A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by ben509 » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #47

ben509 wrote: post #41

There's a solution to the congestion problem that works even without AVs: private ownership of roads and automated pricing. Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road. If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route and time to drive, people can make better decisions. And people living nearby should be able to collect nu…

Privatizing roads is absolutely not a solution. People do not choose to drive congested roads, they already have traffic information available to them in the form of google maps. All your solution would do is make it prohibitively infeasible foe many to drive, cutting them off from jobs. A few at the top would see less traffic, but roads only for the 1% aren't really something we should be aiming for.

> People do not choose to drive congested roads

Um, how do the roads get congested, then?

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

#202

Post by oftenwrong » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

tda wrote: post #98

chadcmulligan wrote: post #75

I used chauffeured cars yesterday, I just shared them with other people. I went to the beach, and had no real plan, I thought I'll go here, clicked on my app and it told me where to go, usually walk a couple of hundred metres. I spent the day travelling and walking around cost about $20 and travelled a couple of hundred kilometres. I took my laptop and worked in between scenic spots. I was thinking about this yesterd…

If you think about it vehicles on asphalt/tyres (not buses as we know them) are superior to vehicles on tracks/steel wheels in every way (except rolling resistance). Vehicle to vehicle dista CE on the road can be as little as a few seconds, where on train tracks it is usually one to several minutes. Deadweight per passenger is in the range of 5-10x more for trainers vs buses. If a train breaks down, everything is blo…

In my city, the subway trains can carry ~1400 people. During peak commuting times, a train comes every 5 minutes or so. Even our largest buses only carry ~100 people. You would need a bus to stop every ~21 seconds to match that capacity. That rate probably can be achieved. Stops would have to be designed to reduce the overhead of disembarking/boarding cycles, since there would be ~14x as many as with a train.

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

#203

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #186

wutbrodo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are any number of things that seemed utterly critical and timeless to the myopic of their time that are either anachronisms or at best optional today. "There's no ways people will live in apartment buildings", "there's no way people will give up their horses", etc etc

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

#204

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 10:55 PM UTC

lozenge wrote: post #181

wutbrodo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For the same reason I use a combination of transit, Ubers, and rental cars to get a far better experience than car owners at a fraction of the cost. For the same reason that the average person gave up horses and large plots of land and indoor woodfires for heating and cooking: if something is horribly inefficient and costly relative to an alternative, eventually society stops subsidizing it, and the only ones left doing it are the highly irrational or the highly passionate (compare horse ownership 150 years ago to now).

There are obviously advantages to owning a car that transport-as-a-service doesn't offer, but the point is that once an alternative is available that's better from a global utility perspective, it doesn't make any sense to subsidize the costly decisions of the irrational (barring interest groups that we as a society choose to explicitly subsidize, like families or the disabled).

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

#205

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 10:57 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #162

wutbrodo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't want to depend on a taxi. I have to drive to work NOW.

Well, obviously. This isn't something you turn off overnight if the alternative infrastructure doesn't yet support it. But you could make the same argument if pretending it's a necessity about any of a million things that don't exist in modern society today. If your definition of what you're entitled to is no different from the status quo, you're barely even coherently engaging with conversations about how society can and should evolve, improve, or maintain its normz and policies.