121–130 of 158 posts
Charging while driving the car through induction. https://www.wired.com/2013/08/induction-charged-buses/
Self driving car guidance built into the roads. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/178640-volvo-designs-mag...
Road signs that communicate to the cars via wireless protocols etc. https://phys.org/news/2017-05-traffic-frisco-cars-technology...
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> By reducing people's sunk cost in cars I love this conversation. The US new auto sales run rate is ~17 million vehicles/year, with an average price right around $35k. That's $595,000,000,000 per year in capital being allocated to automotive mobility alone . Think what better things we could do with that capital (or everyone could work far less!) if we only spent a fraction of that on automotive capital costs.
Don't forget maintenance, insurance, and gas costs
Holy crap. That's more than 5% of GDP.
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> Anytime you make something cheaper, easier to use, more useful and/or more efficient you get an increase in usage. This isn't inherently true. You only get an increase in usage if people want/need that usage but previously couldn't have it. (i.e, if there was already a shortage -- if we were severely undeserving the need previously, or a new undeserved need was discovered). If there is no shortage already and/or no…
Could you expand on "critical shortages up the chain?" It seems like if slightly less-preferable alternatives are already being used, this would be enough to induce demand when the price drops a bit. Many car trips are optional; consider shopping and the ability to combine trips or order online, if you're motivated to do so. Also, there are many alternatives for entertainment, whether by going somewhere else or stayi…
For instance, no one says "we shouldn't make the air cleaner. If clean air became too cheap or too easy to breathe, people might breathe too much". Such a thought is ridiculous. It's understood that, once we have enough so that there is no longer any shortage for anyone, demand simply won't rise, no matter how much cheaper or easier to use that becomes. To the extreme that it's infinitely easy and has absolutely no cost for me to breathe extra clean air right now, but I still don't over-breathe because it would be pointless, there's nothing to gain by doing that.
Another example is a hospital. No one says "we should never build a new hospital. If healthcare becomes too cheap or too easy to get, people might become overly-healthy." Or "If we build a new hospital, we'll just encourage people to be more sick". Someone will even print up some misleading statistics. They'll say, "see, last year we had a 500-bed hospital, and it was always full of sick people. Now we have two 500-bed hospitals, and they're both full. Sickness has doubled since last year! We have more sick people now than ever before". It's understood that a new hospital does not create sickness, it does not induce sickness. These people were still sick, they just weren't counted because they weren't in the hospital. They were getting ill at home or at work, and not getting recorded at the hospital because it was already full.
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Transportation works the same way. But it's been so under-built, poorly-built, and under-serviced for so many years, that everyone approaches it with starvation mentality to scrape by with, instead of approaching it as a problem to be actually solved well.
Cheaper and more convenient cars do not create demand, they expose shortages up the chain. There is already, today, many people who have a shortage of housing and transportation across the US. Clean/cheap/safer cars allow them to meet needs that previously were unmet. This will create the illusion of new congestion (because transportation will be more accessible to people), but that congestion is not new, it already existed. It just was not being not measured, it was spilling out into other areas where it is unaccounted for (such as people who ordering online who would have preferred to shop in stores but couldn't, or people just giving up on life altogether and not going places they want or need to go, because no transportation exists to make the trip possible).
For example, Autonomous cars will likely increase total car trips because empty cars will be summoned around to places. That's not really new demand though, that's an exposing of a critical shortage of parking. If Autonomous cars were cheap enough, and parking was cheap enough, Autonomous cars would never need to make empty trips. They could wait for people right where people already are without any problems. But because most cities have a critical shortage of parking, that shortage will spill out into the streets as "induced demand", where cars will waste lots of time and energy driving around empty into and out of cities, just so they can avoid parking in cities. Autonomous cars "solve parking" by moving parked cars into city streets and circulating them. It's not new demand, its old demand being pushed around to different places, hot-potato style.
Similarly, autonomous cars will likely increase total driving distances, as they make it easier for people to live further away from cities and endure longer commutes. But this too isn't really induced demand for cars, this is an exposing of the critical shortage of housing that most US cities have. If there was enough quality affordable housing in cities, people wouldn't waste their time commuting further away, even if doing so had zero cost. But because we are not willing to solve that problem, it too will spill out into our transportation infrastructure, and then get blamed on "cars" or "induced demand", when neither is a really accurate representation of the problem, nor an accurate path for finding a solution.
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Could you expand on "critical shortages up the chain?" It seems like if slightly less-preferable alternatives are already being used, this would be enough to induce demand when the price drops a bit. Many car trips are optional; consider shopping and the ability to combine trips or order online, if you're motivated to do so. Also, there are many alternatives for entertainment, whether by going somewhere else or stayi…
A good example is to focus on things that aren't cars first. For instance, no one says "we shouldn't make the air cleaner. If clean air became too cheap or too easy to breathe, people might breathe too much ". Such a thought is ridiculous. It's understood that, once we have enough so that there is no longer any shortage for anyone, demand simply won't rise, no matter how much cheaper or easier to use that becomes. To…
It seems like this isn't likely to be settled via armchair reasoning in an online discussion; someone needs to look at the data (for example, at pricing), and that's likely to lead to a complicated economics discussion.
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> Autonomous cars will not significantly change this. Autonomous cars (if used exclusively) over time should decrease safe separation, increasing capacity, but there's a limit to the gains from that. Some additional gains if they are networked at routing is optimized to utilize all available roads rather than just the usually-best route.
Right we all expect this sort of thing, but so far it's all theory and I haven't seen anyone seriously test and study the idea based on real world factors. For example I doubt we'll see any benefits of decreased safe separation in cities where there are cyclists and pedestrians and other factors that are hard to predict. My prediction would be that the efficiency gains will be marginal and will be dominated by other…
Well, yeah, that applies to roads with exclusive use of autonomous vehicles, which clearly doesn't apply to roads shared with cyclists and pedestrians, but limited access freeways. But even within cities those can serve as arterial routes.
You don't realize it until you focus on it, but walking around a city, even a relatively clean one like Boston, how much of the air is full of exhaust. City busses that don't run on natural gas spew huge amounts of black smoke, it's disgusting. I can't wait until electric cars take over, the air is going to be so much cleaner, even in dense urban environments.
I have a theory that people will treat gas cars like they treated smokers. There was a stretch of time where smoking was popular in restaurants but the common shtick was the table next to you would go 'ewww!' and wave their hands around their nose or faux-cough causing all kinds of conflict and pressure. Pedestrians at stop signs might do the same for ICEs, etc.
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Congestion? I don't think you're taking into account the huge advantage that autonomous cars have with respect to coordination among themselves. Much, if not most, congestion is caused by human drivers attempting to accrue advantage to themselves through maneuvers that disadvantage everybody else on the road.
No most of congestion is caused by the spacial inefficiency of car based infrastructure. Cars are big and roads have fixed capacity. Autonomous cars will not significantly change this.
Platooning https://youtu.be/t9uEPnGI6zA?t=54s
Shuttling to and from stations
Road pricing to get people to share
More road available as there would be less parked cars
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I worry that self-driving cars are going to be used as an excuse not to expand public transit, especially in the Bay Area. The problem is scale -- once the population reaches a certain size, the roads are going to be gridlocked even if every car is self driving. I'm not sure if the Bay Area is at that point yet, but NYC certainly is, as are most of the major cities of the world.
Hopefully Uber/Lyft start a van/bulk transit service. This would help reduce traffic by combining trips while being more efficient than buses because the server can dynamically route the driver to optimize pickups and departures. Perhaps even adding discounts for riders willing to trek the last mile on foot.
If I had to choose between a world where 1) everyone owned electric cars 2) no one owned cars but just hitched rides on autonomous ones and 3) no one used cars at all, I would take the third option. I think it's possible if we start building new cities designed for walking, instead of just expanding our current cities, with all the problems that presents. I think the trick would be to strictly limit their footprint t…
> ... we start building new cities ... I hope that you realize that cities are not just begun and built up (like the ghost-cities of China), but are built up over time because the area was desirable and people migrated to those areas. The US isn't in the habit of just building a city somewhere. That just doesn't happen. That -new city building- is something that happens when a country's GDP is slipping so low they ha…
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/21/china-west-gh...
I personally think America could benefit from taking a little bit of China's approach here. Can you imagine how much more affordable housing would be in San Francisco if a bunch of "unnecessary" / "ghost" housing got built before all the new tech jobs moved in.
And sure, it's possible to misjudge things, not every future plan will be wildly successful. But what's really the worst case scenario? "Oh no, we built too much housing. I guess apartments will be really easy to afford. I guess we can start sheltering homeless people really cheaply now, or artists can retrofit some for cheap studio space."
US drivers drive 3.1 Trillions miles per year [0]. Every month, the 12 Month moving average has been going up at 5 billion miles [0]. So every month we need to install enough charging stations to charge 5 billion miles/year. Lets use a Level 2 charger that adds ~25 miles of charge per hour. So 5B miles / 25 miles of charge per hour / 24 hours per day / 365 days per year = about 23,000 Level 2 chargers need to be adde…
You forget charging at home. There are currently around 100M home charging stations in the US, most of them completely underused :-) So every home is a charging station and if the range for EVs keep increasing 10 percent per year we will reach 400 miles in 2 years, 500 miles in less than 5 years. By then, road side charging stations will be for people driving more than 7 hours in a day and for the very forgetful. I d…