The average passenger capacity per mile of a Waymo is <1. The average for a regular passenger car is >1.
Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.
The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher.
Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality.
I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization.
But yes, traffic is indeed an impact.
The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended
You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??
The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.
The overwhelming majority --overwhelming-- of cars, SUV's and trucks on the road have exactly one passenger, including the guy commuting to his office job in an F-250.
An autonomous vehicle doing a deadhead drive has a passenger count of 0. 0 < 1. You start tossing in a lot of miles with 0 in there on top of the vast majority of your trips being 1, and suddenly now you're less than the cars you're theoretically replacing.
A lot of these AVs at the moment at least are still roughly minivan/midsize SUV. On top of that, with safe distances adding another foot of the car to a highway scenario really doesn't increase the percentage of the total space that much. You need a lot of follow space ahead/behind the vehicle.
Maybe if they were like single person pods that teleported to their pickups and managed to group tightly together in packs on the road, but until then they're just another SUV on the road driving around sometimes with zero people in the car.
Whatever this will become, it will be a matter of decades and a real modernization of our traffic laws and other infrastructure. I will not pretend to know what form that will take, my crystal ball stopped working a few decades back.
There are so many questions. Just looking at a place like Los Angeles, I regularly drive right next to massive trucks moving containers and all kinds of cargo. Can we be more intelligent about this? An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway? Sure, as an idea and a fantasy. In the real world you'll have to contend with myriad issues spanning a range between our inability to build anything anymore in this country with how you are going to deal with millions of people losing their jobs if you automate cargo transport and clear large trucks from the highways. Etc.
It's nice to have these visions about the future. What will actually happen is a different matter. I am placing my bet on self driving cars as the first practical phase of a transition into something more sensible that will likely require three to five decades. The equation is very simple: Atomos are expensive and hard to move. Conventional cars and trucks manufactured and purchased today are going to stay on the roads for at least a decade. A mass transition to a different paradigm is measured in units of decades after the last conventional vehicle is manufactured and sold. Hence my five decade estimate for transportation utopia.
> An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway?
There's already cargo freight rail practically all across the country. Loads on trucks are on trucks because of the desired flexibility and point to point response time as opposed to having to load/unload rail.
Also, unless you're talking some really long distances, having rail in the middle of a highway doesn't always make much sense. You're not going to have the depots or stations in the middle of the highway after all. The train then needs to weave back and fourth across the highway to get to the places its routed to. Far better to just figure out its own right of way rather than stick it in the middle of a complicated place.
This will obviously change in future, once they start a truly mass rollout.
We're not willing to enforce basic safety on buses, let alone other norms. If Waymo is willing to do that, that will make it available to many more people. Even just not having to wait at the bus stop before sunrise can be a game changer.
It's not that people refuse to ride busses. In most places in the US this is either a non-existent or extremely impractical option. It's just reality.
And remember, the alternative is even worse: buses.