Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Nothing surprising here - as society moves forwards, things that were once only available to the very rich classes slowly trickle down. Having a chauffeur for your kids used to be for the 0.1%, Uber and the like have now made it for the 1% (and even for the 5% in large cities like SF).

When networks of self driving cars start appearing, it'll reduce the cost so much that it'll trickle down to the 10%, then 50%, then to the 100% - much like the original car or the fridge did. When I used to work in downtown SF, taking an Uber from my house to work was only 2x as expensive as the bus, even though it was more like 4x-6x a few years ago. Over time and as technology/infrastructure improves this will go down to 1x, and then even below.

It'll be a great future where people don't own cars anymore (except for a select few who will for recreation, much like people still ride horses for fun now), and instead pay a monthly subscription fee for X miles of driving around per month. Much like cellphones, there'll probably be things like family plans and so on. Your kids will get a self driving car to pick them up from school, which will promptly drop them off at home/sports practice/etc. The car will then just drive to its next request, thus completely removing the need for parking (which will have a wonderful impact on American urban areas- larger sidewalks, no more need for giant parking lots everywhere), heavily minimizing traffic (no stop and go when all cars on the road can sync up in real time), heavily reducing lethal road accidents, etc.

Self driving vehicles will do for transport what the fridge did for food or the internet did for communications. It's going to be very, very exciting and I wish more people realized it so we could make it happen as fast as possible (e.g. a really forward thinking city could easily make a subpart of its downtown area open to self driving vehicles exclusively by 2020).

As Schumpeter said: “[e]lectric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them... The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."

Creative destruction, as enabled by captitalism allows everyone to gain access to the luxuries only previously enjoyed by the rich; it takes time, but we all our lives are improving in astonishing and unexpected ways.

So which Uber driver is taking the calls to the poorer neighborhoods?

One of the best, if not the best part of Uber is the payment. No tipping, no haggling, and no getting screwed, whether you are the driver of passenger. Don't need to worry about getting stiffed because it's already paid for.

You might not get cash stolen, but might still worry about getting carjacked

I think tippy meant that Uber drivers are still expensive.

Maybe with UberPool(sharing rides with other people on the same route) they'll have more access ? and if you combine that with Uber's SUV service, which enables sharing rides between up to 6 people, you'll get to something more accessible to poor people.

Or a forward moving city bans cars entirely from dense city centers.

I've no doubt driverless cars will come, but while they are moving forward, so is the realization that we really don't need all that many cars in cities and that they don't do us any good.

In dense city centers this problem has already been solved for a long time, hasn't it? Kids easily make their own way around Copenhagen, because it's compact and easy to bike/bus/metro your way around.

In the US we can only dream about cities built the way they are in Europe. I am moving to Stockholm in a couple of years and just based on the change in available infrastructure, I will be able to die a happy man.

To add to your point and take it a couple steps further. The continuous automation of physical muscle and mind muscles will reduce white and blue collar work.

Humans Need Not Apply:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

A bus full of people is more efficient than a car. So, really what your seeing is cheap prices in off peak times subsided by peak pricing. There are actually lot's of capital intense markets were off peak prices can go negative in extreme cases ex: electricity.

ED: Price controls such as is the norm with cab's do distort the market, so Uber's dynamic pricing is probably a good thing as long as it's non discriminatory.

I'm not sure I really agree that a bus is more efficient than a carpool ride with Uber, Lyft, or Sidecar would be. Often I've noticed a bus full of people are going a few miles (Sunset neighborhood to Downtown SF), but the bus makes a stop at every small intersection for 1-2 people - inconvenient for the masses.

I live in Nob Hill, SF. If I wanted to go to the Mission, it's quite a wait for the Van Ness bus that goes to the Mission, and it takes a long time to go 2 miles because of the numerous stops the bus makes.

If instead, I were to take a UberPool/Sidecar Shared Ride, it might be $1 or so more, but I'd get there in a fraction of the time (no walking to the bus stop, no waiting for the bus, no numerous stops).

Also, I'm wondering if the the capital expenditure of the car vs the bus makes the car the preferred choice. Eg a Muni bus costs $700,000, but a car for UberPool or others is $10,000-$10,000.

I'm certainly not against buses, but for many cases, the technology here can provide smarter, faster transportation. Imagine this: an UberBus/Sidecar Shared Bus or so, that takes just as many people as a full bus would, but without the in-between stops.

http://www.howwedrive.com/2010/06/28/german-efficiency/

Efficiency is a complex topic, buses are often less convenient in large part because there less frequently. In high traffic areas it can actually be faster to take a bus that's showing up every 2-3 minutes than wait for an cab / uber to happen by. The only real downside is it's harder to match demand so you often have large stretches of the day with few riders.

While it's true that self driving cars are the future of transportation, I think there's a chance that transportation itself will be disrupted by 2025 through the use of VR. If VR replicates a true sense of presence within 10 years, I think we're going to see a large decrease in people using all modes of transportation. I'm very interested to see how the next 10-15 years play out.

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