I think this is just complacency and a bias towards how things are; imagine a world in which biking is safe, pedestrians are safe, and huge amounts of the city don't have to be devoted to parking. That's what 24/7 driverless cars can enable.
If I'm short on time, going to the airport, or my eyes are dilated from going to the optometrist or something, I'll use Lyft or Uber. This is like a once a month or less occurrence, (as you might guess since dilated eyes are one of my main reasons for using a car... I don't go to the optometrist that often.)
So I'm a world where few people own care, you might expect something like this. The car costs are up front per trip, not sunk as they are when you own the car, so you should see people thinking more rationally about their trip planning.
Also, every parked car is one that isn't being used. So if there is lots of parked cars, that means you would need a lot fewer driverless cabs to replace them.
I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber.
Big Tech has way, way too much power already. Please don’t give them any more of it.
Seems like a red herring. I think it’s safe to assume that you will be able to own your own SDC, and the faster Google gets this tech scaled, the sooner you can affordably purchase one.
I don’t think the self driving car cheerleaders have thought this out.
The tech to do this is getting easier each year.
Why would this be any different with SDCs? The tech might be getting easier, but current market forces make it far easier for the big players to monopolize the market.
Then again, they haven't always done well with that in supplier selection. You might be right, they might end up largely tying themselves to a few suppliers.
OTOH, the network effects shouldn't be as strong. It isn't hard to imagine FOSS options like OpenPilot continuing to exist.
With Google (and big tech) squeezing more and more for profits, some here even proclaiming it the new IBM, I don't see this ending with consumers winning.
It doesn’t seem to me like there’s a big competitive moat other than $xxb in R&D costs, so if there is unmet consumer demand for self-owned SDC, it’s probably safe to assume someone will cough up the R&D costs.
Which pretty much means that in this future, you will have no choice but to use a self-driving car. Which gives disproportionate power to automobile/SDC companies.
If the only motorized way to move from point A to B was Amtrak, I would be worried about the power Amtrak has over my physical movement too.
- You require a car manufacturer like Ford or Toyota to manufacture and sell you a vehicle.
- You require an insurance company to cover your liability.
- The government must issue you a license, which it may take away at any time for not abiding by its traffic laws.
Google is not beholden to any democratic process and can summarily deny my request to go somewhere.
Just reducing it to only the people who choose to drive will make a big difference.
Great news! If you join the tens of thousands of people who die from driving related deaths every year in the US, you won’t have to.
But surely I can’t be the only one concerned about companies that already own my digital lives now also encroaching upon my physical life?
We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.
Where I live, it gets so brutally hot and humid in the summer that people literally collapse and die if they do anything much outdoors.
The reason it gets so hot in cities is because it's a concrete wasteland that traps heat because of, guess what, cars.
Here's an experiment to show said effect - same city, same day, very different street layouts: https://doemee.leiden.nl/uploads/55aa69e8-fb15-4ccc-8335-9b6...
The main difficulty is making sure the self driving transit vehicles are safe enough that people feel comfortable taking them instead of individual cars. Even though you are statistically speaking less likely to get shot on Philly public transit than you are to die in a car crash on a Philly highway, many people still choose to drive because there's a shooting on transit every few months or so and other less serious disorder on a more regular basis. I assume the same is also true in other cities like San Francisco or New York.
I'm strongly in favor of walkable cities and public transit but most people are going to choose cars and suburban sprawl if it means not having to deal with rampant crime. So anybody who wants to get rid of cars and car dependent suburbs needs to be in favor of both locking up the criminals (in a manner that respects their rights to due process of course) and addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty, bad schools, drugs, etc.) so we don't end up with another generation of hardened criminals.
Cars moving over the next 15 years to be much safer for pedestrians/cyclists could be a big shortcut on this path.
My point is: even the bicycle capitals of the world (Amsterdam, etc) have equal car and bike trips per day, and it's taken a long time to get there.
Do you suggest biking?
If the prospect of this happening was somehow grounded in reality, that is.