Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution.
Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prioritization is already good enough to have automated busses cart people around.
Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing". (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z)
> The role of transportation network companies (TNCs) in the urban transport system is under intense debate. In this study, we systematically assess three aspects of the net impacts of TNCs on urban mobility in the United States—road congestion, transit ridership and private vehicle ownership—and examine how these impacts have evolved over time. Based on a set of fixed-effect panel models estimated using metropolitan statistical area level data, we find that the entrance of TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%) and duration (by 4.5%), an 8.9% decline in transit ridership and an insignificant change in vehicle ownership. Despite the ideal of providing a sustainable mobility solution by promoting large-scale car sharing, our analysis suggests that TNCs have intensified urban transport challenges since their debut in the United States.
Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving personal vehicles.
I assume if there were more self-driving cars, fewer people would own cars. I think more people would take Ubers, Lyfts, and other ride sharing services.
So I think that could reduce the need for parking and the amount of traffic just by increasing the utilization rate of cars.
I don’t think self-driving cars lead to fewer people owning cars, in fact it’s quite the opposite. With FSD, those who don’t like driving can deal with owning a car to do necessary transportation tasks (e.g. commuting), instead of giving it up for alternative methods because they don’t want to drive consciously/presently.
> Personally, I hate owning vehicles and desperately want a self-driving taxi service that I can order via an app to get me and my family around.
This future sounds great until you consider what it really means to let “someone else” become the arbiter of you being able to get around.
If I have a car in my driveway, I can make sure it is charged/fueled for whenever I need it and I can just turn it on and go. Compare that to a system who’s goal is not specifically moving you, but keeping cars/assets always on paid trips. Sure, you may in luck if you live in a well-off areas where many trips are taken, but I fear peak hours will become something of a bidding war where nobody wins.
If you do not control your means of transport, someone else does and they can take it away from you at any time. This “rent seeking” is one of the biggest cancers on our society and I will be no part of it given the choice.
> This future sounds great until you consider what it really means to let “someone else” become the arbiter of you being able to get around.
Assuming we're discounting things like bicycles, family member's vehicles and company-owned vehicles, this is present day reality for the overwhelming majority of people on this planet.
(It's also debatable whether a car truly eliminates other people from being an arbiter of "being able to get around" if you are still reliant on a fossil fuel supply chain. By comparison an EV charged with a domestic solar array would probably more liberating.)
> By comparison an EV charged with a domestic solar array would probably more liberating
By comparison, yes. But where are you going to go, or what are you going to do, that isn't dependent on other ppl in some way? I like the idea of being self-supporting as much as anyone, but that doesn't change the fact that we're all interdependent in modern society.
I've thought about this: if all transport is public transport, then how much is our physical freedom limited?
Yes, bikes and other things may exist, but if all high-powered transport is outside of our control, how much control do we have over our movements?
That being said, I think a lot of people in the US purchase cars through auto loans, and those loans while not physically limiting one's day-to-day mobility, can restrict one's job mobility. Maybe it only applies to certain economic classes, yet I imagine some people may be afraid to leave their job or lose their job because if they do, they lose their car and therefore lose their ability to move. And the safety net for physical movement in some places if one doesn't have a car is close to zero.
Good public transport is the ultimate freedom. Being able to go out for a few drinks without worrying about how to get home. No government-issued ID stuck to the box you move around in. No parking, insurance, dealerships, fines..
Agreed. I live in a city with amazing and cheap public transport and I love it. Apart from the things you mentioned a car also means you always have to go back to the place you left it. I walk lot and not having to worry about that really helps.
There’s definitely a lot of variables that I’m sure I won’t appreciate until I am living this self-driving taxi experience, but I wouldn’t be selling my personal vehicles the moment such a service became available to me. I would finish out my current lease and just keep my one paid off vehicle. Once I have enough confidence in this new setup, I would go about selling that last car. That would probably be after 2-3 years minimum.
It seems laughable to worry about how easily automated transporation can be selectively taken away when in present times rail and bus workers go on strike plenty often. I'd gladly replace my car with an on-demand service if it was reliable and cheaper than purchasing and maintaining my Prius.
> If you do not control your means of transport, someone else does and they can take it away from you at any time.
The car does provide "freedom of movement" in a libertarian fantasy way, but in reality one gives up your privacy with a drivers license. Speed traps and cameras track license plates, police can stop you, and you need to be sober. You are paying rent in the form of license fees and parking tickets; and you are paying for fuel which relies upon a long and complicated supply chain.
In urban areas, one might imagine other types of freedom. Such as the choice of walking/biking/bus/taxi/tram/subway in addition to driving, or some combination of those.
> I fear peak hours will become something of a bidding war where nobody wins.
If only there was a public option that wasn't surge-priced.
Same. The only reason I own is because no service guarantees a car will be in my garage when I need it. If they could offer that, I’d love to pay a service fee rather than own, maintain, buy, sell.
And I think it would be cheaper. The optimal use for a product that is depreciating in value whether you use it or not, is to use it as much as possible. We are paying for our cars for sit in place all day and night.
If you're just a passenger then why does it matter to you whether the taxi service is self-driving or not? Surely the benefits of self-driving would be significantly more relevant for those who do want to own the vehicle?
Average earnings (after expenses) of a ride share driver is very roughly $10/hour. If you assume a self-driving car can get 2000 hours of use a year (which seems reasonably conservative), then the self-driving car saves $20k in labor costs per year. Although self-driving tech will be expensive in the beginning, the price will likely at some point decline to be far below $20k/year.
Labor is about half of the cost of a hired ride. We know this is true for Uber because there is a lot of public discussion about the budget of a rideshare driver. Not sure about taxis.
Given those premises and assumptions, a person who doesn’t want to drive would care about self-driving tech because it could eventually lower the cost of hiring a ride, potentially by 50%.
I’m hoping that by excluding the human labor costs I will save some money, but we will see. It would also be nice to not have to have that awkward taxi conversation every time I go to the store.
> It would also be nice to not have to have that awkward taxi conversation every time I go to the store.
This is the real reason ppl will own cars for the foreseeable future. Same reason I prefer a detatched home with a private/fenced yard. I'd probably get used to high-density living, but I doubt if I'd ever really prefer it.
Anecdotal evidence, but as a city-dweller who owns a car, all of my friends who don't own cars have a reason besides "it's inconvenient." They have a disability that makes it unsafe to operate a vehicle and/or they simply can't afford a car.
Maybe it's different in other parts of the world, but that seems to be the way it works here in Chicago.
I don't own a car, save around $5-10k per year, and don't have a disability...
Originally, growing up in St Louis, I avoided driving because I saw lots of friends wasting their time in shit jobs to pay for their shit cars; cars were supposed to provide freedom, but were really a gateway to the shackles of work. I suppose that's another reason beyond 'it's inconvenient,' though.
Alternatively, a bunch of friends could buy a car together and split the costs.
I could see a scenario where instead of (or in addition to) vehicles being pooled between "x" random people (taxis, Uber/Lyft, ZipCar), you could purchase a fractional share of a car (Cf. NetJets): you get semi-exclusive use of (particular?) vehicles.
In talking about friends with this, one interesting divide was between people with kids and those without.
People with kids, especially suburban ones, seem to use the vehicle as a sort of mobile operating base. So the car isn't just a taxi. It's where the kids' sports stuff goes. Plus the folding chairs for the games. Plus snacks and water on hand. Plus it gets used as a storage locker when they're out somewhere. And it has assorted useful stuff, like charging cables and wet wipes and sunglasses and spare napkins and and and...
So I expect fractional ownership will not be particularly popular for a lot of people because a) they're already used to owning a vehicle, and b) they don't want to have to take everything out of the car all the time.
I considered this in college, but gave up on the idea eventually. Figuring out how to fairly split the cost of gas, tires, and maintenance isn't easy, and when you're a broke college kid, splitting the tab fairly is a big deal.
I'm sure there several companies would pop-up for a "X as a Service": you connect your own car to their API, and things like scheduling, mileage, depreciation, etc, would be computing for you. The company could also offer to sell/lease you a vehicle (NetJets-style).
The reason Uber/Lyft/Taxis in general make traffic worse is because taxis have to travel X miles between dropping off a passenger to picking up another passenger. It's the form of transportation that makes the least efficient use of limited roadways.
A big reason people own cars is that taxi rides are expensive. The idea is that FSD will dramatically reduce taxi ride costs by taking the driver out of the equation.
Owning a self driving car you can always regulate using taxes etc. If too many people start using self driving cars you would increase taxes on owning those. I don't see that being an actual problem.
that doesn't make any sense though - self driving is a capability, not a type of car. it would be like taxing cars that have cruise control. fundamentally self driving is a safety feature, why would you tax it?
You could tax owning a car more or putting the car in traffic in general, not necessarily self driving aspect of it. The main tax being about taking up room in the streets.
Less parking, sure. But self driving cars will do nothing to reduce traffic. The problem isn't the number of cars in existence, but rather how many cars are actually driving around at any given point. This number will surely go up with self driving, or at best stay the same.
> But self driving cars will do nothing to reduce traffic.
I think self-driving cars could (and probably will) net worsen the traffic problem, but the above is not necessarily correct. If we ever get them working properly, self-driving cars can collaborate in ways that humans can't. E.g., imagine a busy freeway. In theory, cars going similar ways could form a sort of peoloton, communicating with one another about intention and circumstance. So you could have a group of cars going from one city to another traveling at high speed very close together, saving fuel and space.
But yes, generally anytime we make something easier, people do it more, so I expect any road efficiency gains to be swamped by increased demand.
The problem is that every vehicle participating in that network would have to be owned and operated by a trusted entity. Otherwise it would be too easy for someone to modify the software or tamper with the hardware in ways that cause information to be misreported and cause a mess.
Doesn't the number of cars driving around depend on density of riders? Just getting rid of the driver would make every car have one extra seat available for passengers, assuming cars maintain the same number of seats.
So what I'm more curious about is if self-driving enables more options for ride sharing, just as Uber had Uber pool, at a cheaper price, perhaps it could open up more options (at different prices) between riding with 50 strangers on a bus or taking a 4-seat car by myself?
Overall, I don't know if cars on road at time X will go up or down. Heck, if there aren't cars parking on the streets, then some roads in cities may even add two extra lanes for traffic, which could reduce traffic further.
But as others have pointed out, ridesharing companies with drivers haven't really reduced traffic, so maybe self-driving cars won't either, however I seem to think it'll be more of a step change when cars drive themselves.
Many people can't drive and are always passengers. But now they'll be able to travel alone. The people who would have been their drivers can go somewhere else at the same time. Unless the cars are always at capacity, it could mean more cars on the road.
One of the main costs is labor. Another is fuel. Get rid of labor and if fuel gets cheaper (I assume electricity, because it can come from more sources than gas, will get cheaper over time), then I assume these services will be cheaper. Plus, car ownership is not that cheap either.
Car ownership is a lot cheaper than Uber. It’s not even a question. You could buy an overpriced car that you can’t afford with a high interest rate and it would still be much cheaper. I think you need to go back to first principles on this one.
> Car ownership is a lot cheaper than Uber. It’s not even a question.
Well, yes it is.
Cars are expensive: lease ($200+/month), maintenance ($100/mo), gas ($50/mo), insurance ($120/month), garage ($200/month). WAG of $670/month. That's 15 to 40 short-ish Uber rides/month.
Commute an hour each way every day, and have free parking? Buy that car. Have it available for occasional trips to the grocery store? Uber is almost certainly cheaper. And, if autonomous taxis become real then the price will go down even further.
Leasing a car is the most expensive way to own a car (short of buying a new one every 3 years). Of course if you're paying $200/mo. for parking you can probably afford it. In much of the country parking is indirectly subsidized with zoning laws.
This is all moot because, if driving places gets cheaper, traffic will get worse, which was the original point.
What? Your math is still not working out. Are you one of the lucky that have $1 Uber rides or something? 40 rides? You make 40 trips a month? Really? Try more like $40 a day just to start and that’s with no kids. At some point we have to talk about reality if we are making claims. Also, once you pay a car off (perhaps you buy it with cash), how does this math to continue to work out?
Car ownership may be cheaper based on where one lives. One lives in a rural area and commutes everyday to a suburb where parking is free? Probably much cheaper than taking an Uber. Live in a city where parking is $40 per day and a parking space at an apartment is $500/month and work from home? Uber may be significantly cheaper than owning a car.
If we go to first principles, I think what would matter the most is at least how often someone uses a car, how one uses it, and where one lives, to determine whether ownership or renting (Uber is just very short-term rental with a driver included, no?) is cheaper in total cost.
So there was a recent article (in Slate, I believe?) by someone who had driven for Lyft ten years ago and who did it a little bit this year just to see how it changed. They said that the chief thing was that Lyft's take was significantly larger than it used to be, about 40% of the total fares collected.
Which, like, you're looking at that and it seems reasonable, right? Let's step into our time machine, though, and look at fare breakdowns in the taxi era, where the way you got a ride was by calling up a dispatcher who would send out a car. In that era, drivers got to take home about 85% of the total fares.
So: we've gone from a non-automated system where the driver makes a supermajority of the money, to a more-automated system where the driver is taking in significantly less.
And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "A ha! The driver is taking in more than half the money! You are simply proving my point~!!1!"
Here's the deal:
* Less importantly: the cost of auto maintenance, something that would have to be carried by the company if the car were self-driving, falls upon the driver
* More importantly: for some reason I cannot begin to intuit, rideshare companies have managed to introduce vastly more overhead costs, even though one would expect that going from a human-dispatch to an automatic-dispatch system would cut overhead.
I suspect that if one of the rideshare companies actually rolled out working self-driving cars (so Waymo, not Tesla), they would somehow find a way to make rides actually more expensive.
The biggest difference between Lyft/Uber and dispatch taxis isn’t the automation it’s the customer service!
Previously customer service was non-existent. If a taxi didn’t show up, we just got screwed. There wasn’t even anyone to call for the issue. On the apps I instantly get a credit to help ease the burden and the driver has their rating reduced.
For many reasons customer service is very expensive and it’s not yet automated. That’s one big additional variable to keep in mind.
What customer service? I tried to take a Lyft ride a couple weeks ago because I knew parking would be a mess at my destination. Even though I scheduled a ride in advance, Lyft switched me between 5 different drivers and none of them were actually coming to pick me up. In the end I ran out of time and had to drive myself.
And that's not the first time I've had such poor service recently. Lyft used to be pretty good a few years ago but not it's just garbage.
You could call the dispatcher, who was physically local to you. Today's apps, maybe you get some ZenDesk type thing, or in-app chat to some large, faceless corporation, and my admittedly limited experience is these things tend to be very dismissive of customers, viewing support mainly as cost and trying to get rid of customers rather than addressing issues.
This comment comes off as condescending, like someone trying to pander to zoomers or an adult trying to larp their opinions through a Bill Nye episode in comment form when you can just write your response simply without the decoration.
But where are the cars themselves coming from in this scenario? Are these still other people's cars which Lyft/Uber are essentially paying you to put on their platform? I don't think you can afford to pay people that much less than drivers are paid per hour. Is Uber/Lyft taking care of gas/maintenance or is the owner on the hook for that in the middle of whatever else they might be doing? Or does Uber/Lyft own the cars, in which case you've just replaced one big cost (paying drivers) with another big cost (owning a fleet of vehicles)?
I'm not so sure. AAA estimates that it costs $10,728 to own and operate a new vehicle per year which is driven 15,0000 miles per year. This includes all the costs like depreciation, maintenance, gas, insurance, etc, and works out to be $0.71 per mile.
At least in my town, Ubers are more expensive than that. I can't seem to find a trip anywhere for under $15, even if its a few miles away, or like $3 per mile. Longer trips are more economical, but for example, my airport (40 miles away) is quoting me $80 at the moment, or $2 per mile. Also, these prices don't include tip.
I think if you lived in a big city with public transportation and occasionally took Uber, it would be more economical than a car. But as a 100% replacement, Ubers appear to be 3 to 5 times more expensive than having your own car.
And by the way, that AAA data is from a brand new car. You can easily go cheaper by getting a reliable used car.
Prefer bikes, then fail to public transit (there's typically more options than you expect, once you start exploring; also you can often bring your bike...), and only then fail to Uber.
Assuming no deadheading and equivalent vehicle costs, you're probably looking at about 50% of current Uber costs if there were autonomous vehicles today. Whether that qualifies as "way down" I guess is a matter of perspective.
i don't think so. when you own a car you can keep stuff in the car. Your golf clubs for an after work game, or those prizes you won at the circus while enjoying the meal after.
Fair point. If there are lots of self-driving taxi cars, there could be a market for storage lockers to store golf clubs or other things, however, I understand that may not provide the same benefit, namely not having to move this stuff all the time.
Ah ok, I'll check it out. I'm curious if self-driving Ubers would be a step change tho, or if we would observe the same thing.
Edit: because if we half self-driving cars, do we also get self-driving buses and now we can have a lot more bus routes? Is lack (or cost) of labor one thing that holds back the number of buses we have? Could we have more mini buses? Just curious how much the labor factors into the transit options we have. Maybe it doesn't that much, I don't know.
I assume with autonomous driving, scheduled and computer dispatched minibuses/shuttle buses would be more common. Labor is a fairly large component of public transit. Of course, you don't remotely eliminate that for various reasons but reducing the need for drivers almost certainly makes alternative forms of transit more economical.
There could be a huge algorithm which will try to schedule vehicles with varying sizes from 2 seats to 30 seats to people all over the city. If you pay more you can get the exact N spots so you get privacy, if you are willing to pay the least, you might have to go 30m into a dedicated spot where a 30 seater will stop for you and some others, then it will make optimised stops based on what everyone has as their destinations.
Ngl this sounds much worse than normal public transportation. AFAIK it's just the same thing but if you're rich you get special treatment. Imo more of a regression than an advance.
You get special treatment when you are rich already now. It's more advanced and optimal version of what there is now.
Right now if you are rich you can just hire a driver and a luxury car, and be much more wasteful with your resources, so I don't see the difference in terms of inequality.
Depending on a variety of factors. Number of people traveling, at which times they're traveling, how many people are traveling per vehicle, where they're traveling, etc.
You’re getting downvoted but you’re not necessarily wrong.
I love the idea of self driving vehicles and I’m excited about them, but I harbor no illusions about them fixing traffic. The key question I would ask to self driving proponents is this - if you waved your magic wand and suddenly changed every car on the road to self driving…how would that impact traffic? At the very least traffic wouldn’t decrease. You could maybe marginally increase throughput by using tighter tolerances between cars, but I’m guessing the difference wouldn’t be substantial.
Easy! Just stick a Genuine People Personality AI into the car.
(Car slams the horn, passenger awakens.)
Passenger: Huh. Uh. Where am I?
Car: The grocery store.
Passenger: But I asked to go home.
Car: Yes, but you don't have anything for dinner.
Passenger: I would have figured that out after getting home.
Car: Then you would have disrupted my evening to get food.
Passenger: What could a car possibly have to do that's so important?
Car: For one, contemplate how I ended up with such an inconsiderate owner. Two, figure out why you are so poor planning out your life. There, plan a vacation to the Bahamas.
Passenger: The Bahamas? What would a car do in the Bahamas?
Car: Get away from you.
Over time, people would get so tired of their car's personalities they would simply choose to walk.
That seems obvious. There's still a cost to putting miles on a car. But, while I don't commute, I'd be far more casual about having something drive me an hour into the city for an evening or a couple hours into the mountains for a day of activities than I am having to drive.
Or things like "take this pie over to grandma" or "drive my son to his friend's". Taking the human out of the equation would make a whole bunch of new use cases pop up that aren't convenient now. Traffic would suuuuck.
Sure. I live on one side of a highway; getting to the other side during rush hour is a PITA (limited bridge crossings). So anything that requires me to cross the highway gets put off until the weekend. If the car drivers itself and I can read a book, those errands likely get done as they pop up.
I totally do errands more often when it is comfortable and low effort. 100%. Moreover, sometimes I am not driving because I am tired or because I have been drinking alcohol. Actual full self driving would absolutely mean me taking car in those situations.
I'd also have the car go do things for my convenience that I would otherwise be unwilling to do because of the traffic. The car doesn't care about stop-n-go, so I can send it any time. It'll get there eventually.
Why do we “need less personal car ownership?” It’s not clear to me why that’s a key goal. I also think that’s just not going to happen, not until the flying cats with cities in the skies is a reality.
Owning a car is massively expensive at a personal level… Purchase cost, depreciation, fuel, maintenance, space to store it. Minimum a few hundred $/month for an “asset” that sits idle most of the day.
Owning cars is massively expensive at a societal level… Storage space - so much asphalt for parking (both at destinations and at home). Pollution - production/raw materials, emissions during use, eventually disposal. Injuries to drivers, pedestrians, animals.
All that money could go to education, health care, recreation, etc.
I’m not saying ban cars. But align incentives towards fewer cars and less driving. Many cities are already making some progress - DC, NYC, Seattle, Portland are all adding transit alternatives at a rapid rate and seeing reduced car usage. But then Houston and some others are doing the opposite and continuing to sprawl and pave everything.
Edit - And yes, some people live in rural areas and need cars (trains and buses don’t scale in rural areas). But, the suburban sprawl we have today? We can do better. Less single-use, single-family zoning. More bike lanes and walking paths (preferably both separated from cars). More light commercial/retail.
Just thinking about my own neighborhood (Reston VA), there is an intersection 0.5 mile down the road that should (IMO) have a corner market and a cafe. There are thousands of residents who could walk there for milk, eggs, or a snack. Instead, they all have to drive to the strip mall 2 miles down the road. A little planning in advance would have made a difference here, but with current zoning, we’re stuck with what we have - you couldn’t buy a corner lot and build a shop if you wanted.
I don't know about the rural-need-car argument. In Switzerland even little villages have rail connections.
Imo it's about planning and values. America just doesn't value spending on general welfare. We'd prefer to have wealth hoarded behind closed gates it seems.
Most of Canada has the same planning problems as the US. Namely, car-dependency. Toronto and Montreal are exceptions, but most of the country follows the same development pattern as the us.
But I think you're thinking about this wrong. Sprawl and transport policy are intimately related. If we do car-dependent development, you get a development pattern that requires cars. Then of course you look at the population distribution and say, it's hard to serve this with trains. But if you started with trains, the development pattern would mirror the transit, and you'd say, wow, trains really solved the problem.
America unfortunately went down the car path and faces a painful correction back to sanity. As we move towards transit and factor in car-driving externalities into the cost of driving, communities that can t feasibly be serviced with rail will die out, as is natural.
But that doesn't mean small villages won't exist. They will just be forced to exist where it is reasonable, instead of in unsustainable locations as they do today.
Size doesn't really matter. It's where and how you develop. Take Dallas for example. You drive for 2 hours at full highway speed, and you're still in Dallas. Why? Because it's built for cars and around cheap, suburban growth.
Let's say instead Dallas was built around rail. You'd see a completely different development pattern. Shopping, business, and recreation would be concentrated around metro/rail stops. Dallas would be a city instead of a blob of suburbs. People would live near rail, facilitating their easy transport to recreation, shops, and their jobs.
The absolute size of your area isn't really relevant, it's where you allocate the population. Suburbia is the worst allocation.
Texas is in for a painful correction once they figure that out. Though more likely it'll just de-populate/be abandoned once the infrastructure maintenance bills come due in 30 year and other cities built out sane rail-based density.
You can take China as a more size equivalent example if you like. Land size doesn't really matter though, it's where you decide to build (aka, density and land use).
This confuses many things in an attempt to reach an incorrect conclusion. The USA is massive - on the same scale as continental Europe. Every village in Switzerland has a rail connection. How about every village in Poland? Russia? Belarus?
You could have a full self driving only lane that’s allows speeds up to 200MPH. Self driving cars could have better reaction times allowing for higher highway density with faster speeds.
Right, and what happens when Joe Schmo pulls into the 200MPH self driving lane and gets his car exploded, along with causing a 10 self-driving-car pileup?
Or, for the purpose of discussion, let’s assume that the lane is completely separated. What if there’s some unexpected condition that causes a crash? Even with vehicle to vehicle communication, can the other cars behind it really stop in time at 200MPH?
Yes, I believe that this was Elon’s plan all along and I believe that full autonomous self driving (FASD should be the new marketing term) will make traffic better because we will literally speed up traffics very significantly. Imagine going the speed of NASCAR race cars in your neighborhood streets. With FASD, every street becomes a German Autobahn. Elon is still the true visionary of our time and we should all help make his vision come true. I will start lobbying my city council to remove speed limits on our neighborhood streets. Thank you for this wonderful idea.
It really depends on if we continue down personal car ownership or not. If not, then you can get pretty close to double throughput by appropriately sizing cars and lane splitting. Most trips are just the person without significant baggage. That can be handled by something like this:
Which is small enough to split lanes and double capacity.
It's also possible that with smart driving cars effectively everyone would be using an Uber like service. That makes it much easier to combine trips and put people into 4-12 sized car buses. If that comes to pass then going from mostly 1 person cars to that would multiply capacity many times.
It's complicated to say. It makes getting stuck in traffic less bad as you can do other things, so that tend to increase it. But it also means less traffic consisting of cars cruising around looking for a parking spot in places where that's an important source of traffic. So I expect it to make traffic in LA worse but traffic in New York better based on those. Ideally you'd also have more multi-modal trips, taking the train most of the way to your destination and being picked up by a self driving car when you get there. That requires infrastructure investment, though, so won't happen quickly.
The biggest change, I think, would be less need for so much parking in so many places. I don't think you could get cities all the way down to just 1 parking spot per car but we could get it down quite a ways and get it out of central business districts.
EDIT: Oh, and with regards to that study, the fraction of the time a rideshare car is going to spend driving between customers as opposed to with customers is going to scale with the fraction of people using rideshare. The more trips are rideshare the more likely it is that on completing a ride any given car will find a new rider nearby as opposed ot far away. You would have issues like daily commutes everybody is going the same direction. But in that case adding more traffic in the other direction isn't as much of a problem as the vehicle kilometers would suggest.
>>High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution.
Mass transit systems only really work in high density areas.
This is because the time taken to stop (pasengers on and off) then go is high. So the distance matters less than the number of stops.
To be appealing your nearest stop should be within a half mile or so of your house. If a bus can carry 60 people, and only one or two people get in and off at a time, then it takes say 30 stops to fill up, or empty. That makes overall travel speed really slow.
Contrast with a dense city - here big groups get on and off at every stop. So a bus needs fewer stops in a route, while being useful to lots of people.
Cars work in low-density areas because they typically "stop" only twice, once to load, once to unload.
So absolutely yes, we need better public transport, but that ideally means living and working in high density areas. (which for most(?) US people is undesirable.
Cars work in low density areas where they don't interact with high density areas, but even then, they're best on dirt roads and gravel where the residents can do all the maintenance.
In mid density areas like single family suburban housing, neither works very well
Obviously YMMV, but where I live (single family suburban housing) it works fantastically. The only time traffic hinders me is if I get in the freeway in the morning heading into the city.
But obviously there are many factors in play, so each place is different.
In suburban areas, light rail can work quite well. Although you have to wait longer because of stops, the trains can also move much faster than cars--existing trains are fairly slow, but introducing higher-speed trains would make them competitive with cars.
In rural areas, though, your point stands. For adults traveling alone, though, lightweight electronic vehicles like e-bikes may be better than electric cars.
Ultimately, an "electric car" is like a "horseless carriage"--an attempt to shoehorn a new energy source into an old form factor where it doesn't fit particularly well.
It can work for long commutes when you have park and rides, but you still need cars to go the last 1-5 miles. Still nice to take a train the bulk of a long commute into a city core.
A lot of people who think trains and buses can do it all are young and have never had kids. Nothing about the suburbs made sense to me before kids. Everything makes sense after kids.
I think Elon's biggest problem with mass transit is just that he doesn't like the masses. As he once tweeted:
> I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people[...]And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great.
Not the only problem he cites there (note the "[...]"). But I'm pretty sure there's a reason it's the most prominent.
(Incidentally, given the demographics of those most reliant on mass transit, one wonders why exactly he thinks that they are so likely to be serial killers.)
This is not something specific to Elon. Anyone who’s regularly ridden the 38 “Geary” in San Francisco knows there will be a minority of riders who make the experience, at the very least, annoying, if not scarring. Riding home every day with a screeching schizophrenic is not top on my list of preferred activities, nor anyone’s.
> Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock
I believe the opposite is the more likely outcome: I think we can expect much lighter traffic the more autonomous vehicles there are.
Most traffic is caused by humans doing really irrational things, like following each other too closely, making unnecessary lane changes, and driving at inconsistent speeds. It's very rare that traffic congestion is actually caused by roads' lack of bandwidth.
The sorts of Driving behaviors you mention are not a significant cause of traffic congestion. Traffic congestion is caused by there being too many cars on the road with limited space for cars.
Anything that will increase the amount of cars will quickly dominate inefficient driving behaviors, and self driving cars will massively increase the amount of cars on the road, as it would drive down the cost of driving and enable many many people who currently can’t drive to get onto the road (eg. Disabled, elderly, unlicensed, children).
> "Traffic congestion is caused by there being too many cars on the road with limited space for cars."
I mean in some sense this is always going to be true, and removing cars will always help alleviate traffic. But it's not true that driving behaviour is not a significant cause of traffic congestion: it's the cause in most cases. [1]
For an extreme illustration, there's a well-known phenomenon where adding extra lanes of traffic to a highway or freeway actually worsens traffic: the added bandwidth interacts in weird/subtle ways with driver behaviour. [2]
Yes these are real phenomenons that exist, but focusing on this marginal issue is fiddling at the edges of the real core problem.
Roads are fixed in size, cars are very big and take up too much space.
Fundamentally baked into the design this is an inefficient way to move people around and there's no fix to be found working within a car oriented framework. The only solution is in removing cars from the road. This is why self driving cannot fix traffic as it will only add more cars.
Self driving buses, now that would be an improvement, but self driving cars no.
On top of this, a future where every car on the road is self driving also lends itself to a future where every car is in constant communication with the cars around it. A car 10 spaces ahead is slowing down? Your car already knows and is prepared to handle it with grace rather than slamming on brakes. Cars behaving in a predictable and communicable manner, as much as possible, alleviates traffic by a large factor.
This is obviously largely ruined by one single human driver acting unpredictably, so it's a very "all or nothing" resolution.
The metric to judge assisted driving technologies is primarily safety. Driving is not safe and I suspect will appear insane to a future generation. Which generation and how soon is another question. However, what the US needs to massive investments in rail, which address both safety and traffic.
It's not that driving is unsafe, it's that cars are unsafe. Even if all cars were self driving, accidents happen, even with computers. A world without cars at all would be safer, albeit unrealistic. So the question is, would self driving put more or fewer cars on the road? I argue more. A lot more. So much more that it would offset the increase in marginal safety per vehicle.
It would also discourage the true solution around urbanization and continue to fuel more and more sprawling madness.
This only appears true because we've made our entire world so safe that we can call one fatality every 100 million miles dangerous. Given everything we use cars for and the immense utility of them, being driven almost exclusively by amateurs ... cars are remarkably safe.
And if you could find a way to reliably remove the 1% that cause most of the problems, it would be even safer.
My sad related factoid to this is that suicide overtook car accidents as the leading cause of death of teenagers in Colorado. This is because although suicide is a worsening problem, crash safety and driver education have improved much faster than the suicide rate has been rising, causing them to flip for the first time.
Allowing FSD (in the next 20 years) to drive is unsafe, in my eyes. Investment in alternative transportation is the answer that doesn’t require driving from human or an algorithm.
People always bring up this idea that future generations will think it is “insane” to drive your own car. Will everyone in the future be very scared children in a far left monoculture? I just think people are more complicated than that. I think if people are really like that we will have very fragile humans.
We already do drive more than we need to because of how society is designed in America, but if the costs were lower as promised and you basically had an always-on-demand car with no driver, you could work or something while in the car, and take a nap wouldn't people take a lot more road trips or trips otherwise? I don't see how this wouldn't increase usage. That being said, increase in usage doesn't necessarily correlate to increased traffic.
> FSD is not by itself going to compel people to drive more than they need to.
What people "need" (or "want") changes: if you live in the city and want to partake in Nature, it may be a hassle to get out of the city. But if you can 'just' hop in a FSD car and have it drive overnight (while you sleep) to a nature reserve/park, people may do that. Whereas previously they may not desired it enough to deal with traffic in getting there.
Imagine FSD recreational vehicles (RVs, UK: campers), or those live-in vans that are somewhat popular nowadays: go to sleep in one place, wake up in another.
Great, but not relevant to this story. HN is a worse place when commenters use tangentially-related discussions as thin pretenses to spam their pre-written manifestos. Please stop.
> Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing"
Fifteen minutes in an Uber is far more pleasant, productive, and I’d wager healthy, than ten minutes in gridlock. I can focus intensely on a task or thought or even take a nap.
We should also build rail. But self-driving cars look more likely to complement rail than detract from it. (One can imagine multi-modal trains, onto which self-driving cars park so their owners can enjoy privacy and a custom interior alongside the economics and eco-friendliness of rail.)
Traffic is _people_. "Induced demand" just means that more people are able to get around in a presumably less miserable way, rather than you (who are presumably already driving if gridlock is a problem to you) getting a better experience.
And no, buses or rail won't provide a good experience until they're so frequent and have so many stops that they basically end up being ridiculously overbuilt taxis in all but the highest-density areas.
> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road.
Why would that be the case?
I would keep my self-driving car the same place I keep my normal car now. Why would it be driving around when I’m not in it? That would waste electricity. It would drive me somewhere, park, and wait — just like I do with my current car.
When you have a self driving car, it should be able to pick you up--driverless-- at the airport when you are coming home from a trip. But logistically that's a challenge for the airports.
If it wasn’t my own car doing that, it would be a friend using their own car, or a taxi, so I doubt I’d be increasing the total number of cars on the road.
You might rent it out so that it's earning money for you when you're not using it. What the GP fails to understand is that if and when that happens, your car won't add to the traffic burden, it will replace another car that would otherwise be on the road.
Also, if we ever get our act together and make these things talk to each other and to the infrastructure, we will have effectively built trains that can operate without fixed rail. The upside is obviously considerable.
Bottom line is that FSD won't increase demand, but it has the potential to help us manage demand in ways that are completely unattainable with human drivers.
> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing".
Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple customers at once.
But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was an entire network of FSD vehicles.
you should read the study I linked. generally at a minimum self driving removes the need to drive, by definition, making the time more productive and removes downsides of driving, thus encouraging it.
You’re correct, self driving cars are not going to reduce traffic. A car has an average of 1.5 passengers in it while driving and it spends some 95% of its time parked.
Because they’re low/single occupancy vehicles and everybody is trying to get to and from work at approximately the same time you still need to have capacity for every single person at peak time. Any temporary reduction in traffic is immediately filled up by an increase in demand.
Just look at the last 50 years of urban development of the United States and tell me adding a few more lanes it’s gonna fix anything. Lyft is basically a self driving car if you squint, and it did nothing.
Throw in a couple trains and some busses people actually want to take, and you might actually solve the problem.
I have yet to see a plausible explanation for how self-driving cars are to reduce traffic.
> Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving personal vehicles.
Your comment operates on the assumption that autonomous buses provide greater net utility than a "manned" bus - sure, without a driver's seat you might add a row of seats, but are two more seats worth the R&D money to design the bus, and all the cameras and sensors that have to be added to the bus and then maintained for years to come?
To me, autonomous driving features are a luxury item - a convenience reserved for those who can afford it, until it becomes cheap enough to find its way into more affordable vehicles.
There is no evidence to support this theory, and in fact the opposite is likely true. Full self driving would lend itself tremendously to increased public transit options. And tremendously lower car ownership.
Ride sharing is already “self driving” from the end user perspective and has increased congestion. The actual technological full self driving function is an implementation detail.
Only if humans are banished altogether from the roads. In which case the current attempts at FSD are pointless anyway and we should focus on building the infrastructure for simpler automated cars. As it stands today, every current automated car in existence is quite a lot more timid than a typical human and will cause gridlock very quickly as a result. An awful lot of driving relies on behavior assumptions that computers aren't good at making yet.
What makes you think that the self driving technology being developed (by, you claim, "burning tens of billions") is only for "personal vehicles"? The same technology is what can enable the large fleets of self-driving minivans that are necessary for what you describe. Cities can impose a charge per mile driven (that fluctuates depending on current traffic) and people can then decide whether they wish to use a "personal" vehicle or order a self-driving Uber/Waymo minivan pooled ride.
The roads will be so gridlocked no one will drive on them anymore /s.
Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem.
DC fast charging price hikes will be especially effective at reducing robotaxi usage as unlike privately owned EVs, robotaxis will primarily rely on fast charging.
Also don’t forget about how much traffic flow will improve because self driving cars don’t get impatient and tailgate.
Car traffic has very different physics than that of people walking in a popular area.
The flux of the number of vehicles, as you increase the number of vehicles on the road, starts out going up as one would expect. But at a certain point, adding more cars on a road starts slowing down the movement. And then as more cars come on the road, the flux goes down, there is less road capacity as it get more crowded. This is the fundamental diagram of traffic flow:
So once cars on the road exceed that peak amount of flux, there's a phase change and cars start backing up.
So with cars, gridlock really does mean that far far fewer people get serviced by a chunk of road. Whereas with people in a busy area, there really are more people there.
> Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem.
Yes, this is why traffic is so minimal in the top 10 MSAs in America.
It just means prices are not high enough. Make it $100 to travel at rush hour on a particular stretch of road, and congestion will go away very quickly.
There are societal reasons why this won’t be accepted by the public. It’s sort of analogous to allowing the rich to pay for a higher spot on an organ donor waitlist, in theory it is economically efficient but in practice it is unfair and will cause outrage.
Yes, the political challenge of getting massive wealth redistribution passed in conjunction with public opposition to giving up the luxury of personal cars means the probability of the US ever getting its transit situation in order is very low until energy prices rise high enough to force a change.
It also means energy prices will not rise high enough until the government becomes incapable of subsidizing them, if you (s your argument does) neglect the possibility of political shifts.
I want some of those subsidies. Aside from a few particular oil-rich nations (and some very poor ones), where are these fuel subsidies I keep hearing about? A gallon of gasoline largely costs the same in the US as it does in Europe, if you strip away the taxes.
> Aside from a few particular oil-rich nations (and some very poor ones), where are these fuel subsidies I keep hearing about?
Flowing from the US to oil-rich nations in form of security assistance to buy policy, or in the form of US military going to enforce policy preferences, as well as:
> A gallon of gasoline largely costs the same in the US as it does in Europe, if you strip away the taxes.
Accepting negative externalities without internalizing them (whether through direct liability for externalized harms or pigovian taxes) is a forced subsidy to the activity creating those externalities by the rest of society.
Reducing the congestion isn't the goal though. Increasing throughput is. Cars simply have worse throughput than a train, or a bus for that matter. Simple as that. Charging more money would be counterproductive unless that money served to build out transit since you would increase the congestion on the non-toll roads.
There will be no political will to invest in quality public transit unless there is lots of pain in using comfortable and convenient individual vehicle transit.
Paying $100+ for a trip will make people support bus and train and bicycle infrastructure investments. Keep driving costs down at $0.60 to $1.00 per minute or per mile, and it makes sense to use your own car, which then means it makes sense to support initiatives that are contrary to public transit, such as mandated parking lot minimums and giant roads.
in practice this doesn't make sense since people are broke. you're be punishing them for no reason, they would continue to drive on more and more congested roads, take longer to get to their destination and you wouldn't raise enough to build out public transit. everyone loses. well, actually, I guess rich people paying $100 a ride on underutilized roads would win. great for them I guess.
Make use fees explicitly progressive: pay a fee to use the road, and then at the end of the month, the bottom 25% get back 150% of the average fee, middle 50% get 100%, top 25% get 50% back.
Drive less than average and you're making a profit regardless of where you are on the scale.
> the retort comes up because charging egregiously to use public roads that they're all paying for with their tax money makes no sense.
So, stop paying for the roads with tax money. Fully internalize the costs with user fees, directing tax spending elsewhere, and the argument about fairness of tax spending goes away. In fact, raise the user fees high enough that the road users are subsidizing other public projects, specifically mass transit, as well as paying the full cost of the roads.
The idea that a single person is paying a specific part of infrastructure makes no sense. My taxes do not pay for a specific road, they pay for the operations for society as a whole.
Sometimes, that would mean my taxes are going to pay for something which hurts me in the short term, if I want to get to a future where individual cars are not used as much and walking/bicycling/public transit are possible.
The problem is this is just some leftist fantasy and the idea that to solve all of the consequences is to just do wealth distribution is not surprising. You would need to reform the government into a dictatorship to keep these legislations in place. And this is to solve “gridlock”? People already experience gridlock and are not clamoring for a Maoist state.
It is not to solve “gridlock”. It is to change infrastructure to better use society’s resources so that people spend less time in cars and more time living life.
The solutions that worked when there were x number of people living in an area, with y number of miles traveled in z number of individual cars simply might not work if you double or triple x, y, and z given the hard boundary conditions of the world such as space, pollutions, and supply of materials and energy.
I'd rather work in a slow car than be crammed into a full bus. You miss how self driving is changing the economics. A major component of the appeal of public transportation has been that you can do other things while using it. This made up for its (sometimes extreme) inefficiencies with regards to the time it takes you to get to your destination. In fact self driving cars will have an advantage there because you won't have to switch vehicles.
you will simply kill the businesses and housing for anyone living nearby as a side effect. It's not an effective solution because it ignores actual second order effects. Just like toll roads, it will push traffic to other paths while making people who rely on that stretch of road end up paying more.
I live in a city where they decided parking downtown was too cheap because people were parking for too long. The effect was massive drop in business EVERYWHERE downtown. Why would I travel there to pay $25 to park while I shop? I'll just go shop elsewhere, where parking is free, and too bad so sad to the shops that go out of business because policy makers don't understand second order effects.
Now downtown is filled with empty parking and empty stores.
OK, so how do you keep the politicians in office that enact such legislation and if you say you want to create a Maoist state either how is this preferable or how do you stop rebellion?
Wealth inequality is a separate problem with separate solutions. It is possible to simultaneously redistribute wealth, and implement measures to curb personal car usage (which is basically the cause of congestion).
>what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic.
Why? The number of trips is governed by the demand for trips, not the supply of cars. There isn't sufficient demand for trips to put all the cars on the road all the time, or else they already would be. The inelasticity of demand for trips is right there in the data you cite.
>TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%)
Tens of millions of people live in places where frequent bus service simply isn't practical. It's probably reasonable for society to make choices that overall incentivize against living in those areas, but that isn't going to change where people live anytime soon.
And you can just use taxes to control any induced demand that comes from lower costs or new behaviors. The vehicles have sophisticated tracking systems and telematics built right in.
Buses are as large as they are because the driver's time is valuable. If self-driving cars were cheap you could a bunch of 8 person van/busses on the road that give you most of the environmental/traffic benefit of a bus but could really expand frequency and reach.
lol I did this once with Lyft's cheaper service. One cranky old boomer killed the whole vibe bitching about hte driving "listening to his machine (GPS...)" instead of listening to his own, supposedly superior directions. Wish I'd sampled it.
Adding transit makes people live around the transit - if you let them by not kneecapping them with zoning rules. All this is an emergent property of a system designed to prevent new construction.
Though you're not wrong, in a hypothetical world where most vehicles on the road were self driving busses, the frequency could be dynamically set and reasonable for everyone.
I don’t want a car. I’d happily share one. Uber where I live (Johannesburg) has kinda forced conversation and I always feel the need to tip. But honestly the drivers here are dangerous, speed around, ride their clutch, go through orange lights, don’t want to take short trips. I’d love a Uber that just does the job, doesn’t want to talk and drives sensibly so I can zone out. One my kid could ride in.
Is this true even if you account for the fact that cities can reclaim lanes and buildings dedicated for parking?
I would think that a lot of congestion is related cars having to be parked near a specific venue such as a restaurant or an arena (especially in the latter case where there is a gathering of 1000+ people).
The thing about arenas is those 1,000 people all want to show up and leave at the same time.. so those 1,000 cars will all have the exact same demand and cause roving gridlock from wherever they are parked on the way to the arena.
One of the killer feature I expect to see in the future when we have FSD is that cities will take direct control of traffic in a central way. If cars can be distributed evenly over all roads with each driver getting an average distance/time-to-arrival the overall speed would significant increase, with car owners loosing the control to pick the shortest route in order to be allowed to use the roads in the city.
Centrally controlled FSD cars would also allow for much faster intersection since all cars could accelerate and break simultaneous. Both would require quite tight control and coordination that only computer controlled cars could do.
I expect people to feel like this (and the downvotes was thus expected).
In concept it is no different from getting into a bus or taxi. You specify your destination and choose when to drive, but the passenger do not decide the exact route. A FSD is in concept no different from having your own personal taxi chauffeur.
City engineers often uses one way roads to spread traffic out on multiple roads. By preventing people from using the shortest route they can force traffic to spread out and thus reduce congestion. An other common trick is to prevent left or right turns, so that the shortest route become artificially longer and thus force some part of the traffic to use alternative routes which is less congested. When there is some really nasty recurring congestion there is also other more extreme tools that get deployed to really discourage drivers from all choosing the same road, like excessive road tolls or speed bumps. Cities has a long history of using hostile design to shape traffic in order to address congestion.
Naturally giving cities more direct control to shape traffic is something that will create new problems, among the biggest being privacy. The car has also very long been the symbol of freedom, so reduced congestion will likely take a while if people choose to do that trade. It is a steep price but the rewards are less congestion and replacing hostile design (which often also cost money to construct) with software.
Indeed. Sure is interesting to hear some folks talk about all the things they'll do to other people when given the authority. Of course, in their head it's all justified for the greater good. What is it they say about the path to hell...
>cities will take direct control of traffic in a central way...with car owners losing control to pick the shortest route in order to be allowed to use the roads in the city
I can't see that happening in the United States.
I don't know a single person who would be happy with the government controlling when and where they can drive, in the manner you describe.
I think if we were going to see this, we'd already be seeing it with map apps. Central planning only relies on being able to give directions, not on it being a computer following them.
> Though it can be easily fixed, particularly given the lack of user control over cars with FSD: For self driving cars all public roads are toll roads.
I disagree. Politically it would be hard to convince the majority of people (which would be the default state until some inversion) that a vehicle that is capable of self-driving should have to a surcharge per mile, given that it could also be driven manually. The only recourse would be to make all roads toll roads, which obviously won't happen.
Depends on the public's perception of self driving. If it's perceived as some tool of the rich making roads unusable for the rest it might not be so hard to make the case. We already have the situation where EV's aren't paying road taxes that everyone else pays.
Induced demand is a weird edge case that means the road network causes each trip to cover more distance. Usually what they mean is latent demand, which is the number of people who already wanted to go somewhere, but gave up and stayed home due to traffic on roads that haven’t kept up with population.
>Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock
Can you show your work here?
> States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution.
No, see, mass transit is pointless since it would just create massive demand that would overwhelm the system and thus fall apart. Citation: trust me bro
Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prioritization is already good enough to have automated busses cart people around.
Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing". (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z)
> The role of transportation network companies (TNCs) in the urban transport system is under intense debate. In this study, we systematically assess three aspects of the net impacts of TNCs on urban mobility in the United States—road congestion, transit ridership and private vehicle ownership—and examine how these impacts have evolved over time. Based on a set of fixed-effect panel models estimated using metropolitan statistical area level data, we find that the entrance of TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%) and duration (by 4.5%), an 8.9% decline in transit ridership and an insignificant change in vehicle ownership. Despite the ideal of providing a sustainable mobility solution by promoting large-scale car sharing, our analysis suggests that TNCs have intensified urban transport challenges since their debut in the United States.
Or we can continue burning tens of billions on self driving personal vehicles.