
Self-driving cars will cause sprawl - aresant
https://medium.com/99-mph/introducing-the-marchetti-a-unit-of-measure-for-transit-379aa51170a4?TrucksFoT
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JoachimS
I'm probably dim. But I fail to understand why self driving cars will make the
congestions in morning and evening commutes be radically reduced.

If the wall described in the article is to be pushed out, the speed must
increase from today.

If we can go to work and go home at more varying times over a day then yes
congestion should decrease. But why would AVs cause that effect? As long as
everybody is expected to be at the office at 8am and leave at about 5pm, we
need to move the same amount of people back and forth at the same time. Ride
sharing (hey buses and metros are efficient for that!) may make the number of
vehicles/person go down.

~~~
colordrops
The amount of vehicles a road can handle before becoming congested is
dependent on the safe distance needed between cars at a particular speed, the
reaction time of drivers, and the consistency and coordination of driving
styles.

You won't see any improvements from AVs until human drivers are banned, after
which the AVs can all drive at 100 mph and inches apart from each other.
Traffic lights would also no longer be necessary.

~~~
sn41
Is human reaction time is the only reason for enforcing safe driving distance?

Even if AI increases to great levels, inertia still would exist. A large truck
cannot stop in inches when traveling at 100 mph.

~~~
adrianN
It only has to stop as quickly as the truck in front.

~~~
CPLX
An interesting thing about objects is that they can move in three dimensions.

All you need is an object of any kind, including a downed tree limb or falling
rock, entering the stream of vehicles at an angle, to cause cataclysmic
disaster in this scenario.

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em3rgent0rdr
We need cities that are easily traversed by humans, not cars.

~~~
thriftwy
They need to be really small for that to work, and what's happening is that
only 1M+ or even 5M+ population areas are in demand.

A home to 5M people isn't likely going to be very walkable.

~~~
sveme
You can have locally village-like situations in a large city if you have a
high enough population density and then connect these local villages with mass
transit. I can walk to three movie theatres, all doctors, a university
hospital, five or six different supermarkets and a shitload of other shops
despite living in an agglomeration of three million. Another similar area is
just six stops on the subway away.

~~~
m_mueller
Yes, that’s how Tokyo works. Living standard with average salary is quite nice
for this reason.

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PeterStuer
All will depend on whether people will still feel being chauffeured around in
a self driving vehicle as 'travel time'. With few restrictions, you can design
an autonomous light truck to be like a true 'mobile home-
office/bedroom/apartment'. My personal prediction is that when we get to true
AV's, it will be an ecological disaster, clogging roads orders of magnitude
more than today.

~~~
trevyn
Thought experiment to help you improve your prediction power in general:
Imagine that your prediction was wrong. What are some possibilities for why it
was wrong?

~~~
Simon_says
Oo, that's a good one.

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bobthepanda
This analysis is flawed. You can already do all of this internet browsing and
whatnot that you can't do on a car on commuting modes where you're a
passenger; a bus, or on a subway, or sometimes in a carpool. But that doesn't
make people tolerate longer commutes on those modes.

~~~
apotheothesomai
Sitting comfortably in a car with space and silence is not sufficiently
analogous to public transport for the analysis to be flawed on this account.

And how many people on Caltrain or a major subway can actually even get a seat
and space for comfortably sing a laptop during commuter hours?

~~~
rwmj
This could be some US thing, but in Europe trains are quiet and comfortable
enough that plenty of people work/commute on them.

And anyway it's not like modern offices are quiet, interruption-free
workspaces either.

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Gibbon1
Self driving minibuses solves mass transits last mile problem just saying.
Cause no one is mentioning that.

Self driving cars aren't going to make peoples commutes from Tracey to
Moutainview any faster.

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calvinbhai
I think there's a simple solution:

Zone to Zone travel tax based on time of the day.

This tax wont apply to public transit, or shared rides (like UberPool, Lyft
Line, Waze carpool etc). Applies to all other vehicles, even AV if it is a
personal/commercial use thats not meant for shared rides, even if HOV (so that
fewer people are looking for parking, blocking / flooding the streets in am/pm
due to parking).

any thoughts?

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rdlecler1
We shouldn’t blame autonomous vehicles. Unaffordable housing is causing
sprawl.

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yAnonymous
There need to be better parking solutions for any of that to actually happen.

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thriftwy
I think it would be positive. We will sprawl so much that we end up
repopulating much of the area what we left previously.

Suburbua (or sleeper districts) around city core is sprawl. Semi-rural
settlements all over the map is not sprawl. It is normawl.

Add more telecommuting and basic income, and we're all set.

~~~
bobthepanda
Suburbs were also originally supposed to be pastoral garden cities. Usually
the ideal of planners and technologists falls prey to the reality of mass-
market commoditization.

~~~
thriftwy
Aren't them? I guess you was never exposed much to other ways of mass
urbanization.

Like this:
[http://www.vsedomarossii.ru/photos/area_77/city_2894/street_...](http://www.vsedomarossii.ru/photos/area_77/city_2894/street_10767/122712_1.jpg)

Or this:
[https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/v1492112219/artic...](https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/v1492112219/articles/2016/06/26/the-
lost-chinese-city-police-feared-to-enter/160625-_O-Connor-Kowloon-City-
embed_yvvhte)

You will have to admit that suburbs are pretty pastoral.

~~~
paganel
I lived in an apartment building just like the first one in your photo until
not that long ago (I now also live in a 8-storey apartment building, but it's
a little smaller compared to the first one) and I'd take living in such a
building over living in a suburbia-like hell every day of the year (this
happens in an big East-European city).

Living in that type of building meant that the tram-station was literally 50
meters outside of my building and a metro station a mere 5-minute walk away,
there was a school just bellow my apartment's window (I could here the
children playing in the school's yard in the morning) and a kindergarten 100
meters from my building's entrance and the same tram would take me to a
Walmart-like store 3 stations away pretty easily (yeah, you don't need a car
to do shopping).

And on top of that, having a city that is comprised of mostly tall apartment
buildings means that nature is a very short drive away (either with one's car
or with public transport), but nowadays, as the suburbia phenomenon has also
invaded the city of which I'm talking about, it means that in order to "reach"
nature one has to drive further and further away.

~~~
aquadrop
You describe advantages of transportation and location around the building,
not advantages of the building itself. Because crammed building like this
usually also means smaller living space, problem with sound from/to neighbors
and the street, if you live on a high floor - you need to go up and down (and
hope that there's no problem with elevator). You say that nature is too far,
but if you have nice garden you can have nature one step away (also, there
should be more parks, regardless of if it's suburbia or a city, but it's
cheaper to have a park in suburbia). I think best solution is combination of
individual homes and apartment buildings (just not giant ones), so we could
increase population density and there could be some shops and cafes in
walk/bike ride distance. You don't need to always go to walmart to get a load
of bread, for that you can occasionally ride there. And self driving cars will
only help here.

~~~
paganel
> you need to go up and down (and hope that there's no problem with elevator).

For the last 7 years I've been only living on the 7th and 8th floor, I think
only twice I had problems with the elevator.

> also means smaller living space

I'm very fine with that, I don't need huge spaces to live all of by myself (or
with my wife + kids). As a matter of fact I have several coffee shops on a
10-minute walk radius, there's where I also spend most of my free time.

> You say that nature is too far, but if you have nice garden you can have
> nature one step away (also, there should be more parks, regardless of if
> it's suburbia or a city, but it's cheaper to have a park in suburbia).

I don't have that much spare time, and as such I don't have time for gardening
(plus, I don't like it). On top of that, "raw" nature beats "gardened" nature
by several orders of magnitude. I want my kids to be able to wander by
themselves in wild-ish forests just outside the city (as I used to do as a
kid, while I was living in an communist apartment building), I don't want them
to enjoy the sort of "manicured" nature that the suburbia promotes.

~~~
aquadrop
> For the last 7 years I've been only living on the 7th and 8th floor, I think
> only twice I had problems with the elevator.

Still it's a bother, especially if you're a senior citizen. Also you still
spend much time just waiting for an elevator and riding it,

> I'm very fine with that, I don't need huge spaces to live all of by myself
> (or with my wife + kids). As a matter of fact I have several coffee shops on
> a 10-minute walk radius, there's where I also spend most of my free time.

That's ok, but many people would like something more than a 50 m^2 flat and
don't spend most of free time in coffee shops.

> I don't have that much spare time, and as such I don't have time for
> gardening (plus, I don't like it). On top of that, "raw" nature beats
> "gardened" nature by several orders of magnitude

I don't mean some fancy garden, just grass and maybe some trees/bushes. And I
don't agree that raw nature beats it by several orders of magnitude, of course
someone likes it better, and it's no mountains, but it's still real trees,
real flower and real grass.

> I want my kids to be able to wander by themselves in wild-ish forests just
> outside the city (as I used to do as a kid, while I was living in an
> communist apartment building), I don't want them to enjoy the sort of
> "manicured" nature that the suburbia promotes.

If you want that than living in a large city is really not an answer. Your
kids only can do that if you live on the very edge of the city. And suburbia
has more places like that because it has more edges (there's many detached
patched of sprawl). Or you can live in a very small city.

