Rush hour traffic is usually the heaviest in a single direction, the empty self-driving cars would mostly be going into the other direction.

...if there's ten of them. If there's 1000 of them, now the rush hour traffic is both ways. That is the expected scenario, not "I have my very special car like nobody else has."

The self-driving cars are not in a hurry to get to their parking space. The commuters don't want to be late for a meeting, but the self-driving cars don't care about being late for a parking space.

Yes, and...? Doesn't change the fact that they're creating congestion (not only for themselves but also for other road users); plus the return trip can be expected to be "pick me up at $location at $time", which is again a scheduling problem.

Clearly, the solution is to let self-driving cars drive into town on the opposite side of the road.

Rush hour traffic in that single direction might get heavier if the drivers of single occupant cars can do other things with their time. It simultaneously removes some of the disincentive of a long commute, and also removes much of the benefit of not being the driver.

One common mitigation for rush hour traffic is to steal some lanes from the reverse-flow traffic to give more capacity for peak-flow traffic.

Not if the route is well designed. One of my colleagues at Stanford developed an algorithm which can `rebalance' without increasing congestion: https://asl.stanford.edu/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/Rossi...

That might work in theory but I doubt it'd work in practice. You already now get Google Maps congestion of small roads that happen to be the fastest according to Google maps. I don't think vendors will be able to develop a fleet that intelligently coordinates routes. Especially because that'd make routes of some cars slower, not something people would accept.

> I'd sincerely hope they introduce a tax on vehicles driven without driver.

I sincerely hope they do the exact opposite. Taxes are often added to behaviors the state wants to limit (ie. Sin tax on Alcohol/Cigarettes/etc), it would be in everyone's best interest to convert to driverless cars so the tax should be on people without driverless cars and/or more importantly on people who don't carpool.

Sorry, I meant empty cars. Even though that would create a job market where you pay people to sit in a car to avoid taxes (hire teenagers for that?), so maybe just tax cars by miles driven instead of on a fixed basis.

The only reason we don't tax by usage is because we don't have the data. If cars have that data, it would be by far the superior system. Why tax someone driving 100mi the same as someone driving 100k miles?

I think the intention was to say self-driving vehicles with no passengers, though I could be wrong.

The reason being that a car driving itself around with no one in it is essentially wasting resources and spewing out emissions. The example comes up often in what-ifs about self-driving cars.

Ahh, well that I can get behind IF they are in congested traffic because one of the big advantages of driverless cars is mine can drop me off at work then go park in a charging garage across town. I wouldn't want to be taxed for my car driving on a wide-open road to a more efficient location.

You'll still pay for it indirectly through the cost of gas and putting miles on your car though. Which is the ideal way to "tax" usage anyways.

What we really need to do is encourage self driving cars as being a form of shared transit, not something that people sleep in, with massive taxes on usage not involving high occupancy.

Self driving vehicles allow ride-sharing to be far more effective as you won't have to pay for the cost of the driver. Right now bus routes are studied, and are used less often than they could be due to the last mile problem, and should we grow the scale of HOV lanes, ride sharing will be further encouraged. We could take a fleet of minibuses and focus on the real time optimization problem, rather than making car travel more luxurious but also make congestion far worse.

Maybe they could be forced to take the slow route. Or lane.

this would in fact decrease the traffic for two reasons:

1. self-driving cars make more efficient use of the roadway

2. parking lots could (partially) be converted into roadway, or even better, actual business, so there will be less road to "outside of town".

Both leading to more cars on the road, i.e. more traffic

Converting on-street parking can help to increase capacity but I don't think you can convert a lot of parking lots into roads. And where real estate prices are high, they're often underground anyway. Making more efficient use of the roadway is great but they'll probably not more than double efficiency (as long as not all cars are self driving and the road is also used by pedestrians), so doubling the number of trips will still increase congestion.