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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, self-driving cars are probably the most realistic route to walkable neighborhoods. Self-driving cars are much better road citizens (obeying traffic laws and driving courteously) and don't require any of the parking that human-driving cars do. If the self-driving cars become widespread for human transportation and deliveries, we will be shocked at the amount of free space have that can be put to better use.

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Questionable take. The best road "citizens" are trams, trains, and subways. They all obey traffic laws and are reliable. Self-driving cars don't exist in any meaningful way. The most realistic route to walkable neighborhoods is good public transit, bike infrastructure, and repealing of restrictive zoning. Walkable neighborhoods already exists all over Europe and work today unlike the pipe dream of self-driving cars.

There are definitely situations where legacy public transit makes sense, but at up to $1 billion/mile for urban railway that doesn't seem a practical future for the US. I'd love to snap my fingers and make more cities in the US to be like Amsterdam, but there are hundreds of historical, political, and climactic reasons why that is not a feasible path for US cities at this point. The consistent and deliberately boring progress of Waymo has me very optimistic that there is a better way. For tech crowds, the best analogy I have is the switch from dedicated copper to packet-switched networks. We're on the verge of unleashing dramatically more efficient utilization of existing pipes (road infrastructure).

Why is point to point travel blahphemy to urbanists?

> Self-driving cars don't exist in any meaningful way

Agreed, but I wouldn't call them a "pipe dream" — Musk's timelines may all be pipe dreams, but the tech exists (and isn't just from Tesla) and can be used where legislation allows. On the scale of changing urban infrastructure, even if these take another decade, I'd expect them to be widely available faster than new train and subway lines.

Bike infrastructure should be an easy win, if only it wasn't for the political aspect that makes many see cyclists as "other". I'd be inclined to vote for people who promise more of it.

How do they not require parking? What do you do with them when people aren't using them? They're either parked or circulating idle. If they're circulating you can only have a more walkable neighborhood by excluding them, which means they are elsewhere and making those neighorhoods less walkable.

In some ways rideshare has given a preview of this model and it simply is not the future. Cars can't save us from cars.

A self-driving car that sits idle is a wasted resource, so the owner will always want to put it to some profitable use by moving people or goods. Contrast that to human-owned vehicles that spend 95% their life parked: https://www.reinventingparking.org/2013/02/cars-are-parked-9... That's a tremendous amount of the earths mineral resources that were mined, processed, and transported (at great carbon expense) to sit around doing nothing.

> A self-driving car that sits idle is a wasted resource

This is also true of non-self driving cars, yet we structure our resources around this case. Car use has extreme & predictable peaks with long down periods between them. If we couldn't prevent it the first time what are we doing differently to prevent it the second time?

And again rideshare has given us a slight preview of this. The taxi constraints incentivize having cars near their predicted users. We'll either need to build and maintain waiting-car storage in central areas (eg parking), or accept idle circulation in down times.

Who is going to use these cars when everyone is in school or at work or sleeping. This will not solve any issues since most people follow the same schedule.

Transportation demand would still be "lumpy", but surge pricing would encourage people to shift their transportation needs to save money. Deliveries would probably be one of the common uses during the workday. Utilization would not be 100%, but it's certain to be more than the 0% productive use that parked cars currently have.

self-driving cars are also much worse at handling the ambiguity of mixed vehicle-human spaces. They work best when the infrastructure is specifically dedicated to them - a place designed for cars.

This is definitely a huge challenge, but the progress that Waymo is making (stark contrast to Tesla or Cruise) is very encouraging. An attentive driver can definitely handle the most confusing situations better than the current self-driving vehicles currently, but attentive and courteous drivers are rare in the US.

You can actually design roads to encourage attentiveness - by using road trees, narrower lanes, roundabouts, non-straight roads, or obstacles like bollards or similar. These aren't popular though because people want generally want to zone out and move fast.

Courteousness is a bit more difficult to address with just road / public space design, but designing to encourage more driver / non-driver interaction can help.

edit: a very non-american way to force people to pay attention on country roads is to make them BARELY wide enough to accommodate two cars. This forces attentiveness, because you don't want a head-on collision. Sounds problematic, but actually kinda nice in practice.

Agreed. In their quest for efficiency, American roads have had some huge unexpected externalities. I love how the central areas of Europe chaotically blend pedestrian, car, and bicycle traffic which causes everyone to be more attentive and careful. In the US, our cities were built in the era of cars and not cows so conversion is cost prohibitive. For the US, I think "smart endpoints and dump pipes" (where self-driving cars are the endpoints, and existing roads the pipes) is the more promising way to a better future. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/running-conta...

> and don't require any of the parking that human-driving cars do

Could you unpack that? It doesn't make much sense to me. We don't want them driving around all day, we don't want them to drive home, and if it's a communal usage type thing they need to be stored outside of peak hours.

Like a taxi, an autonomous car that's parked or not carrying a passenger is wasting money, so owners will want them to be productively utilized for paying trips as much as possible. Other than for charging, there's no reason for a self-driving car to sit in one place car to wear it self out driving around empty. This means that roadside parking and parking lots will be dramatically less useful for their original purpose.

So we would have all of a rush hour's worth of cars on the road all the time?

If freedom to move about freely is a desirable thing (think: making more jobs accessible to people without their own car without an hour-long multi-stage commute), this is a great outcome! A self-driving rush hour would also be very different from the ones we know today. No irritated, distracted, or road-raging drivers. Immediate and safe yielding to any pedestrian who used the road. As a regular urban cyclist during rush-hour, I would instantly trade a road full of distracted commuters juggling a cup of coffee and looking at their phone with self-driving cars. Further, surge pricing would discourage people from traveling at peak times. I know of no public transit system that has anything like surge pricing, which therefore means that the systems must be overbuilt for peak capacity.

So instead of using parking, they will use road space while cruising around. That is worse, parking space is valuable, but road lanes are even more valuable. Unless you are suggesting taking parking for road, which is worse for pedestrians. Self-driving cars don’t help if everybody is stuck in traffic caused by empty cars.

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