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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

Self-driving cars only look like high OpEx/low CapEx because there are a trivial number of them on the roads. At scale, they require vast investment in road infrastructure to manage congestion. Adding many more vehicles to roads that are already congested will not work.

So in practice, they will be high OpEx/high CapEx. Which makes sense in a country fully captured by Capital.

Unless autonomous cars are accompanied by step-function changes in the ability to build new roads cheaply, they are not the answer.

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America has and likes roads, so the marginal capex here is low.

Half of the country lives in suburbs and that's not going to change overnight. So roads are an unfortunate reality of keeping America functional.

Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads, though, because they don't gawk at accidents and potentially could drive in denser formations with less separation.

This isn't about the suburbs, where by and large people don't take transit today. Shutting down transit entirely wouldn't affect most suburbanites directly. But when folks talk about transit, they generally are not trying to tell suburbanites or rural residents to live differently. They should keep their cars and drive or let self-driving get them around.

But places where people take transit are a different animal. These places are characterized by higher density and higher levels of road congestion.

> Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads

Yes, in the suburbs and exurbs. A gridlocked highway in a city does not have a much higher throughput possible; cars are generally tightly packed and/or stopped.

Remember that for all the gawkers at an accident on one side of the highway, there are also drivers on the other side of the road who are physically blocked by the accident. Autonomy does not help this either, for medium-term penetration levels of autonomous vehicles. (Making the great assumption that at near 100% penetration, accidents could be nearly eliminated.)

I think the suburban angle does matter because the general life cycle of a suburb is that they start rich because they have 0 maintenance costs, but after 20-30 years require money to pay for road + sewer + water maintenance.

So they start with a massive budget surplus which creates well-funded schools that attract rich people. But after 30 years, they cannibalize education to fix potholes. And the socio-economic landscape changes to reflect this.

We're starting to hit a lot of suburbs in the USA around that 30 year mark, and they're attracting progressively lower income residents for whom transportation costs become an increasingly important factor in their home buying decisions.

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