Escaping the Ogallala Trap | Hacker News Reader

Escaping the Ogallala Trap

worksinprogress.co

13 pointssurprisetalk14 comments

I do worry that autonomous vehicles will result in rules that further hinder walking and cycling because it makes it harder for AV’s to drive unimpeded

This post makes the assumption that people choose not to drive because it’s annoying or that they can’t multitask (the latter, unfortunately, seems not to be a blocker in the Bay Area).

I don’t see how this would increase demand significantly. Fleets may grow, but I doubt more people will be going on trips because now they don’t need to drive. I can get uber to pay my trip to the office, that doesn’t mean I want to go to the office.

If you can sleep during your commute, why not live 2 hours (or more) away?

Oh I don’t care about all that.

When the highway I can see out my balcony is gridlocked everything is quiet. When there’s high speed it’s noisy.

When the roads are gridlocked I can bicycle by quite easily. When they’re going by at 45 mph that’s a lot more risky.

When the cars in the line are autonomous they won’t turn into me randomly because they lost their temper. Honestly, you’re making this outcome seem like paradise. Gridlock is a dream.

Aren't gridlocks noisy due to honks?

The ones in SF’s FiDi are, but the highway ones seem quiet. Beats me why.

My experience of travel suggests to me that honking is cultural: what's normal for Mumbai doesn't happen in London.

In the UK, the horn might be used to "wake up" a driver in front - e.g. the traffic light has gone green, the driver in front isn't paying attention, so the car behind might sound a short honk to alert the driver in front that the light has changed. There's also the annoyed "you cut in front of me" / "you did something dangerous" long blaring honk.

Those are the two main accepted uses of the horn in the UK, so there isn't much honking in UK traffic jams.

How are you getting around personally? Especially if demand shifts further to cars—now with fewer downsides—and further hinders availability and development of public transit, much like the post-WWII original car ownership boom did (and not just in the US!).

I have electric bike. For me and family. Gridlock is best for that because cars not moving.

So making cars public, letting people just summon one at will to bring them where they want to go, cars that rides in coordinated, self-scheduling fleets, cars that pick up other people going the same way etc. etc. will lead to MORE cars on the road ?

Nope, not buying it.

Then you are blind. It has already happened.

Look at commute length. When families had a maximum of one car, you simply couldn't live very far from work. As soon as you got two cars per family, commute times and traffic exploded.

If you can simply sleep during the trip, how much further will people be willing to commute? I suspect quite a bit.

I don't personally think the shared-fleet model is going to be the dominant one. I think private ownership will. Which means you still have to deal with parking and such. But it no longer has to be at your office. (Why private ownership? Because if you need something every day, and you can already afford a car, you're gonna want to still have your own personal one and never have to think about not being able to find a ride due to a demand spike, or rates going up, etc.)

Today if you drive you have to actively sit in traffic.

Replace that with a commute in an isolated near-soundproof private office with a comfy chair, fancy sound system.

You're gonna see people who can afford it choose to take the luxury ride over standing packed in a bus or train.

You're gonna see people who lived 25 minutes from their office because they didn't want to lose more than an hour total a day driving start be willing to put up with a longer commute to get more space for the same money, since the commute is now idle alone time, to work or relax as desired.

You take away the biggest negative about something that is seen as a luxury good compared to the alternatives in most of the US. You're gonna get more usage.

It will probably lead to more cars traveling at any time, but potentially far fewer cars parked.

However: turn most of the street parking into bus and/or bike lanes, the parking garages into apartments, seems like an absolute win. (Except for Chicago, which is presumably going to have more problems with its privatized street parking.)

For a shared car that you can summon, any road-mile it spends between a drop-off and a pick-up is a new road-mile created by swapping 2 parked cars with 1 moving shared car. These have to exist by necessity as well since trip demands are very uneven.

I wouldn't bank on ride-sharing either. Only a fraction of ride-calls are shared, and ride-calls are of course on a fraction of road traffic compared to private vehicles. Ride-sharing is probably going to be less popular in autonomous cars since you don't have the driver to act as a buffer with whatever weird stranger you can end up with, and the financial pressure to share a car is lower when you have no driver to pay for.

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