I really hope if anything that seeing so many occupant-less vehicles on the streets makes us collectively realize how inefficiently these vehicles are using a scarce, congestion-prone resource in a way that wasn’t as visible with Uber/Lyft.
I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.
The city should just start to bill big fleet operators for passenger-less miles.
That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer.
By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.
Kinda surprised they stop... When you have a self-driving system that costs $200k+, you want to keep it running and collecting data as much as possible - passenger or no passenger.
The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.
But when roaming around at like 10 mph average round the city, it can presumably do a full 18+ hour day on a single charge. Electric cars are super efficient in urban environments.
