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Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

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Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#191
post #34

Uber's product is the company's stock. All of their "AI" and "self-driving" stunts so far have been transparent hype fuel that anyone with the slightest domain knowledge knows have no practical significance. Their PR department are, as can be expected, top notch though. I especially like how they put a populist spin on their announcements, like the beer delivery (yay, beer!) and now picking up passengers with their p…

Plausible. Apparently, the driver needs to intervene 15+ times in a 30min period. Their technology seems to be way behind other companies.

Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they forget that people like owning their personal space -- especially if it's they need to inhabit for multiple hours in the day, pretty much every day. And (as with the "smart home" advocates), they forget that, outside of the tech crowd - not everyone likes interacting with (and hence, being dependent on) computers for every conceivable need in their life, 24x7. The ownerless model might work for some peopl…

I dunno, of my friends under 35 (San Francisco and Oakland) it is rarer to own a car than to be carless. Most couples I know with cars are also single car families. In cities and the surrounding metros (which continue to grow as a proportion of the US pop) I could totally see an ownerless model working. How many Manhattan residents own cars?

An important insight here is that if you and your friends already don't own cars, then moving from drivered-rides-for-hire to driverless-rides-for-hire for you and your friends won't reduce car ownership.

Clearly, in every world, the modern one and the future driverless one, childless adults in dense urban areas are the people most likely to benefit from a rides-for-hire approach. Families with children and people who live in suburban, exurban, and rural areas will be the people least likely to rely on rides-for-hire.

One interesting (though not, I think, probably overall very likely) scenario is where total car stock increases in a driverless car world because:

1. Childless urban adults use rides-for-hire, but they already used rides-for-hire and already didn't have cars. Meanwhile, they start substituting some amount of their former public transit travel for the new-cheaper rides-for-hire (so more vehicles are needed to serve them).

2. Families with children and suburban, exurban, and rural families purchase driverless cars instead of signing up for rides-for-hire, because rides-for-hire still don't work very well for them. In fact, they purchase more cars, because the driverless cars offer them more utility than their old cars did.

3. Meanwhile, a smaller number of people in relatively dense suburb do go to rides-for-hire and abandon ownership, but there are relatively few of them and the cars in their localities are relatively poorly utilized, so they don't offset the increases in vehicle stock driven by people in groups 1 and 2.

As I said, I don't think that's overall a likely scenario, but I don't think it's an insane one. I'd say 10% chance of coming about.

Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 mph under the speed limit during SF morning commute is ~30 mph faster than today, so that'll be awesome.

But the speed limit in almost all of SF is 25?

Not on freeways

Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced, and I don't think there is very much evidence either way. Are the traffic waves caused by erratic driving due to driver error at misjudging average speed? Or is it more caused by small fluctuations due to actual and unavoidable conditions? Would a self driving car see a plastic bag blowing in the wind and slam on its brakes, or drive right through it? What about a kitten? What about a bowling ball,…

I try to leave 10-20 car lengths between myself and the next vehicle in this kind of stop-and-go heavy traffic. No waves for me! The anti-traffic essays indicate that doing what I'm doing will actually speed up the breakup of a traffic jam.

That's true, but depending on the local driving culture, this may just lead to many vehicles cutting in front of you and making the gap vanish. In metro NY/NJ, at stop-and-go speeds on freeways, 1 to 2 car lengths seems to be about as much as you can safely leave without it quickly being snatched away. Too bad.

Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video you linked to was interesting - thanks for sharing - but I didn't follow how that's related at all to self-driving cars driving around looking for parking. The video seems like more an example of what happens when individual households all own cars and don't carpool when taking their kids to school. If the kids being dropped off at that school started using self-driving Uber Pools, then that video would be…

The relation is that instead of driving around looking for parking, they queue up at their new bottleneck: loading and unloading. Nobody in the video needed to park, and yet traffic within that area was still moving slower than 3-4mph. Place this phenomenon on city streets where they won't have space for conveniently designed queuing areas, and cars will stop in the road, blocking anybody who is trying to move by. Do…

This! Self-driving cars makes car use much cheaper, and I can't imagine any other outcome but substantially more car use as a result, leading to more traffic. At some point we have to deal with this in some way, such as tolling, especially in denser urban areas, where land values are expensive, and the hassle/time cost of driving/parking are the only things metering motorists' use of this valuable resource.

Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#197
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, Uber and Lyft CEOs both said they envision a future where we don't own cars and just call self driving taxi services via app when we need them. They both envision this happening in less than a decade. This seems to be coming true, millennials have the lowest rate of car ownership and it seems to be the best explanation for why both companies are willing to bleed money to expand market-share as quickly a possible…

Why not use trains or buses. Thousands of cars compared to a single train seems inefficient.

It's all about keeping the same user experience for most people (those with cars).

One thing much of this analysis is missing is how much more in demand commuter vans will be. Transportation will be much more hub based for both long and very short trips. A middle of the range option will fill the void, which is large. Given much of transit is pre planned with times and locations, for jobs, van use in self driving cars will be enormous.

Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#198
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a whole suburb is taking self-driving car every morning to get to the train, I guess someone will innovate and start offering rides in a minibus or even a bus.

Nah, self driving electric vehicles with 6 seats operating on an UberPOOL model will dominate, and it wouldn't be surprising to see the UberPOOL model be extended to a subscription service as well where you simply pay a commit for the service level each month, get an included number of trips, and a further discounted on trips over that number. Having the commit will make it maore feasible to fund vehicles that are in…

One neat thing about this (that probably won't end up making that big a difference for most people, just those few with high-mileage commutes in low traffic areas) is minivans can safely go faster on the freeway than buses.

Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they forget that people like owning their personal space -- especially if it's they need to inhabit for multiple hours in the day, pretty much every day. And (as with the "smart home" advocates), they forget that, outside of the tech crowd - not everyone likes interacting with (and hence, being dependent on) computers for every conceivable need in their life, 24x7. The ownerless model might work for some peopl…

I dunno, of my friends under 35 (San Francisco and Oakland) it is rarer to own a car than to be carless. Most couples I know with cars are also single car families. In cities and the surrounding metros (which continue to grow as a proportion of the US pop) I could totally see an ownerless model working. How many Manhattan residents own cars?

Indeed. Manhattan residents rarely own cars (IIRC around 20% do), and when they do it's always for some weird miscellaneous reason, these being the most common ones I've noticed:

- it's a toy (like a motorcycle or boat would usually be) or

- it's a business tool (like a sedan owned by a cabdriver or a minivan owned by a deli owner) or

- it's owned by someone who recently moved from a suburb to Manhattan and brought their car along by default (which most of the time, lasts no more than a few months before they learn the transit system, get fed up with parking, and sell the car) or

- they're a law enforcement officer or family member (because LEOs, even personal cars, usually get away with parking murder here, so from a parking perspective, manhattan looks as convenient as a sleepy suburb, to someone driving a car with the right protective LEO markings to ward off tickets)

- more than one of the above

Re: Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of traffic reduction is twofold. First is the fact that there can be a lot more carpools because you don't need the owner of the car to be inconvenienced to make the carpool work, so there will be an overall reduction of cars on the road. Second, and more importantly, when you have only autonomous vehicles on the road, you can make assumptions that all drivers are perfectly rational, and then your safety mar…

> Second, and more importantly, when you have only autonomous vehicles on the road, you can make assumptions that all drivers are perfectly rational, and then your safety margins can be smaller, allowing closer travel at higher speeds. Are you saying that a rational driver will never apply maximum braking?

There are non-rational things like animals, kids, and adults with their face in their phones to watch for, so it will never be fully rational...

However, the fact that the computer in the following car can detect instantly that the front car is slowing, it can react instantaneously and (theoretically, with similar braking distances) the following car would stop exactly the same distance (give or take a few inches) from the leading vehicle as when they were driving at speed...

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