In my home-town of 30k people, nearly 2,000 of those are high school students alone, plus probably another 1,000 elementary school kids, and maybe 800 middle school. No doubt they'd all want to use the cool tech to ride to school instead of taking the school bus. Add 4,000 more cars to the road please. (And as for ride-sharing, that may be fun once in a while, but why do that when I can get an entire entertainment pod all to myself?)
Currently Uber charges more during rush hour.
It's rather obvious that self-driving operator will implement similar price discrimination e.g. $10 if you drive alone, $5 if you share with one or more people.
And the more they want you to share, the bigger the surcharge e.g. if $10 vs. $5 doesn't have desired effect then maybe $20 vs $5 will.
It's a win-win during rush hour (operator makes much more money from the few people who don't care about money and minimizes over-all traffic by packing more people into a single car).
Personally I'm very skeptical of both the claim that a) self-driving cars will see huge adoptation at the cost of car ownsership and that b) self-driving cars will give less traffic, less pollution and be significantly cheaper than owning a car.
On the latter point, we have basic economic theory: say the average American today spends $600/month total on owning a car. Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month? No, they'd go for an initial price of $400/month for a couple of years to get customers, then sneak back up to $600/month once they've caught most of the market.
That's assuming a monopoly.
> Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month?
Because if they priced it at $400 then a competitor could price it at $300 and make more money.
Think about gasoline prices back when crude oil prices suddenly fell off a cliff. Did gas prices at your local station drop? No, not one cent. All of the competing stations kept the prices roughly where they were and raked in increased profits.
Petrol prices in the UK definitely have dropped (30% over four years, not including inflation) http://www.racfoundation.org/data/uk-pump-prices-over-time
In year 2000, in order to run a medium web site as a company you need 2 Servers one for each Database, WebServer. People bought each server box for $5000 and server capacity used is only at 15%
Come to 2012, Amazon AWS charged for the same Servers only $40/month . Amazon know It costs lots for website owners, why they offer all the server capacity for $40 ???
So why do they need 2 servers?
Also, I'm pretty sure VPSes and shared hosting were available in 2000.
Rackspace offered dedicated servers for $150/month and up. Smaller providers would rent you a server in their datacenter for around $60/month. I used a company called sagonet in the early 2000s that is still in business and still offering a similar service for about $30/month: http://www.synergyisp.com/dedicated-servers/
Most larger companies at the time contracted with a colocation provider and purchased servers for between $1000 and $4000 each, and paid in the neighborhood of $1000/month for a rack, or $500/month for a half rack, including power and network.
This was monumentally cheaper than the AWS based stack we have these days, though - no company with any complexity to their website has a $40/month AWS bill. A company with a similar SAAS offering to what I ran in 2001 for $40K up front and $500/month is probably looking at a $5000/month AWS bill at today's rates.
I imagine a self-driving car packs a ton of servers, I'm not sure it can be cheaper than your average mid-range car...
A town could say, for instance, "we will only allow 3,000 self-driving cars to be actively driving within our borders". If transportation needs are not met, then it's time to start thinking about other improvements like walkability, biking, buses, etc. Realistically though, this would never happen in the United States. Either people would sue to get that law repealed, or every time the cap was hit those in charge would just raise it to keep their constituents happy...
Without strict agreements ahead of widespread self-driving car adoption, I think it's just going to be a free-for-all with lots of car companies freely pushing their products into towns, and the people of course are going to welcome it.
[0] http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/24/news/singapore-car-numbers-l...
I think for self driving to realy work well, we have to ban humans from driving (and perhaps make it a felony to interfere with a self driving bus the same way we cover assault on a bus driver).
I thought it would be easier to implement self driving trains than to implement self driving cars. Who is working on that?
I didn't know that but I assumed it would be cheaper than roads? I mean four tracks of trains (two local, two express) compared to four lanes of road?
All of that is expensive - like the difference between 80% and 99.9% reliability.
We already have self-driving light rail systems (London's DLR for instance).
I could see them charging something like $10 for one person and $7 each for 2 (which is close to actual Lyft pricing). That way they give a price break to the user, while they themselves also make more money, so they have an incentive to offer that pricing even if the trip takes longer, or they can't find a 2nd rider.
What? Per year or once? If per year I wonder what amounts of corruption must be going on. A simple 31-seater bus from Mercedes costs approx. 285.000€ to buy new (https://www.busplaner.de/omnibusmagazin/omnibustest/10035/Me...), which means over a 5y life it's 57k/y... add the same for insurance premiums and the driver, and still I can't get anywhere close to that figure of 1M/bus per year.
If it is class/status, what is the view of a public conveyence like Lyft vs the personal car?
I'm waiting for the ability to, rather than pay for parking, have my car circle the block while I eat lunch. The cost of running an electric vehicle for a few hours is far less than paying to park.
I definitely see your logic towards higher density with things like 'office cars' so people do more travel. Or sleeping cars but that would be outside typical peak hours. But would self driving increase volume that much? Possibly if people stopped getting trains/busses but this should be remain cheaper and faster via priority lanes most cities have.
Also in general;
Freeways; most traffic jams are caused from someone breaking and then the next person breaks a bit more and so on creating a jam. With self driving car the computers will be able to talk and do a 'everyone accelerate on this mark' and get the flow happening even on very crowded roads. And ideally accident reduction that often creates traffic jams.
Cities: Algorithms will start making little efficiency improvement to driving. All the little things like removing unnecessary lane changing. People double parking to drop something off. And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups.
We will need to make rules to adapt and keep the flow, e.g. stop people have cars driving around the block rather than parking. Ensure we have 'road neutrality' so the wealthy dont pay a premium for faster trips where other cars in the fleet move aside and slow everyone else type deal.
Anyway, I dont profess to know the answer. Its all a guess! I do suspect the benefits will outweigh additional trips people might take. Besides, who knows, maybe by then we'll have the 'Boring company' or equivalent making private roads so only the plebs use public roads anyway....
This won't even be necessary as the self driving cars will have vastly superior reaction time when compared to humans. Especially if the cars are electric and thus have almost instant power to the wheels.
Especially if you use tricks like radar underneath the car in front of you so you can react to what the car one car ahead of you does etc.
Also a lot of the highway traffic jams are caused by too small distance between the cars. A self driving car should be much more efficient in keeping enough distance between the cars to keep up the flow.
Absolutely. Not even accounting for induced demand, you'll see ~30% more vehicle-miles due to empty-vehicle repositioning.
As you say, accelerations and decelerations can be synchronised, accidents reduced, and standing wave behaviours eliminated, all of which will indeed help traffic flow more efficiently. But this is not by any means enough to compensate for empty-vehicle redistribution, much less induced demand.
> And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups.
That's only possible in environments where there are no pedestrians or cyclists -- eg., segregated motorways/freeways, which already have no intersection conflicts. At best it represents a space saving, not really a time saving.
Yeah, of course self driving cars are going to make traffic way worse! Who even thinks otherwise? Suddenly you are going to have millions of disabled and homebound seniors wanting the cars to take them to do grocery shopping and errands, kids being driven around to and from from school and practice, and low income residents sleeping in their cars commuting to work in higher income areas of the country. Self driving cars will make traffic exponentially worse.
What might be interesting is how they deal with peak usages like commute hours. Would swarms of cars try to hop over to the next time zone when it's easy?
Without a source, this is just a made-up statistic, i.e., worthless.
Here's a source for you, though [1].
> Sixteen studies of cruising behavior were conducted between 1927 and 2001 in the central business districts of eleven cities on four continents (see Figure 1). ... About thirty percent of the cars in the traffic flow were cruising for parking. The data varied widely around these averages, however; on some uncrowded streets no cars were cruising, while on some congested streets most of the cars were cruising. Cities have changed since these observations were made, and the data are selective because researchers study cruising only where they expect to find it.
[1] "Cruising for parking" by Donald Shoup http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf
Instead we could be sleeping, playing video games, working on laptops, etc.
I think that vehicle design will shift a lot once we start optimizing for these new use-cases, and this might make a big difference to how tolerable road journeys are.
This is all very hard to predict though...
When it comes to commuting in the Pacific Northwest, for most of the year an extra half-hour of available daylight at the end (or start) of the day is the difference between getting out climbing during the work week, or not.
Personally, I'd trade a comfortable commute for that extra time, no question. Of course, maybe a self-driving car could allow for working during the morning commute, and getting off earlier... Hmmm.
That's what I'm hoping for. It's already sort-of possible in the special-case of commuting on a bus like Google/Apple/etc. offer in the Bay Area.
Can we reach the point where working while in transit is as productive as being on site (face-to-face meetings notwithstanding)?
Surely you mean turning your 8 hour shifts into 10 hour shifts?
Maybe self driving car fleets will be so numerous, they will optimize via carpooling in busy urban pockets. Maybe people will stop driving there own self driving car to work and use these. Maybe people will own/ride in really small self driving car that network to optimize and self park.
> The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides.
This may not be generally correct. People also like to commute quite a bit by rail in certain areas. Living on the east coast I can tell you this because of #of people using NJ Transit and Amtrak is big. Cars take much longer to get to NYC already. Commuting to city via subway trains is so that there is shortage of housing right in manhattan where no one goes by cars.
Couple that with the ability to reclaim a lot of space designated for parking, and forward thinking cities might make themselves much more walkable as well.
once people are okay with sharing seats in a van
I think it has a lot less to do with the bubble factor than the fact that public transportation in the US just sucks, period.
My 3-mile commute from Menlo Park to Palo Alto would take
- bus: 58 minutes (2 minute walk from home to bus stop + 12 minutes average wait for ECR bus + 10 minutes on ECR + 12 minutes average wait in Palo Alto Transit Center for bus 22 + 15 minutes on bus 22 + 7 minutes walking to work)
- train: 51 minutes (4 minutes walking from home to station + 30 minutes average wait till next train + 5 minute train ride + 12 minutes walking to work).
- running: 35 minutes end to end
- bike: 15 minutes end to end
- Uber: 13-20 minutes
- driving: 8-12 minutes
I bike, but I can see why others would drive. Public transportation is basically defunct here. I can run faster to work than taking public transportation. That says something about seriously how bad it is.
So, while the efficiency of public transport might be a concern, car-as-a-status-symbol seems to be near-universal.
Do the trains really not go on a timetable there, instead arriving completely randomly?
- The signs about which train is actually arriving are frequently wrong, resulting in boarding the wrong train
- The time I need to be at various destinations is fairly uniformly distributed. with a bike I can just leave for work exactly 20 minutes before my first meeting, allowing 5 minutes to freshen up.
In many cases, running, biking, driving would all waste less time because I can leave on-demand, even if the actual transit time takes longer.
Public transportation needs to be either frequent enough (e.g. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York, etc. where rush-hour trains arrive about every 1-2 minutes, non-rush-hour every 5-8 minutes or less) or on-demand (e.g. UberPool, autonomous cars) to cut the time waste.
In my limited sample group of one (1), these are rarely true.
There certainly must be places in the world where trains are so unpredictable that the average delay is 30 minutes, but (not having been there, I should say) Menlo Park and Palo Alto sound like places where trains should be a bit more punctual than that?
1: https://jalopnik.com/5344758/six-door-prius-limo-totes-kids-...
I assume, you are a technical person. If you look back at year 2000, In a typical IT company there is a server Box for each category. A Database server box , a WebServer Box ( physical machines ) etc.. very few people used viruvalization etc.. Physical Machines capacity utilization is around 15% . Come to 2017, with Amazon AWS cloud is providing on demand servers to thousands of companies, all of them TIME Sharing tens of thousands of Servers.
Same thing applies with self-driving cars. Higher utilization by ride sharing leads to FEWER cars on the Road. Today average occupancy in a car may be 1.3 with Self-driving RIDE sharing, if it goes to 2.6 that is HALF the CARS on the ROAD compared to today.
Doubling the average people in car from today is much EASIER, since that BEHAVIOUR of Sharing is tied to FINANCIAL gains to people. If you ride by yourself , 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION cost is $500 vs. If you Share it is $200/month, that motivate people to SHARE and leads to LESS cars.
But I see your point though. If people are incentivized to share a car then that might reduce the load.
That said, my suspicion is, once you take the driver out of the equation, you can do so much more than just ferrying people. E.g courier/shipping services, or mobile food stalls (food truck that sells food while moving on the highway, once engineers figure out how to safely and autonomously speed match two cars), etc. The induced demand may be greater than the savings from ride-sharing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
I will give you one great example of 'Exponential adoption' happened in recent history of technology.
In the year 1998, at the early days of Internet, we used have only WIRED Broadband Router. Everybody has a 100 Feet CAT 5 cable in the home, when you need to connect a different computer/laptop you change that CAT 5 to that ROOM from Router. 100 Feet CAT 5 wire used to cost $75 those days.
When Wireless ROUTER are released in the next 10 months, at the cost of $100 every body bought, it is no brainer instead of Buying couple of CAT5 100 Feet wires which each cost $75 and still inconvenient .
In my memory this is the most RAPID adoption in a matter of one year , whole USA moved to Bought WIRELESS Routers.
Same thing will happen with , Electric Self-driving on-demand summon CARS where it costs $200/month using it any time vs. owing CAR costs $400/month ( insurance , Gasoline , etc.. )
That's the only thing that keeps me from using something like Uber Pool today -- I don't want to spend extra time picking up/dropping off another passenger.
There are places with comfortable public transport today but it seems most prefer would prefer a 40 minute drive than a 1 hour train ride even though it frees up their time.
A train ride frees your time up less than an autonomous car ride because on a train you have no personal space. You always have to be aware of people around you and where your own belongings are, watch for your stop, etc. In a car you can focus on whatever you're doing.
In the long term a critical mass of well-behaving self-driving cars may be able to regulate traffic much more efficiently than humans currently can.
In the medium term we may also see dedicated self-driving car lanes with higher speed limits.
In my experience Public transportation sucks. It's fine for getting around locally, but is terrible for commuting.
For a short 3 month period I found uberpool to be far superior to taking a train. Some days it cost a dollar more. Some days it cost less. The travel time was pretty much equivalent plus it was more comfortable.
I hate driving in rush hour traffic but as a passenger I didn't mind.
This is why I think self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides, the more people will drive (self driving or otherwise). If road infrastructure is the same, that necessarily means a much higher density of cars on the road. It's possible that self driving cars will be more space efficient on the road, but ten times more efficient? I think it's more likely that there will just be way more cars on the road and traffic will worsen considerably.