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Comment by dougSF70 | Hacker News Reader

Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. I cant see how congestion can be reduced...the worst congestion happens during rush hour...replacing personal cars with a Waymo will have no effect.

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> when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion

Of course it is. Banning street-side parking would double or triple most cities’ navigable road space.

You can only fit 3 cars across on most side streets near me. You have more space, but does it really create better flow?

Many of these side streets and neighbourhoods are designed and modified NOT to flow, because then people would use them to get to work. Would this change that?

While I admit I see these more in the ‘burbs, this is becoming more widespread and is no longer exclusive to them.

Waymo isn't really the answer to congestion, busses and other public transport solutions are. If Waymo is the answer, what is the question?

Q: How can I get to the gym and use the treadmill without having to walk all the way to the bus stop?

Its been proven over and over, and there are tons of studies that show that more lanes doesnt help congestion.

Who said they had to be car lanes

> more lanes doesnt help congestion

It does increase throughput. And it’s not relevant to a weighing of reducing ridesharing and increasing lanes—both would induce demand.

And as another person said, a single streetside-parked car has made that entire street more dangerous for bikers. Take out streetside parking and you can add lanes for cars, light rail, busses, bikes or even just widen sidewalks and add more trees.

Parked cars add to congestion far more uselessly than taxis, ride sharing vehicles or AVs.

Streets with parked cars are residential and don’t need better throughput. They need safety rails so little kids can exist without being run over. They need to be exempt from gps routing so people can quietly live their lives.

In some places throughput isn’t needed… safety is.

You could widen sidewalks, place bike lanes, or plant trees in those parking spaces for the equivalent effect. Also the residential dichotomy isn’t true for lots of areas of the city. I live next to an office building, for example.

>Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion.

Presumably they're not just roaming around aimlessly. They're also providing transportation to whoever's sitting inside.

Anecdotally, what I observe in SF is empty waymo cars driving around

Unless every passenger pickup is at the location of the last drop off and the timing is perfect, some portion of robotaxi driving must be empty as the taxi drives to the next pickup or at least goes somewhere to park. And I'm honestly not sure Waymos are smart enough to know where it is and isn't legal to park for some unknown period of time while waiting for the next trip, so that might not even be an option.

Contrast this with personal vehicles, which are always transporting at least one person to their destination. It seems essentially impossible that robotaxis could result in less congestion unless people share robotaxis significantly more frequently than they do personal cars or regular taxis.

Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans.

That is why parking lots make places un-walkable.

> Your parked car is adding to congestion. It takes up space that could otherwise be used by humans.

But that's not what congestion means.

If it’s parked on the street, that is taking up a lane that could be carrying traffic. (And in some cities it’s common for parallel street parking to turn into a lane from 4-8 PM or similar)

It's adding indirectly, more space taken by parking lots means that you have to spread further, which begets the need for more cars

Less parking spaces > denser enviroments > more walking(Or other more compact forms of transport) > less cars (To an extent) > less congestion

The US has multiple (smaller) countries worth of parking space

I'm immediately suspicious of any chain that links "denser environments" to "less congestion", since everywhere I've ever been, the densest environments have the most congestion.

It's a bit like adding extra lanes, to some degree, demand expands to meet capacity (But I mantain that in this case the net effect is possitive)

There would be less space to be congested by fewer vehicles, but in this context, less congestion also means fewer people experience the congestion directly (because it also works to disincentivize car usage), but those affected have it the same or worse.

I wouldn't take my car to a large city center if I can at all avoid it, which seems to be the common reaction. These people are "transparent" to the congestion—they don't add to it and (mostly) aren't affected by it.

On the same idea, I think the densest enviroments are a bad comparisson There's a noticeable middle ground between US Style Sprawl and say, Tokyo

But the alternative to Tokyo isn't Tokyo but with 20 million cars, it just stops being Tokyo

Density accounts for situations that expansion can't

So optimal would be to get entirely rid of private and single user vehicles likes taxis. Thus density could be maximised.

Robo-taxis can pack significantly more densely into a dedicated parking space than regular cars. Snout to butt and no room side to side, as there's no need for maneuvering. A robo-taxi parking lot just becomes a dense FIFO queue.

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