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A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

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Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#181

Post by lozenge »

wutbrodo wrote: post #158
CydeWeys wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you think people will choose to rent a self driving car instead of owning one?

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#182

Post by whoisthemachine »

masonic wrote: post #166
whoisthemachine wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also highly possible that robotaxi companies would incentivize efficient use of their vehicles in order to drive costs down (and increase profits).

They'll optimize profit by being able to respond instantly to hails , capturing as much market share as possible. So, the entire idle fleet will orbit downtown all the time.

Is that necessary? Couldn't such companies also have many cars parked around downtowns, ready to be activated for a ride at any time? Remember, without a driver, there's no need for someone to "orbit", looking for riders, rather the riders call the cars themselves.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#183

Post by Mattasher »

randcraw wrote: post #85

IMHO, this study suffers from two big blunders. First, nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip? Making a new service free when the current service costs money is a poor way to assess how the novelty will change car use. A better study design would have estimated the cost per mile of future AV use, then charged participants accordingly. Second, no AV comes with a…

Another major issue, beyond the comment in the article about how people may have shifted around usage temporarily to take advantage of the service, is the all-you-can eat effect. Compare how much you eat and drink your first few days at an all-inclusive resort versus how much you'd consume each day after a couple weeks there. The novelty of gorging wears off, and if you were paying gas and maintenance per trip that would happen especially fast.

I'm certain lowering the cost (and opportunity cost) of driving will mean more driving, but the magnitude of the change can't be predicted from a short study.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#184

Post by semiotagonal »

ars wrote: post #156
semiotagonal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's weird, I don't think I've ever seen that happen. I'm constantly having multiple doors pop open at the locker.

Although maybe it's possible they do it some of the time and I'm actually much worse about fragmenting my orders than I think :)

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#185

Post by adrianmonk »

randcraw wrote: post #85

IMHO, this study suffers from two big blunders. First, nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip? Making a new service free when the current service costs money is a poor way to assess how the novelty will change car use. A better study design would have estimated the cost per mile of future AV use, then charged participants accordingly. Second, no AV comes with a…

> nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip?

What is the future of self-driving cars (SDCs)? Are they going to be deployed as a service, or are they going to be privately owned by individuals and sold as an option when you buy the car?

If SDCs are a service, then a study needs to charge a fee to match that.

If SDCs are individually owned, then the incremental cost of an extra trip is just fuel plus wear and tear. In this study, the chauffeurs used the study participants' own cars, so the participants presumably had to pay fuel costs and wear and tear. So this seems to match closely what they'd pay.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#186

Post by orbifold »

wutbrodo wrote: post #158
CydeWeys wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no way people would give up owning their own car outside of very dense urban centers. Everywhere else it would neither be practical nor desirable to wait for a rental car to arrive.

People also tend to store lots of personal items in their car.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#187

Post by adrianmonk »

> For example, the chauffeur could bring the kids to soccer practice and back or drive a friend home and then return to the house. They could even pick up groceries and make a Target run to simulate a driverless car future where items could get bought online and loaded into your AV by a store employee before returning home.

The survey measured the additional faux-SDC trips, but did it also measure the trips that did not need to happen as a result of this?

Would the friend have taken an Uber home? Would the study participant have just driven their own kids to soccer practice or driven themselves to Target? Some of these trips probably would not have happened, but surely at least some of them would have happened, just in a different car or with the car owner doing the driving.

They've already acknowledged the study is imperfect, but I think this is an important question to consider when interpreting the data.

Another issue is that this study simulates what happens when one person has access to a SDC but all their friends do not. If all my friends have SDCs too, they won't usually need to borrow mine. The friend is likely to take use their own SDC to get to my place and ride home in it, so that wouldn't count against my SDC's ride total.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#188

Post by TulliusCicero »

Mirioron wrote: post #109
TulliusCicero wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone is welcome to move to a low-pollution low-vehicle area and live a no-car life. There's a whole lotta such space in the US. No there isn't. In fact, I can't think of a single one. Living in rural areas means being super dependent on cars. The center of major cities are less car dependent, but still there's plenty of cars around in every city in the US. There's nowhere in the US like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or…

> Living in rural areas means being super dependent on cars. You say that because you're unwilling to give up the comforts that car use provides. Do you think that people elsewhere didn't have to give up anything when they decided against car use? You might think that it's fine to mandate bikes, buses and walking instead of cars, but pretty much everybody would rather have a car during a cold winter.

> You say that because you're unwilling to give up the comforts that car use provides.

Nope. I don't have a car. For a family of 3.

> You might think that it's fine to mandate bikes, buses and walking instead of cars, but pretty much everybody would rather have a car during a cold winter.

I'm not mandating anything; you are. I want options that make not-driving viable, while you're for the side that wants to force everyone to drive.

I don't even mind driving, I just hate being required to drive, which is the case in most US cities, because they were designed to make everything else worse.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#189

Post by CydeWeys »

rootusrootus wrote: post #118
CydeWeys wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think the politics of land use are more easily solvable than the simple physics problem of too many cars, not enough space. Plenty of other countries in the world (and even some US cities) have solved the land use problem to the point that most people don't use space-inefficient private vehicles to get around. It's solvable and there are working models to emulate. This is not true of your alternative.

So we all just need to compress our cities until they achieve NYC density?

Nope, doesn't have to be nearly that dense. Just get rid of SFH-only zoning and the required density will be reached over time.

Re: A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

#190

Post by CydeWeys »

xnzakg wrote: post #150
CydeWeys wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting the unoccupied trips. There will be unoccupied trips running errands even at rush hour, because why not, you're not sitting in traffic, just your car. Also you seem to be thinking more of the robotaxis model, but the article is talking about the more likely future of everyone continuing to own their own car, only now it can drive. If cars are driving back empty after a commute then rush hour will ha…

One way to prevent congestion would be to instead of paying for the distance traveled, you simply paid for the time the car is on the road, giving a financial incentive to send the car outside of rush hours. Would probably also cause people to use alternative routes rather than everyone trying to use the shortest one when is congested.

Yes, this is one of the main solutions proposed by the linked article.
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