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.
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.