Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

Europeans have already solved this problem without need for non-existent technology. It's called public transportation. That's why Americans spend 101 minutes per day driving on average while Germans spend 36.

Imagine how much more GDP the US would have had if they had done that...

edit: Of course, Europeans also use that extra time to enjoy life versus driving GDP that due to increasing wealth inequality won't benefit them in any tangible way.

View on HN

Which problem has been solved?

There are 250M cars on the road in Europe. Clogging up public space and requiring human labor to be driven around. There are cars everywhere in Germany.

The US has 280m with half the population.

Public transport has pros and cons.

A self-driving car can take you exactly from where you are to where you want to go. Right now.

Public transport requires you to walk to an entry point, wait and then walk to your destination.

Self-driving cars will make things way more efficient. Similar how TCP/IP packets are more efficient than TV broadcasts, which required you to plan when to watch what and then wait for it.

So if you propose that Europe should try to achieve efficiency via more public transport, I think that is a losing battle. Electric self-driving cars are the future.

In European cities it's often the opposite:

- A train will take you right into the city center, sometimes even where cars are not allowed. OTOH entering the city from suburbia can take an hour of being stuck in traffic.

- metro and trams can skip traffic. Bus lanes are common. There are no "stroads". Average car speed in London is 12mph. That's slower than a bike.

- Finding a parking place can easily take longer than waiting for public transport, and it will probably be an underground garage, far away from your destination. Bus stops are much denser than parking garages, so they usually involve less walking.

The US experience of driving on an 8-lane highway and arriving at a mandatory-parking-quota asphalt desert in front of your destination is rare in Europe. The closest we get is a 3-lane motorway to an IKEA on the city outskirts.

With self-driving cars, there is no "finding a parking place". You just exit and the car drives on to the next customer.

And without parking cars, streets become wider. Single lane becomes double lane.

So basically make the urban environment a sea of constant fast driving cars filling all available space. There's a reason a lot of cities are converting roads and urban centers into non-car area. Parking and car lanes replaced with bike paths and green areas. It's a much better quality of life. Which, oddly, some people prefer to a 1800s style corporate dystopia where most people's miserable lives are nothing but a means to drive ever more wealth to an elite minority.

Double lanes are still orders of magnitude less efficient than trains.

In some dense European cities there's physically not enough road surface to put every traveller in a car, self-driving or not.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity#/media/File%3...

This is EU, it would rather become a cycling path or some sort of park/recreational zone.

> Self-driving cars will make things way more efficient.

Road capacity has a physical limit. Unlike data you cannot convert cars into light of various wavelengths to pack more into the same physical space. Well you can but that's called public transit. In other words, public transportation has a higher capacity per road/rail area than cars ever will. We don't live in the metaverse after all.

As a result more people using cars (self-driving or not) means you hit the road capacity much more often. That means more congestion and longer trips. Any efficiency you gain by going point-to-point is utterly lost in the increased congestion and traffic.

As the other person noted, European cities are much denser and have significantly less road area than US cities. Thus more cars means significantly less efficiency as you spend more time in traffic.

So what do you expect? That cars will continue to be manually operated and that the number of cars on the road will go down due to better public transport?

That's an odd straw man. I'd appreciate you not put words in my mouth. You're claiming that self-driving cars are better than public transit and will replace public transit in Europe (assuming they were available). I'm merely saying they won't because that is an inferior solution. I said nothing about manual cars or the shift of manual to self-driving for the segment that does drive cars.

Not having half of the population morbidly obese in EU somehow makes walking 5 minutes less of a problem.

Just wait 10-20 years when self-driving is the norm, it will reduce congestions caused by human's behavior and accidents.

How exactly will it reduce congestion? The cars are the same size. The trips are the same and are likely to go up in frequency with self-driving. The roads are the same as before. If anything you will have a ton more congestion. The vast majority of congestion is due to not enough capacity and too much demand. Right now that is caped due to the time you waste driving but if it's self-driving then the sky is the limit.

Public transportation increases the potential commuter density per area of road/rail while self-driving doesn't.

I think self driving and public transport are actually complimentary. The principal benefits of owning your own automobile are convenience, as it’s always available for your use, and range— it will go wherever you want. Enabling vast fleets of on demand taxis is already well underway, making owning your own vehicle less attractive. The next step imho is bundling rides together, making NOT owning your car cheaper still. For urban cores, I would expect shared self driving to crowd out private cars pretty quickly.

> Just wait 10-20 years

Musk said in 2 years, in 2012. Two more weeks brothers, two more weeks ... lol

I highly doubt self-driving is going to reduce congestion. Self-driving makes driving more convenient & useful, so people are going to use it more.

And it is also inefficient because it is used in cars taking 4 passengers max so it can not really scale.

But if a bus, a tram or a train would have a self driving... but that smells like communism to our techbros from Silicon Valley.

I will always argue that self-driving will increase congestions. There are so many behaviours that are on individual level superior, but on large scale worse. Send car to park somewhere cheaper doubling the number of trips. Have it circle around waiting to pick you up... And as felt cost of just sitting in car goes down, time spend in car can go up.

It will probably nearly eliminate individual car ownership which will free up a ton of real estate currently used for parking. Which will probably reduce congestion inside the cities. It may also reduce highway congestion because we can engineer it such that it knows how drive unlike most people on the roads today

Reply on news.ycombinator.com