
Driverless cars aren't a fix for our transport woes - edward
https://theconversation.com/going-down-the-same-old-road-driverless-cars-arent-a-fix-for-our-transport-woes-50912
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ensiferum
Autonomous drive is a novel idea but doesn't really provide any real solution.
Most important selling point at the moment is that you could take the time
spent in car and spend it doing something else such as your work while the car
drives itself (i.e. is stuck in the traffic).

However if the real problem we want to look at is the overall stupidity of
traffic congestion that is extremely a) energy inefficient, b) time consuming
c) unenvironmental d) space intensive

the first real question to be asked really is, why does everyone need to
commute to the same place in the same time? It seems that urban city planning
has really gone horribly wrong with all the businesses and companies packing
into the "business district". The direct consequences in terms of economy and
environmental pollution not to mention direct impact on individual life (time
wasted in a car...) are dire.

In order to really solve the problem of traffic congestion the ultimate
solution is to disperse with this silly need. If people are really required at
a place physically (i.e. cannot do their work remotely) urban cities should
become decentralized with several business hubs closer to the suburbuan areas.

Failing that a secondary solution is to increase the efficiency of the
transit. One derp sitting in his Ford Thunderfuck XL EarthDestroyer 5600 is
incredibly stupid. Like the author of the commented a train is massively more
efficient, has higher throughput and scales better. I know americans (and
aussies) consider this to be an inferior mode of transport, they rather sit in
their cars. But I personally don't really understand this. I'd never accept a
commute that would take more than 15 minutes. My life and time is simply too
precious for that.

~~~
CyberDildonics
Lamenting that people need to commute for their jobs doesn't really change or
help anything. People work within their systems of incentives.

Driverless cars will be an enormous help in many ways, even to traffic
congestion.

Having many small buses are a distinct possibility. They could be basically
boxes filled with standing people with the motors and batteries underneath.
They could be be much more granular and recharge on their own. They could even
turn their wheels selectively to get around smaller spaces. Even a small one
could hold 6-8 standing people.

You have to realize that there is a lot more to an advancement like this then
just 'now you can take your hands off the wheel'

~~~
TrevorJ
The problem with driverless cars is it incentivises behaviour that puts more
vehicles on the road: you can call your (empty) car to come pick you up, and
public transport no longer has the same advantages compared to driverless
cars. I just don't see driverless cars helping congestion in the long run.

~~~
CyberDildonics
How would that put more vehicles on the road?

Don't forget carpooling. What if one car could take everyone home then return
to it's owner?

Also how would public transportation lose its advantage? It could be cheap,
more direct, and more granular.

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vlehto
It seems like the whole congestion problem could be greatly diminished if
employers would take responsibility of the negative externality they are
causing.

Let's say employer can dictate when you arrive at work. Then your employer has
to pay you salary for the time you spend commuting. The result should be
either flexible hours or employers finding arrival times that don't overlap
too much.

It's overly simplistic idea, but you get the point?

~~~
1stop
Or employers who only hire people who live nearby?

~~~
jacquesm
Companies routinely establish themselves in locations where their employees
can't live or can't afford to live. Zoning laws don't help with this either.

~~~
snarfy
Zoning laws are a big part of the problem. There are far too many backroom
deals where the politician rezoning an area as 'high occupancy residential'
happens to be the brother of the guy building the apartment complex there. The
problem is systemic.

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trhway
considering that driverless car would make sitting in traffic less painful one
can see how it can lead to even more congestion and worse traffic in peak
times. Also significant majority of driverless cars would be "Uber-ed" on the
cheap and thus would allow to be on the road in the car for the people who
wouldn't own/use car otherwise. Plus delivery vehicles, currently limited by
the number of available drivers, will be in practically unlimited number on
the roads.

~~~
meesterdude
but driverless cars would make the actual 'sitting' obsolete, or at least a
much more rare occurrence.

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Shivetya
Trains, Trains, Trains.

Get real. First off they cost so much more per mile they already bust the bank
and then comes maintenance. Finally the end is they cannot respond to
population movements.

Light rail is already a boondoggle of an expense in many cities trying to fit
them in, with per passenger costs so many times that of alternate solutions
only a politician could love it.

Trains are a romanticism that blinds people to their real cost. Heavy rail has
many uses and sharing tracks can be a good solution. However when new heavy
rail is proposed they don't want to take into account existing support
infrastructure, they want to build all new end points; here is a hint start
and end at an major airport where taxis and buses already provide service and
parking is plenty

As for the safety canard, we don't have enough history on autonomous cars and
buses with proper planning to make that call. If you want to even the playing
field, instead of making a new train track you instead use that same space for
dedicate autonomous vehicle travel. In this you can let cars and buses serve
the same central points and at the end of the route there is no need to change
vehicles. Bonus, no trains or tracks to maintain!

~~~
npsimons
> Bonus, no trains or tracks to maintain!

I'm honestly curious: what's the maintenance cost differential between train
tracks and road? And between trains and other forms of public transport
(buses, etc)?

~~~
kuschku
Roads for busses are far more expensive to maintain than light rail. Road
maintenance of asphalt road for heavy use (like bus lanes) is so expensive
that all the bus stations here are using the same road-building techniques the
romans already used, and they still go through the stones in a few decades.

Just for my city the estimated savings are in the amount of 19 million EUR for
switching the main bus lines to light rail.

And it would improve quality.

~~~
RightWingRabble
Do you have a link to the numbers? I'm curious about the actual costs, since
what you're saying contradicts Shivetya. Without numbers and sources, I have
no idea who's actually right.

~~~
kuschku
I’ve been trying to find the case study for a few months anymore, but since
the website redesign in 2004 it’s been less accessible, and recently I can’t
find it anymore at all. If I find it, I’ll link it.

Obviously, it depends on the actual situation.

Replacing routes where busses are running as rare as every 10 or 15 min, like
suburban routes, makes no sense.

But downtown routes where articulated and bi-articulated busses are running
every minute, and they still can’t cope with the demand? Well, that’s exactly
what light rail was made for.

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paulsutter
Author neglects to consider that carpool lanes could (and should) be converted
to "self-driving only", as a phased approach to increasing capacity.

Second step, make controlled-access highways driverless-only. It's not
necessary to upgrade /every/ vehicle to self-driving to start getting
benefits, the change can happen one lane at a time.

~~~
jacquesm
> Author neglects to consider that carpool lanes could (and should) be
> converted to "self-driving only", as a phased approach to increasing
> capacity.

That would _decrease_ capacity for the rest of the road. Maybe you could allow
single occupant self driven cars to _also_ use the carpool lanes. But to move
carpoolers out of the carpool lanes and make them exclusive for self driving
cars will simply cause car poolers to stop pooling and will increase traffic.

~~~
paulsutter
Yes, less capacity for manually driven cars because there will be fewer of
them.

Besides, the capacity increase from a pure self driving lane far outweighs the
increase from a carpool lane. In fact, many argue that existing carpool lanes
give less overall capacity.

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mentos
Driverless cars will reduce the cost of taking a taxi such that it may become
viable for car owners to completely opt out of owning a car. But if 10 million
people need to get to work parallel to each other what does it really matter
if the cars are Ubers or self owned?

~~~
legulere
Also this actually increases the use of roads: Instead of just transporting
people the cars have to drive between the points where it will load off people
and where it will pick up people.

With ownership of autonomous vehicles it will get even worse:
[http://www.humantransit.org/2015/11/self-driving-cars-a-
comi...](http://www.humantransit.org/2015/11/self-driving-cars-a-coming-
congestion-disaster.html)

------
Wingman4l7
For a very narrow definition of the term "fix", maybe.

What is the fix we're looking for? To alleviate traffic congestion? To spend
less time on the road? Or maybe just to remove the necessity of having to
focus all our attention on the act of driving itself?

~~~
vkou
To reduce the outrageous amount of resources we pour into inefficient modes of
transportation like single-passenger vehicles?

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Symmetry
Less need for parking spaces could cause a pretty significant increase in
density which would make walking and public transport better.

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GnwbZHiU
It does not fix, but it helps. At least you can do something more useful while
on the road.

~~~
kuschku
You can do that in the subway, too. And it’s faster, cheaper, and more
efficient.

~~~
lisivka
Sorry to inform you, but I cannot buy subway line to my home or work.

~~~
kuschku
But you can rent an apartment next to a subway line.

~~~
lisivka
Yep, but it will take 8 hours to drive to work from nearest subway station.

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kuschku
Then get work in a city with better transit, or just deal with the constant
congestion and the fact that the energy you waste in traffic jams is going to
destroy the planet without providing a value to anyone.

~~~
lisivka
90% of the time I use bicycle.

------
koalaman
Driverless isn't about driverless cars per say. It's about driverless vehicles
and a future where large fleet based transportation companies use various
driverless vehicle formats to optimize for efficiency, speed, and comfort. A
bunch of driverless SUVs might not alleviate consumption much (although they
could if they were all full of people), but a fleet of fully enclosed
driverless motorcycles could. Once the technology matures I could imagine our
subway infrastructure being repurposed to serve as channels for vehicles like
this.

------
meesterdude
> What are we left with? Not much really. In terms of time savings and safety,
> autonomous vehicles will not be a disruptive innovation to urban transport
> systems

Strongly disagree with the professor here. I'm not saying they will fix all
our problems, and wont bring some new ones in addition, but to insinuate that
driverless cars will not have a disruptive impact on safety and time saving
leads me to question the authors understanding of autonomous vehicles.

Actually there are several other "facts" that author states that I disagree
with, or that are separate from autonomous vehicles.

I think this stuff is certainly important to evaluate and weigh the pros and
cons, and I agree its not going to be a silver bullet for all our problems,
but this reads like a wonk who doesn't believe the internet will ever go
anywhere.

In addition, who knows what additional technological or social changes take
place that would impact how, when and why we travel.

TL;DR: author's magic 8-ball needs another shake.

~~~
kuschku
Self-driving cars can’t disrupt urban transport systems, because they don’t
solve the issue.

The issue is that everyone wants their own, big, car, and everyone wants to
use them at the same time.

During the morning commute you have over a hundred times more cars on the road
than in the late evening, at 10pm, for example.

The only solution that allows the streets not to be completely overwhelmed by
cars is to put the cars underground, or on elevated roads, or use more
efficient systems.

40 cars vs. one bus. Self-Driving cars don’t help in urban environments at
all.

Many cities already suggest to just use P+R instead of using cars downtown.

~~~
demallien
Firstly, you assert that everyone wants their own big car. This is not true. I
don't want one, and I'm not alone in that amongst people living in cities with
good public transport.

I choose my mode of travel (including cars) as a function of the time it's
going to take to get there, and how much stuff I'm lugging. If I am carrying a
lot or travelling out of peak hour, I take a car. If I'm under time pressure,
I'll probably take the metro.

In Paris we have Autolib, which is a wonderful car service where you can
reserve a car at one station and drop it off at another. There are over a
thousand if these stations in the city, so there's normally one near you and
your destination. But the brilliance of this is that I can go to work using
public transport (because peak hour), gi to the gym after work and then drive
home. Or catch public transport to a restaurant in a Saturday evening, and
drive home, or whatever. Self driving cars will make this type of system even
better because I can use one without having a station near me, I just call a
car.

At the moment city centres get clogged by cars because public transport in the
suburbs is horrible. But if you can get a car to a transport hub and then
commute into the centre, I think a lot of people would prefer that to being
stuck in heavy traffic for hours. Maybe not you, but many people.

~~~
kuschku
I personally would prefer it, too – I actually don’t own a car, and live in a
european city (Kiel, Germany) ;)

I’m trying to look at it from the american perspective, because I’ve long
given up the hope that any non-american perspective is even considered
relevant on here.

Actually, self-driving cars, while nice, won’t really improve your abilities
inside the city – you’ll still use bus, metro, etc.

The "transport hub at edge of the city" is already a common concept over here,
called "Park+Ride", with parking spots usually at places which have bus
stations and train stations or metro stops.

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6d0debc071
We know that self driving cars will not solve all the world's problems, but
one can reasonably expect there to be some improvement. Whether that
improvement suffices for a satisfactory level of service is another matter and
will depend upon the reciprocal interaction between demand and capacity -
which the article does not go into. But there's no such thing as a panacea to
free movement, whether you like the current form of public transport or not.
Even if we got Star Trek's transporters I'm sure there would be complaints
about the congestion in transporter room five.

There are significant costs to public transport that the article hasn't
addressed as well. The switching costs of using public transport, whether you
stay with the same form of public transport or not, are significant. The time
you spend waiting for connections; the time spent waiting for all the other
people to board, and alight, at their connections; the bother of finding which
platform your train is going to be on when under time pressures to make the
connection; the incredible cost paid when a bus, or train, is overloaded or
unavailable.

It's all very well to observe that a train can carry a particular number of
passengers per mile per hour on a particular space of track, refer to the
maximum theoretical capability of the system when trains are running within a
certain safety distance. If you look at figures for energy costs, then public
transport will similarly come out as the vastly superior option. But the cost
of a form of transport is assessed in more than simply its use of space to
move people through or its translation of energy into passenger miles.

Even when one is going to be stuck in traffic, it's often more reliable,
faster, and certainly less bother, to drive to the destination. Especially
since the bus is going to be sitting in traffic anyway, that's a tragedy of
the commons problem going on there but it doesn't change the underlying trade-
off. For some that trade-off is so great that when denied access to private
transport they can't make the trips at all - I know people who don't own cars,
who cannot work 10 miles away, because the buses don't run that early in the
morning, or because there is one bus that runs that early in the morning and
if it's unreliable they've taken on a financial liability in gaining the job
that they'll be unable to effectively discharge because they'll lose their
job.

None of which is to say that public transport is a bad idea. I love the idea
of fast regular trains that are little bother to get on, despite the fact that
most of the time I drive to work. But if one's in favour of it, perhaps it
would be better to be in favour of it - in favour of improving it - rather
than against something else.

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ilaksh
[http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage](http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage)

