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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

#91

Post by akadruid1 »

dmitriid wrote: post #69
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a complete nobrainer. Right now the bulk of the cars are single occupant. That's because it is the occupants going places, not the cars. As soon as self-driving cars are a reality it will be the cars going places that get added to all the other traffic already there.

Spotify's central office in Stockholm has ~1000 employees. So, at 6pm a thousand people call up the efficient fast driverless cars to go home.... And that's just one office out of a dozen on that street.

Those 1000 people don't have to be served by 1000 privately owned single occupancy vehicles. When they are inputting their destination before departure, a robo taxi can deliver 6-8 people with similar destinations door-to-door for a fraction of the cost of a private vehicle, the same comfort level, but occupy hardly more road space then 70-80 seat transit buses.

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

#92

Post by ctdonath »

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…

All that's nice if you're single and can toss all your stuff in a bag, traveling on other people's schedules.

Doesn't work for a family of 4 with a busy schedule and volumes of stuff to haul around (dog included), sometimes on very short notice.

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

#93

Post by ctdonath »

wbl wrote: post #89
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…

Do you pay Ford for every trip?

Paid Ford some $50,000+ up front (two SUVs), plus fuel & maintenance.

Cars ain't free.

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

#94

Post by erik_seaberg »

CydeWeys wrote: post #16
kjksf wrote: post #3

Here's what this research tells me: demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. Current use is limited by cost and convenience. Self-driving car is likely to fix both so it'll lead to more use of transportation. This is a good thing. We're currently deprived and if things go well, we'll get more of what we want. The congestion problem is mostly overblown. First, maybe with rare ex…

> 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…

The number of people who need to commute during rush hour can't increase 83%. Maybe some transit commuters will switch to cars, but maybe some car commuters will finally be able to switch to transit if these make the first and last mile feasible.

And 83% was the first and only week. Maybe the number doesn't stay that high once indulging in the novelty wears off.

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

#95

Post by chadcmulligan »

ctdonath wrote: post #92
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…

All that's nice if you're single and can toss all your stuff in a bag, traveling on other people's schedules. Doesn't work for a family of 4 with a busy schedule and volumes of stuff to haul around (dog included), sometimes on very short notice.

Yes indeed, my days of carting kids around are behind me. Some thoughts on that -

Maybe introduce a group travel cost, some places do have family travel passes, so that would reduce costs. Hauling junk (and dog) becomes difficult, asian and some European countries seem to do this, how do they do it?

There should be answers for this, like automate the cars maybe is a solution, but maybe its introducing new problems (it is). Has anyone done a cost benefit analysis? Automating cars is definitely cool, but is there a better way?

Cheaper and better public transport is definitely possible, and the cost maybe is a lot less than a world full of cars.

The arrival of the phone and apps for public transport is a game changer, in the past random travel wouldn't really be possible because you had to learn bus routes and carry timetables with you, not so any more.

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

#96

Post by m463 »

kjksf wrote: post #3

Here's what this research tells me: demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. Current use is limited by cost and convenience. Self-driving car is likely to fix both so it'll lead to more use of transportation. This is a good thing. We're currently deprived and if things go well, we'll get more of what we want. The congestion problem is mostly overblown. First, maybe with rare ex…

> use pricing to force ... resources efficiently

I think this is the answer. It just won't be a very popular one, because it will on the surface benefit wealthy people.

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

#97

Post by Supermancho »

CydeWeys wrote: post #16
kjksf wrote: post #3

Here's what this research tells me: demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. Current use is limited by cost and convenience. Self-driving car is likely to fix both so it'll lead to more use of transportation. This is a good thing. We're currently deprived and if things go well, we'll get more of what we want. The congestion problem is mostly overblown. First, maybe with rare ex…

> 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…

> Yes, and in the AV future the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants

Where do you get that idea from? or maybe, how did you come to that conclusion? It's not evident that would be the case. Traffic mirrors demand. Demand goes both ways, unevenly. Prior to the end-of-the-work-day, you would see an increase in empty vehicles consolidating for the imminent exodus of a city, but that would hardly be the common case.

> that supposes that most people will give up the idea of personal car ownership entirely instead of just buying their own AVs

There are multiple ways to ensure this occurs. The same reason horse carriages aren't allowed on Freeways (legal/safety barriers), or almost nobody uses gliders or natural gas cars to commute (impractical), etc. US Society is subject to change/more malleable than you might imagine. Maybe not in our lifetime, but ubiquitous phone booths disappeared in mine, so I hold out hope.

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

#98

Post by tda »

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 blocked, on the road you just pull over and let others pass. I like to think that passenger rail is just an artifact of history/sunken cost phallacy, except maybe for underground high volume metro systems.

When looking over the vast 20 or so track wide rail intersection with multiple fly overs at Utrecht Central Station easily a minute can go by with not a single train passing, even in rush hour. And this is the busiest train station in the Netherlands. There is also a bus platform underneath which in a fraction of the space fits perhaps 20 (much smaller though) bus platforms.buses come and go continuously, largely over a single (two way) dedicated bus lane. This single road probably has a similar capacity as the twenty or so train tracks above, with extra long buses going by with minimal space between. If we were to pave the railway tracks we could have an incredibly safe and reliable transport system. Its actually quite a thing buses are already quite safe even though drivers make to long hours, share the road with many kinds of vehicles with mostly amateur (as in non professional) drivers, no central traffic control etc. Of course buses as we know it are not pleasant modes of transport, but that is probably only because they can also run on normal roads with sharp turns and traffic lights etc. I don't have the numbers to do a proper comparison but I think paving railroads could be quite an interesting business case

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

#99

Post by TulliusCicero »

ctdonath wrote: post #88
megablast wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams have to include the cost of the rails. Lots of costs aren't factored into cars. Cars in the USA kill 40,000 people every year and seriously injure or disable over 4 million. No one really cares about the deaths, unless it happens to someone you kn…

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. Yes, cars cause "unfactored costs". They also improve life, making the lives of hundreds of millions possible & prolonged. You can't complain about the costs without comparing the savings.

> 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 Tokyo.

> They also improve life, making the lives of hundreds of millions possible & prolonged.

Hardly anyone wants to get rid of cars entirely. But you can look at societies with substantially fewer cars and they have higher lifespans, and generally higher quality of life.

Almost like it's better to have options, rather than America's extreme car dominance.

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

#100

Post by CydeWeys »

maxerickson wrote: post #77
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.

How does Northern Wisconsin emulate the Randstad? Does everybody move to Green Bay?

Does Northern Wisconsin have bad traffic congestion? Which cities are you talking about exactly?
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