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Comment by thebradbain | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes! Would love to know how the crowd that protests better public transit, pedestrian paths and bike lanes as “taking away space from cars” will respond to roads being further clogged with… empty cars?

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.

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The problem everybody is ignoring with self-driving cars is that roads already are too expensive to maintain. Self driving cars will require tighter upkeep because they have lower margins for error, ballooning already ludicrous budgets to maintain the six million mile roadway network. Humans can drive drunk on wet gravel in the dark, but a computer needs full GPS, lidar, radar, and motion sensing cameras just to follow well painted paved roads. When there is no downtime and roads are constantly being used they will wear down faster and the computers will cause more crashes. Drains and manholes sink, paint fades, shoulders crumble, curbs deform, and bridges crack. Accelerate this by three, maybe four times and the entire nation will go bankrupt within a decade trying to pay to keep everything running just so autonomous cars can stay the default.

> roads being further clogged with… empty cars

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.

It might go somewhere to pick up a package.

To be fair, the current cars on the road are, on average, almost empty.

Don't know why you're being dv, I back this up:

- 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...

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