generally I would expect it would reduce the number of households which have more than 1 car rather than a full replacement for car ownership.
Driving children to activities is hardly a "corner case". It's bizarre how disconnected many HN users are from how regular middle class Americans live. Very few married couples with children would be able to manage with one car; they often need to go different places.
> And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster?
When I said it's a corner case but pasted the wrong sentence.
> You're really missing the point. It won't actually be cheaper except for the few customers who rely mostly on public transportation.
Am I? Why would you not expect it to become cheaper overtime? Uber/etc. needs human drivers who need to be paid and car sharing is inefficient because because most cars end up somewhere where none needs them unless there is continuous bidirectional traffic which is pretty rare. Self driving in theory would solve both these issues.
> Very few married couples with children would be able to manage with one car; they often need to go different places.
Yes well they could in theory get two separate self-driving taxis they don't have to always stay in the same car together.
Ride sharing services are amenable to network affects. I.e. they tend to end in monopoly. And monopolies are not known for reducing costs for the customer. If some effective regulation could counter the network effect, i.e. make it easier and cheaper to switch between different sevices, then a monopoly could be avoided.
Are they? Currently it's a low margin business with no real moat. It's hard to maintain high market share without continues subsidies.
> make it easier and cheaper to switch between different sevices
What barriers and/or costs are there for consumers which would make it difficult for them to switch between different services?
This is a purely political decision that does not depend on the availability of autonomous vehicles. It won't happen because it would reduce property prices.
Autopilots immediately get rid of that so I would disagree and argue the less humans the better. Have fun playing around with the "politeness" lever for example:
That adds up very quickly, and when you consider the presence of intersections and traffic lights, you aren't dealing with an isolated roadway where cars just...drive. There are very real limits on how many cars you can stuff in a given stretch of road without radically redesigning roads in a way that makes them entirely unusable for pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. replacing traffic lights with slot-based intersections[0]), meaning there's an upper limit to how much self-driving cars can limit congestion under the most optimistic scenarios.
When self-driving cars eventually manage to take hold, no one reasonably expects car traffic not to increase. Right now, you park your car and do things. There's no real opportunity cost, because you can't be two places at once. When your car can drive around on its own, there's now a real opportunity cost. If it can earn money for you with no human present, there's going to be a massive incentive to let it do so. Stores will use self-driving delivery vehicles--either their own or as part of their own delivery sharing services--for deliveries.
Will there hopefully be big improvements in pedestrian safety and decreased accidents? I think so, though they certainly won't eliminate either. But there will be an incredible amount of increased traffic that goes along with it.
Traffic lights are a bitch, changing lanes is inevitable, incidents are inevitable.
Demand might also go up.
Taxis are too expensive in most of the developed world to be that ubiquitous. But they aren’t uncommon in countries where labor is cheaper, which makes me wonder if robo-taxis in the developed world will be as common as human taxis in the developing world.
If you try to scale up ride sharing vehicles so they carry more people, you now have to build specialized vehicles that make multi-stop trips where you pick up multiple parties on-demand and drop them off at their individual locations. You've now eliminated the advantages of ride-sharing or taxis--they pick you up where you want and take you directly where you want to go--and managed to recreate a smaller bus. Let's call it a small, self-driving minibus that's not a bus system but a ride share system.
Only it's much worse than a bus, because bus routes are optimized in a way that vehicles picking up and dropping off passengers at what amounts to random locations on-demand never can be. Plus, you're adding even more vehicles to the road in addition to all the other self-driving cars that are running around making deliveries, looking for parking or running off to the outskirts of the city to kill some time as they wait for their human passenger to summon them again, or hustling to try to pick up passengers to make some money for their owners.
Heck, you can't even have them drive on access-limited busways or bus lanes because, by their very nature, they can't stick to dedicated routes.
Consider this: the Siemens S700 streetcar carries over two-hundred people in its usual configuration[0] with a length of just under 95 feet, or the equivalent of around ~6 cars that are almost bumper-to-bumper and trams can be built to be autonomous.
Self-driving cars have their benefits, but they're not an alternative to actual public transport solutions no matter how we try to dress them up. In the end, and as others have pointed out elsewhere in recent years, every new transit idea eventually boils down to a train. Or, in this case, an actual bus.
0. https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3ce5a...
Even ostensibly pedestrian friendly cities don’t have sufficient political willpower to hand street space over to other modes of transit at anything resembling a fast enough rate. Everything needs to sit in a “pilot” for two years before action is taken.
Cities like San Antonio, TX with its Riverwalk and Atlanta with its Beltline not only show every other city a path towards walkable and sustainable future but also how a city can invest tens of millions in walkable infrastructure that yields billions in economic investment and development.
Also, I don't have a car so I've been taking bus, train, plane, and occasional car rental to travel between towns and cities. Recently I've started taking buses. What I've discovered is that I can get on the bus in the morning, plug in my phone and laptop to AC power, and using my mobile hot spot work all day while on the bus. The buses travel on interstate highways which have excellent continuous mobile service. Amtrak trains are awful for working because lack of stable internet connection.
Furthermore the river walk was built in the 1930s as a way to improve property values, and remodeled a handful of times over the decades, that's not a recent innovation
Doesn't mean a transition is easy or cheap. Nor will it be quick. After spending years and years both in the US and Western Europe, I wish for a healthy mix of cars and public transport. As it stands, this means significantly and heavily reducing cars in high density settlements where public transport is already sufficient or generally viable in the future.
I absolutely love cars and driving but I despise them in city centers. So much property could be regained to improve the daily lives of millions of people in various ways. There is a multitude of projects which have shown how successful this approach is.
One such project is the ban of cars from the Jungfernstieg area in Hamburg. 5 years ago you would walk along Jungernstieg and hundreds of cars would pass by, especially young men showing off their shitty, loud, tuned Mercedes CLAs to everyone. Then the city reduced access for cars there upon popular request and repurposed some lanes for plants and bicycles.
It took a while until people understood [1] but eventually they did. All sources in German.
Before (4-lane road): https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/verkehr-in-hamburg-fahrverbot-au...
After (intermediate car-reduced): https://www.hamburg.de/pressearchiv-fhh/14369764/2020-09-30-...
Future (cars banned): https://www.hamburg.de/bvm/medien/17154924/2023-05-30-bvm-ju...
[1] https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/autoverkehr-am-jungfernstieg-das...
Proposing that autonomous driving is the only way forward sounds pretty sad to me as it doesn't solve the main issue with cars: their environmental impact.
I didn't mean it would be easy to do, nor that it is decently doable to use public transportation in these cities' current state. Sorry if it came out that way.
https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov...
Yanks could do the same if they wanted to, but unfortunately they've been brainwashed into thinking walking is the devil
(1) Weak Federal Government. The US is more a close collection of small nation states than a single country. The kind of infrastructure you’re talking about takes the kind of planning and funding that only a strong federal government can demand.
(2) Strong respect for property rights. In the US, it takes a lot to take away someone’s private property in order re-allocate it to a public good. By now, all of the cities have vested interests speaking for every square inch of viable property.
(3) Weak labor protections. This is a big one. Labor protections are so weak in the private sector that no one in their right mind would depend on public transport if they could help it. Most Americans are one illness away from being bankrupt, fired, and foreclosed on. To make it in America, by any definition, for a vast majority of Americans (and that includes people not traditionally called Americans, like undocumented immigrants) you must have access to a private vehicle because your work place could change in a heartbeat. You could have to move because your town no longer has any jobs for you. You could have to move into your car because of divorce/eviction/foreclosure etc…
People make fun of the F150 drivers with spotless beds because they’re used as glorified, cramped minivans but the truth is every one of those drivers has made that investment because they’re acutely aware of how precariously close they are having to use that truck to do hard labor.
I also want this, but I grew up in LA and thus realize that there are places where this won't happen.
> I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars.
I would take money invested in self-driving cars over money "invested" in public transit in wildly inefficient ways that's less investment and more waste.
The problem with the position that money should go to transit instead of self-driving cars is that transit is a largely intractable problem because it's a political one, where self-driving cars are very much not an intractable problem because they're a technical one.
40,000+ people die every year in the US in car accidents. Self-driving cars have the potential to stop many of those deaths (and the injuries not counted in that). Investment in public transit, when you consider the practical realities, largely doesn't. I understand why folks prefer public transit as a solution, but self-driving cars will be a lifesaving technology, and on that basis they seem clearly worthy of investment.
And this is all doubly true since this isn't government money - it's VCs and private companies putting their cash towards solving a problem that's beneficial towards society. Why hold up public transit as the alternative to self-driving investment when there is absolutely no chance that these dollars would ever go to public transit?
Investing in public transportation is a much more means tested way of reducing traffic accidents. Countries with good public transportation infrastructure have much less traffic deaths per 100k than car focused countries.
Why? Well it makes sense. Public transportation is much more safe all around as you are greatly reducing the amount of people in charge of machines capable of easily killing others.
So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it. Funny that you would consider public transportation a waste of money when looking at the actual data shows it's the most efficient way of moving people.
Selection bias. By definition, you're looking at public transportation that exists. How many traffic accidents have been reduced by the bullet train in CA that has had $80 billion in investment so far? Zero.
> So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it.
In the cases in which money can be efficiently deployed, you are correct. But has the $80 billion (let's say that again - $80,000,000,000) spent on the CA bullet been more efficient than $80 billion of spending on self-driving cars? Clearly not.
The problem is that there are limits to how much money you can deploy towards public transit at any reasonable level of efficiency. This is true because of geography, and it's true because of politics. In those places where you can use money well on transit, I fully support it, but once you've exhausted those, you're still going to be left with five figures of traffic deaths a year that can be saved by self driving cars.
Also, you ignored my last paragraph - the comparison of spending money on transit vs. self-driving is not one that makes sense, because the money comes from two different places. VCs don't invest in public transit. Google doesn't invest in public transit.
Self-driving cars are something that will provide a huge societal benefit at no cost to taxpayers. If you're a member of the general public, spending money on public transit is infinitely more inefficient than spending money on self-driving cars, because that transit money could be used to benefit you in other ways, whereas the private funding to self-driving cars would probably just be returned to shareholders or invested in other tech companies if it weren't spent there.
The political element follows directly from that: if you aren't a car owner, but you are a bus and taxi user, you stop caring about parking and the specifics of your commute route. The robocar service will lobby the city for their own efficiency in your place - and what benefits their efficiency also benefits the users. So in one stroke you end up with an urban population that is aligned to empty out huge swathes of road space and garages for other uses such as bus lanes, bike parking, etc. People will feel safer on a bike because the cars will drive safely, and this is found in studies to be the main bottleneck to bicycle usage, so investment in dedicated bike infra could flatline in a self-driving environment, and bike usage will still rise!
It's hard to find an angle where there is truly a downside - the doomer response is kneejerk.
We need high speed rail to connect our cities.
Town centers will soon be inaccessible by car, so they'll still need public transport occasionally for that.
If they have a pre-existing medical condition: sure, they can use an alternative method of transportation.
If they don't want to walk for 10 minutes, they're bound to have a medical condition soon-ish.
But hey, you got yours so who cares about others, right?
Perhaps we need to slow down a bit, in general?
I agree with your point in general, I'm just quibbling that speed is the decider.
The major industrial countries have it. Here is is automakers who fight this, nowadays it is Elon Musk, who distracts with BS single file tunnels (Boring Company pushing Teslas in a tunnel) or hyperloop nonsense.
This needs to be a federal infrastructure along the lines of the federal highway system.
This country lacks the national drive and will, which is impeded by Corporate & affiliates like NADA your local 1% in every county in the US.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/rich-republicans...
That being said, I would love it if car reliance was drastically reduced. But it’s not going to happen.
And without a doubt the economy would be just fine in the long run.
It’s survived a depression, WW2, bailing out Europe, Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11, Afghanistan and the 2008 crash after all.
I live in the UK and public transport is actually very unreliable. Cancellations and delays are frequent, strikes happen a dozen times a year, many services have an hour between trains... public transport will take you much linger to get anywhere and you'll be able to transport much less. The car has been a blessing when shopping.
My experience in Germany is that the trains there are even worse. Every single one was delayed by up to half an hour.
Do you want to limit the cars people own or do you want to limit how much cars are used?
I could reduce the number of my cars to 1 and wouldn't be driving any less. Or I could buy more cars and still would not be driving more than I do today (but might be able to choose a smaller more efficient one for a trip).
This would be no different than cancelling the whole train or train route; & stopping or cancelling one's entrance pass to train station.