
A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future - catbird
https://jalopnik.com/zombie-miles-and-napa-weekends-how-a-week-with-chauffe-1839648416
======
kjksf
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 exceptions like L.A., the traffic is only bad during
rush hour, when people are going to work and getting back home. Other times
there's plenty.

Second, the way we drive currently is very inefficient. Just last weak I was
walking in San Diego along a street at ~5:30 PM i.e. rush hour.

I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person.

Not to mention that ~40% cars were gigantic, because it looks that if people
can afford gigantic cars, they'll buy them. And in US they can afford it.

Robotaxis would fix those 2 issues.

The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol
but a utility operated by an organization focused on practicality and cost,
like buses and trains.

It's also very easy to use pricing to force people to use the available
resources efficiently during congestion.

Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with
another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people.

If that pricing delta is not enough, increase the price of to $20 (vs $3) or
to $50.

Or provide commuting passes tho employers (kind of like Google buses) where a
company pays a $100 to robotaxi company per month and the employee gets to use
it for free for commute, but only in shared mode.

The future with robotaxis is much brighter than those doomsday prediction of
traffic.

~~~
CydeWeys
> 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 people are
actually being transported vs road utilization.

You then go on to talk about robotaxis, but that supposes that most people
will give up the idea of personal car ownership entirely instead of just
buying their own AVs; this doesn't seem likely.

~~~
erik_seaberg
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.

~~~
CydeWeys
You're forgetting the unoccupied trips. There will be unoccupied trips running
errands even at rush hour, because why not, you're not sitting in traffic,
just your car.

Also you seem to be thinking more of the robotaxis model, but the article is
talking about the more likely future of everyone continuing to own their own
car, only now it can drive. If cars are driving back empty after a commute
then rush hour will have roughly twice the traffic.

~~~
xnzakg
One way to prevent congestion would be to instead of paying for the distance
traveled, you simply paid for the time the car is on the road, giving a
financial incentive to send the car outside of rush hours. Would probably also
cause people to use alternative routes rather than everyone trying to use the
shortest one when is congested.

~~~
CydeWeys
Yes, this is one of the main solutions proposed by the linked article.

------
modeless
It has been obvious to me for a long time that AVs will not reduce traffic.
Reducing the cost of driving will cause more driving to happen. While AVs will
use the road slightly more efficiently, the increase in driving will more than
make up for it.

AVs will make traffic a whole lot more tolerable, though. And they will
dramatically reduce parking needs, freeing up space for other uses.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
jliptzin
And you won’t need to park cars on valuable street area. Ideally they’d only
stop to load/unload passengers, or to charge. That would free up many more
lanes on city streets.

~~~
Aloha
They need to go _somewhere_ , no one is going to send their car home on a 40
mile one way trip.

~~~
jacquesm
Depending on the parking fees I might just take that bet.

------
chadcmulligan
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 yesterday, I prefer catching trains and trams to
buses - because trains don't throw you around when they turn corners, because
the tracks can't have sharp corners. I was thinking if buses were made to be a
little bit nicer - something like tour coaches then car usage would go down.

Self driving cars have a very real chance of becoming a nightmare scenario
(and I used to think the future with them would be amazing), a world of roads
everywhere always full of cars half of them empty going backwards and forwards
all day every day.

Do other places have an app available like this -
[https://translink.com.au](https://translink.com.au) ?, there's a phone
version to. If more people used public transport then it would become better.
The system is also tied into a card which you can just tap on to travel, so if
you change buses etc the final charge is just the number of "zones" you go
through, there are 5 zones in the local couple of hundred kilometres.

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 (and busways) have to include the cost of the rails.
This distorts the relative costs and leads to suburbs created a long way from
cities with ever increasing highways and highway costs.

~~~
tda
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

~~~
chadcmulligan
Good points, personally I just like trains :-), and they are more comfortable
- but probably the history as you say.

They have busways in my local city (Brisbane, Australia) and special bus roads
which remove the congestion problem [https://translink.com.au/travel-with-
us/bus-train-ferry-tram...](https://translink.com.au/travel-with-us/bus-train-
ferry-tram/busways) and they are also built to be more comfortable to travel
on. So yes Buses can be made better if they are designed to be. They're also
introducing super buses
[https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/new-
sup...](https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/new-super-
sized-15-million-bus-fleet-won-t-fit-in-bus-stops-20180206-p4yzjl.html) maybe
I live in a public transport hot spot - who knew.

------
randcraw
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 human who can run errands for you, like enter a
grocery and push a cart around buying goods. At most, future AVs will only
drive up and wait for a preordered purchase to be loaded aboard.

If the study's AVs included any service more than moving passengers around, it
crossed well outside the foreseeable use for AVs, especially short term. It's
at least as likely that companies like Amazon will offer the same delivery
service much more efficiently at lower cost to the customer.

It sounds like the virtual AVs in this study delivered more than real AVs ever
will.

~~~
wbl
Do you pay Ford for every trip?

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

Cars ain't free.

~~~
scribu
The study selected participants that already owned cars.

------
coding123
Just a crazy aside, it seems like current policy as well as the potential ones
in this thread seem to tax or affect poor more. For example: the way we tax
road use is through gas - rich people in EVs don't pay this tax.

Some people in this thread are suggesting to just make cars with self driving
capability prohibitedly expensive, forcing them to rent an Uber instead of
owning. Sounds just like our current housing market. Some suggestions are to
charge for the mile and time of day... Again restrictions against poor from
driving when rich people want to do so.

Another suggestion is to have more private roads, presumably again owned by
rich people, with little regard for the poor already paying rent on everything
else.

------
kingludite
Every time roads or cars got improved people used the extra time to live
further from work. Its oddly similar to the way every time computers and
networks got faster we used it to make development easier. Perhaps if we
design a crappy car (like a phone is a crappy computer) we will see more
efficient implementation. The sum of collective desires doesn't always make
sense.

------
Shivetya
Pretty much ignores the fact that once society adapts to having driver less
cars they will lapse back into their standard habits and pattern on use fairly
quickly.

let alone ignore the fact that many services will pop up doing the driving for
many different people across all hours of the day freeing many from own the
vehicle in the first place. you might even have the modern day equivalent of
time sharing where you pay to have priority access to a vehicle.

the test was so bad as to be laughable, seriously, drawing such conclusions
from such a small control set is only useful for proving something a select
group wants to believe.

------
im3w1l
Imagine a job where you work for 3h out of an autonomous office-furnished RV,
have meetings and lunch for 2.5h and then work for 3h in the car again. You
could live where land is really cheap! And you wouldn't need to sit in an open
office.

Better hope your mileage is good though.

~~~
Ididntdothis
That seems incredibly wasteful. You spend 6 hours in a car for 2.5 hours at
the office. Just come to the office for a whole day once a week and stay home
the other days,

------
mlthoughts2018
Isn’t this just Jevons Paradox applied to driving?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

~~~
semiotagonal
This reminds me of how my own behavior changed when Amazon Locker arrived. I
could order what I wanted, and have it delivered up the street without having
it stolen off of my porch!

Now I'll order something off Amazon, then 30 minutes later think of something
else I need, then 10 minutes after that get another item, and then I've got 3
separate shipments taking up 3 spaces in the lockers, because to me there's no
cost to the lack of planning.

When Amazon tells me the lockers are full, I become furious.

~~~
ars
I've had Amazon combine separate orders into a single box.

If your orders are really 30 and 10 minutes apart, Amazon will ship them
together if it can.

~~~
semiotagonal
That's weird, I don't think I've ever seen that happen. I'm constantly having
multiple doors pop open at the locker.

Although maybe it's possible they do it some of the time and I'm actually much
worse about fragmenting my orders than I think :)

------
shkkmo
It seems flagrantly obvious that congestion pricing is necessary to allow us
to have the benefits of self-driving cars without shooting ourselves in the
foot traffic wise.

That being said, OF COURSE driving goes up when you tell someone: "here, have
this luxury that you can't normally afford for free for JUST one week". The
novelty factor alone will lead to unnecessary trips and over consumption. Not
to mention the guilt factor of having a chauffeur sitting in your driveway
doing nothing.

------
ben509
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 nuisance fees from road
operators by measuring traffic volume. The operators can build baffling to
reduce the volume, or simply increase the cost of using that road to offset
the fees paid. (And, of course, the operator has to pay to maintain the road,
and it's a lot easier to sue a private entity if potholes damage your
vehicle.)

And if data on the cost of commuting is readily available, employers can be
required to pay for it as part of a standard labor contract, and they can
offer employees incentives to move, adjust schedules to minimize costs, work
remotely, etc.

~~~
mmanfrin
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.

~~~
ben509
> People do not choose to drive congested roads

Um, how do the roads get congested, then?

------
Animats
_" every single retiree used the chauffeur to go to Napa for wine tastings"_

How did they pick their sample?

------
idoh
An interesting take on the problem, but a week isn't enough time to really
know. If I had a chauffeur for a week I'd use the heck out of it, just out of
principle.

------
WillPostForFood
We are going to give you this great, free, novel thing, You can use it as much
as you want, but for just 1 week. It’s a surprise people actually took
advantage of this limited time free opportunity and used it a lot? No kidding.
It is a garbage study, of course that’s the outcome.

------
rladd
I think the conclusion is probably right, but the experiment seems
problematic.

If I was told that a chauffeur was waiting for me to tell them where to take
me, I might feel a little obligated to keep them busy rather than just waiting
around for me. So I might take more rides than I would have otherwise, out of
some sense of politeness.

A better experiment might be to give people an unlimited Lyft or Uber account
for a week. It might also help to tell them that a randomly selected driver
will be paid for any time they are not taking rides, so they don't feel like
they will be helping someone out if they take more rides.

I think that there would still be an increase in rides, but maybe not quite as
large an increase.

------
kamakazizuru
The study has a major flaw in that it ignores the grouping effect that makes
self-driving cars & fleets completely different from chauffers. Shared usage
will: \- most definitely happen in the case of "errand" like rides. The
request to "pick up my shopping from Target" will be clubbed with 5-10 other
similar requests and delivered at the same time. \- lead to single rides being
a rarity, and at best a perk like "first / business class" \- bigger cars on
the road with more seats, driving autonomously vs the nightmare equivalent of
everyone having a chauffeur

~~~
em-bee
that sounds like wishful thinking to me. coordinating with other people is
hard. and if the ride is free, why bother. also people want to stay
independent and not have to share.

the option to share an uber or equivalent for example is already there. every
time i used it the trip took longer than had i not shared. missed a train
because of it once too.

so i doubt that sharing will happen as much as you think

~~~
handoflixue
> coordinating with other people is hard.

Only when you're driving around humans. When you're using automated cars to
replace errands, it becomes a lot easier to coordinate a set of grocery
pickups, laundry dropoffs, and so on.

With concepts like Amazon Lockers in apartment complexes, you can pick up
their laundry from one locker, deliver cleaned goods to another, all while
they're at work.

~~~
em-bee
that may work with services that manage this, but not if i use the car to
manage my own. those are two entirely different kind of uses of self driving
cars.

------
adrianmonk
> _For example, the chauffeur could bring the kids to soccer practice and back
> or drive a friend home and then return to the house. They could even pick up
> groceries and make a Target run to simulate a driverless car future where
> items could get bought online and loaded into your AV by a store employee
> before returning home._

The survey measured the additional faux-SDC trips, but did it also measure the
trips that did not need to happen as a result of this?

Would the friend have taken an Uber home? Would the study participant have
just driven their own kids to soccer practice or driven themselves to Target?
Some of these trips probably would not have happened, but surely at least some
of them would have happened, just in a different car or with the car owner
doing the driving.

They've already acknowledged the study is imperfect, but I think this is an
important question to consider when interpreting the data.

Another issue is that this study simulates what happens when one person has
access to a SDC but all their friends do not. If all my friends have SDCs too,
they won't usually need to borrow mine. The friend is likely to take use their
own SDC to get to my place and ride home in it, so that wouldn't count against
my SDC's ride total.

------
zer00eyz
The issue is that everyone is looking at the problems and no one is looking at
the solutions.

Congestion charges, and utilization taxes are going to be in our future (and
we should have them now). Sure I can send my car to the store and have someone
tuck the gallon of milk I need in the trunk but does utilization make me
decline that use right now? Can I tell my car to go pick up the milk at 5am so
its waiting for me when I wake up to pour in my coffee or cereal and have
those charges be drastically lower?

Do we deliver vehicles with "compartments" for commuting? Where I have my own,
isolated, seat to take me to and from work with stops in between for other
drop offs and pick ups? Is this a service people are willing to use
(ridesharing to get in carpool lanes is already a thing in many metro areas).

What happens when amazon/usps/fedex can send a truck with "lockers" on it to
my neighborhood and I can "summon it" (last mile) when I'm available? Sure I
have to walk to the curb to pick up my stuff, but it going to be safer than
leaving it on my porch all day. Lower loss rates. It came to my neighborhood
in the dead of night, and is driving a minimal distance during peak hours.

Does an always connected world let us change the notion of "delivery". The
idea that "3 people in your neighborhood are waiting on orders this evening,
do you want us to bring your groceries then" is new. Now we are sharing the
charges for congestion and use.

It isn't a question of will there be problems its a question of what new
solutions do we put in place and do they make our lives better. I suspect that
the answer is yes, there is a lot to be gained with the technology.

~~~
john_minsk
One more small? benefit: general population will be trained to think
proactively and be more organized on these small tasks.

------
Merrill
Rather than use an AV for the entire trip, might AVs solve the problem of
getting to/from mass transit?

For example, your personal AV could get you from home to the station and
return to your garage. After the train or bus ride, your employer's AV buses
could pick up groups of employees and shuttle them to work. This might
redefine what it means to be "close to mass transit" for both residents and
employers.

------
awinter-py
> Knowing how much gridlock and traffic those rideshare cars have added to the
> city, imagine six and a half times as much car driving as that is almost
> impossible.

An 83% increase isn't 6.5x more than a 12% increase, it's 71% more = less than
2x

Still bad but '6x greater increase' is the wrong way to describe this. (Also
there's a grammar mistake in the sentence).

------
eherbrernejerh
These are some interesting results. That said, fully self-driving cars almost
certainly won't exist any time in the next 100 years anyway, so I don't think
this will be an issue. By the time, if it ever happens, that fully self-
driving technology is created, society will likely be so different from what
it is now that the issues this article raises will no longer be valid. Fully
self-driving cars require artificial general intelligence, so to me a bigger
issue if they ever exist would be whether it is ethical, given that most
likely in principle no objective test for sentience is possible, to use more-
or-less human-level intelligences as slaves.

~~~
john_minsk
Is it ethical nowadays to hire a driver?

------
nazgulnarsil
This study (and the fact that you're reading it) tells you there is an
underserved demand for studies that give rich people luxuries to normal people
and then find negative effects. In the future people will be enormously
wealthy, as we are enormously wealthy compared to our ancestors. Inequality
will be massive because zero will remain zero while the ceiling gets ever
higher. Find novel ways to complain about this and you will be treated to
thunderous applause by those who don't want this future.

------
spodek
> _During just the single week people had chauffeurs for his study, he saw
> people already getting comfortable with their AV future. When the study
> ended, people begged him to keep the chauffeur longer and wondered how they
> could possibly go back to running their own errands again._

This entitlement happened with flying. Try to suggest people fly less and they
call it impossible.

~~~
walshemj
That does sound like the upper classes saying no foreign holidays for the hoi
polio - a return to wakes weeks.

------
aaron695
I feel like it's clown world.

As driving becomes easier we will drive more. Yes.

Yes. I see no reason why people won't spend 3 hours each way commuting and
live in rural utopias. Like the suburbs but won't suck.

When everything which has to be delivered, which is everything, becomes
cheaper perhaps we can spend that on traffic taxes. This is not an issue for
now.

PHDs are now let's assume a lie and prove its not true?

------
paulorlando
I like this approach. This post takes a look at the impact on systemic risk
that AVs could have: [https://unintendedconsequenc.es/autonomous-vehicles-
scaling-...](https://unintendedconsequenc.es/autonomous-vehicles-scaling-
risk/). Again not something that typical AV projections ever discuss.

------
m0llusk
Fix congestion by charging for use of the network. Automated cars make
automated road use charges trivial.

All this ignores the largest issue with vehicles which is that humans are
lousy drivers who kill many people. Even if the roads get clogged automated
vehicles could save many lives.

------
diego
The weakest part about the conclusions in this study is the assumption that
regulation does not change. If the limitation of driving disappears and the
roads become a tragedy of the commons, then regulation will have to step in to
limit how much people drive. We already do this with tolls, car pool lanes,
taxes, etc.

You can't take it as a given that our society will not seek to reorganize
itself around the new paradigm. It's like someone in 1990 saying "once content
is on the internet piracy will be out control and nobody will make money with
content ever again, check out this experiment we did."

------
paulsutter
Saved you a click. Please put this number in the title.

> The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83
> percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior.

