The solution for too much traffic is well known and independent of robotaxis.
"Road Pricing" means that vehicles pay for driving on congested roads. The price is set so that road supply and demand match, and traffic flows optimally. It also gives the road owner an income for providing important roads.
Singapore has solved this extremely effectively. Note that the solution is not just on demand pricing but also having good transportation infrastructure that actually is usable and is a viable alternative.
Bay Area has addressed it to some degree but I would not call it solved by any means. They have dynamic pricing which ensure you can pay to go faster during peak times. This is mostly a solution for rich people who can afford the $15-20 tolls one way on 101 but in a pinch the common person may be able to use by paying money. However the US just has no decent public transportation infrastructure that can be relied on a daily basis to live your life normally due to legalized bribery (lobbying) by the by the car companies during the earlier years.
Singapore also has very expensive car purchase taxes and gas taxes. Yet, taxis in the city state are still incredibly affordable compared to USA prices, which doesn’t bode well for dissuading robo taxies over there.
If the robo taxies aren't cheaper than normal taxies, they simply aren't going to be used. The fact that taxies are so cheap in Singapore already makes me think that robo taxies aren't even needed (is labor really so cheap there?).
"The average taxi driver salary in Singapore is S$24,900 per year or S$10.88" according to random googling. Having been there one of the big problems with normal taxis is that there aren't a huge number so if it starts raining only about 10% of people wanting one get one. Not sure if robos would help there.
It needs to be based on the number of passengers, though.
3 people in the car should be free in all circumstances.
2 people in the car should be free sometimes, but pay a very small fee when the road is very congested.
1 person should always pay a fee. Sometimes small, sometimes large, depending on traffic.
0 people in the car (in the case of autonomous cars) should always pay a phat fee.
This is the only thing that will prevent driverless cars from ruining our awesome road infrastructure in America. If we don't do this, driverless taxi companies will have cars polluting and congesting every public road trying to be capture a ride until they're clogged and useless.
This already exists in the form of a gas tax and road use taxes (registration). NIMBYs get in the way of building the lanes that already have demand and funding.
Extending it further really just ends up as a restriction on the movements of the poor.
>This already exists in the form of a gas tax and road use taxes (registration).
Neither of these target congestion directly, but road use in general. As a result, they usually fail to do much to slow down driving (since the goal is basically just to fund roads).
>NIMBYs get in the way of building the lanes that already have demand and funding.
Why shouldn't somebody oppose yet more noise, pollution, and traffic in their neighbourhood? That something has externalities on the people around it is a good reason to oppose it.
>Extending it further really just ends up as a restriction on the movements of the poor.
The poorest are in many ways already relegated to using transit, which in most US cities is woefully inadequate for getting around. Effort to make transit more viable can only make these people better off.
Induced demand has been thoroughly debunked [1]. If you build a 20 lane no-stops highway from Fresno to Reno, you might see some use shift from other routes, but it does not spur a horde of people to buy cars so they can drive the route. It is just a convenient thought experiment to point at for people who don't want to invest in infrastructure to meet current demand.
You could make a genuine argument that demand should not exist because people should be taking busses, trains, submarines, or whatever. But continuing to kneecap public infrastructure only furthers the perception that trains might be a good idea, but will become unreliable and packed when NIMBYs decide to turn their attention to noise or whatever and demand we build less track.
I've been in the Bay Area 20 something years now and I have never seen 101 or 280 meaningfully expanded, so no we haven't actually tried it.
> If you build a 20 lane no-stops highway from Fresno to Reno, you might see some use shift from other routes, but it does not spur a horde of people to buy cars so they can drive the route.
That’s misunderstanding the concept: in our hypothetical superhighway, it’s true that people who already lived on that route wouldn’t buy more cars to drive it but that was never the claim. What was claimed is what we saw throughout the 20th century: people would favor car commutes along that route because it’s faster so they could get more house for their budget by living further out of the cities. That’s fine at first but inevitably hits the spatial inefficiency of cars unless the local economy isn’t active enough, at which point you can’t afford road maintenance.
Thank you this is a great example of my point. Induced demand, despite having no hard evidence to support it, feels like it should be the answer. We could talk all day about the concept of going out and seeing for yourself in a large field there is no curve and how the "concept" just makes sense, but flat earth has the same amount of evidence.
Induced demand is the point of road expansions. The government wants more people travelling because it pumps the economy. Never understood this argument since it actually agrees that the government is accomplishing its goal.
Road pricing ideally works by dynamically having different prices for different roads and time of day, depending on load, in order to make traffic flow at all times.
Gas tax and registration fees are intended to pay for road maintenance, which is also useful, but are way too primitive and unfocused for this purpose.
The Bay Area does this with carpool lanes. The electronic billboard says $12 and you see a nonstop stream of Tesla, BMW, Mercedes, etc. and tech company busses.
All it does is force the poor to sit in traffic while some lanes are reserved for people to whom $12 is inconsequential.
I fail to see how applying this same logic to an entire road makes it any better.
> The benefit comes when prices reach the level where traffic flows at full speed.
How then does your gardener get his truck to your house? Your DoorDash driver? The elderly woman on a fixed income who needs to get to her doctors appointment?
Roads cannot be the domain of the rich. (Also please don't pretend that public transport is even remotely viable in the US)
> How then does your gardener get his truck to your house? Your DoorDash driver? The elderly woman on a fixed income who needs to get to her doctors appointment?
The whole idea is to reduce peak demand. Your gardener doesn’t need to go downtown at the same time as office workers, so they are unlikely to be affected since they’re going to your house rather than your office and they can show up at 10am. Similarly, getting breakfast from DoorDash across town is not a human right - you can order closer to home or pay market rate for use of a couple hundred feet of public space to haul your burrito.
> I'll note that all your "poor" examples own a car.
This is actually a key point many city dwelling anti-car advocates completely miss. The poor do depend heavily on cars because they are pushed to the outskirts where they can afford housing but still have to commute to the cities where the jobs are. When I lived outside the Bay Area my car cost me less than what some people here spend on their bikes.
The most congested roads often coincide with the most valuable land in city centres, so charging users (public roads) or owners (private toll roads) based on local land value could be useful. It is also advantageous in that it would be progressive.
It’s almost as if robotaxis are solving the problem in a way that they can make money off of, not trying to be an actual solution.
Why would investors do that?
Oh right.
Robotaxis are just an attempt to do Uber without having to pay drivers. They’re not an attempt at fixing congestion. Or safety (though I’m sure they claim it). Or bad public transit.
They’re aiming for the local maxima. “Fix” taxis/Uber as they exist today and make money doing it.
Similar technology could make self driving busses to provide more/adaptive routes.
I’d rather not ride a bus with potentially mentally unstable, smelly, or violent others, especially without at least one other human guaranteed to be present.
Meanwhile i'm trying to figure out if any city in the us is willing to ban cars. I can't think of any other factor that lowers the quality of life in cities that even comes close to them.
I’d love to see some of the east, where there were cities built long before cars that have some of the public transit infrastructure necessary, to start doing what Paris and other places have done by removing cars from streets and replacing them with walkable parks and neighborhood shops and gathering places.
More like they used to be.
New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, there’s plenty of places that could do it. They could prove the concept.
I don’t see how it would work in a city like Dallas or LA as they exist today. They would try and it would be deemed a failure and never tried again.
But successful trials in a few very dense places could really start to show the benefits and maybe we could start bringing it to other cities, even those more traditionally spread out.
Mackinac is a lovely place, but they ban far more than just cars there so it's not a great comparison to other cities. There also isn't a distinction there between transmission and distribution so it's also not a great model for cities regardless.
This is a very common attitude with americans that dwell in the country. It's just your bog-standard fear of change and the unknown.
Granted, living in the city does reduce your life expectancy by about five years... mostly because of car usage. If only we could figure out how to better distribute labor across a country and not just in cities.
In the United States, people living in urban areas have a slightly longer life expectancy than people living in rural areas. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), life expectancy at birth in urban areas in 2021 was 78.7 years, compared to 78.6 years in rural areas.
Apparently the gap was wider, they blame air pollution for the rural areas catching up. The big advantage urban areas have is rapid access to healthcare.
We could have premium exclusive busses. Still a better solution then everyone being carried individually in their own private vehicle. Also think of the networking possibilities!
Nah what you luddite. You seem more concerned about maintaining artificial jobs and stifling progress to “prevent people getting rich off of it”. Having a 100% automated driving system will fix traffic. It will be better for the environment. It will give us back more time in our day.
There is nothing that a driver would do that an automated taxi would not, because both the driver and the automated taxi are optimizing for their ability to give as many rides as possible for as much money as possible.
The main reason to think their behavior would differ is on the margins where drivers have to go home and sleep and robotaxis do not. But that really makes it likely that a robotaxi service will keep its cars out 24/7 except for maintenance.
The other reason to believe drivers and robotaxis will behave differently is if you think drivers are leaving money on the table, or robotaxis will. And Silicon Valley simply does not leave money on the table. I'd be more ready to believe the drivers do.
There's another other factor here: when you make cars more available and more convenient, people are more likely to take them. So robotaxis will probably increase, not decrease, road usage, if only because they never need to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom. They will just repeatedly get a fare, drive the fare, and go do whatever they do to be idle. Which, in many cities, is going to be "wander the streets" or "take up parking spots in the city center".
EDIT: I had responded to this without reading the OP article. The article has some good discussion of the kinds of secondary effects that are likely to cause robotaxis to increase road consumption.
Do you think that people would be on the road _less_ if everyone were using taxis instead of personal cars? If so, why? What's the actual reason why robotaxis reduce the demand, or consumption, of road miles?
The claim here is that even with more cars on the road traffic can be reduced if cars are able to communicate with each other. E.G. all the cars stopped at a red light accelerate at the exact same rate as the light turns green, no more brake checking/rubbernecking causing traffic on highways. I think in the long run this effect will probably exist, whether it overpowers the increased number of road users remains to be seen.
Now you've just alienated two groups: environmentalists that realize cars are bad for the environment, and car people that are interested in driving their own unique vehicles. The former you were never going to get, but the latter could concievably have been on your side about getting bad drivers from behind the wheel.
You've gone from "People won't have to drive", to "People cannot drive". And the latter will likely play poorly in rural areas.
Probably. I can see the only automated car rule being for freeways only or large urban areas only and it would still make a significant difference. Or maybe the automated vehicles get their own two lanes on the freeway. Many ways to go about this while still being effective.
I'm not interested in providing a public subsidy to Uber. If they want two lanes of the highway dedicated to their vehicles then they can pay for two lanes of the highway dedicated to their vehicles. I expect their road tax to be considerably higher per mile.
> Having a 100% automated driving system will fix traffic.
How? If we replace every car driven by an individual with a car driven by machine… you’re left with the same number of cars. Just as much traffic. Still need all the roads. And parking lots unless the cars drive more to avoid parking.
Better for the environment? I don’t see it. Every car taken off the road (including EVs!) is less polluting. Less fuel. Less maintenance. Less pavement needed. Less particle emissions from wearing down tires. Moving people to walking, bikes, busses, subways, whatever is better than individual cars.
More time in your day because you’re not driving during your commute? What if we set things up so you don’t have to commute so far? Or at all. Either one would be better even with automation driving for you.
Between the pandemic’s changes in traffic patterns and seeing other cities around the world change I’ve come to the realization we could have so much more than what we have today but with robots driving for us. We can ask for more. We can change more than one thing at once.
And what we do doesn’t have to be decided by a tech company just doing something. That may not be the best policy. It may be a waste of money. It may be a real part of the solution!
We can want more. Instead robotaxis are clogging streets and blocking ambulances and we’re celebrating “progress”.
True actual driving aspect can be optimized if all cars were self driving (traffic lights could be handled via negotiation between each car at an intersection, traffic on ring roads could get into a more train-like arrangements, etc…). It’s unlikely to happen in the states anytime soon, but it is something that could happen in cities with really messed up traffic but lots of money; eg some Chinese cities, where normal cars have little care about ambulances already.
> How? If we replace every car driven by an individual with a car driven by machine
If all vehicles - not just cars - were driven by machines and connected to a network then there are many optimisations that they could be doing. For example you could get rid of traffic lights, yielding rules, even lanes. Cars could travel much faster if they didn’t have to worry about reaction times.
For example cars could go through intersections at full speed or close to it, timing it so they passed between each other. Cars could actually merge onto freeways and change lanes at full speed without some jerk trying to block them. You wouldn’t have slow drivers in the fast lane.
Those are the kinds of optimizations that work very well in theory and are an absolute nightmare in practice.
You're talking about a system where one kid running into the road could cause a chain collision of dozens of cars that were counting on rushing the intersection at high speed. Or, alternatively, could end up with the kid getting hit at 45 miles an hour, with extremely fatal and destructive results.
The same is true with human drivers. That kid has a much better chance of surviving with self driving cars than human driven cars when lots of congestion is involved. (I assume you mean the kid rushes out into a crowded road way with 4 lanes of traffic, which actually happens in China although I doubt that case is a thing in the states)
It is not the same with human drivers, because the GP’s hypothesized system can’t be done at all with human drivers. The 45-MPH human roadway is going to be less crowded because people can’t coordinate their exact speed with the car in front of them and have to leave bigger safety margins than a centrally coordinated system with robot cars.
You can say the same thing about high speed trains now. The difference is, a well set up automated system is probably the best odds a kid is going to get at survival because if all the cars are networked they will know ahead of time there is someone rapidly braking ahead of them.
The kid doesn't give a damn if the cars behind the car that's about to hit them are braking. All that matters is whether that first car is able to brake fast enough to avoid hitting them, or if not, whether the car has slowed sufficiently to maybe not kill them. If networked autonomous cars are moving faster, the kid is much less likely to survive. Period.
Maybe the car detects the kid earlier. But that's not guaranteed; if the kid runs out from between two parked cars, for example, there may not be sufficient time at higher speeds for the car to stop.
This is a huge problem with human drivers today. Get rid of on street parking then you won’t have kids just popping out of nowhere! It holds for pedestrians just trying to cross the street, no need to have a hypothetical kid chasing a ball, it’s already a problem.
Absolutely, but networked autonomous vehicles moving faster so as to increase traffic flow like the parent mentioned would only make the problem worse.
People behave unpredictably. Hell, even when they behave predictably and cross at the crosswalk when they’re supposed to, they can still get hit by cars.
That said, on-street parking does have the benefit of placing a multi-ton shield between traffic and pedestrians and cyclists. Slower speeds and better street design can at least lessen the likelihood of fatal accidents when people pop out between parked cars.
I don’t think any road that has kids playing shouldn’t have a fast speed limit. And any road with faster traffic should have no street parking at all, better visibility from the sidewalk, and probably some separation (deeper curbs?). This is regardless of whether AI or people are driving.
Slower speeds work for sure, but getting a robo taxi to adhere to those slower speeds is much more realistic than getting a human driver to do the same.
Road design sends signals to drivers: wide lanes and other design choices make a road less cognitively stressful, and so you speed up. It feels like you should be able to move a bit faster, and so you do. If the posted speed limit doesn't feel right, drivers will ignore it.
The answer is to take that into account with traffic calming measures[0] that alter the street design and make it more stressful for drivers. Narrower lanes, big trees overhanging the street, small traffic circles, pinchpoints, and other measures making driving fast very uncomfortable. You feel like you need to pay more attention, and drivers naturally slow down as a result.
The Dutch have figured this out, there are plenty of things you can do to make roads better and safer for pedestrians, we just don't do that here in the USA. It is just that, if drivers could be controlled, you could focus on more pedestrian/bike safety and expect cars not to go too fast (assuming all cars were self driving, which won't happen for a long time in the states at least).
Realistically, I don’t see how anyone could EVER pass a law saying humans can’t drive where other cars can. Americans (I’m one!) seem far too independently minded, in the sense of wanting to be in control themselves.
Even if you could get 90% on board, the other 10% will fight to the death over it.
Which means the benefits of a 100% automated system (which I disagree with BTW), can’t be reached except possibly after a VERY long time when enough anti-robos have changed their minds/died out.
Highways didn’t exist when cars became common. They came because of cars. We never took them away from horse riders. We gave car drivers a new option.
This would be taking something away from drivers. And that’s what people hate. Look at the responses to congestion taxes or toll roads. Or even traffic jams!
People behave as if they have a right to use any (seemingly) public road just because they have a car. Even private toll roads.
> For example cars could go through intersections at full speed or close to it, timing it so they passed between each other. Cars could actually merge onto freeways and change lanes at full speed without some jerk trying to block them. You wouldn’t have slow drivers in the fast lane.
That kind of system precludes the presence of pedestrians and cyclists.
You'll still need crosswalks to allow pedestrians to cross the street. Beyond that, the mere possibility of a kid running into the street means that your theoretical maximum speed is basically the same as it is now, simply due to physics: even if cars can instantly detect a person trying to cross the road, you still need time to brake and come to a stop. That doesn't change whether it's a computer driving the car or a human. Speeding up autonomous traffic basically undermines the biggest advantage--360 degree awareness and faster-than-human reaction times--AVs should offer.
As for intersections where cars zip through the gaps between cars with minimal spacing, that's a pipe dream simply because you're cutting safety margins to nearly zero. Signals drop out and computer processes crash. Car sensors will pick up false positives.
Car brakes and tires wear down over time, which will cause the car's performance to deviate from what everyone's models will expect. Bald tires? Winter tires in summer? Summer tires in winter? Maybe your car tries to take into account tire wear, but what happens if they're out of balance or alignment and the tread wears unevenly? What about the autonomous SUV that's loaded nearly at its maximum load thanks to the home improvement supplies the person bought at Home Depot?
The sort of carefully choreographed ballet you're envisioning[0] falls apart in catastrophic fashion the moment a single car comes along that doesn't behave as expected. If one car slams on the brakes to avoid a kid, a ball bouncing into traffic, a barrel that fell over, or any of the million other examples of things that happen in a complex environment, you get a massive multi-car collision, and because we're now moving faster than would have been possible before, you're going to get casualties.
So you need to slow traffic flow and increase the distance between cars to create a larger safety margin. That cuts down on the expected advantages, and you wind up much closer to existing traffic flows than the imagined ballet. And even if we choose to ignore the possibility of failure, at the end of the day, roads are a finite surface. There's still a physical limit to the number that can physically fit on a given stretch of road. AVs could, theoretically, push that number higher by removing some of the factors that decrease capacity, but there's still a limit. They can't solve the problem of congestion.
There's also the human element. Even if you "know" the cars are communicating with one another and you'll safely shoot through the intersection, those pesky human brains--you know, the ones that evolved to notice predators on the edge of a person's field of vision before those predators managed to rush up and eat you---are going to positively lose their shit the second they see a car speeding towards them on what appears to be a collision course at 50 miles an hour. That kind of intersection is pretty much perfect for triggering those fight-or-flight stress responses, and they'll make the stress of even the worst of LA traffic look positively pleasant by comparison.
Can AVs do a lot to improve traffic? Sure, assuming they don't increase the number of vehicles on the road--which is unlikely, to say the least. Anyhow, even the less-capable levels of automation could decrease things like phantom traffic jams. But we'll never see the kind of traffic ballets you're talking about save, perhaps, things like highway on-ramps.
The problem of "but my pointless job!" Always has the second part missing, which is "the economy is down a payng job and the displaced family still needs food on the table". If the government offered to meet people's basic needs in these situations (no, the current unemployment system is not sufficient), I bet the complaints would stop.
Hell, I bet the Luddites from back in the day wouldn't have minded the technological progress if they had their needs met otherwise.
They weren’t anti-tech. They were workers who saw the first industrialization destroying their safe well paying jobs at home that gave them autonomy and replaced it with them having to be generic low paid cogs in a very dangerous factory they had to commute to with no say over their working conditions.
They wanted a say over their destiny. Some autonomy. A share of the benefits that came with technology instead of all the downsides with 100% of the upside going to the rich owners.
Any of that sound familiar to things workers complain about today?
From the podcast 99% Invisible: Blood in the Machine
Yes, but the take away from this for me I’m glad they didn’t get their way. There are going to be growing pains and sometimes you lose, I mean it could be me tomorrow but technology needs to keep progressing!
Once you've figured out how to make me whole for the cars and motorcycles I've invested in and can no longer use because of a 100% automated driving system then we can talk.
If you don't have a solution for that then you can just sit down and STFU.
Large metros are already incredibly punishing on car users. NYC is the king of this in the US. I don't think the residents there give a shit that your old, pre automated communicating driving system no longer works there.
Large metros have been punishing on car users for decades. However, they have not mandated you can't use your car. They've simply made it very expensive and inconvenient for you to do so.
Uber Pool was so cheap it increased overall city travel: For every mile of personal driving it removed, it added 2.6 miles of people who otherwise would have taken another mode of transportation.
Seems logical. So, why not automate the bus system and automatically introduce routes where demand is? Such a system would ensure that people can quickly get where they are going, not add vehicles to the busy parts of the system, and achieve the benefits of shared transportation.
The prerequisite technology for an automated bus system is not the ability to take the driver out of the bus. The prerequisite is the ability to credibly signal to all the potential passengers what buses are going where they want to go, where they should get on those buses, and where they are supposed to get off.
All of the automation of bus routes involved is simple computation and I don't see AI having anything fundamentally new to add to the solution. You don't need to actually solve traveling salesman or something to add value to the bus system.
I say "credibly" because you really want the system to work almost perfectly right out of the gate. Otherwise passengers will shun it because the very baseline requirement of a transport system is to reliably get people where they wanted to go.
That would work pretty well. Just hail a bus with your phone, it tells you where to walk and what bus to get on, and where to get off on that bus, and how to finish your trip on foot or by connecting to another bus. It could all easily be integrated into Apple or google maps. No more fixed bus routes, just a bunch of AI buses driving around filling needs dynamically.
We can’t staff our fixed routes today, our agency is flush with cash but they can’t hire enough bus drivers with that cash, so they are cutting routes anyways forcing more more people back into cars. So obviously they couldn’t handle wide spread smaller buses with dynamic routing…maybe if they take a big subsidy on para transit, but that’s niche.
If robo taxies could be limited to running to and from transit hubs, they could provide a huge benefit in providing last mile service. I would love to call a taxi to get from the light rail station home (which is a 17 minute car ride or a 40 minute bus ride + 10 minute walk), I wouldn't bother just getting an Uber directly home from the airport anymore (taking lightrail and transferring to bus doesn't make sense).
Any time you share a vehicle in time but not in space (only one rider per trip) you've increased congestion due to the trip out to fetch the person. Net loss every time.
Yeah nightmare scenario: everyone owns a robotic car, no one wants to pay for traffic. Car drives to work, then you send it home rather than pay for parking, and then summon car to pickup from work. So basically dual direction rush hour that stretches for twice as many hours.
If we define deadheading as any segment on a route a transit vehicle is empty (which is at odds with the definition for deadheading from my flight attendant friends, and my friends who are fans of the greatful dead), and eliminate that, a lot of bus lines are going to become very short, especially late at night.
Buses typically make several runs along their route in both directions, until they need to go back to the barn for refueling, maintenance, or mileage. So any deadheading they need to arrive or return from that route tends to be a fractional part of the mileage they make on that route. Also, the route taken to and from the barn can be a lower-traffic route than that which the bus covers on its scheduled route. It's also a defined endpoint; if we see these robotaxis meandering around town with nowhere to go, except sometimes a random supercharger port, that is not deadheading, that's lollygagging.
A lot of buses will run empty going the non-demand way during rush hour. Like the D-line in Seattle where I live, if you try to catch a bus into downtown around 5 PM, one or two out of service empty buses will pass you by first since I guess metro thinks they are better off getting back to downtown more quickly than servicing off peak demand along the way.
Buses take more passengers and can still be a net-win by reducing taxi traffic (besides secondary reduction in congestions due to less accidents from intoxicated and tired drivers).
They could be going to pick up their next fare, or driving towards where they predict their next fare to likely be. Same as a normal manned taxi actually.
You might want to review all of the hype from when they were getting started. There was a ton of talk about how it’d transform cities not to need parking, which a lot of city leaders liked because it allowed them to suggest cuts to transit and bike funding in favor of something associated with richer people.
It didn’t work, of course, due to the inherent inefficiencies of cars and the challenge such an expensive service has: people don’t want to wait if they’re paying that much but that means you need empty vehicles constantly cruising around. Congestion pricing would help only if it included mileage and then only by making the service even more expensive so people would take the bus or bike instead.
Who cares what people said? They are obviously wrong because they argued from false premises. Uber succeeded because they made hailing a ride easier. Trying to credit them or blaming them for traffic is insane. Traffic is the consequence of roadway design and allocation, not how the cost of VMT is packaged and sold (by Uber or Toyota).
Uber encouraged this as part of their campaign for legitimacy. Their policy was to ignore local laws trying to expand as quickly as possible and getting the TED types on their side was part of that.
> Trying to credit them or blaming them for traffic is insane.
I realize you’re a fan but that doesn’t change the fact that having a large number of empty vehicles circling waiting for fares creates more traffic.
This combines both threads: note both that it recognizes Uber and Lyft’s past claims that they’d reduce congestion and their own data show the opposite:
I’m not a fan of Uber actually, but I’m also clear headed about the cause of traffic. The data in the study you linked doesn’t show the opposite. It just says about half the VMT of a ride hail is without a passenger. It makes no claims about the total effect on VMT which would benchmark against, eg, time spent parking, substitution effects, etc.
The original ride-sharing concept that they claimed was The Thing they were doing definitely had congestion-reduction as an expected benefit, if not the main point.
Whether accidentally or on purpose, they turned into a jitney cab company instead, which does not provide that benefit.
The point was to deregulate an industry to extract money from it. I say this, because that’s the conclusion they’ve arrived at, and if they were solving for any other problem they wouldn’t be here. All else is spin.
They’re already doing that. They don’t want to pay for the parking on the robotaxis, or move them further away when not in use, so they just drive in circles taking up space and making traffic worse without even carrying anyone.
Who said having 90+ square feet of pavement to haul an average of around one person was a waste? Now we have the tech to average less than one!
> They’re already doing that. They don’t want to pay for the parking on the robotaxis, or move them further away when not in use, so they just drive in circles taking up space and making traffic worse without even carrying anyone.
I really expected them to wait for a little more secure of a political position before they started doing exactly the thing that proves that they're entirely out for themselves and don't give a damn about improving traffic or city life.
People want to move around. This is a fundamental fact.
And once they learn how much they can move, they are unwilling to move around less (or slower). This is something all the "get rid of cars" people ignore, and it's why it will never work.
That works if most other people don’t have cars. Once they do, you’re not moving, you’re part of a traffic jam and the freedom promised in the car commercials is really the freedom to spend that time realizing much of your life, money, and health you’re spending to enjoy that quality traffic time.
Similarly, people do want to travel but not endlessly - they want to meet their friends, spend time with family, work, shop, etc. Americans conflate those with driving long distances because much of the country was architected around that lifestyle, but millennials flocked back to the cities because they realized the advantages of not needing to travel so much. Time sitting in traffic kind of sucks compared to just about anything else, and living somewhere you can do the things you want on foot, bike/scooter, etc. is worth a lot.
> And once they learn how much they can move, they are unwilling to move around less (or slower)
I think you’d find a ton of people willing to trade their car for public transit if it was a viable option. I’ve never heard of someone who enjoyed having a $733 monthly car payment (the average). Especially not $1200 (a full 15% now!)
There are plenty of people in big cities, even in the US, who are happy without cars.
I mean, we have pretty overwhelming evidence that people will alter their travel behavior based on incentives and available capacity.
We add more lanes to a highway, and get induced demand with people choosing to drive more. Road diets restricting road capacity lead to reduced demand, with people driving less. There's a ton of research on both phenomena. When the 405 was closed for a weekend due to construction, Los Angeles was told to expect carmageddon. Public transit saw record-breaking ridership levels that weekend, and traffic across LA actually decreased as a result.
Drivers routinely change their driving route based on traffic congestion, and it's not uncommon to choose a slightly longer route to avoid being stuck in a traffic jam. Sitting in traffic feels more stressful, particularly on a highway where everything about the road design is telling your brain that you're supposed to be moving fast but aren't.
If we wanted to, we could build robust public transit systems that are more than capable of moving most people to where they need to go with minimal delay, convenience, and comfort and that a large percentage of the population would want to use.
Instead, most of North America has anemic bus systems that couldn't be more antagonistic towards their riders if they actively tried. A bus stop sign on the side of a four lane stroad that lacks sidewalks--the very thing that would enable people to safely access said bus stop--sends a pretty clear message to riders "we don't care about you, and if you die trying to board your bus, well, that's just how it is."
In any case, you're conflating the desire to move around with the desire to move around by car. They're not the same thing, even if seventy years of urban planning have assumed otherwise. Beyond that, we travel between places because we want to do something when we get to our destination. That's the goal, and the mode by which we travel there is simply a means to an end.
I worry that this perspective alone oversimplifies the issue and doesn't consider that when riding an SF bus today one has to worry about:
- Aggressive passengers
- Stench from smoking / urine / body odor / people bringing in garbage into the bus
- Being on guard in case of theft (can't pull out laptop and catch up on work)
- Falling off seat due to aggressive bus driving
- Sketchy happenings by the bus stop
These aren't mild annoyances as the authors' wording might (unintentionally) imply, but real health and safety risks. More so if one is female or are physically disadvantaged.
I'd love to see this concern being talked about more as part of the conversation.
How could anyone, even for a second, believe that flooding the roads with a bunch of private cars that occupy road space when when they are not carrying a passenger was going to help traffic?
A lot of elites hate transit and bike infrastructure: it’s not something they’d use personally, benefits people who are poorer and browner than they are, and they’re usually old enough to see cars as a sign of freedom and status. Those people really wanted to believe self driving cars and deregulated cabs would allow them to justify not investing in transit because that frees up money to spend on the transportation mode they use.
Medallions were the answer to the race to the bottom that occurred (too many taxis, not enough fares, shady behavior from the taxis)--just like we are seeing again.
Everybody seems to forget that laws that exist are there because there was a reason.
The fact that medallions became perverted into entrenched monopolies was a problem that should have been solved rather than just throwing them out.
The biggest failure with medallions from outside perspective was that they could be transferred. Licensing for taxis does make sense, but those should not be transferable outside selling the whole corporation. And they should be returned in bankruptcy or retirement to a pool to be redistributed.
I think the point was artificial scarcity to increase local government revenues and to gain political support from taxi unions which are often very powerful.
If the true purpose was to limit traffic, why would it be limited to taxis?
Taxi medallions were introduced to enforce a monopoly for the wealthy taxi company owners. Take Las Vegas as a prime example, you can't get a medallion unless you are part of a taxi company. Of course you can't start a taxi company unless you are "mentored" by an existing taxi company.
"Road Pricing" means that vehicles pay for driving on congested roads. The price is set so that road supply and demand match, and traffic flows optimally. It also gives the road owner an income for providing important roads.