AVs will help reduce pedestrian deaths and reduce car ownership. While they are still cars and don't solve all car problems like traffic, most reasonable urbanists seem to support them.
Really? Since when has making using something more convenient reduced ownership of it?
The less of a pain it is to take a car somewhere, the more often people will take cars places. It's very slightly possible that there will be fewer total cars all running at a higher utilization, but the mean number of cars on the road at any given time would seem like it would only go up.
Are you saying we should not debate the meaningful impacts here because OP mentioned a related aspect that has little to no impact?
Parking is an extremely major urban land use issue, and its related to, well, not ownership per se but vehicles being possessed and stored by the usual occupant. On-demand use of not-personally-stored (whuch probably means fleet-owned) AV’s is radically freeing for urban land use, and is probably one of the least disruptive ways to transition from car-dependent to not-car-dependent urban design, with on-demand AVs as a bridge technology.
These will be more convenient, but also dramatically more expensive, and _that_ certainly reduces the ownership of things.
> the mean number of cars on the road at any given time would seem like it would only go up
That's orthogonal to the question of level of ownership -- these can both be true simultaneously.
And it may even be the case that the number of cars on the road goes down. The idea would be that if these services are convenient enough for more people to forego owning their own vehicle in favor of using a fleet, the economics on a per-trip basis would change: now, for car owners, owning a car has a high fixed cost and very low marginal cost per trip, so once you've bought the car, registered it, insured it, etc., you're incentivized to use it for as many trips as possible to recoup your investment. Using a fleet service, you would have low/no fixed costs and comparatively higher per-trip costs, meaning that for some trips, it might be cheaper to take transit, bikeshare, etc. A lot would come down to the specifics of pricing, though, so it's hard to predict with any certainty.
*if everyone suddenly wants to buy the amazing new self-serving cars then that could effect the used car market
Yes making them dramatically more expensive would reduce ownership. I suspect they will be expensive at first, but can't think of any reasons they won't get cheaper with time.
>> the mean number of cars on the road at any given time would seem like it would only go up
> That's orthogonal to the question of level of ownership -- these can both be true simultaneously.
It's not orthogonal, but they aren't completely tied together. Per-car utilization would have to go up for them both to be true.
> And it may even be the case that the number of cars on the road goes down. The idea would be that if these services are convenient enough for more people to forego owning their own vehicle in favor of using a fleet, the economics on a per-trip basis would change: ...
Again this seems to presuppose that self-driving cars will require a significantly higher capital outlay (or perhaps that cities not named "New York" will make parking significantly more burdensome, though that could happen without self-driving cars). If a new self-driving car costs a few thousand more than a non-self driving car, and enough people buy new ones that a thriving used market occurs, the outcome would instead be to move people from "Of course I take transit to work; it's only a bit longer and I can read" towards using cars.
Only if you force everyone to use self-driving cars exclusively. No one sane is proposing that.
That’s an increased use not increased ownership argument. The reduced ownership argument is that AVs make on-demand use without ownership easier, reducing the degree to which regular use necessitates ownership.
> It's very slightly possible that there will be fewer total cars all running at a higher utilization, but the mean number of cars on the road at any given time would seem like it would only go up.
Sure, but that's a different issue. On the flip side, casual AV use doesn’t require parking at either end of the users trip (it still needs some place to park when idle and to the extent that is remote you get extra empty travel distance, but that’s still a lot more urban spacr use flexibility than traditional auto usage.