I think this particular protest is counterproductive. AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc. But protest isn't meant to be convenient.
Highly doubt it.
1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho.
Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :)
2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :)
It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop).
If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.
An AV wouldn't be free to travel that distance but I would absolutely do that and other activities requiring 1+ hour drives each way more frequently if I didn't need to do the driving myself.
I lived in a small village 40 minutes from a big city half my life. There are buses going every 30 minutes each way between around 06:00 and 20:00. They cost under 1 USD per trip. Lots of people use them - kids going to schools, people commuting for work, grandmas who don't have driving licence. I probably used them over 1000 times through my life.
That city isn't even that big - 350 000 people. And the buses are profitable. Why can't cities over million people afford public transport is beyond me.
BTW notice how old people who can't drive still might want to go to a cinema/theater/doctor/whatever without asking their family or paying for a taxi. It's a huge benefit to everybody that these buses are available. I doubt you can get AV profitable transporting 1 person where buses transport 10-20 people.
(And it's about $30 round-trip with parking; I do take it in the rare times when I'm going in for the day to work because driving in and back at rush hour is awful.)
The commuter rail is "fine" but its schedule doesn't really work outside of commuting hours--and even that is significantly worse than pre-COVID.
I'm wondering why there are no such buses where you live? It it a matter of population density, different road network architecture (here most villages are build along the roads so you can put bus stops every 1-2 km and you'll get enoguh passangers to get by), or just a chicken-and-egg problem of customers not being used to it so it's not profitable if you create it?
The surrounding towns--one of which I live in--are pretty rural, or at least exurban, with a very limited commercial tax base and generally don't even have sidewalks outside of the town centers. We'd have neither the density/demand or the budget to have a public transit system.
[0] Which can be fairly accurately described as regions within an acceptable commute of the aforementioned centers. (Or non city job centers a la silicon valley).
Because the residents of his city overwhemlingly prefer cars.
(Hint: in almost all of America, it's this one.)
It's not the only choice and it has lots of bad consequences.
And I'd argue most citizens were never asked about it, it was decided for them by zoning laws and planning commitees in both countries.
And hey look, you're doing it too. "Zoning laws" just magically happened with zero input and somehow radically changed the world without anyone noticing. How did the zoning laws get there? Popularly elected people chosen by the people who live there who made it happen year over year over year. If people didn't like the zoning, they'd vote to change it. That's how it happened in the Netherlands, people elected people who wanted the change.
It was a mess of utopian central planning, good intentions, private capture, bad science, corruption, bad incentives, and never looking back and fixing it. At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
> At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
This is an incorrect take from this though. Those parking minimums coud be changed tomorrow. They could have been changed any time these last 60 years. It doesn't take a federal constitutional amendment. It doesn't take 60 votes in the US senate. Those parking minimums and car centric developments continue to be policy because people continue choosing it. Local elections don't take that many votes to swing! Lots of positions run unopposed every year! They didn't change because the people there didn't care to change it.
Acting like zoning laws are something people can't change and that people don't want is to ignore reality. Zoning laws exist because people choose to have them!
I'm all for cities removing parking minimums. They're often really bad policy. I agree with a lot of things pushed by NotJustBikes and StrongTowns and what not. But acting like nobody wants these policies just isn't reality. Go see the town halls full of people complaing against density, complaining against bike lanes, complaining against transit, complaining against traffic soothing and then tell me nobody wants zoning laws.
This is unambiguously true, but at the same time it's not an answer. There's a deeper problem here that I don't think you can dismiss with "well, people vote for it". Yeah. And people voted for redlining, and people voted for school segregation.
It is very hard not to see (growing up in such places and visiting occasionally still) a deep-seated kind of racism driving a whole lot of that separation, much more than "I want cars". You see elsewhere in the thread the predictable dog-whistles of "crime"--but rural crime is prevalent, too! It's just crime perpetuated by...well...people who look like those worried about crime. You see right-wing influencers on YouTube getting strapped to go to cities or even to Subway restaurants and it's not because of actual incidents--one's more likely to commit suicide with a firearm than to have to "defend oneself". It's just saying the quiet part loud.
At some point we're going to need a societal unfucking, and this is symptomatic (but not causative) of why we need it.
I definitely agree that there's strong overlaps with those demanding far flung remote suburbs, car-centric infrastructure, gun culture, and right-wing ideology. These people want their castles and their tanks to drive around. I do agree this is probably an overall unhealthy culture for our society and do vote against it. In those town halls people argue against densification because "the wrong people" will come into their town, that adding busses will only lead to increased crime rates, etc. I continue to proselytize to those around me about better transit, traffic soothing, right-sizing vehicle choices with realistic needs, pushing for sensible densification, better mixing of zoning, etc. and continue voting for policies to move the needle.
Even if we did, we're fighting uphill against 70 years of suburbanization and the general pattern of very sparse and sprawling development. The level of taxation necessary to make transit work well in many areas would be far more than is politically feasible. Plus there's the perception of public transit being dangerous, for criminals and drug addicts, etc.
You could drive to the nearest transit hub, use public transit for the last 10-30 miles, and still experience a transit without friction.
Or will reduce use of public transit & make traffic worse because the negative effects of traffic will be less felt & the cost of private transit via an AV will be lower
AV adoption will probably be comparable to the effect of Uber. It'll create more traffic on the roads at the expense of gutting the public transit infrastructure and probably create significantly problems than it solves.
On the bright side, parking may become cheaper.
The parking lots for self-driving vehicles can also be significantly more dense than lots for normal vehicles. Current parking lots must reserve half the overall lot for aisles, since every car must be able to leave without any other vehicle moving. A parking lot for autonomous vehicles won't be limited by that restriction and can achieve a higher utilization of the space by filling the aisles with more vehicles.
However, some people will probably decide to commute much longer distances when they no longer need to drive themselves and residential areas will probably end up sprawling even more than they do already.
Why would 90% of people forego paying approximately $1~$5 to travel a dozen miles in their already payed for car vs paying a taxi-cab like fare for an AV? I'm not sure how much it costs to go 10 miles in an AV taxi, but I'm guessing it's $20-$30.
The effect of AVs with respect to strip malls and commercial spaces seems like it'll be a pretty low traffic flow.
Asked another way, how many people take conventional taxis (being Uber/Lyft, or a legit taxi) today to go such places? It seems like the prices are similar, why then would the lack of a human driver make an AV taxi that much more attractive (like, to the point where the 90% of car owners decided to stop driving their own car, which is far cheaper - and then this pattern plays out for long enough that the parking lot situation changes!
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
Counterpoint: pedestrians may be made safer by blockading the roads with unwitting AVs.