Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
"Road Pricing" means that vehicles pay for driving on congested roads. The price is set so that road supply and demand match, and traffic flows optimally. It also gives the road owner an income for providing important roads.
The most congested roads often coincide with the most valuable land in city centres, so charging users (public roads) or owners (private toll roads) based on local land value could be useful. It is also advantageous in that it would be progressive.
Singapore has solved this extremely effectively. Note that the solution is not just on demand pricing but also having good transportation infrastructure that actually is usable and is a viable alternative.
Bay Area has addressed it to some degree but I would not call it solved by any means. They have dynamic pricing which ensure you can pay to go faster during peak times. This is mostly a solution for rich people who can afford the $15-20 tolls one way on 101 but in a pinch the common person may be able to use by paying money. However the US just has no decent public transportation infrastructure that can be relied on a daily basis to live your life normally due to legalized bribery (lobbying) by the by the car companies during the earlier years.
https://www.introducingsingapore.com/taxi#:~:text=With%20som....
Yeah, but people don't like it when we have economic downturns or forced migration.
Extending it further really just ends up as a restriction on the movements of the poor.
All it does is force the poor to sit in traffic while some lanes are reserved for people to whom $12 is inconsequential.
I fail to see how applying this same logic to an entire road makes it any better.
This increases the traffic throughput by maybe 5x, which makes the road much more useful.
How then does your gardener get his truck to your house? Your DoorDash driver? The elderly woman on a fixed income who needs to get to her doctors appointment?
Roads cannot be the domain of the rich. (Also please don't pretend that public transport is even remotely viable in the US)
For many errands, people can avoid rush hours, which may not even need road pricing.
I'll note that all your "poor" examples own a car.
This is actually a key point many city dwelling anti-car advocates completely miss. The poor do depend heavily on cars because they are pushed to the outskirts where they can afford housing but still have to commute to the cities where the jobs are. When I lived outside the Bay Area my car cost me less than what some people here spend on their bikes.
The whole idea is to reduce peak demand. Your gardener doesn’t need to go downtown at the same time as office workers, so they are unlikely to be affected since they’re going to your house rather than your office and they can show up at 10am. Similarly, getting breakfast from DoorDash across town is not a human right - you can order closer to home or pay market rate for use of a couple hundred feet of public space to haul your burrito.
Tolls for entering/leaving the city at certain times (or outright bans for some percentage of cars per day) is more effective.
Neither of these target congestion directly, but road use in general. As a result, they usually fail to do much to slow down driving (since the goal is basically just to fund roads).
>NIMBYs get in the way of building the lanes that already have demand and funding.
Why shouldn't somebody oppose yet more noise, pollution, and traffic in their neighbourhood? That something has externalities on the people around it is a good reason to oppose it.
>Extending it further really just ends up as a restriction on the movements of the poor.
The poorest are in many ways already relegated to using transit, which in most US cities is woefully inadequate for getting around. Effort to make transit more viable can only make these people better off.
We have decades of experience showing building more lanes just induces more demand and the problem gets worse.
But we keep doing it. Because it sounds like it should work.
You could make a genuine argument that demand should not exist because people should be taking busses, trains, submarines, or whatever. But continuing to kneecap public infrastructure only furthers the perception that trains might be a good idea, but will become unreliable and packed when NIMBYs decide to turn their attention to noise or whatever and demand we build less track.
I've been in the Bay Area 20 something years now and I have never seen 101 or 280 meaningfully expanded, so no we haven't actually tried it.
That’s misunderstanding the concept: in our hypothetical superhighway, it’s true that people who already lived on that route wouldn’t buy more cars to drive it but that was never the claim. What was claimed is what we saw throughout the 20th century: people would favor car commutes along that route because it’s faster so they could get more house for their budget by living further out of the cities. That’s fine at first but inevitably hits the spatial inefficiency of cars unless the local economy isn’t active enough, at which point you can’t afford road maintenance.
Gas tax and registration fees are intended to pay for road maintenance, which is also useful, but are way too primitive and unfocused for this purpose.
3 people in the car should be free in all circumstances.
2 people in the car should be free sometimes, but pay a very small fee when the road is very congested.
1 person should always pay a fee. Sometimes small, sometimes large, depending on traffic.
0 people in the car (in the case of autonomous cars) should always pay a phat fee.
This is the only thing that will prevent driverless cars from ruining our awesome road infrastructure in America. If we don't do this, driverless taxi companies will have cars polluting and congesting every public road trying to be capture a ride until they're clogged and useless.
Why would investors do that?
Oh right.
Robotaxis are just an attempt to do Uber without having to pay drivers. They’re not an attempt at fixing congestion. Or safety (though I’m sure they claim it). Or bad public transit.
They’re aiming for the local maxima. “Fix” taxis/Uber as they exist today and make money doing it.
Similar technology could make self driving busses to provide more/adaptive routes.
Nah.
There is nothing that a driver would do that an automated taxi would not, because both the driver and the automated taxi are optimizing for their ability to give as many rides as possible for as much money as possible.
The main reason to think their behavior would differ is on the margins where drivers have to go home and sleep and robotaxis do not. But that really makes it likely that a robotaxi service will keep its cars out 24/7 except for maintenance.
The other reason to believe drivers and robotaxis will behave differently is if you think drivers are leaving money on the table, or robotaxis will. And Silicon Valley simply does not leave money on the table. I'd be more ready to believe the drivers do.
There's another other factor here: when you make cars more available and more convenient, people are more likely to take them. So robotaxis will probably increase, not decrease, road usage, if only because they never need to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom. They will just repeatedly get a fare, drive the fare, and go do whatever they do to be idle. Which, in many cities, is going to be "wander the streets" or "take up parking spots in the city center".
EDIT: I had responded to this without reading the OP article. The article has some good discussion of the kinds of secondary effects that are likely to cause robotaxis to increase road consumption.
You've gone from "People won't have to drive", to "People cannot drive". And the latter will likely play poorly in rural areas.
Please tell me your plan is not to have the cars speed up where all the pedestrians are
Hell, I bet the Luddites from back in the day wouldn't have minded the technological progress if they had their needs met otherwise.
They weren’t anti-tech. They were workers who saw the first industrialization destroying their safe well paying jobs at home that gave them autonomy and replaced it with them having to be generic low paid cogs in a very dangerous factory they had to commute to with no say over their working conditions.
They wanted a say over their destiny. Some autonomy. A share of the benefits that came with technology instead of all the downsides with 100% of the upside going to the rich owners.
Any of that sound familiar to things workers complain about today?
From the podcast 99% Invisible: Blood in the Machine
How? If we replace every car driven by an individual with a car driven by machine… you’re left with the same number of cars. Just as much traffic. Still need all the roads. And parking lots unless the cars drive more to avoid parking.
Better for the environment? I don’t see it. Every car taken off the road (including EVs!) is less polluting. Less fuel. Less maintenance. Less pavement needed. Less particle emissions from wearing down tires. Moving people to walking, bikes, busses, subways, whatever is better than individual cars.
More time in your day because you’re not driving during your commute? What if we set things up so you don’t have to commute so far? Or at all. Either one would be better even with automation driving for you.
Between the pandemic’s changes in traffic patterns and seeing other cities around the world change I’ve come to the realization we could have so much more than what we have today but with robots driving for us. We can ask for more. We can change more than one thing at once.
And what we do doesn’t have to be decided by a tech company just doing something. That may not be the best policy. It may be a waste of money. It may be a real part of the solution!
We can want more. Instead robotaxis are clogging streets and blocking ambulances and we’re celebrating “progress”.
If all vehicles - not just cars - were driven by machines and connected to a network then there are many optimisations that they could be doing. For example you could get rid of traffic lights, yielding rules, even lanes. Cars could travel much faster if they didn’t have to worry about reaction times.
For example cars could go through intersections at full speed or close to it, timing it so they passed between each other. Cars could actually merge onto freeways and change lanes at full speed without some jerk trying to block them. You wouldn’t have slow drivers in the fast lane.
You're talking about a system where one kid running into the road could cause a chain collision of dozens of cars that were counting on rushing the intersection at high speed. Or, alternatively, could end up with the kid getting hit at 45 miles an hour, with extremely fatal and destructive results.
Maybe the car detects the kid earlier. But that's not guaranteed; if the kid runs out from between two parked cars, for example, there may not be sufficient time at higher speeds for the car to stop.
People behave unpredictably. Hell, even when they behave predictably and cross at the crosswalk when they’re supposed to, they can still get hit by cars.
That said, on-street parking does have the benefit of placing a multi-ton shield between traffic and pedestrians and cyclists. Slower speeds and better street design can at least lessen the likelihood of fatal accidents when people pop out between parked cars.
Slower speeds work for sure, but getting a robo taxi to adhere to those slower speeds is much more realistic than getting a human driver to do the same.
The answer is to take that into account with traffic calming measures[0] that alter the street design and make it more stressful for drivers. Narrower lanes, big trees overhanging the street, small traffic circles, pinchpoints, and other measures making driving fast very uncomfortable. You feel like you need to pay more attention, and drivers naturally slow down as a result.
0. https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-...
Even if you could get 90% on board, the other 10% will fight to the death over it.
Which means the benefits of a 100% automated system (which I disagree with BTW), can’t be reached except possibly after a VERY long time when enough anti-robos have changed their minds/died out.
This would be taking something away from drivers. And that’s what people hate. Look at the responses to congestion taxes or toll roads. Or even traffic jams!
People behave as if they have a right to use any (seemingly) public road just because they have a car. Even private toll roads.
It’s not feasible.
That kind of system precludes the presence of pedestrians and cyclists.
You'll still need crosswalks to allow pedestrians to cross the street. Beyond that, the mere possibility of a kid running into the street means that your theoretical maximum speed is basically the same as it is now, simply due to physics: even if cars can instantly detect a person trying to cross the road, you still need time to brake and come to a stop. That doesn't change whether it's a computer driving the car or a human. Speeding up autonomous traffic basically undermines the biggest advantage--360 degree awareness and faster-than-human reaction times--AVs should offer.
As for intersections where cars zip through the gaps between cars with minimal spacing, that's a pipe dream simply because you're cutting safety margins to nearly zero. Signals drop out and computer processes crash. Car sensors will pick up false positives.
Car brakes and tires wear down over time, which will cause the car's performance to deviate from what everyone's models will expect. Bald tires? Winter tires in summer? Summer tires in winter? Maybe your car tries to take into account tire wear, but what happens if they're out of balance or alignment and the tread wears unevenly? What about the autonomous SUV that's loaded nearly at its maximum load thanks to the home improvement supplies the person bought at Home Depot?
The sort of carefully choreographed ballet you're envisioning[0] falls apart in catastrophic fashion the moment a single car comes along that doesn't behave as expected. If one car slams on the brakes to avoid a kid, a ball bouncing into traffic, a barrel that fell over, or any of the million other examples of things that happen in a complex environment, you get a massive multi-car collision, and because we're now moving faster than would have been possible before, you're going to get casualties.
So you need to slow traffic flow and increase the distance between cars to create a larger safety margin. That cuts down on the expected advantages, and you wind up much closer to existing traffic flows than the imagined ballet. And even if we choose to ignore the possibility of failure, at the end of the day, roads are a finite surface. There's still a physical limit to the number that can physically fit on a given stretch of road. AVs could, theoretically, push that number higher by removing some of the factors that decrease capacity, but there's still a limit. They can't solve the problem of congestion.
There's also the human element. Even if you "know" the cars are communicating with one another and you'll safely shoot through the intersection, those pesky human brains--you know, the ones that evolved to notice predators on the edge of a person's field of vision before those predators managed to rush up and eat you---are going to positively lose their shit the second they see a car speeding towards them on what appears to be a collision course at 50 miles an hour. That kind of intersection is pretty much perfect for triggering those fight-or-flight stress responses, and they'll make the stress of even the worst of LA traffic look positively pleasant by comparison.
Can AVs do a lot to improve traffic? Sure, assuming they don't increase the number of vehicles on the road--which is unlikely, to say the least. Anyhow, even the less-capable levels of automation could decrease things like phantom traffic jams. But we'll never see the kind of traffic ballets you're talking about save, perhaps, things like highway on-ramps.
If you don't have a solution for that then you can just sit down and STFU.
Meanwhile I think nothing lowers quailty of life more than living in a city. That said I don't go into them so you guys can do whatever you like.
Granted, living in the city does reduce your life expectancy by about five years... mostly because of car usage. If only we could figure out how to better distribute labor across a country and not just in cities.
Apparently the gap was wider, they blame air pollution for the rural areas catching up. The big advantage urban areas have is rapid access to healthcare.
More like they used to be.
New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, there’s plenty of places that could do it. They could prove the concept.
I don’t see how it would work in a city like Dallas or LA as they exist today. They would try and it would be deemed a failure and never tried again.
But successful trials in a few very dense places could really start to show the benefits and maybe we could start bringing it to other cities, even those more traditionally spread out.
And in London they have patches like the bit near Kings Cross I like https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5349883,-0.125411,3a,75y,7...
I guess you could gradually make those and link them with tube / rail etc
There are solutions to that other than robotaxis. Like healthcare.
Uber Pool was so cheap it increased overall city travel: For every mile of personal driving it removed, it added 2.6 miles of people who otherwise would have taken another mode of transportation.
All of the automation of bus routes involved is simple computation and I don't see AI having anything fundamentally new to add to the solution. You don't need to actually solve traveling salesman or something to add value to the bus system.
I say "credibly" because you really want the system to work almost perfectly right out of the gate. Otherwise passengers will shun it because the very baseline requirement of a transport system is to reliably get people where they wanted to go.
Any time you share a vehicle in time but not in space (only one rider per trip) you've increased congestion due to the trip out to fetch the person. Net loss every time.
Taking up road space and causing traffic with no one inside because it’s cheaper to the companies even though it makes things worse for everyone else.
Who said having 90+ square feet of pavement to haul an average of around one person was a waste? Now we have the tech to average less than one!
(Edit: sq ft corrected, was off by 10x)
Sadly you left out a zero: even a Toyota Camry is a hundred square feet so you’re probably at 150 when you allow space on the sides and buffer zones.
Oh dang. I was using a Chevy Bolt. Its footprint is basically 13k sq in.
But I messed up the math. It’s not ~9 sq ft (which I rounded up). I lost a zero. It’s 90 sq ft.
I’ll fix my post. Thanks!
I really expected them to wait for a little more secure of a political position before they started doing exactly the thing that proves that they're entirely out for themselves and don't give a damn about improving traffic or city life.
Whether accidentally or on purpose, they turned into a jitney cab company instead, which does not provide that benefit.
It didn’t work, of course, due to the inherent inefficiencies of cars and the challenge such an expensive service has: people don’t want to wait if they’re paying that much but that means you need empty vehicles constantly cruising around. Congestion pricing would help only if it included mileage and then only by making the service even more expensive so people would take the bus or bike instead.
> Trying to credit them or blaming them for traffic is insane.
I realize you’re a fan but that doesn’t change the fact that having a large number of empty vehicles circling waiting for fares creates more traffic.
This combines both threads: note both that it recognizes Uber and Lyft’s past claims that they’d reduce congestion and their own data show the opposite:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756945/uber-lyft-tnc-vmt...
And once they learn how much they can move, they are unwilling to move around less (or slower). This is something all the "get rid of cars" people ignore, and it's why it will never work.
Similarly, people do want to travel but not endlessly - they want to meet their friends, spend time with family, work, shop, etc. Americans conflate those with driving long distances because much of the country was architected around that lifestyle, but millennials flocked back to the cities because they realized the advantages of not needing to travel so much. Time sitting in traffic kind of sucks compared to just about anything else, and living somewhere you can do the things you want on foot, bike/scooter, etc. is worth a lot.
I think you’d find a ton of people willing to trade their car for public transit if it was a viable option. I’ve never heard of someone who enjoyed having a $733 monthly car payment (the average). Especially not $1200 (a full 15% now!)
There are plenty of people in big cities, even in the US, who are happy without cars.
We add more lanes to a highway, and get induced demand with people choosing to drive more. Road diets restricting road capacity lead to reduced demand, with people driving less. There's a ton of research on both phenomena. When the 405 was closed for a weekend due to construction, Los Angeles was told to expect carmageddon. Public transit saw record-breaking ridership levels that weekend, and traffic across LA actually decreased as a result.
Drivers routinely change their driving route based on traffic congestion, and it's not uncommon to choose a slightly longer route to avoid being stuck in a traffic jam. Sitting in traffic feels more stressful, particularly on a highway where everything about the road design is telling your brain that you're supposed to be moving fast but aren't.
If we wanted to, we could build robust public transit systems that are more than capable of moving most people to where they need to go with minimal delay, convenience, and comfort and that a large percentage of the population would want to use.
Instead, most of North America has anemic bus systems that couldn't be more antagonistic towards their riders if they actively tried. A bus stop sign on the side of a four lane stroad that lacks sidewalks--the very thing that would enable people to safely access said bus stop--sends a pretty clear message to riders "we don't care about you, and if you die trying to board your bus, well, that's just how it is."
In any case, you're conflating the desire to move around with the desire to move around by car. They're not the same thing, even if seventy years of urban planning have assumed otherwise. Beyond that, we travel between places because we want to do something when we get to our destination. That's the goal, and the mode by which we travel there is simply a means to an end.
I worry that this perspective alone oversimplifies the issue and doesn't consider that when riding an SF bus today one has to worry about:
- Aggressive passengers
- Stench from smoking / urine / body odor / people bringing in garbage into the bus
- Being on guard in case of theft (can't pull out laptop and catch up on work)
- Falling off seat due to aggressive bus driving
- Sketchy happenings by the bus stop
These aren't mild annoyances as the authors' wording might (unintentionally) imply, but real health and safety risks. More so if one is female or are physically disadvantaged.
I'd love to see this concern being talked about more as part of the conversation.
Perhaps we should solve those issues directly instead of finding a way to ignore them by paying investors money.
If the true purpose was to limit traffic, why would it be limited to taxis?
Medallions were the answer to the race to the bottom that occurred (too many taxis, not enough fares, shady behavior from the taxis)--just like we are seeing again.
Everybody seems to forget that laws that exist are there because there was a reason.
The fact that medallions became perverted into entrenched monopolies was a problem that should have been solved rather than just throwing them out.