Mind you, self-driving cars can find computing traveling-salesman routes slightly less of a hassle than humans do—and so punching into your phone that you'd be willing to carpool if it meant arriving faster would likely mean a car (whose occupant had expressed the same preference) immediately stopping on its way to wherever it was going and picking you up. Only the people who want complete privacy will have to wait.

Extend this thought to its logical conclusion, and you realize that (self-driving) commuter busses and light rail can be programmed into the network as plain-old cars that happen to have high occupant capacities. You set that you're willing to take a bus (and one is en route), it'll stop for you. You set that you want a less noisy/drunk/homeless-filled experience, and you get a car instead.

You could also set a price threshold, where everyone in the car must already be willing to pay as much as you are to be picked up there and then. Low threshold—a taxi-like sedan comes. High threshold—a limo.

You beat me to posting this. I think we'll see automated public transport using minivans that can quickly navigate smaller streets. The route home might be different each time, but you'll always get an indication of ETA. Part of the hassle of catching a bus is the last mile and the wait. If a vehicle is arriving shortly after you hail it (or prebook it) and right at your location, those two factors are eliminated.

For the privacy factor, I think people will just get used to it as they have with current public transport, or tiers will be in operation (as you suggested) or someone will inevitably design a pod-based vehicle with seats facing port and starboard and a clever door system.

I do wonder if people will be uncomfortable with other passengers knowing exactly where they live and work? Perhaps designating pickup from the nearest corner would help with that, and pricing that encourages that (to save extra turns down side streets) will help too.

I wrote a bit more about all of these likely developments here for anyone else fascinated by the rise of automated vehicles: http://www.isaacforman.com.au/n/self-driving-cars/

I really do think this is the solution - if carpooling can be made as simple as checking a box, with time savings, and money savings, the only downside would be sharing a car, and a lot more people would do so. Demand and traffic would both be controlled by dynamically pricing 'private' vehicles.

Your phone could also learn your departure time, and automatically determine when there are cars available / pricing is optimal to tell you to leave.

You could road test this idea with existing public transport. It would be interesting to see buses turned loose with GPS guidance say, within a city centre.

That's the crux of the problem. You have to build for maximum capacity, even though that happens comparatively very rarely. The electric grid faces the same problem, perhaps worse.

I remember an enlightening graph of power grid demand over a year sorted by demand. (Which I can't find for the life of me.) The vast majority of the time is spent very near the average, but a very small amount of time needs almost twice the average, and another very small amount of time demands half the average. The problem is, the grid must be big enough to supply that 3-times-a-year double the average demand, which just sits there idly the rest of the year.

I imagine demand for transportation is similar though not as exaggerated.

There's no reason the grid must accommodate peak demand. Two other options are simple failure to meet demand (you only get 10 amps) and dynamic pricing to reduce demand (if air conditioning costs $100/hr you might not use it).

That would work if personal/residential consumption used the majority of power production but industrial and transportation uses far outpace the demand of consumers: http://www.nap.edu/books/12621/xhtml/images/p2001b2d5g186001...

The costs associated with throttling/halting these sectors far outweighs the cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Electricity is already sold by the megawatt in "day ahead" commodity form so businesses have already priced this information into the market.

That chart is misleading because it shows consumption of all sources of energy, not just electricity. We don't use 28% of our electricity for transportation (yet!). Listings of electricity consumption by sector [1] show that the residential sector consumes the biggest share of electricity in the US. And the residential sector also has the highest seasonal variability in power consumption [2]. So better demand control for consumers might actually pay off pretty well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption#Ele... [2] http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10211

Bingo. If getting to work at 9 AM costs me five times more than getting to work at 7, you can be sure I'll figure out a way to do the latter. Motivating large chunks of the population to think about rush hour would be a "good thing".

What if you are a fireman and you need to get to your shift? Can those burning people wait?

Can everyone dynamically shift business routines due to "demand"?

> What if you are a fireman and you need to get to your shift? Can those burning people wait?

There's no particular reason emergency service shift changes need to be synced to the common business day -- indeed, my intuition would be that accident timing patterns would make this a bad idea independent of traffic impacts -- but there's also no reason that employers with employees for which they have strong fixed-time needs couldn't subsidize (or, in the case of public necessity where the employer is the government, exempt) their employees traffic fees.

> Can everyone dynamically shift business routines due to "demand"?

Yes, they can -- but, of course, there is a cost (which varies from situation to situation) in doing so. Of course, there's also a cost -- particularly an externalized cost born by others -- of traffic. If you effectively internalize the external cost (i.e., make it born by the people making the decision to engage in the action), then behavior should reflect the true costs and benefits resulting from the action.

Great! I'll just drop my kids off outside the school gate on the way in at 7.15 and hope the teacher decided to opt for an early commute in today too.

Most schools around me start at ~7:30 and are open for an hour or so earlier in case the kids want to eat breakfast.

A friend of mine works in energy and once said "If roads catered for traffic the way power networks cater for power demand, the Sydney Harbour Bridge would be 100 lanes wide."

That is easily solved the good old fashioned way - through prices. Charge more during the most popular times. Also note that the vehicles can spontaneously carpool - and could incentivize an existing rider. (Do you want a $5 discount on this journey if it goes 5 mins out of the way and you share the vehicle?)

And of course they can be different sizes (eg 13 people, or 23 people). Or a local small car can take you to a feeder location where you get on a big bus and the process reverses at the other end.

Sure you can still pay for your own reserved car, but it is likely to be even more expensive than pay as you ride.

The big problem with existing solutions like public transport and car pools is they are cumbersome at either end and require precise in advance organisation for timing and capacity, plus being inconvenient if you don't fit their deployment patterns. The major benefit of self driving cars will be algorithms can maximize utilisation and reduce individual costs. Owning your own car will look like a really bad decision by then.

You are proposing that this is easily solved by charging enough to enforce widespread, MASSIVE social change (that is, changing from a 9-5 commute schedule), which will be most punitive for those who also have least control over the behaviour being punished (as your job pays more, the likelihood of flexible hours increases). Unless your proposal comes along with "and use those fees to provide housing for people to live next to the Walmart/pharmacy/bank that they work in so they don't have to pay to commute" then it seems pretty damn inequitable.

It is already expensive at peak times - transport is not free in time or money.

The change doesn't have to be MASSIVE. For example shifting by 15 minutes may be enough to better match capacity. The most expensive would be point to point direct service for just you. But the driverless vehicle could pick up several people for a lower cost to them, but taking more time.

ie the worst case wouldn't be substantially different than today with its limits and hard routing/timing on public transport. It will also be easier for competition to come in compared to today which will help.

It is still possible to provide social services. For example in Britain my over 65 parents get free bus passes. Lower income people can be subsidised in similar ways.

This is a really great observation - I think we need to think of it less as a 'car rental' service, and more as a ride rental service. If people are comfortable sharing the car with other people, it could automatically assign a group of people to a certain car as they walk out of the building. Essentially little buses, except they don't have to stop as often. A side benefit would be less cars on the road = less traffic.

That is assuming the same type of cars and same driving patterns will be used. I actually think cars have a horrible user experience so there is plenty of room for innovation and improvement; you are stuck in a seat, can't move your legs much, have no workspace in the back seat, I have to maintain my own car, gasoline is expensive, etc.