Still, traffic will be worse when you compare one bus with 50 people vs. 12 self-driving cars with 4 people each. A bus is 14-15m long, whereas even a small car like the Chevy Bolt is over 4m. So parked bumper-to-bumper the cars produce >3x as much traffic, and then you add some gaps for actually driving you're up to 4x.

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.

> 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.

No, that's not what happens. This is a classic situation with a stable Nash equilibrium where the best for all competitors is to keep the price high. They know the current price is affordable enough that people will keep paying.

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.

> Think about gasoline prices back when crude oil prices suddenly fell off a cliff. Did gas prices at your local station drop?

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

I know it’s not the main point you’re making, but gas prices near me (north east USA) absolutely did drop a lot when oil plummeted.

> 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.

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 ???

> People bought each server box for $5000 and server capacity used is only at 15%

So why do they need 2 servers?

Also, I'm pretty sure VPSes and shared hosting were available in 2000.

VPSes did not exist as a commercial product in 2000. Back then you likely purchased and colo'd your hardware or leased from a provider. You could get shared hosting with CGI access but that was about it.

Shared hosting (with PHP, mod_perl and SSI) was available from thousands of providers for between $5 and $25/month. SSL required a dedicated IP, because SNI wasn't a thing yet, and so if you wanted an SSL enabled site, you were looking at closer to $100/month. But that was for managed, shared hosting, typically with access to a database and automated backup. Good enough for most businesses small-ish web presences.

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.

Are cars comparatively cheaper than in the Model T era?

I think a Model T was about $22k-$25k in today's money.

So parent's logic, as I was expecting, doesn't necessarily apply. We just started wanting more from our cars, we didn't necessarily make them cheaper. There are very cheap cars but most would consider them death-traps...

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...

The only way I see limiting the impact of traffic increases on self-driving cars is for municipalities to pass laws ahead of time limiting the amount of self-driving cars on the road to a specific number, much like Singapore [0] (or tie it to a percentage of the town population, say 10%)

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...

They could build small self driving busses.

Someone said a few weeks ago that buses that run very often on the same route is just a very expensive train.

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?

Having worked with trains I'd guess that frequently running busses are actually very cheap trains. Rail infrastructure is incredibly expensive.

> Rail infrastructure is incredibly expensive.

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?

Roads are dirt-cheap (pardon the pun) compared to rail: first off, a road requires an order of magnitude lower precision, can scale significantly steeper grades, and allows for curves and stopping distances that on rail would be considered insufficient. Next, operating it is a dark art in itself - scheduling, communication, safety, etc.; a highway through nowhere just needs asphalt and it just lays there, a railway needs active elements. And to top it off, there's maintenance: a 2-inch bump in a road is normal, in a railway it's a major defect. Worse, rerouting around a closed section is not a simple matter of setting up traffic cones.

All of that is expensive - like the difference between 80% and 99.9% reliability.

> I thought it would be easier to implement self driving trains than to implement self driving cars. Who is working on that?

We already have self-driving light rail systems (London's DLR for instance).

...and much of the normal rail is running at Level 3-Level 4 equivalent.

Wouldn't the route inefficiency compensate somewhat for the rider efficiency of the bus? If you break one bus route that snakes around town hitting a dozen or more stops with 12 cars each hitting one or two close together stops and going direct to the school, you've potentially saved some driving mileage and certainly decreased the amount of time the kids are on the roads. Dependant on timing, this could be used to like traffic impact.

Why would the self-driving car vendor charge $20 if you ride by yourself or $5 if you share with one other person? They'd be getting less revenue for a longer, more time consuming trip due to the need to pick up and drop off the 2nd passenger.

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.