We're going to have to slowly shift to more usage-based pricing if we want autonomous cars to work. Start off charging tolls per mile for zero occupancy vehicles when they drive in congested areas, then expend it to single occupancy vehicles in congested areas, etc.

A bit more controversial, but I personally love the idea of a congestion-free fast lane (say, 100+ mph) exclusively for autonomous vehicles, with prices that fluctuate based on supply and demand. We already have this for a couple freeways in Southern California and it's lovely to have as an option.

Gas taxes are already effectively toll-per-mile, with a bonus incentive to get fuel efficient cars.

If we start seeing enough EV adoption to dent gas tax revenues, that's a win.

If you’re talking gas tax in the US, I’d say that’s laughable. Using eia.gov[1] as a reference, the prices are half of what we have in the EU. We’ve observed a steady increase in the prices (mostly due to taxes). But it didn’t have the effect, people just deal with the higher price and carry on. There’s even more cars than there used to be. And the average living standard in the east/SE EU is lower of that in the US.

When I was in Göteborg, Sweden, I saw this system where the toll increases based on the time, and it’s highest (~30 SEK = ~3€) in the rush hour. There was no price in the off hours. Maybe if it costs more to drive in the rush hour, one might think about not doing it or finding someone else to split the cost.

To rely on the “tax system” to take care of the congestion/traffic pollution problem, we’d have to bump the taxes and tolls by 10x to see any effect. EV is a step in the right direction, but only by a small amount. We need incentive to drive less, something that forces everyone to think before they drive. And by everyone I have in mind the person who is driving and also the person who is making them drive to the office to have their physical presence to do the same work they can do from anywhere. Make it more expensive for a company to have car riders and make them count commute as part of the workday. I believe remote work is a part of the solution to this and making it more expensive to get everyone to the HQ every day might make more managers reconsider if it’s necessary.

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/

The linked article addresses how gas taxes are nowhere near good enough to solve the congestion problem, and especially not when more cars go EV.

This is already the case, and has been so for a little while.

The number of people who need to commute during rush hour can't increase 83%. Maybe some transit commuters will switch to cars, but maybe some car commuters will finally be able to switch to transit if these make the first and last mile feasible.

And 83% was the first and only week. Maybe the number doesn't stay that high once indulging in the novelty wears off.

It probably could increase quite a lot because more people might be willing to live far away and enjoy cheaper / more housing if it means that commuting won't be dead time. With self driving cars you could actually work during your commute. As you point out, a number of existing commuters might also transfer from train to car travel.

You're forgetting the unoccupied trips. There will be unoccupied trips running errands even at rush hour, because why not, you're not sitting in traffic, just your car.

Also you seem to be thinking more of the robotaxis model, but the article is talking about the more likely future of everyone continuing to own their own car, only now it can drive. If cars are driving back empty after a commute then rush hour will have roughly twice the traffic.

One way to prevent congestion would be to instead of paying for the distance traveled, you simply paid for the time the car is on the road, giving a financial incentive to send the car outside of rush hours. Would probably also cause people to use alternative routes rather than everyone trying to use the shortest one when is congested.

Yes, this is one of the main solutions proposed by the linked article.

Wouldn't that be a trip that someone would normally be driving anyway? Also wouldn't it make sense to have a store deliver to lots of people on one circuit, this reducing traffic?

No, once you don't need to drive it personally you can run a lot more errands, and thus will. See the linked article.

And look at how much more random stuff people buy when a click of a mouse gets it delivered to your house vs having to go to stores looking for it.

If one car is going in a loop and delivering to lots of people it would be less time on the road than all the cars of the individual errands.

This doesn't seem to be the world we're headed towards though. People like owning their own personal vehicles and aren't likely to give that up.

What are you basing that on? In dense cities with good transportation infrastructure people don't own cars nearly as much and the people that do own cars use them less.

I think you are confusing necessity with desire.

If the future is car as a service, then yes congestion does not automatically get worse, you call an automated car to pick you up, and another one to take you home, it might also mean that more ride sharing happens too

But we already have buses and bicycles. Car as a service might just as well make the congestion worse since it will go empty to pick you up.

Think Uber carpooling, minus drivers, much cheaper, and short pickup times. Maybe 6-10 person shuttles instead of sedans/SUVs in denser areas. To a car service, moving an empty vehicle is inefficient and a waste of money.

Keeping an empty electric vehicle in motion all the time is cheaper than parking it, in urban contexts.

Because you're not pricing the externalities of having zero-occupant vehicles roaming around streets that are already at or near maximum capacity.

> Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants

Where do you get that idea from? or maybe, how did you come to that conclusion? It's not evident that would be the case. Traffic mirrors demand. Demand goes both ways, unevenly. Prior to the end-of-the-work-day, you would see an increase in empty vehicles consolidating for the imminent exodus of a city, but that would hardly be the common case.

> that supposes that most people will give up the idea of personal car ownership entirely instead of just buying their own AVs

There are multiple ways to ensure this occurs. The same reason horse carriages aren't allowed on Freeways (legal/safety barriers), or almost nobody uses gliders or natural gas cars to commute (impractical), etc. US Society is subject to change/more malleable than you might imagine. Maybe not in our lifetime, but ubiquitous phone booths disappeared in mine, so I hold out hope.

So here's a hypothetical scenario. Car drives kids to school (in my experience, school tends to start before work). Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work. In the afternoon, car drives (empty) to pick up kids and drive them home, then drives (empty) back to work to pick up the parent. Half the time it's empty.

> Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work.

This implies there are no other people for which a rideshare would be suitable in either direction at any given time. This seems, like an unreasonable way to predict how mass AV would work. Again, demand is asymmetrical, which means there are opportunities for aggregation and overlap, when talking about mass adoption to the point that "the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants".

There's the issue with demand for AV availability (ie traffic), which can never be reduced to zero. This would incentivize better judgement than "I'll stagger the school and work times"

Logically, why would AVs be 1-4 occupant vehicles? Once you have AV, you have AV vans and buses, similar to airport shuttling.

We're not talking about rideshares, we're talking about autonomous personal vehicles. Most people are not likely to give up their personal vehicles; they'll just have self-driving ones.

This seems like an odd argument to me: "enabling efficiency isn't useful if you assume people's habits won't adapt to the new status quo". Once you've moved personal vehicle use of the sort you describe from essential to luxury, I don't see why you couldn't make users bear the cost of their frivolous externalities.

There is no way people would give up owning their own car outside of very dense urban centers. Everywhere else it would neither be practical nor desirable to wait for a rental car to arrive.

People also tend to store lots of personal items in their car.

There are any number of things that seemed utterly critical and timeless to the myopic of their time that are either anachronisms or at best optional today. "There's no ways people will live in apartment buildings", "there's no way people will give up their horses", etc etc

Why do you think people will choose to rent a self driving car instead of owning one?

For the same reason I use a combination of transit, Ubers, and rental cars to get a far better experience than car owners at a fraction of the cost. For the same reason that the average person gave up horses and large plots of land and indoor woodfires for heating and cooking: if something is horribly inefficient and costly relative to an alternative, eventually society stops subsidizing it, and the only ones left doing it are the highly irrational or the highly passionate (compare horse ownership 150 years ago to now).

There are obviously advantages to owning a car that transport-as-a-service doesn't offer, but the point is that once an alternative is available that's better from a global utility perspective, it doesn't make any sense to subsidize the costly decisions of the irrational (barring interest groups that we as a society choose to explicitly subsidize, like families or the disabled).

I don't want to depend on a taxi. I have to drive to work NOW.

Well, obviously. This isn't something you turn off overnight if the alternative infrastructure doesn't yet support it. But you could make the same argument if pretending it's a necessity about any of a million things that don't exist in modern society today. If your definition of what you're entitled to is no different from the status quo, you're barely even coherently engaging with conversations about how society can and should evolve, improve, or maintain its normz and policies.

> We're not talking about rideshares, we're talking about autonomous personal vehicles

> they'll just have self-driving ones.

That won't last long, because of market inefficiency. Why pay for maintenance and energy on a vehicle? It's just as unrealistic as saying we'll keep personal vehicles running on gasoline, to me.

people who can afford it value exclusive ownership of an item. a good example is the vacation home. it's possible to defray the cost of ownership of the second home by a lot if you are willing to rent it out to others while you aren't using it, but most people don't seem to do this. [0]

I suspect that unless it gets banned outright, wealthy people will be happy to pay whatever it costs to guarantee strangers can't leave a bad smell in the vehicle that takes them to work.

[0] only about 30%, according to https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/07/12/study-mor...

In your scenario the number of trips is the same but the car is more often empty because the parent doesn't have to chauffeur the kids around.

Now the parent can be in a different car at the same time, going something else, thus doubling the number of cars on the road.

Yes, that was the point.

But it still takes up space on the road

> It's really not. Congestion is a huge problem already, and increasing the current road utilization by 83% will bring entire cities to a standstill for the entirety of waking hours.

That's not how equilibria work though. Currently congestion is the primary bottleneck on personal consumption of transportation in major metro areas in the US. That will not change with AVs. That is to say, we will probably reach a similar congestion equilibrium as we have now, there will just be more transportation happening, which is a net good thing provided there are not also negative externalities (such as emissions) from that transportation bump.