I see the same issue happening with any ride service model. Unless some part of it is being subsidized, I find it hard to see how a company will be able to have enough capacity for peak demand while not wasting a ton of capital. And if people have issues with getting a ride service, they'll buy their own, further complicating the profitability margins of ride service companies.
You deal with peak demand by having a supply that is equal to the peak. Automatic Rideshare companies can self balance over a large area, watch the predictable trends that show up during a year and so on and will print money and thus have a lot of capital.
You're also forgetting that most existing cars on the road have way more seating capacity than needed, since they need to account for the maximum number of people who will use that car at once. A family of four needs a car with four seats, even if most of the time that car will only be carrying one person to work and back throughout the week. Self driving cars will be much more efficient in that respect.
That assumes that nearby places have different peak times, which is probably a flawed assumption.
By offering discounted fares at off-peak times, and charging premium fares at the busiest times, you can smooth out the peaks while optimising profitability.
Easy, only companies with absurd amounts of cash will be able to compete, and won't mind burning through billions to dominate the market. The economics of Uber and Lyft don't work right now, but that isn't stopping them.
Google, Uber, GM, and whoever else will compete with one or two heavily funded startups, until one wins and the rest fail because of the dynamics you describe.
So I think the GP has the wrong picture.
No until they control the market at which point you will pay all the subsidy back with interest.
It's not impossible, but if they go into corrupt regulation (how else could they do it?) there is no reason they can't get the same without the throwing a lot of money away first. So, again, they won't.
Also, you make it sound like corrupt, industry protecting regulation is the exception and not the norm. Where do you live, and does this fantasy place accept immigrants?
Most vehicles sit idle in a parking lot but could be doing meaningful work.
(Queue SitCom script where someone tries to leave a party but forgot to turn off the feature and their car won't be back for 30 minutes...)
I would guess that in most cities the capacity is not limited by capital to buy cars, but capacity of the street network, which cars, autonomous or not, are notoriously bad at utilizing.
Many rides aren't so time sensitive that they can't be shifted to another time if the price is right (or wrong).
Car sharing companies will likely come up with a subscription service where you pay $X/month for your normal commute, then they can make sure they have enough base capacity for the regular rides and the on-demand rides can use demand pricing to ensure that everyone can get a car when they need it.
Which creates carpooling opportunities through economies of scale, as Uber/Lyft pool is already demonstrating.
That being said, there's probably still a place for busses during rush hour in a lot of places.
The main reason why non-dense places don't see good bus service is because of labor costs. In developed countries labor is easily the biggest source of cost when it comes to a bus, so agencies will run one 40-passenger bus every half hour rather than three 15-passenger buses every ten minutes. Removing labor makes the latter scenario affordable, and if buses are coming every ten minutes average wait time is about five minutes, which is comparable to Lyft or Uber today in some places.
I mean today it is a no-go decision from be, simply because it takes a minimum of twice as long to go to work by bus as by my car, but with a smarter route, that may not be an issue.
To take a bus from point A to point B, I have to walk to point C, wait for the bus, get on, wait to be dropped of at point D, cross the intersection to point E, wait for a transfer bus, get on, wait to be dropped off at point F, and finally walk to point B.
With this system I call a cab, wait for it at point A, get on, get dropped of at point B. Rather than my time being fragmented into 3 periods of walking interspersed with 4 periods of waiting, it is just 2 periods of waiting, which makes it much easier to make use of the time. In my experience riding buses, only about a third of the time spent is usable (except for long distance commuter routes), while nearly all the time spent in a cab is usable.
Even if the shared cab took a bit longer than a bus, I would still choose it over a bus for the improved productivity / enjoyment.
Like busses and trains? Seriously. Public transit.
The issue is a geometric one. There is only a fixed road capacity. Consuming that road capacity with deadheading vehicles is the worst usage.
IE, it can't go point to point, and is instead stuck in a movement pattern that isn't changing.
I think it would be feasible for the self-driving taxi companies to have a small fleet of cars in each neighborhood that could respond rapidly to take people for short trips.
By definition, public transit can only serve a specific segment of the commuting population.
That's not inherent to public transport. You can easily imagine a public network of bus transit where users send in a request for transit an hour or two beforehand; software coalesces the set of requests into a dynamic set of routes and stops; and tells the user to turn up at a stop (relatively) near the origination point and drops them off at a stop (relatively) near their destination point.
Whether it's economic or feasible is a separate issue. But funding mechanism, transport form factor, and autonomy are all distinct parts of a transportation method, and it's a mistake to think of "private autonomous cars" as competing with "legacy human-driven buses with set routes."
If "on demand mass transit via large multipeople vehicles (IE busses)" were feasible, then you'd already see companies like Uber doing it.
On demand point to point, where you don't have to wait a dozen stops to get where you want, is just strictly better than the alternatives in many many ways.
Sure. Get around this by having preset schedules. Or infer it. These details matter, but you can point out similar issues for public transit as it exists today and for private car ownership as it exists today: both are commonly used, despite drawbacks.
> If "on demand mass transit via large multipeople vehicles (IE busses)" were feasible, then you'd already see companies like Uber doing it.
Not at all. Uber and Lyft are premised on having a large base of independent contractors to perform all the labor and provide all the capital. "Large multipeople vehicles" would require complicated integrations with different municipalities, or for Uber/Lyft to purchase their own fleet of buses. Neither aligns well with their current businesses.
> On demand point to point, where you don't have to wait a dozen stops to get where you want, is just strictly better than the alternatives in many many ways.
Sure. And shared rides is strictly better in one very important way: cost. I'm much less cost-sensitive than the average American, and I take Lyft Line far more often than a regular Lyft.
It's not about what's best, but best in certain situations. I value latency sometimes, and cost sometimes.
Current public transportation is rigidly designed for capturing massive economies of scale (still good), while a dynamic swarm of self-driving vehicles can fulfill last-mile demand with the benefits of economies of scale (market opportunity).
There is a fixed road area to work with.
Links? I haven't found any way to practically share Lyfts for long-ish trips. I don't see any evidence Lyft or Uber will ever do much with shared-rides.
For self-driving cars, people wanting to save money will drive their own cars before they share rides. If you have a car, you've sunk a lot of money into it and so the per-ride cost is fairly small. Even a self-driving car has to price-in wear-and-tear.
Not only do many people have significant capital sunk into their cars but a lot of people would have trouble affording the cost of using a self-driving taxi and some number of others would simply object for whatever reason.
Moreover, maintaining a car and using a self-driving taxi is even more expensive - cars sitting around still decay and require maintenance as well as insurance.
I suspect these are more easily solvable since there is more flexibility about parking spots (the cars don't need to be within walking distance and only a few need to be close by). But there will still be idle cars that need to be put somewhere during off-peak times.
The local airport has similar issues with Lyft or Uber, which are in a separate zone from the taxis, so if it were possible to optimize better they probably would've tried already.
Autonomous vehicle “drivers” don’t need to shower, use the bathroom, eat or sleep, so instead they can be constantly moving rather than camping at airports. A car in motion is generating revenue, so I think autonomous taxis would be fewer in number than human taxis as well as behaving in revenue-optimizing ways (i.e. not camping at the airport.) Theoretically, those airport taxi villages would likely turn into charging stations with a few employees to provide necessary services.
Not necessarily. A lot of the self-driving taxi utopia is based on the idea that self-driving taxis will serve commuter traffic. And the major facet of commuter traffic is that you're going to have a high-volume, unidirectional traffic flow--once that car drops off its worker, there is no demand for it make any trips nearby. So if that car is in motion, it's still not carrying anybody, so it's not generating revenue.
It's sort of like congestion pricing.
Uber has done some of this already.
Not parking means excess capacity is creating traffic jams. So to avoid paying for storage, self driving cars are going to consume energy and space in travel lanes.... cities should charge the f out this.
(I'm fairly bearish on the prospects/likelihood of self-driving cars in my lifetime, but that's orthogonal to the point above. If they exist, we might not need to build mini-tanks anymore.)
in this vision for the future, is it still necessary to chisel out 6ft on every surface street for humans to ride self-propelled bicycles?
It's tough to see how to get down to 6 foot wide lanes when there are so many vehicles on the road which are wider than 6 feet. A Ford F-150 (thirteenth generation), which is the best selling pickup in the US, has a width of 79.9 in = 6.6 feet.
Or, consider a family with 2 parents and 3 kids, where all three need car seats, plus room for strollers, extra clothes, and so on. I looked at top DDG hits for "car for three kids" and all of them were over 6 feet in width.
Then there are service vehicles, like garbage trucks, which are well wider than 6 feet. (https://www.reference.com/vehicles/size-typical-garbage-truc... says a popular model is "approximately 102 inches" = 8.5 feet). Where do they drive without blocking two lanes of traffic.
It would also be impossible to use by any RVs. https://campergrid.com/average-rv-length-width/ says "Travel trailers or a camper trailer on an average are around 20 feet in length and 8 feet in width". Others are larger; "Class A RV width stands at an average of 9.5 feet".
Or conversion vans for people in wheelchairs.
These are all solvable, but there's a lot of existing - and expensive - systems in place which would need to be changed to make that vision come true. At the very least you need to wait until people who don't have narrow self-driving cars no longer have the political influence to keep others from kicking them off the road.
It'd be better for everyone if you could just walk in any car in these scenarios.
The partners at one place I worked at in London did this.
Maybe we'll have a AirBnB type of service where you would rent your self-driving car to others from 9 to 4 and the "AirBnB car" company would make sure it goes where there's demand.
This way people owning the cars are still sure to have their own ride even when there's high demand.
Another option is to have the car drive out into the suburbs in search of free parking to abuse.
For a family, the car would drive home to be available for other users. Each trip thus turns into two trips, one to drop a person off and another to pick a person up.
The ride service model doesn't work except for the people already tolerating ride services. Lots of us want to keep our junk in our cars. We haul around our snacks, spare shoes, and raingear. Our cars might get dirty, but at least it's our own filth, not a puddle of a stranger's vomit.
Some people will pay extra for car storage, other people will opt for the discount of not owning a car.
Disclaimer: I was never a regular in any big-equipment sports.
If I'm wrong, well, like I said owning a car might still be fairly popular when they self-drive.
This doesn't sound like abuse, it sounds like a good idea.
The point of expensive parking is to reduce the contention for parking spaces. If the car drives a long way away to park where parking is less contested, that seems like a win.
Neither I nor Walmart would be pleased to have empty cars showing up to park on our property.
I had in mind just the side of a road that doesn't have parking restrictions. Anybody is allowed to park there.
Perhaps you are talking about a free car park outside a supermarket or similar? In which case, yeah, fair enough, that would be abusing the free parking.
It's a bit like the complaints about Waze sending cars down minor little suburban streets. The town hadn't intended to be paying for the transportation infrastructure of a nearby major city.
Once self-driving ride services become competitive, people will own far fewer daily commuters. They will put their money into a 4WD that can take them skiing, and leave it in the driveway on work days.