Honestly, I want both. I live in Germany and my city has pretty decent public transit. But there are still way too many cars in the city, most streets have parking spaces on both sides, leaving only a small sidewalk. I want people to not be dependent on owning cars anymore. I want personal cars in the city to be replaced by self-driving cabs that you can just order when you need them. Imagine how cool that would be. There would be centralized (underground??) self-driving car storages and if you need a car, you just order one via an app and they just come to wherever you are autonomously and drive you wherever you want to go. You could basically get rid of all public parking spaces, it would be awesome.
I really like this idea! How would you get parasites to not use the self driving cabs in lieu of public transit? It’s a great idea for disabled folks and others who have a more difficult time using mass transit, but it seems like something rich people would monopolize.
How would you get parasites to not use the self driving cabs in lieu of public transit?
Pricing. Taxes on robo-cabs that partially fund the cost of public transit. Subsidies for disabled people who need a robo-cab and can’t use public transit.
IMO there should also be an additional tax on self-driving cars for private use. It’s ridiculous right now that many people use their cars for maybe 2 hours a day, and the other 22 they just sit parked somewhere.
The issue with the self-driving-cab concept, as a cure to car infrastructure, is it doesn’t really fix the problem. Sure, maybe parking becomes less of an issue, but not roads. If anything they are worse. Not only is it still one person per car (usually), it also now has to drive around empty to pick up new passengers. At least a personal car never occupies or damages road infrastructure when it isn’t in use.
Busses are a legitimate solution for shorter distance travel that reduce infrastructure requirements. You can fit potentially dozens of people in a single vehicle, and they can be made to get you almost anywhere you need, with only a short walk required.
it also now has to drive around empty to pick up new passengers
If it’s picking up new passengers, that means it isn’t sitting around parked for 8 hours.
Additionally, how much time is spent looking for parking? How much time is spent disrupting traffic while trying to parallel park?
While it’s true that a car might end up driving around empty for a certain amount of time, it’s only doing that in the short space needed to get to the next passenger. The empty trips will be much shorter than the trips with a passenger onboard. And, every time that happens it saves 2 parking spots. One for the passenger it just dropped off, and one for the passenger it’s currently picking up.
At least a personal car never occupies or damages road infrastructure when it isn’t in use.
Yes, it saves parking, but why would we choose this over busses?! That’s the argument. Busses do essentially everything self-driving taxis do, with none of the negatives, and the positives are even better.
Self-driving taxis are car companies trying to make you stop advocating for better solutions that lose them money. That’s it. Stop doing their work for them. Push for public trains and busses, and not for corporate owned shitty self-driving taxis that don’t benefit anyone except shoveling money into a few rich people’s pockets.
Yes, it saves parking, but why would we choose this over busses?!
Because you have to walk to a bus stop, which in some areas can be a 15 minute walk. Then you have to wait for a bus, which in some areas can be a 30-60 minute wait.
Busses do essentially everything self-driving taxis do
Except come to your exact location and come on demand.
Self-driving taxis are car companies trying to make you stop advocating for better solutions that lose them money
The biggest self-driving taxi company isn’t a car company, it’s Google.
That’s it
It’s not it.
Stop doing their work for them.
I’m not. You’re as unaware of the self-driving car space as you are about spelling your favourite alternative: it’s “buses” not “busses”.
Push for public trains and busses
Yes, those are great too, but there will always be a demand for vehicles that go directly to your doorstop and come on demand. In less dense areas a bus will never be able to compete with that. So, you can push for both.
that don’t benefit anyone except shoveling money into a few rich people’s pockets.
Who do you think is getting rich off self-driving cars?
Because you have to walk to a bus stop, which in some areas can be a 15 minute walk. Then you have to wait for a bus, which in some areas can be a 30-60 minute wait.
Sure, and autonomous taxis don’t exist at all almost anywhere. We’re talking about fixing problems. Those problems you listed are fixable. There’s no need to introduce something so obtuse to avoid fixing them with a worse solution.
Except come to your exact location and come on demand.
When done well, it should be pretty close every five minutes or so. You can handle that I think. The driverless taxi doesn’t literally put you in the car, so I guess we need a better solution. (/s)
The biggest self-driving taxi company isn’t a car company, it’s Google.
I never said they were. First, where do they get the cars? Another company is making money from the sales (and ongoing maintenance and parts). Also, promoting a reliance on car infrastructure, which these do, benefits car companies.
I’m not. You’re as unaware of the self-driving car space as you are about spelling your favourite alternative: it’s “buses” not “busses”.
First, I’m not unaware of it. I’ve been paying attention to it for as long as people have been working on it. Second, https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus. I guess you’re the one unaware. If you’re going to be a pedantic ass, at least have the courtesy of being correct.
Yes, those are great too, but there will always be a demand for vehicles that go directly to your doorstop and come on demand. In less dense areas a bus will never be able to compete with that. So, you can push for both.
We have those. They’re called bikes. They cost a lot less, cause less traffic, pollute less, don’t take up much parking space, cost almost nothing to use, can get to more places, and they make you healthier as a bonus.
Who do you think is getting rich off self-driving cars?
Why would these huge companies be doing it if they don’t expect to make incredible profits off of it? Do you see Google just doing things out of good will? Hell no. They expect to make stupid amounts of money with it, and likely fuck over public option while they’re at it. If they can sell cities on letting them operate, kick back some cash, and trash public infrastructure, they’re going to do it.
When done well, it should be pretty close every five minutes or so.
That only makes sense in a dense, built-up area where there are enough passengers arriving and departing every 5 minutes that it’s worthwhile for a bus to stop. That may be true in downtown NYC, but it isn’t going to be true of the more distant parts of Long Island.
That only makes sense in a dense, built-up area where there are enough passengers arriving and departing every 5 minutes that it’s worthwhile for a bus to stop. That may be true in downtown NYC, but it isn’t going to be true of the more distant parts of Long Island.
Three things:
first, buses (I’ll switch for you, even though my phones really likes the two s version) don’t have to stop at every stop. They can drive past stops that don’t have passengers. As long as passengers are on the route every five minutes then it’s got something to do.
Second, our society building so spread out is part of the problem and should also be part of the solution. Mixed use and denser living spaces should be being built. Suburban hell is a massive issue, and part of the reason buses won’t be as useful in some places.
Third, we don’t need to have a 100% solution. A 90+% solution is still great, and it’d be better than these taxis. Whenever someone say "oh, it won’t work in this situation* it isn’t really an argument. Yeah, any solution will have outliers. They need to be considered, but they need not obstruct good solutions being implemented.
They can drive past stops that don’t have passengers.
Yes, and they often do. But, it’s a massive waste of money if they drive an entire route and nobody gets on or off. They only make sense if the population density is enough.
I can see a lot of possible futures if self-driving cars become common.
In some, people use self-driving taxis whenever they need a car. In places like NYC where owning a car is a real hassle, self-driving cars mean you can ditch that annoyance and still enjoy the benefits of a car when you need one. That means urban living is much more popular, and high-rise building don’t need to be built with obscene amounts of parking attached. Because nobody has to park their car when they’re not using it, parking spaces and parking lots completely disappear. This opens up space for bike lanes or other uses. Because nobody has to worry about parking anymore, pedestrian malls are more common. People can just be dropped off and picked up in a small area nearby. In this scenario, mass transit might also be more common. People could take self-driving cabs from their homes or workplaces to the nearest transit hub, switch over to mass transit, and then get a self-driving cab on the other end to get to wherever they’re going. This would be less convenient than taking a car the whole way, but if the pricing was right, and the mass transit was nice enough, people might want to save money this way. This would work especially well if you have things like express subway lines that go very quickly between two very popular spots.
Unfortunately, there’s the other end of the spectrum. In this one, people decide they want to own their self-driving cars. The fact that they can get to work, working while the car drives, means they want to live out in the middle of nowhere. So, instead of reducing urban sprawl it makes it much worse. Because everyone owns their own car, you still need lots of parking for the self-driving cars to use while the owner is at work. One possible benefit of this is that you don’t need the parking right next to the associated building, so at least you can do away with parking scattered everywhere, ruining cities. OTOH, you will end up with some dystopian hellscape parking structures where 10k cars wait for their owners to call.
It could get even worse too. If the rich all move deeper into the suburbs and self-driving cars make traffic more efficient, I could easily see cities passing laws that give cars much more priority even than they already have. Jaywalking might be considered an even bigger crime because not only are you interfering with the driving of one or two human drivers, you’re disrupting the algorithm-optimized flow of traffic.
Very interesting thoughts, thank you. I would guess that the percentage of people owning their car would decline rather than increase, especially in the cities, but I had never considered the factor that the travel time itself will be less inconvenient and people might be okay with longer commute times. I guess it’s possible that overall, these two factors more or less cancel out, and then the number of cars would stay the same but they would move more to the suburbs and rural areas, and out of the cities. That still doesn’t sound so bad.
Any way, I don’t think self-driving cars should replace public transport, but complement it. Politics and society need to steer development in that direction. While I personally look forward to self-driving cars, currently my energy goes into fighting for better bike infrastructure und better and cheaper public transport. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a way for all these modes of transportation to form an intertwined and accessible network that is efficient and sustainable. We should keep trying to make it happen.
but they would move more to the suburbs and rural areas, and out of the cities. That still doesn’t sound so bad.
It sounds bad for the city cores though. I like cities and I especially like cities with dense cores that combine good walkable areas with great transit. Tokyo is a prime example. Some people still drive in Tokyo, but a lot of people use the amazing mass transit system there. The end result for Tokyo is that mass transit hubs become these amazing walkable areas with all kinds of interesting things to see.
If everybody except the most poor get self driving cars and move to the suburbs, the downtown cores might become robocar hells, where cars have the priority and pedestrians need to wait 5 minutes to cross a street.
Any way, I don’t think self-driving cars should replace public transport, but complement it.
Yeah, I agree. There might need to be some kind of government intervention to make sure that people have an incentive to use public transit instead of just going everywhere in self-driving cars. But, if you can make journeys robocar -> mass transit -> robocar that’s still an improvement on just full robocar journeys.
As for bikes, I have spent most of my life using a bike to get around. I want Netherlands style bike highways everywhere. But, it’s really hard to get any progress with bike-friendly designs in the current climate. What I think some people should do is have some very well developed bike highway plans in their back pockets, waiting for the opportunity to roll them out.
It could be that self-driving cars will take over the roads in a way that was like how cars replaced horses. If that happens, there are going to be a lot of cities that are going to have to make new laws suddenly: what happens to street parking, what do we do with existing parking lots, etc. That would be the time to pull out a big plan and say “ok, first of all, let’s install all these bike highways with the room we now have”.
I meant that cars would move out of the city, not people. I live in Germany where the statistics is that 57% of people own a car. In my city the percentage is 48% so that’s already lower than average and in the city centre districts it’s only around 30-35% of people owning a car. I would say that is a pretty normal distribution for German cities. That difference between inside and outside the city would just get bigger and I see no problem with that. The reason is already that public transport in the city is decent, people use bikes a lot, and parking is difficult and expensive (my city just increased parking prices in public resident parking zones to 360€/year). We need better public transport and better bike infrastructure and car numbers should go down in total, but I would still appreciate a shift of cars into rural areas. At least there is enough space to park them. In the city they’re just taking up way, way too much valuable space. And they’re loud and they smell (both getting better with electric ones, to be fair).
And they’re loud and they smell (both getting better with electric ones, to be fair).
My city just started trialing some electric buses, man are they so much quieter than the deisel buses. One advantage to self-driving cars is that cars can drive themselves to somewhere where they can be charged, which should only make electrification easier. I’m cautiously optimistic that self-driving cars could make cities better, but we’ll see.
Honestly, I want both. I live in Germany and my city has pretty decent public transit. But there are still way too many cars in the city, most streets have parking spaces on both sides, leaving only a small sidewalk. I want people to not be dependent on owning cars anymore. I want personal cars in the city to be replaced by self-driving cabs that you can just order when you need them. Imagine how cool that would be. There would be centralized (underground??) self-driving car storages and if you need a car, you just order one via an app and they just come to wherever you are autonomously and drive you wherever you want to go. You could basically get rid of all public parking spaces, it would be awesome.
I really like this idea! How would you get parasites to not use the self driving cabs in lieu of public transit? It’s a great idea for disabled folks and others who have a more difficult time using mass transit, but it seems like something rich people would monopolize.
Pricing. Taxes on robo-cabs that partially fund the cost of public transit. Subsidies for disabled people who need a robo-cab and can’t use public transit.
IMO there should also be an additional tax on self-driving cars for private use. It’s ridiculous right now that many people use their cars for maybe 2 hours a day, and the other 22 they just sit parked somewhere.
The issue with the self-driving-cab concept, as a cure to car infrastructure, is it doesn’t really fix the problem. Sure, maybe parking becomes less of an issue, but not roads. If anything they are worse. Not only is it still one person per car (usually), it also now has to drive around empty to pick up new passengers. At least a personal car never occupies or damages road infrastructure when it isn’t in use.
Busses are a legitimate solution for shorter distance travel that reduce infrastructure requirements. You can fit potentially dozens of people in a single vehicle, and they can be made to get you almost anywhere you need, with only a short walk required.
If it’s picking up new passengers, that means it isn’t sitting around parked for 8 hours.
Additionally, how much time is spent looking for parking? How much time is spent disrupting traffic while trying to parallel park?
While it’s true that a car might end up driving around empty for a certain amount of time, it’s only doing that in the short space needed to get to the next passenger. The empty trips will be much shorter than the trips with a passenger onboard. And, every time that happens it saves 2 parking spots. One for the passenger it just dropped off, and one for the passenger it’s currently picking up.
You live in a place without on-street parking?
Yes, it saves parking, but why would we choose this over busses?! That’s the argument. Busses do essentially everything self-driving taxis do, with none of the negatives, and the positives are even better.
Self-driving taxis are car companies trying to make you stop advocating for better solutions that lose them money. That’s it. Stop doing their work for them. Push for public trains and busses, and not for corporate owned shitty self-driving taxis that don’t benefit anyone except shoveling money into a few rich people’s pockets.
Because you have to walk to a bus stop, which in some areas can be a 15 minute walk. Then you have to wait for a bus, which in some areas can be a 30-60 minute wait.
Except come to your exact location and come on demand.
The biggest self-driving taxi company isn’t a car company, it’s Google.
It’s not it.
I’m not. You’re as unaware of the self-driving car space as you are about spelling your favourite alternative: it’s “buses” not “busses”.
Yes, those are great too, but there will always be a demand for vehicles that go directly to your doorstop and come on demand. In less dense areas a bus will never be able to compete with that. So, you can push for both.
Who do you think is getting rich off self-driving cars?
Sure, and autonomous taxis don’t exist at all almost anywhere. We’re talking about fixing problems. Those problems you listed are fixable. There’s no need to introduce something so obtuse to avoid fixing them with a worse solution.
When done well, it should be pretty close every five minutes or so. You can handle that I think. The driverless taxi doesn’t literally put you in the car, so I guess we need a better solution. (/s)
I never said they were. First, where do they get the cars? Another company is making money from the sales (and ongoing maintenance and parts). Also, promoting a reliance on car infrastructure, which these do, benefits car companies.
First, I’m not unaware of it. I’ve been paying attention to it for as long as people have been working on it. Second, https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus. I guess you’re the one unaware. If you’re going to be a pedantic ass, at least have the courtesy of being correct.
We have those. They’re called bikes. They cost a lot less, cause less traffic, pollute less, don’t take up much parking space, cost almost nothing to use, can get to more places, and they make you healthier as a bonus.
Why would these huge companies be doing it if they don’t expect to make incredible profits off of it? Do you see Google just doing things out of good will? Hell no. They expect to make stupid amounts of money with it, and likely fuck over public option while they’re at it. If they can sell cities on letting them operate, kick back some cash, and trash public infrastructure, they’re going to do it.
That only makes sense in a dense, built-up area where there are enough passengers arriving and departing every 5 minutes that it’s worthwhile for a bus to stop. That may be true in downtown NYC, but it isn’t going to be true of the more distant parts of Long Island.
Thanks for proving my point:
Ok, I know I don’t have to take you seriously now.
You’re pretty lazy if you stopped there.
Three things:
first, buses (I’ll switch for you, even though my phones really likes the two s version) don’t have to stop at every stop. They can drive past stops that don’t have passengers. As long as passengers are on the route every five minutes then it’s got something to do.
Second, our society building so spread out is part of the problem and should also be part of the solution. Mixed use and denser living spaces should be being built. Suburban hell is a massive issue, and part of the reason buses won’t be as useful in some places.
Third, we don’t need to have a 100% solution. A 90+% solution is still great, and it’d be better than these taxis. Whenever someone say "oh, it won’t work in this situation* it isn’t really an argument. Yeah, any solution will have outliers. They need to be considered, but they need not obstruct good solutions being implemented.
That’s all that was needed.
Yes, and they often do. But, it’s a massive waste of money if they drive an entire route and nobody gets on or off. They only make sense if the population density is enough.
I can see a lot of possible futures if self-driving cars become common.
In some, people use self-driving taxis whenever they need a car. In places like NYC where owning a car is a real hassle, self-driving cars mean you can ditch that annoyance and still enjoy the benefits of a car when you need one. That means urban living is much more popular, and high-rise building don’t need to be built with obscene amounts of parking attached. Because nobody has to park their car when they’re not using it, parking spaces and parking lots completely disappear. This opens up space for bike lanes or other uses. Because nobody has to worry about parking anymore, pedestrian malls are more common. People can just be dropped off and picked up in a small area nearby. In this scenario, mass transit might also be more common. People could take self-driving cabs from their homes or workplaces to the nearest transit hub, switch over to mass transit, and then get a self-driving cab on the other end to get to wherever they’re going. This would be less convenient than taking a car the whole way, but if the pricing was right, and the mass transit was nice enough, people might want to save money this way. This would work especially well if you have things like express subway lines that go very quickly between two very popular spots.
Unfortunately, there’s the other end of the spectrum. In this one, people decide they want to own their self-driving cars. The fact that they can get to work, working while the car drives, means they want to live out in the middle of nowhere. So, instead of reducing urban sprawl it makes it much worse. Because everyone owns their own car, you still need lots of parking for the self-driving cars to use while the owner is at work. One possible benefit of this is that you don’t need the parking right next to the associated building, so at least you can do away with parking scattered everywhere, ruining cities. OTOH, you will end up with some dystopian hellscape parking structures where 10k cars wait for their owners to call.
It could get even worse too. If the rich all move deeper into the suburbs and self-driving cars make traffic more efficient, I could easily see cities passing laws that give cars much more priority even than they already have. Jaywalking might be considered an even bigger crime because not only are you interfering with the driving of one or two human drivers, you’re disrupting the algorithm-optimized flow of traffic.
Very interesting thoughts, thank you. I would guess that the percentage of people owning their car would decline rather than increase, especially in the cities, but I had never considered the factor that the travel time itself will be less inconvenient and people might be okay with longer commute times. I guess it’s possible that overall, these two factors more or less cancel out, and then the number of cars would stay the same but they would move more to the suburbs and rural areas, and out of the cities. That still doesn’t sound so bad.
Any way, I don’t think self-driving cars should replace public transport, but complement it. Politics and society need to steer development in that direction. While I personally look forward to self-driving cars, currently my energy goes into fighting for better bike infrastructure und better and cheaper public transport. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a way for all these modes of transportation to form an intertwined and accessible network that is efficient and sustainable. We should keep trying to make it happen.
It sounds bad for the city cores though. I like cities and I especially like cities with dense cores that combine good walkable areas with great transit. Tokyo is a prime example. Some people still drive in Tokyo, but a lot of people use the amazing mass transit system there. The end result for Tokyo is that mass transit hubs become these amazing walkable areas with all kinds of interesting things to see.
If everybody except the most poor get self driving cars and move to the suburbs, the downtown cores might become robocar hells, where cars have the priority and pedestrians need to wait 5 minutes to cross a street.
Yeah, I agree. There might need to be some kind of government intervention to make sure that people have an incentive to use public transit instead of just going everywhere in self-driving cars. But, if you can make journeys robocar -> mass transit -> robocar that’s still an improvement on just full robocar journeys.
As for bikes, I have spent most of my life using a bike to get around. I want Netherlands style bike highways everywhere. But, it’s really hard to get any progress with bike-friendly designs in the current climate. What I think some people should do is have some very well developed bike highway plans in their back pockets, waiting for the opportunity to roll them out.
It could be that self-driving cars will take over the roads in a way that was like how cars replaced horses. If that happens, there are going to be a lot of cities that are going to have to make new laws suddenly: what happens to street parking, what do we do with existing parking lots, etc. That would be the time to pull out a big plan and say “ok, first of all, let’s install all these bike highways with the room we now have”.
I meant that cars would move out of the city, not people. I live in Germany where the statistics is that 57% of people own a car. In my city the percentage is 48% so that’s already lower than average and in the city centre districts it’s only around 30-35% of people owning a car. I would say that is a pretty normal distribution for German cities. That difference between inside and outside the city would just get bigger and I see no problem with that. The reason is already that public transport in the city is decent, people use bikes a lot, and parking is difficult and expensive (my city just increased parking prices in public resident parking zones to 360€/year). We need better public transport and better bike infrastructure and car numbers should go down in total, but I would still appreciate a shift of cars into rural areas. At least there is enough space to park them. In the city they’re just taking up way, way too much valuable space. And they’re loud and they smell (both getting better with electric ones, to be fair).
My city just started trialing some electric buses, man are they so much quieter than the deisel buses. One advantage to self-driving cars is that cars can drive themselves to somewhere where they can be charged, which should only make electrification easier. I’m cautiously optimistic that self-driving cars could make cities better, but we’ll see.