This study (and the fact that you're reading it) tells you there is an underserved demand for studies that give rich people luxuries to normal people and then find negative effects. In the future people will be enormously wealthy, as we are enormously wealthy compared to our ancestors. Inequality will be massive because zero will remain zero while the ceiling gets ever higher. Find novel ways to complain about this and you will be treated to thunderous applause by those who don't want this future.
A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
151–160 of 205 posts
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
that sounds like wishful thinking to me. coordinating with other people is hard. and if the ride is free, why bother. also people want to stay independent and not have to share. the option to share an uber or equivalent for example is already there. every time i used it the trip took longer than had i not shared. missed a train because of it once too. so i doubt that sharing will happen as much as you think
> coordinating with other people is hard. Only when you're driving around humans. When you're using automated cars to replace errands, it becomes a lot easier to coordinate a set of grocery pickups, laundry dropoffs, and so on. With concepts like Amazon Lockers in apartment complexes, you can pick up their laundry from one locker, deliver cleaned goods to another, all while they're at work.
that may work with services that manage this, but not if i use the car to manage my own. those are two entirely different kind of uses of self driving cars.
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
So here's a hypothetical scenario. Car drives kids to school (in my experience, school tends to start before work). Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work. In the afternoon, car drives (empty) to pick up kids and drive them home, then drives (empty) back to work to pick up the parent. Half the time it's empty.
In your scenario the number of trips is the same but the car is more often empty because the parent doesn't have to chauffeur the kids around.
But it still takes up space on the road
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The congestion problem is mostly overblown. It's really not. Congestion is a huge problem already, and increasing the current road utilization by 83% will bring entire cities to a standstill for the entirety of waking hours. > I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person. Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants, so things will get much, much worse as far as how many…
If the future is car as a service, then yes congestion does not automatically get worse, you call an automated car to pick you up, and another one to take you home, it might also mean that more ride sharing happens too
But we already have buses and bicycles. Car as a service might just as well make the congestion worse since it will go empty to pick you up.
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would robotaxis fix the ~80% of cars being single person? It seems like it would make it even worse, replacing some of those with zero people in the car.
Network of robotaxis has a wonderful quality of increasing utilization with density. It's a self-healing system: the more people use it, the more efficiently we can use it. Efficiency, it this context, is number of people we can transport per hour on a given stretch of the road. It's important, so i'll emphasize it: high utilization of roads is a good thing. Roads are a fixed resource that have already been paid for.…
That would be the case for uber pool too, but it isn't used nearly as much.
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#156Isn’t this just Jevons Paradox applied to driving? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
This reminds me of how my own behavior changed when Amazon Locker arrived. I could order what I wanted, and have it delivered up the street without having it stolen off of my porch! Now I'll order something off Amazon, then 30 minutes later think of something else I need, then 10 minutes after that get another item, and then I've got 3 separate shipments taking up 3 spaces in the lockers, because to me there's no cos…
I've had Amazon combine separate orders into a single box.
If your orders are really 30 and 10 minutes apart, Amazon will ship them together if it can.
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're going to have to slowly shift to more usage-based pricing if we want autonomous cars to work. Start off charging tolls per mile for zero occupancy vehicles when they drive in congested areas, then expend it to single occupancy vehicles in congested areas, etc. A bit more controversial, but I personally love the idea of a congestion-free fast lane (say, 100+ mph) exclusively for autonomous vehicles, with prices…
Gas taxes are already effectively toll-per-mile, with a bonus incentive to get fuel efficient cars. If we start seeing enough EV adoption to dent gas tax revenues, that's a win.
This is already the case, and has been so for a little while.
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work. This implies there are no other people for which a rideshare would be suitable in either direction at any given time. This seems, like an unreasonable way to predict how mass AV would work. Again, demand is asymmetrical, which means there are opportunities for aggregation and overlap, when talking about mass adoption to the point that "the majority of cars on th…
We're not talking about rideshares, we're talking about autonomous personal vehicles. Most people are not likely to give up their personal vehicles; they'll just have self-driving ones.
This seems like an odd argument to me: "enabling efficiency isn't useful if you assume people's habits won't adapt to the new status quo". Once you've moved personal vehicle use of the sort you describe from essential to luxury, I don't see why you couldn't make users bear the cost of their frivolous externalities.
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#159These are some interesting results. That said, fully self-driving cars almost certainly won't exist any time in the next 100 years anyway, so I don't think this will be an issue. By the time, if it ever happens, that fully self-driving technology is created, society will likely be so different from what it is now that the issues this article raises will no longer be valid. Fully self-driving cars require artificial general intelligence, so to me a bigger issue if they ever exist would be whether it is ethical, given that most likely in principle no objective test for sentience is possible, to use more-or-less human-level intelligences as slaves.
Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the future is car as a service, then yes congestion does not automatically get worse, you call an automated car to pick you up, and another one to take you home, it might also mean that more ride sharing happens too
But we already have buses and bicycles. Car as a service might just as well make the congestion worse since it will go empty to pick you up.
Think Uber carpooling, minus drivers, much cheaper, and short pickup times. Maybe 6-10 person shuttles instead of sedans/SUVs in denser areas. To a car service, moving an empty vehicle is inefficient and a waste of money.