

How driverless cars will affect our cities - luu
http://cityminded.org/how-will-driverless-cars-affect-our-cities-6526

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pash
I'm hopeful that driverless cars will be a boon to cities, particularly to the
many second-tier American cities whose formerly vibrant cores have been
decimated by the need to supply parking for suburban workers.

For the past sixty years, suburbanization has increased demand for parking and
fed a feedback loop that's destroyed urban density. More people driving means
greater demand for parking, which means buildings get torn down for lots and
parking structures. Nodes of activity spread farther apart, so more people
drive, and drive more often, further increasing demand for parking. The result
is a country of paved-over cities with more parking spaces than people [0].

Driverless cars have the potential to break the feedback loop by decoupling
destinations from nearby parking, shifting parking out of central cities and
freeing land for all the things that make urban living great. Perhaps the
feedback loop will start working in the other direction.

(I don't think driverless cars will lead to a redoubling of suburbanization,
by the way, because I think big houses and wide open spaces are far down the
list of reasons most suburbanites live in the suburbs.)

0\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-
parking...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking-lots-
seriously-as-public-spaces.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

~~~
tocomment
Why are big houses far down the list? What's high on the list?

~~~
potatolicious
The perception and/or reality of safety.

Suburban flight in the US didn't occur until long after cars became
ubiquitous. People had the means to move to suburbs for years but didn't do so
en masse until the urban cores started to rot.

People moved out of cities when they became shitholes, and people stay _out_
of cities out of a perception that they are shitholes. Said perception may be
true or false depending on where you are.

There is also the issue that for people with families, many urban centers have
in the past few decades reconstituted and cleaned up, but without the
infrastructure that families are looking for: e.g., schools.

Suburban living is _all_ about being safe from criminal hordes outside the
gates - whether real or imagined.

~~~
rayiner
There is no coincidence that suburban flight coincided with desegregation.

~~~
paul_f
Are you suggesting people like big houses with large lawns in quiet suburban
neighborhoods with great schools because they are racist?

~~~
rayiner
Racism was certainly one of the things that precipitated the shift in the
equilibrium. Remember, at the time when people still lived in the cities, the
suburbs weren't like they are today. There were good schools and decent
housing in the cities, because the middle class white people hadn't moved away
yet. As someone pointed out elsewhere, the availability of cars to make the
suburban exodus happened long before the suburban exodus itself happened. And
let's face it, race place a huge role in living choices today. Check out:
<http://www.city-data.com/forum/chicago>. People are perfectly happy to be
egalitarian right up to the point where it involves sending their kids to
schools with heavy black populations. "Gentrification" is almost synonymous
with moving blacks out of neighborhoods, and cities like to tout
gentrification statistics, with their underlying tone of racism, without any
of the bashfulness that is usually associated with even the hint of racism.
People in Chicago considered it a great thing that the South Loop had gone
from 35% white to 75% white in just one decade.

Look at it from a different perspective. Why is it that in Europe more of the
population of the various metro areas lives in the city than in the
surrounding suburbs, as compared to the U.S.? Do Americans just inherently
like big houses and large lawns more than Europeans? And if they do, why
didn't they move out of the city long before 1960, when it was eminently
practical to do so?

That of course doesn't mean that suburbanites are racist today. After decades
of suburban exodus the core cities are shells of their former selves, urban
public school districts are almost exclusively for the poor, etc. There's lots
of non-racist reasons, today, to not want to live in the city besides the
inherent availability of lawns, etc. But given how racist society as a whole
was in 1960, I think it's ridiculous to claim that the racial tension
precipitated by the civil rights movement and desegregation didn't play a
large role in tipping the balance between the cities and suburbs.

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rayiner
This sounds like some perverse suburban fantasy. To an extent I'm okay with
the idea of people following their preferences, but the fact is that the
market is being undermined by municipalities in this case. All those land
owners in San Francisco are halting further development of the city, driving
prices artificially through the roof and driving people who might prefer to be
in a more urban setting into the suburban wasteland. Where at least now they
can tool around in their robotic cars. Fucking wonderful.

On a less bitter note: as someone who lives in the future (future circa 1930)
and spends 0% of his day in unproductive commuting, you west coast folks are
in for a treat in 20-25 years when (if) this happens. That extra hour or so a
day of unstructured time to read, surf the net, or just veg is really
wonderful.

~~~
potatolicious
Like virmundi brought up, landowners are _not_ the bottleneck in San Francisco
- if anything they'd _love_ to knock over that 3-story Victorian and put a
huge apartment building in its place. After all, those 5 apartments in his
existing building cannot possibly be worth as much as 30 brand new ones, no
matter how stratospheric the rent gets.

The root cause of _almost_ every San Franciscan problem is rampant NIMBYism.
Look at a bus map on the city and notice how closely the stops are spaced
together - you have buses that stop on _literally_ every block due to local
lobbying, and any attempt to remove some redundant stops to make things run
faster elicits an incredible wail from local constituents for whom the only
thing that matters is themselves.

Development is the same story. People moved to SF for the pretty Victorians
they get to see when walking down the street, and any attempts to change this
landscape, no matter how mindful of history, art, and architecture, is struck
down to preserve the status quo (wherein the status quo is a sick, perverse
emulation of the early 1900s).

San Francisco is the city where everyone is trying to squeeze through a very
small door, while the people who _just_ squeezed through are busy trying to
slam the door shut behind themselves.

~~~
rayiner
I agree with you, I should have used "resident" instead of "land owner." The
people that vote on the municipal boards, whoever they are.

------
rayiner
I think a lot of these things also aren't thought through:

1) Driverless cars might possibly allow higher capacity/speeds on major
highway thoroughfares, causing cities to expand. Or, they might totally solve
the "last mile" problem of commuter rail. High-speed car travel dramatically
increases wear and tear on roads, and building more highly-worn roads further
out might not make as much sense as building out rail.[1]

2) Driverless cars may case semi-urban areas (like Palo Alto or Tyson's Corner
in Virginia) to contract, because of the dramatic reduction in parking
requirements.

It's not clear that the prevailing trends are towards bigger, sprawlier
houses. Indeed, at least on the east coast, the development seems to be on
moderate-density mixed commercial/residential in places like Northern
Virginia. In the Chicago area (not east coast, I know), satellite cities like
Aurora have been growing at 20-40% the last few decades. In the D.C. area,
Arlington has been growing at double-digit rates over that period, and
Alexandria has averaged about double digits. I can easily imagine driverless
cars moving this trend along, replacing core cities with sprawling suburbs
with core cities surrounded by dense satellite towns, connected by rail.

[1] One of the interesting things about say the Metro North railroad I take to
work is how relatively undisruptive it is to the surrounding area. There are
nice houses a stones-throw away from the rail line, while there would never be
such houses that close to a highway. And even the 2x2 express arrangement fits
the capacity of a major highway into the space of a very modest suburban road.
The whole Metro North system moves 300,000 people into Manhattan each weekday
and operates on a meager budget of $200 million/year. I don't think there is
any way you could maintain a comparable highway network for that price, and
that's before you factor-in gas/mileage on the vehicles (which, operating at
higher speed, are going to use more energy and wear out faster--it's simple
physics).

EDIT: I've seen 7-15 cents per vehicle mile quoted for maintenance and traffic
services. Metro North probably represents a few billion vehicle miles
equivalent.

------
ekr
Cars shouldn't be allowed inside cities at all, for obvious reasons (air
polution, noise polution, overall well-being of all citizens).

And secondly internal combustion engine is an inventian appropriate for 20th
century, certainly not for the present age (because of its 20-25% efficiency,
and when you take into account that that's engine efficiency, and the power
output is actually used to accelerate several tons of metal, actual cargo is
insignificant in most cases, you end up with 2-3% efficiency). This is really
one proof of the incredible human stupidity.

I would like to see most European cities in the following two decades, as
having a traffic made up of bikes and few smaller electric cars.

On the topic of driverless cars, it is solving the wrong problem. The
advantage most of you mention is more time available for people. That's not
really true in my view, because: when I'm in a car, I feel physical distress,
some kind of motion sickness, and a great portion of the population has
similar symptomes. This greatly reduces the amount of activities one can
perform in a car. And secondly, because we're talking about replacing cities
(distances < 30km), the best solution is to replace cars with bikes, and you
get the additional exercise that's missing from most people's lives, and you
don't need to waste time in gyms, which are not as healthy, and don't result
in as much endorphines/happiness (I don't have studies to cite for this).

And getting back to the topic of driverless cars. As a cyclist I would
definitely feel safer around automated cars (but that's mostly because the
place where I live is also inhabitated by many uncivilized drivers with no
regard for other traffic participants, and no respect for the law, (Eastern
Europe)). But then, the add efficiency of automated cars is quickly lost when
you add cyclists and other vehicles to the equation.

The bottomline : wrong problem, very few benefits, except in places like
Eastern Europe, where it can't/won't be implemented because of social and
economical reasons.

~~~
h_r
Wouldn't a bicycle be a lousy transport during the winter or when it's
raining? Or when you need to carry something like a suitcase to the airport
that's 20 miles away? Your reasoning seems to be incompatible with a bus
system too.

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saosebastiao
A reluctant upvote, but only because the author has put more thought into the
matter than the typical futurist.

But for some reason, he still is victim to the same trap that befalls many
futurists: A misunderstanding of the new problems that arise.

Cheap taxis that don't require parking and can drive closer together at higher
speeds is great. But new problems arise:

1) Bottlenecks on streets due to the expansion of cars in dropoff zones.
Imagine the typical airport dropoff zone on a busy day...and then think about
that happening on nearly every street. Through-traffic is guaranteed to grind
to a halt.

2) Smarter cars do not fix transportation networks. Braess's Paradox is not
just a theoretical scenario; It has been observed in multiple cities and sub-
city networks. Increasing road capacity can and will increase travel
times...and it gets worse when everybody is independently optimizing their
paths while driving in the same direction.

3) Supply and demand matching for taxis is an easy problem when you assume
spatially random demand for travel in spatially random directions during
temporally random times of the day. In the real world, taxis have a limit on
the number of places they can be at the same time...and the non-randomness of
times, origins, and destinations creates real problems with the availability
of taxis...in addition to carshares, buses, trains, etc. Thus, the
hypothetical futurist scenario relies upon an abundance of taxis, which may or
may not occur due to the delicate balancing act between marginal utilization
and capital/operating costs. A taxi that is used twice a day during rush hour
is a taxi that does not exist.

4) Deadheading (driving to a demand-location while underutilized) has costs of
its own: Now your taxi ride is paying twice as much for fuel for the same
amount of of human transportation.

A more realistic future involves smaller net benefits which can be only be
partially offset to the extent that modification of urban geography permits;
We may not be able to turn a hilly isthmus into a flat plain with grid
streets, but we can move away from our archaic zoning practices that ensure
non-random travel vectors. Carpool lanes will continue to have benefit. If,
and only if we allow it, transit systems will become more efficient and less
costly on a vehicle mile basis, compounding the benefit of grade separation in
the still-gridlocked future.

------
kailuowang
Driverless cars also means that taxis can be scaled a lot more according to
real time demand. Unlike taxi drivers who have to work on a x hour shift, on
demand driverless taxi can start and stop working at any time. Second, if
people can call a taxi using a smart phone app then taxi's don't need to
wondering around the city without passengers. These two factors combined will
further dramatically lower the cost for taxi more, a lot more than the 2
thirds cost cut down this article predicted
([http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-
business/economy/ec...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-
business/economy/economy-lab/why-the-future-of-urban-transit-might-be-a-
taxi/article6764554/)). The cost (and effort required) of using such taxis as
main means for transportation will be significantly lower than owning a car
even without the concerns of parking expense (in rural areas).

Does that mean that cities will further spread out or the other way? Who
knows. I think it means more freedom for people to select wherever they want
to live. You can live in the middle of Manhattan without worrying how to get
to the countryside with your dog. You can also live in the mountain and
commute 5 hours a day to Manhattan to work (because that 5 hours won't be lost
in driving any more)

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rdtsc
Can anyone tell me if a driverless car hits and injures someone and it is the
fault of the driverless car. Who is really at fault? Does the victim sue the
driver, the software writer, both.

I can see data logging and pervasive monitoring will be needed in order to
prove who was at fault, or what exactly happened.

In anyway I see somewhat of a legal obstacle more than a technical at this
point.

EDIT: clarification, removed "hits me" reworded for clarity.

~~~
rubinelli
I think the legal situation is clearer than it looks. Hitting someone due to
software failure isn't any different than if it happens due to a break or
cruise control malfunction. As long as the equipment is approved by your local
traffic authority and you did proper maintenance, you can prove it wasn't your
fault. (not being your fault won't stop anyone who wants to sue you, but
that's another matter entirely)

~~~
w0utert
>> _As long as the equipment is approved by your local traffic authority and
you did proper maintenance, you can prove it wasn't your fault._

Which is exactly why I'm still 100% convinced this whole pipe dream will
disappear the moment self-driving cars become available to consumers, and a
few serious accidents happen. No car manufacturer on earth is going to
continue selling cars with the promise they can 'drive themselves' if that
makes them liable for accidents. Exhaustively testing a cruise control system
is one thing, but ensuring at least 'nine nines' of reliability of all the
hardware and software systems of a self-driving car, in every possible
situation it could be used, is simply intractable. Anything less than nine
nines reliability, and someone will die because of a problem with your self-
driving car at least once every week or so.

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dclowd9901
Wow, what a breathtakingly misinterpreted vision of the future of cars. Off
the top of my head:

1) Parking lots will not dwindle in usage. What a silly notion. In fact, the
demand for cheap driverless taxis will probably make public transit all but
obsolete, thus causing more vehicles to occupy the road. Just because the cars
will be in high demand doesn't mean they won't need a place to stop and wait
on occasion. I could definitely see more efficient and sophisticated parking
structures becoming more commonplace, ones where human usage isn't a
consideration. Where do you think all those cars will go at 3am? They're not
going to just keep driving around...

2) the author seems to think at some point, driverless vehicles will become so
ubiquitous that policy would ever pass that stripped the usage of freeways
away from drivers. As if that was even enforceable, there will always be a
significant enough subset of the population that won't own or choose to use a
driverless car. That's what makes driverless cars _rather than driverless car
infrastructure_ such an important development. It doesn't ask the world to
change around it, or ask people to change.

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masklinn
> Cities will greatly expand, again: Faster and more efficient transportation
> will convert locations that are currently too remote for most users into
> feasible alternatives, abundant with space.

Here's my alternative idea: cities will contract because you won't need to
ever have your own car anymore (with all the required space that entails),
city centers will keep making driving your own car more of a pain (as is
already happening in european cities) and as gas prices keep increasing the
incentive of owning and using your own car will drop, just as the cost of
using self-driving electric cars on short in-city commuting will do.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Either way, in many places (like San Francisco) the constraint isn't places
that are too far away, it's places which have too much traffic between here
and there. If you could replace a freeway full of human-directed cars with a
freeway full of robot-directed cars, this would let you put more people not
just further into rural areas, but around existing neighbor cities too. (One
of the reasons the SF peninsula is interested in new "transit-oriented
developments" near Caltrain instead of other developments: highway capacity on
US-101 and 280.)

~~~
iromem
True, but the constraints to construction and therefore to densification -
particularly in the Bay Area - are immense.

When it's hard to build in the city and it's the urban fringe is a miserably
long commute away - housing prices go up. When it's hard to build in the city
and the urban fringe suddenly looks feasible, because traffic moves faster -
you see city expansion.

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JumpCrisscross
" _a technology that condenses the time needed for commuting along the same
route – and allows doing so in the back seat – will make [affordable, spacious
dream] homes more agreeable_ "

As a New Yorker who spends a lot of time in back seats, I think the author is
exaggerating the effect driverless cars will have on the palatability of
commute times. I am _more_ sensitive to commute times than my friends in the
Bay Area, gladly moving to cut a 20 minute commute to 10. Even though I have a
car taking me door-to-door, and even though I'm reading my email and screwing
around on Hacker News the whole time.

~~~
nkozyra
In other words, no matter how great, easy, convenient or pleasant things get,
people will find a way to complain.

------
atyoung
Hummmm... Too optimistic. I think the driverless car thing is going to be
hampered by rural living as well as the dependence on fossil fuel. Refueling
is still a major limitation to this. I don't want my vehicle parking 5 miles
away from my work using up more fuel at my expense. It sounds like a recipe
for me hating cars in general.

This kind of thing would also give techno terrorists a very easy way to cause
havoc on the masses... I think we would need to take cyber security quite a
bit more serious before this could take place.

------
chiph
People want mass transit ... as long as it looks like a car.

~~~
danielweber
People want a transit system that takes them where they want to go when they
want to go, that is clean, that they don't have to share with strangers, that
they won't have someone asking them for "spare" change [1], that has their
personal accouterments available for them, that allows them to do other things
with their time, that isn't terribly expensive, that doesn't smell like urine.

[1] <http://www.davebarry.com/gg/newyork.html>

~~~
fennecfoxen
[1] "I once watched three German tourists -- this is a true anecdote --
attempt to get off the northbound No. 5 Lexington Avenue IRT train at Grand
Central Station during rush hour."

Yeah, taking the Lexington Avenue Line is usually a mistake if there's any
alternative (e.g. walking, crawling, just staying home, or getting kidnappend
and carted off to southeast asia for random organs to be harvested...) Rush
hour just makes it worse.

------
ck2
If automated cars stop just one drunk driver from killing someone, I think the
whole invention will be worth it if only for just that.

Because I've come to realize people are just going to drive drunk no matter
what the penalties may be and judges are going to keep letting them back on
the road. So maybe robots will cause better behavior despite some horrible
people in society.

~~~
pyre

      | If automated cars stop just one drunk driver
      | from killing someone, I think the whole
      | invention will be worth it if only for just that.
    

Well, not if they cause more deaths from malfunction.

~~~
ck2
That's a valid concern but sensors and computing hardware is becoming so
inexpensive it's possible to have two or more redudant systems that check each
other's results before causing an action (or if one fails).

That is how the space shuttle's computers worked based on 1980s technology, I
think there were six of them checking each other's results.

------
mikeg8
One of my biggest questions is what does this do for Children and young teens?
Can they now ride in their families car by themselves? Do rich 12 year olds
get their own car?

Driverless cars could open up entirely new age ranges to "driving" (10-16 and
the elderly who can't physically drive anymore). And if these kids are riding
around by themselves, what impact does this have on their social development.
I enjoyed getting picked up by my mom or dad and the discussions we had in the
car; and I look forward to picking up my children and talking with them about
their days. But this may not be something future parents feel is important and
those lost interactions would be a shame IMO...

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mattstreet
Some of the comments here point out how driverless cars would allow people to
just call for a car when they need it, a sort of on demand taxi.

I'd like to take it one step further and point out that it may make electric
cars even more viable. If a car is going to be waiting until someone calls for
one, rather than driving around the city looking for people - we could have a
certain factor of "extra" cars charging while they wait.

When you then request a car, the system would send you one that is
sufficiently charged. When you arrive the car will reenter the system and
recharge.

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Nux
I welcome driverless cars!

Tens of thousands of people die annually because of car accidents. Driverless
cars should make sure that number decreases _dramatically_.

Second, driverless cars should use fuel more efficiently and try not to cause
too many jams. Optimise traffic and make it less polluting.

Driverless cars don't need to be stored in/near your home; they can be parked
in big neighbourhood parking facilities near-by and come pick you up when
needed.

Driverless cars should put an end to the auto insurance mafia.

------
marco-fiset
There will be far less car accidents.

