Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work? Right now our crumbling infrastructure is loaded with traffic. Imagine if the max amount of driving a human can endure is removed entirely as a final constraint on the total utilization rate of this infrastructure and is replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death.
People would commute up to 4 hours one way, napping in their cars, maybe even longer. Delivery vehicles running all hours of the night, perhaps with no one ever in them at all. People sending the cars to go pick things up or people that they otherwise wouldn't have time in their day to do.
Even if you don't want to live in your car that the pressure will still be exerted on you because you'll be competing with people that do. Cars instructed to circle the block in areas with no parking clogging the streets. You'll need a self driving car yourself to even get a spot since you'll never defeat all the robot vultures.
People will forget how to drive entirely of course so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, people will need more self driving cars to get back the time stolen by other self driving cars.
I think it's important to realize that part of the reason self driving cars are so hard is because there is a necessary period of coexistence with human drivers.
In your hypothetical future, where no humans manually drive anymore, it opens up the possibility of completely redesigning our vehicle infrastructure without having to worry about the training and compliance of a mixed human/AI population on the road.
My optimistic hope is that with fully automated vehicles, mass transit wins out on sheer efficiency in order to negate the wasteful deadheading inherent in personal vehicles.
Even in that hypothetical future the cars would still have to deal with pedestrians, road workers, construction, weather, road damage, flooding, and many other random situations that are much more complicated than just staying in your lane and maintaining a two car lengths gap from the car in front.
How does a self driving car deal with a blizzard with white-out conditions or a complete loss of traction due to ice? Yes, humans get into a lot of accidents in these conditions but as a percentage of the time the rate is still remarkably low.
If you want to eliminate large classes of those adverse situations then the best approach we have right now is to switch to rail transport. Public transit is truly the way to go!
My brother in christ, it's called a driverless metro. It has existed for decades and isn't even slightly like a google owned surveillance drone "accidentally" causing delays for ts competition.
Excommunicating humans from all public space and drawing a moat of monopoly owned robo taxis around every block and every destination isn't a utopia, it's a complete nightmare.
The eternal pessimist within me looks at how difficult it is to get anything with infrastructure accomplished, both at a reasonable pace and reasonable cost, in the US and can't help but expect this sort of thing to not play out as wonderfully as that sounds.
Well I hadn't yet thought about a possible outcome of driverless cars being better mass transit, that makes sense to me though. Once personal ownership is removed, and as atomicity is slowly reduced in exchange for efficiencies/cheaper rates to the customer, certaim areas would be analogous to mass transit.
> Cars instructed to circle the block in areas with no parking clogging the streets. You'll need a self driving car yourself to even get a spot since you'll never defeat all the robot vultures.
Why do you think this would happen? Self-driving cars are poised to dramatically improve parking overall. One can be dropped off exactly at their destination, and the car can then go elsewhere. Even an elsewhere of "somewhere 5 minutes away" is a large amount of potential parking in a typical urban environment. Additionally, any existing parking lot that chooses to only accept self-driving vehicles instantly gets additional capacity: self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves into space efficient configurations.
And if your counter is "a minority of selfish entitled people", the answer to that is "laws and regulations". Self-driving cars will have to follow the laws of wherever they're driving. If your "circling the block" apocalypse comes to pass, the mitigation would literally be a law/regulation that self-driving cars would have to obey.
Not to mention, if self-driving taxis were ubiquitous and cheap, people would be far less likely to take their own car downtown--or own a car at all. In retrospect, the idea that there's a car sitting idle in a parking spot right in the middle of downtown all day for nearly every person in the area will seem downright insane.
It was already starting to happen in NYC with Uber's exponential growth before they capped the number of cars permitted. They were a year away from carmageddon.
> Self-driving cars are poised to dramatically improve parking overall.
And interestingly, all of the parking lots in a city, in theory, will be obsolete, opening a whole bunch of opportunities for new urban design. The idea behind self-driving cars is not to own the car, but to rent it...which is why some people are super bullish in the long term on Uber.
The cutover to autonomous cars will be a huge PITA however, and I think this is really what the OP is getting at.
>self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves into space efficient configurations.
I've had this same thought, but haven't seen it discussed much.
Parking lots essentially switch from random access (which requires expensive unoccupied 'lanes') into a slowly snaking space-filling curve. Cars can crawl slowly from entrance to exit, moving like water through a pipe. The paths can even branch and merge to make efficient use of the entire surface area.
If you also want to charge the cars stored in the parking lot, your solutions fall into two broad categories:
1.) Arrange the parking lot with rows of chargers that automatically plug in. Cars choose the appropriate row based on state-of-charge, twith he algorithm making sure the entire row finishing charging at roughly the same time. This minimizes unnecessary disconnect/move forward/reconnect cycles. Or,
2.) put wireless charging under the parking lot. This would be a lot more feasible than electrifying large swaths of highway.
Personally I still prefer option 1, because the peak charging speeds can be much greater.
> self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves
This is unlikely to ever happen. Even in the human-driver world, there would be huge potential to have cars communicate directly with each other. Never materialized.
Where are you going to go that's five minutes away though? if you're in the inner city, like downtown Manhattan, it's all urban so it's not like there's anywhere to go.
I recall many years ago Jonathan Hall (economist at Uber) describing a "traffic apocalypse" caused by empty self-driving cars flooding city streets. I think the notion was the operational cost of self-driving cars was so low that wasteful (empty car) usage would skyrocket without anyone directly paying the cost of time/road use. Today, the mean number of people per car on the road is at least 1, but with empty AVs that could plummet to <1.
I believe this scenario was discussed as an argument for congestion pricing, serving as a vital solution to the tragedy of the commons exacerbated by self-driving cars.
I've never forgotten a Hacker News comment about the same idea - might have predated Uber even. If parking costs increase, and self-driving cars can recharge cheaply, then we'll see them slowly navigating streets en masse while waiting for their next gigs. Like a molasses taxi rank oozing around with no urgency.
At the same time you'll have a dramatic drop in car ownership (since it'll be far cheaper to be taxied), meaning less waste overall as each car is fully utilized for potentially dozens of people a day, rather than sitting on a concrete pad 20+ hours a day doing nothing but aging.
I think this would ultimately be for the best. If the streets clogged up so severely with traffic then the value of owning a car would drop precipitously. Even if car owners lobbied successfully to widen all the streets the traffic would just expand to fill the available capacity.
People would finally be forced to seek alternatives!
I guess it's the season of AI fear. Humans don't rarely drive to their endurance levels now, so why would removal of a rarely-used limit affect much?
8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.
Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street.
> 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.
You poor innocent child. Spent a couple of years of my life doing pretty much that, in crowded trains with a thousand others doing the same. Some did it for many, many years. It's a thing. (OK, I was lucky about where I worked and only had a 3-hr commute each way.)
Related data point... my commuting choices were
a) drive all or most of the way (saving 45 minutes to an hour each way);
b) drive 15 minutes to a park-and-ride, take a commuter bus;
c) drive 45 minutes to train station, take train in (extra 30 to 45 minutes each way, exta $$/mo).
Often did (b) for practical reasons, much preferred (c) for comfort. Didn't do (a) too often. (d) "black car" (private driver) was an idle astronomically expensive dream. But if it was only a relatively small premium over normal car ownership? I and 100's of thousands of my fellow commuters would have given our left kidneys.
> Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street.
I know this sounds nice for just a moment, but if you consider it longer, it's awful. It won't decrease congestion, it will increase it. Why?
1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby. It's not as if every car will altruistically drive to a far-off area. Since self driving cars have more patience than humans, they'll be on the road much longer searching for their parking. It may be more efficient to keep the car circling the block, which is even worse.
2. Parking availability is a major inhibitor of car trips, especially in cities. This is a good thing. If it becomes easier to "park" (ie leave your car driving on the street or send it away), that will induce more car trips, and more car trips means more congestion, until there's a new equilibrium (maybe a 7-minute parking search is eliminated, but it's replaced with 7+ minutes of traffic).
3. Pick-up and drop-off in cities is already difficult with rideshare services. If all personal vehicles are doing it as well, they'll definitely congest the curb lanes more. This is definitely a more solvable problem than the first two, but still an annoyance.
And for what it's worth, the 4-hour commute may be a bit far fetched, but it's hard to deny that many wouldn't mind an extra 20 minutes of commute time in traffic if they can relax, nap, read, watch a show, etc. People will chose that option more, adding more trips and more congestion, until an equilibrium is reached. Maybe it won't be 4-hour commute times but it will be a major increase and added congestion.
All of these extra miles traveled searching for parking, and adding extra congestion, are disastrous to cities and neighborhoods. Sure, the fossil fuel emissions alone would be awful, but suppose (charitably) that all autonomous vehicles are electric, and assume that their electricity generation is emission free (unrealistic for decades). The weight of EV batteries will dramatically increase road wear and tear, and they'll increase the pollution due to rubber tires, which are already the major source of microplastic pollution. And of course, it's a dramatic waste of energy from the power grid. And all of this is ignoring that dedicating that much road space storing to idling and parked vehicles is a no-good, terrible, awful way to utilize public space in a city or neighborhood, when it could be used by some efficient public transit, parks, and safer infrastructure for personal vehicles when necessary.
I don't think it's 8 hour commutes so much. But that I could now take the 75-90 minute trip into the city that's about 50 miles away for dinner/show without thinking about it too much. I've really cut down on casually swinging into town to meet someone or do an activity on a weeknight because it's just a hassle to drive with all the traffic and driving back home when I'm probably getting a bit tired.
Of course, it still costs money and if everyone does that now maybe it's 2+ hours in a car each way and I still won't mostly do it.
I'd also routinely take the car into the city for a work event of some sort rather than dealing with non-trivial hassle of multi-modal driving to the train station and 2 different forms of public transit.
> 8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life
There are already people who live in their vans anyway, if they didn't even need to drive them anymore perhaps areas with overzealous zoning laws that circumvent supply & demand would see an influx of small moving apartments instead.
It would be like a land yacht, and economically sound so long as the price of gas is lower than the price of rent.
I've met several people who in pre-pandemic times were commuting from beyond Sacramento to San Francisco, which is about a 4-5 hour daily commute. You'd be surprised how far some people will go to have both a good paying job and the house of their dreams.
> and is replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death.
Listen, and understand! That relentless driving machine is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!
I see self driving cars as a backwards compatible way for us to reimagine infrastructure.
Right now, SDC is operating in the real world, in non-trivial environments (San Francisco), without special road infrastructure to make them work. It’s beautifully backwards compatible, at the cost of not being generalized (the service areas are extensively mapped).
Once SDC take off we’ll likely start getting infrastructure and rules to support them. Think standards for communicating position locally - ie car A broadcasts its position and route to cars B, C, D within 200m, special road infrastructure to make lanes and corners more manageable for SDC, rules against aimless circling. There’s already a carrying cost in the form of gas or electricity plus wear incentivizing aimless driving, also the opportunity cost of not actively moving someone or something, but we can probably introduce some kind of toll or tax on a SDC operating with no humans inside it to further disincentivize this.
A very useful thing about SDC, and something I think people forget about rideshare and taxis, is that they let people move around independently without needing parking for those trips. In dense cities like SF and NYC that’s hugely useful. A single rideshare or SDC can move 10 people on custom routes without any of those people needing to find and pay for parking, and without using any parking infrastructure. That’s great because it disincentivizes wasting more space on parking in aggregate. Over time this should let us build denser.
Of course, public transit could obviate all these concerns, and I’m a big believer in funding way more public transit than we do already, but it will take a lot of time and political will to make that happen in the US. And it still does not offer the flexibility of SDC and rideshare. SDC is fully compatible with existing infrastructure and may give us a way to morph into public transit more smoothly with things like dynamically routed SDBusses and a reduction of parking infrastructure leading to denser urban environments that more easily support public transit. I think we can solve the “spending too much time on the road doing nothing” problem with congestion pricing, which we should really be doing already.
That picture has the cars bumper to bumper, which is likely rather better than even the self-driving best case. Cars take up a lot of space.
I can imagine interesting and efficient ways to move large numbers of people that involve self-driving vehicles for part of the journey, but for high capacity at reasonable cost and space utilization, feet, bicycles, busses, trains, subways, etc are dramatically better.
What I'm hearing is that I should do a self-driving startup whose fleet heads out in the morning to take all of the prime parking spots in the city and then have an app for people to bid in auctions for access to the spaces come prime shopping/restaurant/bar hours!
There were companies that enabled "selling" the parking space that you currently occupy, but cities successfully argued that on-street parking specifically (and city-owned parking generally) belongs to the city and these companies were issued cease and desist orders.
Corporations want all the rights an individual wants but no social, ethical and financial responsibility towards the humans they are meant to serve. It is time we rethink the concept of corporate personhood and legal protections an individual's get for acting via such entities, as they are getting compensated generously, the risks they take are miniscule to the entitlements they actually enjoy for their decisions and their consequences on the society.
Cars that never have a driver could be much smaller. Eventually what we need for this scenario in congested areas is a driving decision protocol that's based on consensus with neighboring cars, some kind of leader election algorithm, etc. If all cars were full self driving they could in some situations drive at super high speeds as a swarm, you wouldn't even need stoplights.
I love your optimism. I predict the GP is correct though, since everyone will want one of those Mercedes megavans to set up a comfortable bed or office while stuck in traffic. There's no way I'm going to sleep or work in a tiny self driving smartcar.
Since they'll autopark or circle anyway, their size no longer becomes a limiting factor for most people.
>replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death.
Listen, and understand. That car is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶ reach your destination.
And thus the motor vehicle takes his rightful place at the top of the food chain: King of the concrete jungle. May he reign forever, tire never, and render his enemies unto the road.
Gosh, if it gets to the point where cars never stop circling because there's no parking ... we could like, make the cars bigger, and longer, and then people can just hop on and off as needed ... maybe even make a few of them go underground and such. Could even give them a cool name - like Timed Rides Around In the Near Streets or something like that. If we put these things on rails then they would even cause far less wear and tear on the road.
Yes, if cars continue to just massively decline in performance and quality of life, become entirely a shared resource, and lose all their advantages, than they could rival trains.
I suspect a lot of people won't want to own self-driving cars, especially if you're right and people forget how to drive themselves. We could drastically reduce the amount of parking we need, at least within cities, meaning there probably won't be many cars idly circling blocks.
Personally, I'd be down for a driverless Uber-like service.
This also implies that some nontrivial amount of the driving on roads will be cars with no humans in them, which may also be worse than the status quo.
> Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work?
Actually, yes. However, my take is a bit different from yours.
The future driverless car will not at all look like a Tesla.
It will be a moving office or comfortable room for family trips. This does not mean it has to be massive. Something of the size of a modern minivan could be fantastic if you did not have to worry about driving at all.
In other words, I actually see future driverless cars giving us more time rather than taking it away by being stuck on traffic paying attention to stay in a lane, press the brake or accelerator.
As for people forgetting how to drive. Well, maybe in one or two more generations?
Nobody really likes driving. People either need to go from point A to point B or want to (vacations, eating out, etc.). I enjoy driving, not on the street, on the race track. I do that with some frequency. Driving on the street is boring, dangerous, time consuming and stressful. I hate that kind of driving. I can't wait until I don't have to do it any more.
> Anyone ever think about what a nightmare driverless cars will be if they actually work?
The scenario you outline was part of Mega-City One's landscape in the 2000AD/Judge Dredd comics: cars on the road all day every day, with people living out of their perpetually moving RVs; something similar was depicted for Termight in the Nemesis the Warlock series.
This was tested empirically by giving people access to a chauffeur temporarily. Not having to personally drive your car nearly doubles vehicle miles: http://www.joanwalker.com/uploads/3/6/9/5/3695513/mustapha_e... The study is a pretty small sample though, so I would take it with a grain of salt.
Actually my experience with self driving cars is the exact opposite.
After giving control over to an AI, suddenly I don't care at all about saving 3 minutes by picking the perfect lane, getting the best spot on every merge, maxing out the speed limit threshold where the local police will pull me over.
That kind of gamification with no tangible reward actually generates the anxiety. When you're no longer the player, there's no more anxiety about those weird time optimizations.
If streets are "clogged" it saves me a few pennies and gives me less reason to worry about a human cutting across to risk my life for no reason. It's actually kinda relaxing.
But you are wrong about one thing: AI have a fear of death. Every aspect of their training is hyper focused on a paranoid level of death avoidance.
When I picked up my father from the airport last month, I did your worst nightmare, my car circled the terminal for about an hour while I jammed out to progressive rock. 90% of the time I was in bumper to bumper on a closed access road with no entrance or exit. From a traffic perspective it was irrelevant whether I was there or not. On the 10% when I reached the terminal on the loop, surprise, I was blocked by loading cars in front of me... The same blockage the car behind me would face.
Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.
What will happen is:
Companies will buy fleets of self driving cars.
The best self driving cars will be too expensive for most people to buy.
People will just pay one of those companies for transportation services.
The transportation - serving companies who will use the cars in the most efficient way will survive. They will use AI to optimize the usage of the fleets.
Regulators (governments) will tax the companies per km / time interval / peak hours.
People will pay more if they want to travel alone or want to travel in a straight line. They will pay more if they want more exact timing.
Roads will be safer because they will communicate with the cars and the cars will communicate with other cars.
There will be manned vehicles that will help relieve any obstructions.
In other words, given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.
> Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.
This is not necessarily a given; after all, most Americans have other little-utilized equipment that nobody bothers to try to "rent out" to maximize usage. Think - washing machines, dish washers, lawn mowers, snow blowers, etc. In fact, there's an entire industry built around storing little-used equipment (storage units).
And we have high-usage vehicles transport already, they're called taxis and they're at use in most major cities; the AI cannot save MORE than the cost of the driver without some magical accounting.
> Once you buy the self driving car, you will want it to be on the road as much as possible, you want return on investment.
I don't really follow the argument. I don't think of my car as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think of it as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly a necessary cost of living (commuting for work, shopping) and partly for leisure (visiting friends and family, going out on the town, road trips). It makes very little sense to me to "want to be on the road as much as possible," especially considering that most of the depreciation for when I eventually sell it or trade it in is likely going to be based on the odometer rather than the calendar.
> ...given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.
And if you mix together "modern American government" and "billions of dollars at stake for mega-corporations" - just how close to zero is the real-world probability of those "proper tax rules" being made and maintained?
Shortly after we get self-driving cars widely available, most municipalities will have trolly busses that run the grid so that the most you need to wait is like 2 minutes. At which point, a substantial amount of people aren't going to pay $20 to get from A to B when you can get there slightly slower for $2.
Honestly I think by that point owning one won’t even be a thing. You’ll rent it from the manufacturer on demand or via a subscription with your subset of features enabled just for your trip.
They won’t park, they’ll just move from one job to the next (like taxis and ubers).
I think that's naiive. There's a reason why taxis aren't couriers. There will certainly be specialization. There will still be buses, with AI drivers instead of humans, to get a lot of people from A to B, there will be delivery vans, with maybe delivery robots, maybe there will be taxi's, long haul, etc.
I completely agree they can change our relationship with vehicles. Let's look beyond a subscription service though and think how it can be part of a stand-alone auto insurance policy, or offered by your apartment complex as part of your monthly rent, or the HOA and paid for as part of your dues the same as landscaping is. SDCs will be services that are offered as part of a larger relationship/service.
What will really happen is that ownership of vehicles will dramatically drop, as it's cheaper to simply rent an automated vehicle to get to your destination. This means a lot less waste, as you have far less vehicles sitting around being utilized maybe one or two hours a day. Folks aren't going to be interested in daily 8 hour drives if the wear and tear on the vehicle is going to force them to buy a new car every 3-5 years, on top of the fuel cost (even electricity). Same goes for if you're renting, since you won't want to pay a small fortune on your daily commute.
This seems much closer to the reality. With LiDAR's, imaging radar's, a host of other sensors, more custom calibration and crazy high development costs, these autonomous vehicles are going to be the price of a Lamborghini for a long time. The idea that A/V's like this will clog streets across America because every worker will keep 2 in their garage is unlikely.
Something I’ve realized is that people have been saying this for a long time.
I used to write them off as over the top worries of uninformed people.
More recently as Elon Musk’s failure to deliver has been made clear, I’ve realized that I was myself taken in by a lot of hype.
Now when I go back and look at some of the cyclical content around self driving cars that has been around for years, I realize that a lot of it makes sense. The most damning criticism is that automobile-focused infrastructure sucks, and self driving cars won’t change that. We need to invest in traditional forms of transit. But in a world with cheap money (the last decade) and winner-take-all mentality, we get huge investment in individualized technology like self driving cars instead of better urban design and transport infrastructure.
> Imagine if the max amount of driving a human can endure is removed entirely as a final constraint on the total utilization rate of this infrastructure and is replaced with a relentless driving machine that never tires or gets frustrated and has no fear of death.
Sure!
An entire class of accidents and injuries will be entirely gone, saving countless lives. Insurance will get cheaper for everyone. Cities will be able to adapt and grow more quickly, since traffic management can finally happen in realtime and at scale. Pollution will plummet.
Cars can get smaller and smaller, focusing only on having a safe space for passengers and eliminating all the extra "driver" nonsense. With so many cars on the road, you'd always be able to catch a ride, anywhere, anytime.
Each car could have a delicious sandwich compartment, so that it's always doing double-duty for carrying both passengers and sandwiches. (Every car would have a couple drones it could dispatch to pick up and deliver sandwiches, so that passenger trips can go on uninterrupted.)
People will forget how to drive entirely, of course, so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, and we'll enter a golden era of cheap transportation and ever-faster sandwich delivery.
Ok you lost me at the first part but then came in for the win with the sandwich compartment and drone delivery.
I for one welcome our autonomous sandwich delivery overlords.
Joking aside I'm more curious on the negative aspect of self driving vehicles as I'm not entirely convinced they will explode into the market quite the way it's been pitched.
In the long run however you can't ignore the productivity increases and the cultural changes that will come with it being a net positive.
Governance and ownership is the sticky point for me.
While I immensely enjoy driving "the human way", I think a total-ai roadsystem would be much more efficient and do away with the clogging.. A lot of clogging comes from humans being terrible at merging and driving in general.
Of course, like anything there will be major societal changes. But consider a few brighter possibilities:
* Cars are all electric, since the one downside major downside (a long time to charge versus gas) is reduced if they can go charge themselves. So less pollution and noise.
* The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity of roads due to faster speeds and higher density. So a city could possibly only have a couple of car accessible roads.
* Parking can also get denser, as cars can presumably park themselves and coordinate. So you could build a few massive parking garages (for example) to serve thousands of cars, or require them to park outside of the city.
Of course, self driving cars might also mean slower cars, because the drivers are less impatient, and if that is true then noise would go down. On the flip side, self driving cars might end up meaning faster cars because they can coordinate better, increasing noise levels.
Not to say I'm a current enthusiast of self driving cars, but I assume many of the issues you outlined would get better rather than worse. Ownership of car will become continually less rational with hyper effective rented transport. With fewer cars overall parking should be much better especially on busy areas. Cars of the far off future may be more predictable and thus more rational when traffic increases. Networked cars open up a lot of possibilities.
None of this is coming soon as far as I'm aware mind you. I just don't think the end game of self driving vehicle is bleak - just the long mid game :)
On the other hand, ride sharing could mean less cars overall and less car ownership. Electric cars mean fewer or no emissions. Totally automated traffic management could enable vastly higher throughput, and otherwise congested roads could have dynamic tolls applied so people won't use them unless they really need to. Delivery vehicles can batch shopping pickups and dropoffs to use less vehicles than currently.
If problems arise, they can be fixed through policy and incentives. Otherwise, traditional economic incentives for efficiency continue to apply.
Self driving cars will completely collapse when pedestrians are factored in. You'll just walk out on the street and expect all the cars to stop. You don't do it now because someone inattentive could kill you. But when the tech works well, all car traffic will just be locked in stand still.
Hopefully we can use this moment to purge inner city areas of cars.
On the other hand, we will see a sharp decline in human-driven cars on the streets. Who would do it themself anyway? At every moment we will have on the streets exactly the number of cars to serve current demand. They will not clog curb parking places - there's no point for driverless car just to stay there for nothing. They will not roam free - there's no point for that too. They will stay in the cheapest, ergo most inaccessible for humans places waiting for orders.
Sounds good in theory. I’m not optimistic about all the car makers cooperating on an industry standard, though. Plus the failure scenario seems pretty catastrophic to overall throughput. I hope some bright thinker figures those problems out; it does seem like a great opportunity
I've been held up longer by side shows at intersections than driverless cars here. Not that SF is the lawless hellscape the media pretends is the case, but I do think it's a bit rich that city officials are pointing fingers at fairly remarkable services using paid permits that work well 99% of the time while failing to enforce laws that are broken more frequently.
Same. As a pedestrian in SF I very frequently get put in danger by impatient human drivers at 4 way stop signs. No self driving car has ever put me in danger, and I interact with them quite frequently.
The national media of course wants to produce content confirming the biases of people who are (in the back of their minds) anxious about the prospect of SDC but don’t have exposure to them. I have a lot of exposure to them - not as an employee though - and think Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox are all doing a great job at being cautious and respectful with their testing programs. Sure they do get stuck sometimes, but human drivers disrupt traffic too, and honestly SDC are already better at being safe drivers around pedestrians and other vehicles than humans IME. It’s just that they are so cautious sometimes they just stop and create situations like this.
Most people who haven’t been living with SDC for years like we have in SF want to hand wring about them based on articles like this, but the reality is quite different. You’ll note you don’t hear much about the cars injuring people or getting in accidents despite the appetite for negative SDC media coverage.
It's interesting to hear your experience as a pedestrian, because it makes sense that cautious self-driving cars would cause fewer problems for pedestrians than for traffic. After all, a pedestrian has no problem dealing with a stationary car--just walk around it.
I think this gets at the point I was going to make - Wired probably spent untold hours combing through video requests to find incidents involving driverless vehicles, but tossed out every incident they found where an offending vehicle had a driver. Then they wrote an article about their cherry picked results. I would be curious to see both sets of data.
According to the article, the transportation authority started recording incidents involving driverless vehicles, so Wired didn't have to comb through videos at all. They just requested videos for incidents with driverless vehicles.
As to how many such incidents there were, it wasn't a lot. Quote from the article:
> Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023
In the summer, I can hear side shows in Oakland, which are miles away. Because the night air is still and the particular acoustics of the terrain, I guess, it sounds like it is a few blocks away. I once laid in bed for almost an hour listening to it.
I have never, not once, been held up by a side-show in San Francisco. I did have to wait 5 minutes to cross the street to get to the farmer's market at the Embarcadero while a motorcycle brigade zoomed up the street.
The only side-shows I have seen have been in Oakland and even further into the East Bay.
With that being said, I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians and traffic abiding cyclists around the lower Haight. I have also seen self-driving cars block buses and the street car.
I wasn't trying to be hyperbolic, I've only been delayed by a side show once in my neighborhood by the Chase center -- I've never been blocked by a self driving car. I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but the characterization the article tries to make that these vehicles are a menace to society strike me as overblown and contradictory to many people's lived experiences here. At least these folks are paying money to treat the city like a playground. I haven't seen anyone get love tapped by one of the self-driving cars, but if that's happening regularly it seems like a pretty serious problem.
There are lots of sideshows in the Mission, Castro, Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, SOMA, but yeah not as many in the Haight area.
> I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians
I live in the lower Haight as well and have never personally witnessed that, but don't doubt that it happens. The non-self driving cars here don't interact with the Wiggle super well either though.
In a similar vein, the driverless cars are actually useful to me biking, since they have predictable and safe behavior. When I see one, I take the lane, and it will follow at a reasonable distance, and block other cars behind from aggressively squeezing past.
This article is making a mountain out of a molehill.
The crux of the article seems to be “wow! If you block traffic it really adds up to wasting people’s time!”. Duh. Lots of things do this, many less valuable than driverless cars.
As an example, Seattle’s drawbridges sound like much more of a disaster than whatever time is being wasted by Cruise vehicles. Sailboats can’t even make it under the Fremont bridge, so every rich dude with a boat blocks traffic (including multiple bus lines) for 10 min when they sail by.
> Sailboats can’t even make it under the Fremont bridge, so every rich dude with a boat blocks traffic (including multiple bus lines) for 10 min when they sail by.
I've dreamt of a reverse-toll system where those folks end up paying drivers, pedestrians, and bus passengers some token amount for the delay (not enough to encourage lolligagging but enough to encourage boats to find better travel times or coordinate to spread the tolls.
The main anecdote- where the issue is that busses are not allowed to backup without a supervisor- seems to be an equal indictment of bus rules as it is about a driverless car that won't back up without a supervisor.
Some rich dude should sail his boat under a bridge, then immediately turn around and sail it back under, and repeat this over and over all day long, just to screw with drivers.
Substitute "bus" for "ambulance" and maybe the problem becomes more apparent. The fact you can't issue a "reckless driving" ticket to a corporation is going to become a problem. There isn't a mechanism to force them to address the problems they create.
Not sure what you mean? You could still fine the corporation, or block/revoke approvals.
Unsafe/stupid driving is accepted as inevitable and rarely enforced against for human drivers (outside accidents). Not a good thing, but definitely the reality these days. Tbh, it’ll likely be much easier to enforce rules on a self driving car, since almost everything is tracked and recorded. Every mistake can be scrutinized for a self driving car, in ways that would never be required for human drivers.
Do SF and other municipalities collect fees that compensate the public for these kinds of externalities? It seems absurd that companies performing driverless research can hobble public services and infrastructure without providing some form of compensation, ideally directed towards improving those services.
You can steal ~899$ worth of shit and the cops don’t show up. Open air drug markets, people shitting in the streets, thousands of homeless people. But yeah let’s pontificate about fines for someone disrupting traffic.
You gonna fine the person that runs out of gas, causes an accident or just mechanically breaks down?
The idea of fining the companies involved is proposed near the end of the article:
> As driverless cars keep racking up the miles, San Francisco transit advocates propose a variety of measures to lessen their impact. Jaime Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots group of riders in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies operating autonomous vehicles should be fined for causing delays.
Seems fair. If a manually driven car were to block a streetcar like that surely that would result in a fine? This shouldn't require any sort of special treatment for self driving cars one way or the other.
In any other locality, the compensation would be a bunch of highly paid tech jobs, paying fat stacks of tax and pulling money from all over the world into the local economy - both from the jobs directly working on the cars' software, and by bootstrapping a technology hub.
Of course, in the case of SF you could argue they have far more highly paid tech jobs than the city can support already, and no need to bootstrap a technology hub....
This isn't a strong argument for externalities: no municipality in the world would (should?) accept toxic waste being dumped in its water supply just because a small fraction of its tax base is paid handsomely to do so.
Put another way: the value proposition for SF (and other tech cities) exists above and prior to these companies being allowed to treat the city's streets as a testing ground.
I don't understand why they don't have a big red STOP button on the roof or something to immediately call for either a driver or why don't these have remote control take over so they can be quickly moved out of the way? Imagine if one of these parks itself in front of an ambulance or fire truck?
I believe they actually do have that kind of mode. When you are riding in one of these cars commercially they have an “end ride” button that cancels the route and gets the vehicle to pull over.
I think most clogs are when cars are mapping so I’m not sure if they either don’t have enough data to offer that when they get stuck (depends on how much they depend on mapping to implement the feature). It could also just be that they figure a stuck car is too messed up to reliably pull over without causing more problems, so to err on the side of caution they don’t use that feature.
I was thinking the same thing. The car on the tarm/light-rail track clearly don't have any concept of being in the way. It seems to be the same case with the car blocking the bus in the first example. Neither of those systems seem to have a notion of reversing or pulling over to make space.
The ability to "read the road" seem to leave a lot to be desired.
I'm surprised by this too. If I were running an operation like this I would definitely have a team of remote operators in racing sim setups (steering wheel, pedals) who could "jump" to a car and take control in one of these situations.
Slack notification comes in: a car is stuck. Click link, get jacked-in and take manual control to move it to a safe location for further debugging.
Readit News
People would commute up to 4 hours one way, napping in their cars, maybe even longer. Delivery vehicles running all hours of the night, perhaps with no one ever in them at all. People sending the cars to go pick things up or people that they otherwise wouldn't have time in their day to do.
Even if you don't want to live in your car that the pressure will still be exerted on you because you'll be competing with people that do. Cars instructed to circle the block in areas with no parking clogging the streets. You'll need a self driving car yourself to even get a spot since you'll never defeat all the robot vultures.
People will forget how to drive entirely of course so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, people will need more self driving cars to get back the time stolen by other self driving cars.
In your hypothetical future, where no humans manually drive anymore, it opens up the possibility of completely redesigning our vehicle infrastructure without having to worry about the training and compliance of a mixed human/AI population on the road.
My optimistic hope is that with fully automated vehicles, mass transit wins out on sheer efficiency in order to negate the wasteful deadheading inherent in personal vehicles.
How does a self driving car deal with a blizzard with white-out conditions or a complete loss of traction due to ice? Yes, humans get into a lot of accidents in these conditions but as a percentage of the time the rate is still remarkably low.
If you want to eliminate large classes of those adverse situations then the best approach we have right now is to switch to rail transport. Public transit is truly the way to go!
Excommunicating humans from all public space and drawing a moat of monopoly owned robo taxis around every block and every destination isn't a utopia, it's a complete nightmare.
The eternal pessimist within me looks at how difficult it is to get anything with infrastructure accomplished, both at a reasonable pace and reasonable cost, in the US and can't help but expect this sort of thing to not play out as wonderfully as that sounds.
We are nowhere near a future where cars exist in hermetically sealed tubes, completely walled off from the rest of existence.
Why do you think this would happen? Self-driving cars are poised to dramatically improve parking overall. One can be dropped off exactly at their destination, and the car can then go elsewhere. Even an elsewhere of "somewhere 5 minutes away" is a large amount of potential parking in a typical urban environment. Additionally, any existing parking lot that chooses to only accept self-driving vehicles instantly gets additional capacity: self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves into space efficient configurations.
And if your counter is "a minority of selfish entitled people", the answer to that is "laws and regulations". Self-driving cars will have to follow the laws of wherever they're driving. If your "circling the block" apocalypse comes to pass, the mitigation would literally be a law/regulation that self-driving cars would have to obey.
It was already starting to happen in NYC with Uber's exponential growth before they capped the number of cars permitted. They were a year away from carmageddon.
And interestingly, all of the parking lots in a city, in theory, will be obsolete, opening a whole bunch of opportunities for new urban design. The idea behind self-driving cars is not to own the car, but to rent it...which is why some people are super bullish in the long term on Uber.
The cutover to autonomous cars will be a huge PITA however, and I think this is really what the OP is getting at.
I've had this same thought, but haven't seen it discussed much.
Parking lots essentially switch from random access (which requires expensive unoccupied 'lanes') into a slowly snaking space-filling curve. Cars can crawl slowly from entrance to exit, moving like water through a pipe. The paths can even branch and merge to make efficient use of the entire surface area.
If you also want to charge the cars stored in the parking lot, your solutions fall into two broad categories:
1.) Arrange the parking lot with rows of chargers that automatically plug in. Cars choose the appropriate row based on state-of-charge, twith he algorithm making sure the entire row finishing charging at roughly the same time. This minimizes unnecessary disconnect/move forward/reconnect cycles. Or,
2.) put wireless charging under the parking lot. This would be a lot more feasible than electrifying large swaths of highway.
Personally I still prefer option 1, because the peak charging speeds can be much greater.
This is unlikely to ever happen. Even in the human-driver world, there would be huge potential to have cars communicate directly with each other. Never materialized.
I believe this scenario was discussed as an argument for congestion pricing, serving as a vital solution to the tragedy of the commons exacerbated by self-driving cars.
I think this would ultimately be for the best. If the streets clogged up so severely with traffic then the value of owning a car would drop precipitously. Even if car owners lobbied successfully to widen all the streets the traffic would just expand to fill the available capacity.
People would finally be forced to seek alternatives!
8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.
Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street.
Learning to drive was never that hard.
You poor innocent child. Spent a couple of years of my life doing pretty much that, in crowded trains with a thousand others doing the same. Some did it for many, many years. It's a thing. (OK, I was lucky about where I worked and only had a 3-hr commute each way.)
Related data point... my commuting choices were
a) drive all or most of the way (saving 45 minutes to an hour each way);
b) drive 15 minutes to a park-and-ride, take a commuter bus;
c) drive 45 minutes to train station, take train in (extra 30 to 45 minutes each way, exta $$/mo).
Often did (b) for practical reasons, much preferred (c) for comfort. Didn't do (a) too often. (d) "black car" (private driver) was an idle astronomically expensive dream. But if it was only a relatively small premium over normal car ownership? I and 100's of thousands of my fellow commuters would have given our left kidneys.
I know this sounds nice for just a moment, but if you consider it longer, it's awful. It won't decrease congestion, it will increase it. Why?
1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby. It's not as if every car will altruistically drive to a far-off area. Since self driving cars have more patience than humans, they'll be on the road much longer searching for their parking. It may be more efficient to keep the car circling the block, which is even worse.
2. Parking availability is a major inhibitor of car trips, especially in cities. This is a good thing. If it becomes easier to "park" (ie leave your car driving on the street or send it away), that will induce more car trips, and more car trips means more congestion, until there's a new equilibrium (maybe a 7-minute parking search is eliminated, but it's replaced with 7+ minutes of traffic).
3. Pick-up and drop-off in cities is already difficult with rideshare services. If all personal vehicles are doing it as well, they'll definitely congest the curb lanes more. This is definitely a more solvable problem than the first two, but still an annoyance.
And for what it's worth, the 4-hour commute may be a bit far fetched, but it's hard to deny that many wouldn't mind an extra 20 minutes of commute time in traffic if they can relax, nap, read, watch a show, etc. People will chose that option more, adding more trips and more congestion, until an equilibrium is reached. Maybe it won't be 4-hour commute times but it will be a major increase and added congestion.
All of these extra miles traveled searching for parking, and adding extra congestion, are disastrous to cities and neighborhoods. Sure, the fossil fuel emissions alone would be awful, but suppose (charitably) that all autonomous vehicles are electric, and assume that their electricity generation is emission free (unrealistic for decades). The weight of EV batteries will dramatically increase road wear and tear, and they'll increase the pollution due to rubber tires, which are already the major source of microplastic pollution. And of course, it's a dramatic waste of energy from the power grid. And all of this is ignoring that dedicating that much road space storing to idling and parked vehicles is a no-good, terrible, awful way to utilize public space in a city or neighborhood, when it could be used by some efficient public transit, parks, and safer infrastructure for personal vehicles when necessary.
Of course, it still costs money and if everyone does that now maybe it's 2+ hours in a car each way and I still won't mostly do it.
I'd also routinely take the car into the city for a work event of some sort rather than dealing with non-trivial hassle of multi-modal driving to the train station and 2 different forms of public transit.
There are already people who live in their vans anyway, if they didn't even need to drive them anymore perhaps areas with overzealous zoning laws that circumvent supply & demand would see an influx of small moving apartments instead.
It would be like a land yacht, and economically sound so long as the price of gas is lower than the price of rent.
What if that time is spent sleeping? Maybe you don't even need a house, so you'll have more money to spend on a nice car.
With self driving cars, it will be like a NYC taxi, the goal is 24 hour operations.
To paraphrase a certain fictional pirate captain, "You'd best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias... you're in one!"
Dead Comment
Listen, and understand! That relentless driving machine is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!
FTFY
Right now, SDC is operating in the real world, in non-trivial environments (San Francisco), without special road infrastructure to make them work. It’s beautifully backwards compatible, at the cost of not being generalized (the service areas are extensively mapped).
Once SDC take off we’ll likely start getting infrastructure and rules to support them. Think standards for communicating position locally - ie car A broadcasts its position and route to cars B, C, D within 200m, special road infrastructure to make lanes and corners more manageable for SDC, rules against aimless circling. There’s already a carrying cost in the form of gas or electricity plus wear incentivizing aimless driving, also the opportunity cost of not actively moving someone or something, but we can probably introduce some kind of toll or tax on a SDC operating with no humans inside it to further disincentivize this.
A very useful thing about SDC, and something I think people forget about rideshare and taxis, is that they let people move around independently without needing parking for those trips. In dense cities like SF and NYC that’s hugely useful. A single rideshare or SDC can move 10 people on custom routes without any of those people needing to find and pay for parking, and without using any parking infrastructure. That’s great because it disincentivizes wasting more space on parking in aggregate. Over time this should let us build denser.
Of course, public transit could obviate all these concerns, and I’m a big believer in funding way more public transit than we do already, but it will take a lot of time and political will to make that happen in the US. And it still does not offer the flexibility of SDC and rideshare. SDC is fully compatible with existing infrastructure and may give us a way to morph into public transit more smoothly with things like dynamically routed SDBusses and a reduction of parking infrastructure leading to denser urban environments that more easily support public transit. I think we can solve the “spending too much time on the road doing nothing” problem with congestion pricing, which we should really be doing already.
https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ehq-production-austr...
That picture has the cars bumper to bumper, which is likely rather better than even the self-driving best case. Cars take up a lot of space.
I can imagine interesting and efficient ways to move large numbers of people that involve self-driving vehicles for part of the journey, but for high capacity at reasonable cost and space utilization, feet, bicycles, busses, trains, subways, etc are dramatically better.
And stop calling for-hire cars "rideshare", because it isn't sharing, it's hiring or renting.
Which may be.. but backwards compatibility doesn't absolve you of actually doing maintenance on your legacy systems. Unless the upgrade is free.
Road Pricing
When a scare resource is given away for free, it becomes overused. Somehow we have a hard time seeing that for road access, but it's true anyway.
Since they'll autopark or circle anyway, their size no longer becomes a limiting factor for most people.
Listen, and understand. That car is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶ reach your destination.
Personally, I'd be down for a driverless Uber-like service.
If it involves the car having a data link to someone else's server, then I have no interest whatsoever in self-driving vehicles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Actually, yes. However, my take is a bit different from yours.
The future driverless car will not at all look like a Tesla.
It will be a moving office or comfortable room for family trips. This does not mean it has to be massive. Something of the size of a modern minivan could be fantastic if you did not have to worry about driving at all.
In other words, I actually see future driverless cars giving us more time rather than taking it away by being stuck on traffic paying attention to stay in a lane, press the brake or accelerator.
As for people forgetting how to drive. Well, maybe in one or two more generations?
Nobody really likes driving. People either need to go from point A to point B or want to (vacations, eating out, etc.). I enjoy driving, not on the street, on the race track. I do that with some frequency. Driving on the street is boring, dangerous, time consuming and stressful. I hate that kind of driving. I can't wait until I don't have to do it any more.
The scenario you outline was part of Mega-City One's landscape in the 2000AD/Judge Dredd comics: cars on the road all day every day, with people living out of their perpetually moving RVs; something similar was depicted for Termight in the Nemesis the Warlock series.
After giving control over to an AI, suddenly I don't care at all about saving 3 minutes by picking the perfect lane, getting the best spot on every merge, maxing out the speed limit threshold where the local police will pull me over.
That kind of gamification with no tangible reward actually generates the anxiety. When you're no longer the player, there's no more anxiety about those weird time optimizations.
If streets are "clogged" it saves me a few pennies and gives me less reason to worry about a human cutting across to risk my life for no reason. It's actually kinda relaxing.
But you are wrong about one thing: AI have a fear of death. Every aspect of their training is hyper focused on a paranoid level of death avoidance.
When I picked up my father from the airport last month, I did your worst nightmare, my car circled the terminal for about an hour while I jammed out to progressive rock. 90% of the time I was in bumper to bumper on a closed access road with no entrance or exit. From a traffic perspective it was irrelevant whether I was there or not. On the 10% when I reached the terminal on the loop, surprise, I was blocked by loading cars in front of me... The same blockage the car behind me would face.
What will happen is:
Companies will buy fleets of self driving cars.
The best self driving cars will be too expensive for most people to buy.
People will just pay one of those companies for transportation services.
The transportation - serving companies who will use the cars in the most efficient way will survive. They will use AI to optimize the usage of the fleets.
Regulators (governments) will tax the companies per km / time interval / peak hours.
People will pay more if they want to travel alone or want to travel in a straight line. They will pay more if they want more exact timing.
Roads will be safer because they will communicate with the cars and the cars will communicate with other cars.
There will be manned vehicles that will help relieve any obstructions.
In other words, given proper tax rules, transportation will regulate itself in effective and efficient ways.
This is not necessarily a given; after all, most Americans have other little-utilized equipment that nobody bothers to try to "rent out" to maximize usage. Think - washing machines, dish washers, lawn mowers, snow blowers, etc. In fact, there's an entire industry built around storing little-used equipment (storage units).
And we have high-usage vehicles transport already, they're called taxis and they're at use in most major cities; the AI cannot save MORE than the cost of the driver without some magical accounting.
I don't really follow the argument. I don't think of my car as an "investment." In fact quite the opposite, I think of it as an extremely depreciatory purchase that is partly a necessary cost of living (commuting for work, shopping) and partly for leisure (visiting friends and family, going out on the town, road trips). It makes very little sense to me to "want to be on the road as much as possible," especially considering that most of the depreciation for when I eventually sell it or trade it in is likely going to be based on the odometer rather than the calendar.
And if you mix together "modern American government" and "billions of dollars at stake for mega-corporations" - just how close to zero is the real-world probability of those "proper tax rules" being made and maintained?
Deleted Comment
They won’t park, they’ll just move from one job to the next (like taxis and ubers).
I used to write them off as over the top worries of uninformed people.
More recently as Elon Musk’s failure to deliver has been made clear, I’ve realized that I was myself taken in by a lot of hype.
Now when I go back and look at some of the cyclical content around self driving cars that has been around for years, I realize that a lot of it makes sense. The most damning criticism is that automobile-focused infrastructure sucks, and self driving cars won’t change that. We need to invest in traditional forms of transit. But in a world with cheap money (the last decade) and winner-take-all mentality, we get huge investment in individualized technology like self driving cars instead of better urban design and transport infrastructure.
This is a disease of the soul caused by reading Freakanomics which makes you think everything that's counterintuitive must actually be true.
Sure!
An entire class of accidents and injuries will be entirely gone, saving countless lives. Insurance will get cheaper for everyone. Cities will be able to adapt and grow more quickly, since traffic management can finally happen in realtime and at scale. Pollution will plummet.
Cars can get smaller and smaller, focusing only on having a safe space for passengers and eliminating all the extra "driver" nonsense. With so many cars on the road, you'd always be able to catch a ride, anywhere, anytime.
Each car could have a delicious sandwich compartment, so that it's always doing double-duty for carrying both passengers and sandwiches. (Every car would have a couple drones it could dispatch to pick up and deliver sandwiches, so that passenger trips can go on uninterrupted.)
People will forget how to drive entirely, of course, so there will be no going back. The whole thing will feed on itself, and we'll enter a golden era of cheap transportation and ever-faster sandwich delivery.
I for one welcome our autonomous sandwich delivery overlords.
Joking aside I'm more curious on the negative aspect of self driving vehicles as I'm not entirely convinced they will explode into the market quite the way it's been pitched.
In the long run however you can't ignore the productivity increases and the cultural changes that will come with it being a net positive.
Governance and ownership is the sticky point for me.
* Cars are all electric, since the one downside major downside (a long time to charge versus gas) is reduced if they can go charge themselves. So less pollution and noise.
* The number of cars may increase, but so will the capacity of roads due to faster speeds and higher density. So a city could possibly only have a couple of car accessible roads.
* Parking can also get denser, as cars can presumably park themselves and coordinate. So you could build a few massive parking garages (for example) to serve thousands of cars, or require them to park outside of the city.
Tire noise dominates at speeds above roughly 30 kph (20 mph), so on reasonably fast roads not really.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Propulsion-noise-the-tyr...
Of course, self driving cars might also mean slower cars, because the drivers are less impatient, and if that is true then noise would go down. On the flip side, self driving cars might end up meaning faster cars because they can coordinate better, increasing noise levels.
As someone who enjoys walking and biking, this strikes me a serious negative, not a positive.
(Group parking spots are typically better monitored than streets.)
None of this is coming soon as far as I'm aware mind you. I just don't think the end game of self driving vehicle is bleak - just the long mid game :)
Why? Attrition on a car is mainly miles based. Sharing a car won't make it last more miles. Not accounting for vandalism.
On the other hand, ride sharing could mean less cars overall and less car ownership. Electric cars mean fewer or no emissions. Totally automated traffic management could enable vastly higher throughput, and otherwise congested roads could have dynamic tolls applied so people won't use them unless they really need to. Delivery vehicles can batch shopping pickups and dropoffs to use less vehicles than currently.
If problems arise, they can be fixed through policy and incentives. Otherwise, traditional economic incentives for efficiency continue to apply.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/car-tire...
But... there's another dimension here. Would you share a car with a random stranger with no "trusted" third-party (i.e. the driver) present?
Hopefully we can use this moment to purge inner city areas of cars.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
The national media of course wants to produce content confirming the biases of people who are (in the back of their minds) anxious about the prospect of SDC but don’t have exposure to them. I have a lot of exposure to them - not as an employee though - and think Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox are all doing a great job at being cautious and respectful with their testing programs. Sure they do get stuck sometimes, but human drivers disrupt traffic too, and honestly SDC are already better at being safe drivers around pedestrians and other vehicles than humans IME. It’s just that they are so cautious sometimes they just stop and create situations like this.
Most people who haven’t been living with SDC for years like we have in SF want to hand wring about them based on articles like this, but the reality is quite different. You’ll note you don’t hear much about the cars injuring people or getting in accidents despite the appetite for negative SDC media coverage.
As to how many such incidents there were, it wasn't a lot. Quote from the article:
> Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023
> Sideshows entail street stunts in which parties perform “doughnuts,” or high-speed circles, burn-outs and other risky maneuvers.
In the summer, I can hear side shows in Oakland, which are miles away. Because the night air is still and the particular acoustics of the terrain, I guess, it sounds like it is a few blocks away. I once laid in bed for almost an hour listening to it.
You will see weird speed bumps that form a circle that are designed just to stop people from doing these.
The only side-shows I have seen have been in Oakland and even further into the East Bay.
With that being said, I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians and traffic abiding cyclists around the lower Haight. I have also seen self-driving cars block buses and the street car.
> I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians
I live in the lower Haight as well and have never personally witnessed that, but don't doubt that it happens. The non-self driving cars here don't interact with the Wiggle super well either though.
The crux of the article seems to be “wow! If you block traffic it really adds up to wasting people’s time!”. Duh. Lots of things do this, many less valuable than driverless cars.
As an example, Seattle’s drawbridges sound like much more of a disaster than whatever time is being wasted by Cruise vehicles. Sailboats can’t even make it under the Fremont bridge, so every rich dude with a boat blocks traffic (including multiple bus lines) for 10 min when they sail by.
I've dreamt of a reverse-toll system where those folks end up paying drivers, pedestrians, and bus passengers some token amount for the delay (not enough to encourage lolligagging but enough to encourage boats to find better travel times or coordinate to spread the tolls.
Special laws sometimes are passed to have "boat times" so the boat has to wait until the top of the hour or similar.
Those bridges don't open 7-9AM and 4-6PM, which shows that we have and should continue to regulate to mitigate disruptions!
[0] https://pbfcomics.com/comics/sir-leopold/
Unsafe/stupid driving is accepted as inevitable and rarely enforced against for human drivers (outside accidents). Not a good thing, but definitely the reality these days. Tbh, it’ll likely be much easier to enforce rules on a self driving car, since almost everything is tracked and recorded. Every mistake can be scrutinized for a self driving car, in ways that would never be required for human drivers.
You can steal ~899$ worth of shit and the cops don’t show up. Open air drug markets, people shitting in the streets, thousands of homeless people. But yeah let’s pontificate about fines for someone disrupting traffic.
You gonna fine the person that runs out of gas, causes an accident or just mechanically breaks down?
I'm much more interested in fining the crap out of the people who don't have an "excuse" for their bad traffic performance.
OP clearly refers to a fee on autonomous car companies using public infra as a testing ground. Causing traffic jam is but a tiny part of it
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/traffic-congesti...
https://www.sfcta.org/funding/tnc-tax
> As driverless cars keep racking up the miles, San Francisco transit advocates propose a variety of measures to lessen their impact. Jaime Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots group of riders in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies operating autonomous vehicles should be fined for causing delays.
Of course, in the case of SF you could argue they have far more highly paid tech jobs than the city can support already, and no need to bootstrap a technology hub....
Put another way: the value proposition for SF (and other tech cities) exists above and prior to these companies being allowed to treat the city's streets as a testing ground.
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https://archive.ph/PAhqM
What they seem to be missing is a “get out of the way” path-planning mode when it doesn’t know how to proceed.
I think most clogs are when cars are mapping so I’m not sure if they either don’t have enough data to offer that when they get stuck (depends on how much they depend on mapping to implement the feature). It could also just be that they figure a stuck car is too messed up to reliably pull over without causing more problems, so to err on the side of caution they don’t use that feature.
The ability to "read the road" seem to leave a lot to be desired.
Slack notification comes in: a car is stuck. Click link, get jacked-in and take manual control to move it to a safe location for further debugging.
So about one unplanned stop every 3 days? Seems a bit of a stretch to call it "clogging" San Francisco.
By a regular old delivery truck.
Better statistical data on these incidents is called for.