To the extent that self driving taxi services are cheaper than human driven taxi services, they will also increase use of taxi services.
There's no reason to assume that on the balance people will end up driving less as a result of a technology that makes driving significantly more convenient simply because it might make taxi services somewhat cheaper and therefore potentially might make it easier to not own a car and encourage people to use other modes of transportation for some trips.
While I’d certainly prefer to watch Netflix than actively drive, I’ve still got stuff I need/want to do that I can’t in a car even as a passenger. And it’s just not comfortable for long periods of time. A lot of people get motion sickness staring at a screen in a moving car. Etc.
A lot of people own pickups just because they occasionally want to tow something or move something large. A lot of people own second cars for occasional use. These might become rentals instead when it can affordably just show up at my door in a half hour.
There’s no way to tell how this plays out. There will be some amount of induced demand, there will be some amount of reduction in use. One never knows which will be bigger.
What I do know is traffic deaths kill over 40,000 Americans a year, and driverless cars could potentially get that to 0 or near it, whereas human drivers cannot. I do know we can electrify cars and power them all with renewable energy, not immediately of course, and remove many of the environmental concerns. We can enhance mobility for the elderly and children and mentally disabled who can’t drive.
There’s a strange amount of anti-car propaganda that has gotten people worried about this, but I look forward to a driverless future in which cars are cheap, clean, safe, and available to all.
It’s not propaganda but jumbled concerns which are often poorly expressed. I think the strongest arguments are:
1. Self-driving cars don’t change pollution - even EVs are better for local air quality but still cause massive carbon emissions and unchanged or worse tire particulates, etc. – and may even make it worse locally with the extra mileage from taxi fleets.
2. Self-driving cars only lightly improve congestion, and then only to the extent that they can coordinate and you can ban non-AI drivers from certain chokepoints at certain times. The form factor unavoidably needs far more space per passenger than anything else.
3. Self-driving cars don’t really help with affordability – even if the current prices come closer to parity, that’s a financial stress for many people (e.g. in the region where I live, the average family spends as much on vehicles as they do food).
4. Self-driving safety needs a different relationship with the manufacturer. There are many areas where they can be safer but failures can also be correlated so we really need companies to share liability and have rigorous safety oversight.
As a pedestrian, I’m fairly bullish on the concept given how dangerous the average driver is now compared to 20 years ago but I worry that a lot of politicians are going to ignore the other issues because those require hard choices whereas it’s so compatible with American culture to say you can solve major problems by making an expensive purchase. These shouldn’t be opposing issues, of course, and I’d really like to combine them because autonomous vehicles should soon, if not already, be much better about following speed limits, staying out of bus lanes, etc. Making advanced automatic braking a requirement to enter a city could save thousands of lives every year.
I had half a mind to write a long treatise on why I think we'll only see significant EV adoption if/when cars become driverless, but I'll save it and just go with this. Someone I know was killed last week in a hit and run. She got in a minor car accident, got out to check on it, and a third driver hit her and took off.
When it comes to affordability, economists generally set the economic value of an average American life at ~$10 million, and 40,000 people die from traffic deaths every year. Even if we just look at the numbers, Americans buy about 3 million cars a year. So 40,000 * $10 million divided by 3 million is a savings of over $133k per car, which is far in excess of the average car's lifetime cost. Even a 50% reduction in deaths, which for all I know currently existing driverless cars could achieve, would be the same as making all cars free in terms of average cost.
And even if driverless cars are a total push in every other respect (and I think they'll be much better) 40,000 families a year (and I assume globally, at least 5x that) not losing a wife and mother that way is more than worth whatever we have to do to make it happen.
Stay safe.
That’s not the argument being made. Everyone knows they pollute less per mile – but unfortunately the manufacturing is roughly half of the lifetime pollution from a vehicle.
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/27/ucs-study-shows-lifetim...
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
This matters especially because consumers have been getting heavily marketed into getting massive trucks and SUVs, where the sheer size of the vehicle means the lifetime emissions are greater than a small ICE because the lack of tailpipe emissions can’t make up for that even if it’s powered entirely off of renewables.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be electrifying the vehicle fleet quickly but it’s buying time on the trip to zero emissions, not a solution. Buses and e-bikes get us much further because they don’t suffer from emissions the inherent inefficiency of automobiles.
It's a free country: people are free to choose to use autonomous cars over ebikes and buses and why wouldn't they? The emissions profile of a personal electric car being unaffordable[0] doesn't pass the sniff test.
[0]Fair economic taxation of externalities - considering current status quo.
I don’t particularly love cars or anything, and would be really happy to not have to have one, but there’s no way I’m going to try to rely on buses or bikes. I value my time, too much for buses and my life, and not being either frozen or covered in sweat too much for any sort of bike.
A car gets you from point A to point B quickly, reliably, comfortably, and with cargo. Nothing else does that, and we are willing to spend a significant portion of our income for it.
I think taxing carbon would be a great way to encourage people to reconsider how they travel, and would expect many people to pick things like those small EVs for urban usage if that became common.
Studies are all over the map but the ones that put it anywhere near 50% are all from China.
No way I can do that and be functional the next day, but if the car could drive itself, I’d probably be going.
If all you pay is the marginal cost then those that live an hour away will pay six times those that live ten minutes away
I prefer Caltrain.
The existence of taxis is (obviously) not enough to curb car usage growth.
EDIT: Some specificity: How would robotaxis replace commuting for millions of people in a way that reduces car rides? The taxi has to move at least from the storage to the rider pickup to the rider dropoff. Without sharing, that's actually more miles and the same number of cars.
Instead, if it picks up two people per day, that's more miles, fewer cars in existence (since both riders dont need a car), but the same number of car trips (plus the to/from storage).
With taxis (robotic or otherwise) the number of miles driven is just going up unless people change their lifestyle. That doesn't do anything to curb care useage.
That doesn't mean I agree with the GP's point about it lowering car usage overall. The reduced cost of auto taxies also pushes against your reluctance to take one, though perhaps not all the way to "use my car whenever I leave the house" levels. I also think that once people begin replacing their cars with autonomous taxis, they'll sign up for all kinds of taxi subscriptions that will further reduce that reluctance. After all, driving your car now isn't completely free: it still costs you gas money, plus the hassle of actually driving it. And other forms of transportation aren't free either. So the bar here isn't 0.
I see this all the time and I just do not believe it is true. Uber/Lyft/etc undercut taxis for users to take market share, and have drastically raised prices to become marginally profitable.
Autonomous cars are more expensive, and the labor in non-autonomous cars is not the majority of the costs. In NYC, a 1hr Uber could easily cost $100 against a minimum wage of $15.
The idea that a taxi trip becoming cheaper than a car owners marginal car trip would require dramatic dropping of taxi prices. Even halving is not really going to do it, and I don't think removing the driver even halves the costs.
The autonomous taxi boosters also seem to overlook what happens to unattended, unmonitored public infrastructure in urban areas of this country. The reason I stopped using Zipcar in NYC was because they were typically trashed inside by the previous drivers. Now imagine an autonomous taxi that gets turned over 10x as often. Good luck.
Cost. The cost of an Uber is way too much for daily travel (vs owning your own car or public transport).
A human-driven taxi needs to pay the driver's salary within an 8 hour shift. An autonomous taxi can run (almost) 24/7, 365 days a year. Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?
Another scenario is someone simply renting out their own car as an autonomous taxi whenever they aren't using it themselves (which is most of the time). Then it'll always be cheaper than current-day taxis because it's just a low-effort bonus source of income to the car owner.
And, for a car driven any reasonable amount, most of the cost is in the mileage.
Neither, any savings will trickle up to the investors. The price of robotaxis is going to be just below the limit where it would make sense to own a car.
I think most people will try the taxi, but if you already own a car (that is transit doesn't make sense for most trips) you will discover it isn't much cheaper than owning your own car, and your own car is waiting outside when you want to go (one big advantage of owning a car over transit is the car is ready when you want to go instead of having to call or hope one is waiting - if cars need to wait outside your office all day in case your kid gets sick that increases costs). Instead you can just buy a self driving car and then leave your things in the car if you go shopping over lunch - something you cannot do with a shared car.
In reality, I don't think it is useful to try to enumerate these small immediate changes that are distinct from the availability of taxis. The long term cultural shift of having autonomous vehicles may lead people to fundamentally share vehicles in a different way. This may lead to a situation where fewer vehicles are driving more miles.
Only if it is always picking the same people up. Otherwise this is a big negative. People often need to arrive someplace on time. If my car had decided to take a detour to pick someone else up and made me late for my early meeting I'd be mad. Car pools work - to the extent they do - because it is always the same people who need to arrive at the same time.
And the cars and autonomous driving software itself is becoming more expensive and more subscription-based over time so those rents are going to have to be passed on to the consumer. Large autonomous taxi services may be able to strike better deals or even build their own software/vehicles if they're big enough, but you're not going to be able to compete with them effectively by purchasing a Tesla (and presumably consumer prices will rise as there's less individual-owned vehicles and companies go seeking after only the highest margins and abandon the toyota-corolla market to the robotaxi corporations).
If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or trips.
You factor in intelligent ride sharing and you could halve the number of cars on the road most days.
So the leap here is based on "Autonomous taxi companies will charge less per ride than rideshare"?
perhaps.
This would also reduce the cost on doordash type services so if instead of paying an extra $10 for your food/groceries/everyhing to be delivered you paid orders of magnitude less.
This might reduce the traffic on the road.
The pessimist in me makes me think once they got sufficient market share price would go back up and wed be worse off than before lol.
It's far cheaper to live in an autonomous motorhome that drives around all day and happens to arrive at work just as you need to be there each morning than to rent an apartment in San Francisco. Driving about is probably cheaper than paying for parking too, especially if you deliberately head for the busiest traffic.
You could already commute with cheap taxis (eg in the developing world). The more important thing is that people want to live in San Francisco, they wouldn’t be happy commuting from some far off place in the first place. And as stealth campers have already figured out, not a lot of places available to camp in your car even 40-60 miles out, so might as well be where you want.
But the idea that your car could just involve itself in traffic jams all day rather than pay for parking is interesting, it could also look for time limited but free parking and move on to somewhere else when that expired, which is more common outside the city. Heck, it could park at a shopping mall that doesn’t allow walk offs…because no one is walking off.
Already, though, you've got a budget of >$4000/mo for a more comfortable studio apartment.
Must as well have the cars in the US drive themselves so we can all get a nap at least.
But if you own the car, it's just waiting wherever you left it. If you have an autonomous cab, it has to make an extra trip from wherever it dropped off the last driver to wherever it's picking you up. That alone increases the number of cars on the road. And that's before you consider the cab potentially driving a holding pattern when nobody is actively using or calling it.
But most of all roads are governed by induced demand. People would take a lot more and longer trips if there was the option to just teleport to the destination. The main downwards pressure on the number of trips is the time investment. That's why adding more lanes to roads often doesn't reduce traffic (outside of a short adjustment period): faster trips means more people willing to take it, which fills up that lane. But a trip people weren't willing to do for 40 minutes behind the wheel they might take if it's instead 60 minutes watching Netflix in a driverless car. Which makes the roads fuller and thus slower for everyone.
Owning a car is simply more economical. Now if I could buy into fractional ownership of a fleet of vehicles, that may make financial sense for me.
1. Will it mean fewer total cars? Probably. If I have to drive to work and then back home, and you do to, and we each own cars to do it, that's at least two cars. If I can take a Waymo to work, and then it can take you to work, that's only one car.
2. Will it mean fewer cars on the road? (Or, perhaps, let's say fewer car-miles driven.) Plausibly not. If I drive from home (A) to work (B), and you drive from home (C) to work (D), then if we own cars, we drive A-B and C-D. If we use Waymo, it may drive A-B-C-D, which is longer by the B-C leg. That takes up space on the road.
So we may have fewer total cars, but more car-miles driven, and therefore more traffic and congestion.
If autonomous cars drive down the costs of taking a taxi it’ll mean more people will do that versus public transit.
Anything that reduces public transit use or increases individual car use will be disasterous for traffic and transportation in our cities.
You're being overly pessimistic. I can see the opposite occuring on each of your points.
- less traffic due to more efficient driving: once automated driving is pervasive it's natural that cars and traffic as a whole will coordinate and optimise use of the road. You should be able to predict traffic accurately and choose the optimal time to travel. Car speeds will coordinate to maximise flow through roads. Improved public transport will increase the number of passengers per vehicle and reduce personal vehicles.
- more investment into better modes of transport due to lowered costs: the cost structure of buses (and trains) lends itself to larger vehicles with less stops. Without having to pay someone to drive you can remake public transport into something that takes less people at a time to more places, without requiring expensive infrastructure. Think small automated busses that serve a web of points instead of routes, so people can request to get from A to B and the system delivers from as close to A and to as close to B as possible as soon as possible at the lowest cost.
- less car ownership: most people don't want to own cars, so it's very likely that car ownership will drop significantly. With new privately and publicly owned forms of public transport, the need to own a car will disappear in many cases.
I feel that almost all technology is positive (not sure about social media), since it generally gives people more choices and abilities. Automated cars have very few downsides.
- Increase cycling and walking because the roads are much safer
- Less noise from cars revving their engines, or being poorly maintained (holes in mufflers, underinflated tires, etc.)
- No carjacking
I strongly believe it will go the other way, i.e. the 'robo-taxi' vision. Once cars can pick us up, take us where we want and then disappear, very few people will want to own their own car. I honestly think the vast majority of people already don't want to own one, but we don't have a better option. Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.
Cars will just show up, take us places then go away to get someone else. We won't need nearly as many of them, and we won't need to dedicate so much of our cities to them, and especially not to parking them. We will be able to reclaim our cities.
NOTE: Old School automakers who can't/won't/don't adapt are going to push back on this HARD. But I still think it will happen.
For the record, I'm a car guy. I love cars. I will likely always have one for the weekends. If I was going into a city or commuting, I would take the robi-taxi every time.
I'm as much of a transit advocate as the next guy, but I think a lot of people blind themselves to how annoying the last mile problem is for a lot of destinations anywhere outside of urban cores. There aren't going to be train stations built at every possible origin point and destination point, and even if there's a robust bus network, transfers, slow speed/frequent stopping, and the walk to/from your destination/origin are pretty damn annoying. They're not the end of the world by any means, to be clear, (I use buses too!) but it's just, if I have a car, why wouldn't I just drive?
Taxis have the potential to solve that in a great way. But I (...and probably most people?) don't currently use them for that purpose since they're way too expensive. As they should be, it's a whole human being tending to your transport personally for twenty minutes or more. If robotaxis can lower the price, it'd be great, but I don't know how confident I am on that happening. The equipment is presumably expensive, the car itself is expensive (though EVs do have much lower maintenance costs), the R&D is expensive. We'll see. Exciting times!
Because it will probably still be cheaper if they use it regularly (as is owning in most cases). Because they want a specifically equipped vehicle for young kids/outdoor activities/etc. Because when they want a car, they want one right now.
I'm also skeptical that, if you own a vehicle, it would make any sense to then also rent robo-taxis locally. Certainly I can reserve a private car for an evening event today but it would be 10x or more the cost of parking/gas.
The biggest change would be the lack of a need for parking. This will allow us to build more densely.
Induced demand economics. Make something cheaper and people use more of it.
If Autonomous cars make ride hailing cheaper we’ll see an explosion in its use, and traffic will increase as cars are space inefficient and road size fixed.
If you are a single person working a flexible schedule (no mandatory meetings), with no other activities planned traffic and travel time are not a big deal. However if you have any life at all you will care about traffic and travel time because you have places to be. Watching netflix is not your goal it is how you kill time that you would prefer to do something else.
People will continue to all commute at similar times, resulting in the same traffic as before. That it is automated makes no difference.
And supposing a car can go off after and do some taxi work instead of being parked, well it still has to commute from here to there which is adding even more cars constantly onto the roads driving to where they’re needed whereas before they’d be parked.
The likely outcome is permanent rush hour as cars are constantly going back and forth on the highway.
Imagine those unmutable video ads that are increasingly common at gas stations, but running constantly inside the car.
That ship sailed a while ago and didn't need Google to push it.
I guess it's always possible that they're lying about it, but given the depth of the regulatory and public relations fiasco that would cause I'd be very surprised.
This one could go either way I think, traffic might actually improve once autonomous driving is the standard.
I also kinda-sorta hope that if autonomous driving takes over, that cars end up gaining the ability to switch onto and off of rails, I think this would be the ideal end-state... people still maintain the ability to move independently of each other but we have the improved safety of transport on rails.
In reality, self-driving cars would help by increasing following distance and leaving a genuine gap so people don't crash every goddamn day on the same arterial roads.
EDIT: If you disagree, please link to the quantitative data that suggests Cruise isn't on track.
IMO stuff like this is going to lead the public to trust it less, since they're gaming numbers as hard as possible.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...
The whole game plan is have a bank of human operators who prove remote assistance at initially high rates which is then driven lower over time as the edge cases are ironed out iteratively. The fact that Cruise is only using one human remote assistant to manage ~15 rides, as mentioned in the article you link, tells us that the rate of remote assistance is already so low that it will be a very modest expense. For more, see the comment from Cruise's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997
California, at least, cites a disengagement as "whether because of technology failure or situations requiring the test driver/operator to take manual control of the vehicle to operate safely."[0]
Would a car being confused and not being able to proceed without input be a disengagement by that definition? I think so, based off of "technology failure", but it's not reported as that.
> It just means the car is confused. Conflating these things and accusing Cruise of deception is itself being dishonest.
When a car is confused what happens? It stops. That is a safety issue by itself, as it can lead to emergency services not being able to properly respond and killing someone[1].
The fact people are trying to downplay this as "nothing" is shocking imo. What happens when a fleet of vehicles get confused, they all stall and it results in gridlock and frustration.[2]
[0]: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
[1]: https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/01/person-dies-cruise-robotax...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/07/08/cruise...
At your Ref. [0], I just opened up the CSV titled "2022 Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports (CSV)" under the header "2022 Disengagement reports". Under the column "Driver present (yes or no)", every single entry said "yes".
> When a car is confused what happens? It stops. That is a safety issue by itself
No, the car pulls over, just as it does when picks people up or drops them off. It does not just stop in the middle of an intersection. I had 3 of these events in 22 trips, which means the number of times the car pulled over was overwhelmingly dominated by normal pick-up and drop-off, not confusion.
> as it can lead to emergency services not being able to properly respond and killing someone[1]
This article is deceptive, and you're either being deceived or are furthering it. An ambulance being delayed for seconds or minutes by human-driven cars in the road happens all the time. It is a constant occurrence. "90 seconds elapsed between the patient being put on the stretcher and the ambulance leaving the scene" means that at worst the ambulance was delayed by 60 seconds because stretchers don't teleport instantly into ambulances. The article does not causally attribute the death to the delay because that is extremely unlikely. It's not how emergency medicine works. This is just a classic case of fear mongering. ("Ambulance has to take detour around construction. Patient died. Therefore, construction caused death." No.)
This of course doesn't mean that delaying ambulances unnecessarily by even a second should go without punishment/fine. It's avoidable and should be fixed. But it's wrong to think this doesn't happen with humans, and its slander to suggest the delay probably caused a death in this instance.
> The fact people are trying to downplay this as "nothing" is shocking imo. What happens when a fleet of vehicles get confused, they all stall and it results in gridlock and frustration.[2]
Be more quantitative.
Uh, that's kinda exactly my point? Any time a vehicle stalls, even when it has to be recovered by a person physically, somehow isn't a "disengagement."
> No, the car pulls over, just as it and every other taxi does when picking people up or dropping them off. It does not just stop in the middle of an intersection. I had 3 of these events in 22 trips, which means the number of times the car pulled over was overwhelmingly dominated by normal pick-up and drop-off, not confusion.
Easily refuted. [0], [1], [2], [3] should I continue?
> This article is deceptive, and you're either being deceived or are furthering it. An ambulance being delayed for seconds or minutes by human-driven cars in the road happens all the time. It is a constant occurrence.
"It already happens, so who cares if people die." Not even going to bother with the rest since it's clear you're pushing an angle from these two points alone.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZGZWuUx-Y&t=59s
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1k8raq83T4
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/business/driverless-cars-san-...
[3]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/san-francisco-po...
Your second point is replying to a general quantitative statement with anecdotes. Of course there will be unusual situations. This does not support your original wrong claim that Cruise was being disingenuous.
TBH, I didn't even fully read your third point because it's clear you're pushing a certain perspective. I've provided evidence for all my claims, yet a single link hasn't shown up in yours.
10+ vehicles stall and require people to go out and retrieve the vehicles[0]...
Nope, not a disengagement. Clearly the cars didn't have "a technology failure" they just needed to be towed back...for reasons. I guess they all ran out of gas, right?
> Your second point is replying to a general quantitative statement with anecdotes. Of course there will be unusual situations. This does not support your original wrong claim that Cruise was being disingenuous.
He says, while doing the exact same thing.
The vast majority of recorded cases involve the cars "stalling out" in the middle of intersections, roads, or driveways. I have literally never seen evidence of a vehicle "pulling over" when confused.
Please present evidence for your anecdotes.
[0]: https://www.ktvu.com/news/driverless-cruise-cars-cause-traff...
Cruise is done.
Again, if you have data that shows Cruise is behind Waymo by a lot, or is behind any other company, please link it.
That's why it could be a good bet. Or not.
> even more cars on the streets
You don’t know that. I could make a prediction that it would lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.
> less investment into better modes of transport
I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
> traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic
You also don’t know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if people are ok with it, then who cares?
Now this is a bad take. Public transit is _always_ better than individual vehicles when we are talking about a metropolitan area. The amount of resources, land, and pedestrian freedom that is eaten up for roads is insane. Imagine how many people can fit in a subway, and then expand that to each of them individually being in a car on the road.
Public transit is expensive, but so are new highways, highway maintenance, road accidents, speed enforcement... Etc. The worst thing is that many times people who don't own cars pay for those services they won't use. All the while public transit is getting it's funding cut.
I think the original comment is a little off in that more autonomous drivers does not directly lead to less public transit. But it is a concern that these profit/investor driven companies will be competing with public transportation and this has a lot of implications.
Every single time scientists and city planners are called to answer "how we make the city more livable and reduce traffic" the answer is always better public transport (more trains especially).
The only part I could resonate with you is that we don't know whether SDC could lead to less cars. That's true if people will use more self driving taxis over personal cars.
I'm still a bit torn on whether autonomous cars are a good thing once you consider all the second and third order effects (even more cars on the streets, less investment into better modes of transport, and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix). But I have to applaud Waymo for their great execution on a very difficult problem.