
Driverless Congestion - rbanffy
https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/06/driverless-congestion.html
======
jacques_chester
Let's assume you have two levers.

One of these levers is to quadruple road capacity through new roads.

The other is to quadruple road capacity through driverless cars with perfect
routing efficiency.

What do these have in common?

First: they are still massively wasteful of space. Moreso with a driverless
car, which is going to be able to avoid having to find a parking spot nearby.

Second: induced demand. Double capacity, triple, quadruple, it doesn't matter.
It will return to the "barely works" equilibrium in short order, except you'll
have further lashed yourself to a wasteful mode of transport.

I recognise cars have unique utility and that driverless cars will enhance
that utility. But for mass people movement, a train is the clear leader,
followed by a bus in a dedicated lane. As the world becomes increasingly
urbanised that will only grow more important.

~~~
yellowapple
> Moreso with a driverless car, which is going to be able to avoid having to
> find a parking spot nearby.

Only if wasting energy is acceptable. Loafing about doing loops around the
owner will very quickly be more costly in terms of energy expenditure (plus
opportunity cost of "now I have less energy to go to my next destination")
than parking for awhile, especially if we get to a point where every parking
space is capable of EV charging (which is exactly the direction in which I'd
like to see the world gravitate, since that'll significantly alleviate the
problems with EV range relative to ICE).

Thus, I'm far from convinced that this will ever actually be a significant
problem. Only way the "perpetually-circling autonomous vehicle" problem would
be realistic is if we lived in some Nikola-Tesla-esque utopia where wireless
electricity is abundant and constantly charging cars as they drive (or _maybe_
if it's a sunny day and solar tech gets advanced enough to be able to
meaningfully power a car on solar power alone).

~~~
jacques_chester
What I was driving at was that people will expect their car to drive away
after rush hour (meaning 4 trips, not 2, per day). And they will expect it to
come early and loiter near their workplace, which usually won't mean parking
or stopping.

So to recap: the car is used twice as much and yes, does laps of the block
while waiting to pick you up.

~~~
yellowapple
Right, but the longer it's loitering, the more fuel and/or battery it's
wasting. Likewise, the further "away" it drives, the more fuel and/or battery
it's wasting.

The ideal will always be for it to park (or better yet: charge) as soon and as
close as possible, and to delay "unparking" and departing for pickup until as
late as possible. It's possible that some people will want to subvert that
somewhat (i.e. "please park at this specific parking garage instead of the
closest" or "please loiter for a couple minutes and wait for me"), but - again
- I ain't convinced those will actually amount to a significant traffic
impact.

EDIT: as another bonus, self-driving cars don't have to worry about whether or
not the driver can get in/out during these "wait for my owner to need me
again" periods, so they can park in much tighter parking spaces while they
wait.

------
eps
> _taxis_ ... _results in a price of 56 rappen (about half of 1 euro) per
> kilometre driven._

Ahem... a 7 minute ride from our hotel to the train station came up to 35 CHF.
That's around 5 km, so around 7 CHF/km or 6.25 EUR/km. Just something to these
dreamy 56 rappen and realism of the study in perspective.

~~~
bschne
> The ideal level of demand and price lies at a fleet of some 3,000 automated
> taxis, which results in a price of 56 rappen (about half of 1 euro) per
> kilometre driven. This roughly corresponds to the current per kilometre
> costs of a conventional private vehicle, but is much lower than the 2.73
> Swiss francs per kilometre of a conventional taxi.

If you look at the full context, I think the article states that this is the
price which could be achieved by an optimally sized fleet of driverless taxis
- it even says right there that the actual, current price with conventional
taxis is much higher than that figure.

The current taxi fees in Zurich are actually even higher than 2.73, even
before factoring in the base fee and fees for waiting times, but I don't see
how that in itself would limit what prices driverless taxis can realistically
achieve.

------
village-idiot
This isn’t terribly surprising.

First, we always overestimate new technology’s ability to solve problems,
while underestimating the side effects. So any grandiose claims about self
driving cars fixing congestion should’ve been met by more skepticism in the
press.

Second, we already know that people are willing to spend a large amount of
money on personal transit that goes above and beyond the bare necessities of
transit, at least in rich western nations. I see no reason why that would
suddenly stop once the vehicle’s owner is no longer behind the wheel.

~~~
matthewfelgate
>Second, we already know that people are willing to spend a large amount of
money on personal transit that goes above and beyond the bare necessities of
transit, at least in rich western nations. I see no reason why that would
suddenly stop once the vehicle’s owner is no longer behind the wheel.

The success of Uber suggests that some people are choosing not to purchase
private vehicles. But we don't know if this is limited to Millennials.

~~~
village-idiot
How many people do you know that have replaced a personal car with Uber? I’ve
known two people like that, and everyone else I know uses them in place of
traditional taxis.

~~~
sokoloff
I use Uber/Lyft as a replacement for cabs to/from the airport, but almost all
of my other usage of them is in replacement for driving my own car into the
city. (In other words, these are trips that I'd otherwise take, but not via
taxi.)

------
CretinDesAlpes
I hate it when journalists/reporters do not link to the actual study. It looks
like the related publication is
[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2019.02.020](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2019.02.020)

------
PeterStuer
If my nice car tomorrow comes with a free driver, why would I be less likely
to buy/own/use one?

Ridesharing is a greenwash smokescreen for an industry that predicts yearly
driven miles to go up by 300%.

~~~
vidarh
Conversely, I don't know why people still buy cars in urban areas. Rural, I
get. But I've lived in cities all my adult life, and I don't even have a
drivers license. It feels like a waste of time, and owning a car feels like a
pointless waste of money. Why would I pay to have a car that I need to worry
about, including thinking about _where it happens to be located_ when I want a
car.

I like being able to open up Citymapper, tell it where I want to go, and now
they've started not just suggesting Uber and others for the whole ride as an
alternative to public transport, but suggesting it for parts of the way. A car
you own can't compete with taking you to a train station and picking you up on
the other side.

Today it takes ~3 minutes on average to get a car to the front of my house.
That's with human drivers, spaced out inefficiently. Get driverless, and you
can get a mix of ride shares and individual cars based on spacing out cars
based on predicted demand and picking the most efficient solution based on
customer preferences with very low wait times at even lower cost.

Owning a car just can't compete in my eyes. Maybe that's shaped by living in
European cities where driving long distances almost never competes favorably
with mixing and matching with trains and underground (a typical commute for me
in the days I used to commute in to central London would have taken twice as
long with car, and maybe ~30% less if a car/rideshare service could guarantee
to be here in 3-4 minutes instead of waiting for the bus or walking to the
train station; with apps suggesting the best route I'd still take the bus when
the wait is low, but know I could start my journey later because I'd have a
shorter maximum wait)

EDIT: Even more so because parking restrictions are getting stricter and
stricter. The London borough where I live won't even entertain planning
applications for housing if it includes more than 1.5 parking space per unit.
That's expected to drop further as density increases - note that this is not
permits for the road etc., but applies whether or not you build your own off
street parking. The reason is that restricting parking is seen as a way of
discouraging car ownership to reduce demand on surrounding road
infrastructure.

~~~
kalleboo
I was 100% with you until I got a kid. And then a second one. With car seats,
baby carriages, spare diapers, towels, tissues etc etc the value of having a
car always packed with "your stuff" goes up a lot.

~~~
adrianN
Many families still manage fine. My siblings an me were raised without a car
and since then the availability of public transport and things like cargo
bikes has only improved.

~~~
kalleboo
Certainly you can manage fine. And it gets easier when the kids get older and
are more independent.

But if you can afford a car, it's still a big help. So families will keep
buying cars. I'm just trying to explain GPs "I don't understand why people buy
cars", not saying that it's a requirement.

