This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. The more I use them the more I wish for a world where every car was shareable: you need to go somewhere? you simply get into the nearest parked car and drive it to where you want to go. And, unlike autonomy, there are no technical barriers to this, only the will to do it and the economic model to sustain it. Sadly these services seem to be in full retreat now but I will miss them and still hope they'll rise again soon.

This is not the conclusion I would draw from car2go failing out of North America. They still had the problem that you are required to find a legal parking spot and there's no guarantee that there will be a car available anywhere near you. Taxis and private vehicles solve the latter and former respectively but they all suffer from the inefficiencies inherent to the system design.

[1] https://mifold.com/products/mifold-the-grab-and-go-booster

I’m imagining how gross a taxi would be that doesn’t have a driver to provide passengers a low level of behaviour moderation.

If people have to pay the cleaning bill they will be careful not to make a mess.

So riders blame the mess on the previous passenger. Then the taxi company installs cameras. It’s all gross (and yes, I’m aware many taxis have cameras already).

Self driving taxi will be a new possible way to get from A to B, and people will chose their own trade offs.

Probably human driven taxis will become the luxury eventually.

And often that is the hardest thing to get rid of.

For "free floating car sharing" (DriveNow/ShareNow, Yandex.Drive, ...) this seems to work quite well.

I've talked to a number of uber drivers. The cameras recording the passengers are a much greater inhibitor of bad behavior than the driver.

Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. Now the liability for that behaviour is with the driver. In an autonomous car the liability would be Uber which is why they won't do it.

An Uber that needs to look for parking in order to pick you up is never going to work in most busy cities. So I suspect you will see people opt for the driver based taxi service instead. Or maybe autonomous taxis will be reserved for emerging markets e.g. Indonesia which are more relaxed about parking.

I take Uber and Lyft in NYC multiple times per week. No one ever “parks”, they just pull up, you jump in, and off you go. Takes less than a minute in most cases, doesn’t block traffic, and I suspect it virtually never results in a ticket. Maybe if they sit there for 10 minutes or more, but that’s exceedingly rare. And even then, they’re not going to get a ticket outside a few ultra-congested areas of manhattan that make up a tiny fraction of this city. Even in most places in manhattan, you could sit in a running car in a no parking zone for hours without getting a ticket. I had a moving truck up on the curb on the Upper West Side in a no parking zone for hours and the NYPD rolled past several times without a glance.

Also, this is exactly how taxis all work too, btw, which seems to undermine your entire point.

Similar laws simply aren't present in most other cities. Stopping in the middle of the road to pick up passengers is illegal and drivers do it since the police are never there. Hence my point that Uber would never program this illegality into their self driving algorithm.

The vast majority of pickups in nyc at least are not illegal under any current law.

Drivers own the liability for illegal parking. Autonomous cars would make the developer liable.

No government is going to tolerate systemic and wide spread violation of the law.

It's just like self driving cars will go a bit over the speed limit if that is the flow of traffic. If they don't, then the laws will be adjusted. It would be silly to indefinitely hold back a huge industry because humans get to exploit legal loopholes but machines don't.

Autonomous cars won't have the same algorithm as selfish humans to position themselves.

A human will go to one of the busy places and will probably drive back to the original point of pickup.

While a computer will be notified ( 1 car only parked on the busy place) and immediately replaced by a new available/nearby car. Making the process more efficient, more remote places will be handled faster. Busy places more efficient.

Not all cabs will need to earn money, since the biggest expense will be the car driving and not the human driver ( waiting for work).

And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine, some companies even negotiate it because of the sheer amount.

Up until the point they are banned.

Everyone, especially lawmakers, are pretty sick of tech companies breaking the law in order to be "disruptive". As we've seen recently with all of the e-scooter bans.

Scooter bans were mostly because it was disruptive having a staple of scooters in the middle of the pedestrian road and they were consistently breaking the rules.

Ps. We do similar stuff for cities at our company. So I don't need an externzl source for this currently.

Anyway, "people are willing to break the law but companies aren't" seems a really weird reason to stick with the status quo over something far more efficient.

Studies have shown that the growth in Uber/Lyft has increased traffic congestion. This system autonomously will be even worse.