10 ms·

A Week with Chauffeurs Showed the Major Flaw in a Self-Driving Car Future

161 points by catbird 7y ago

im3w1l 7y ago
Imagine a job where you work for 3h out of an autonomous office-furnished RV, have meetings and lunch for 2.5h and then work for 3h in the car again. You could live where land is really cheap! And you wouldn't need to sit in an open office. Better hope your mileage is good though.
- abyssin 7y ago
  Better hope there's no issue with the pollution caused by the energy needed for the additional commutes.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  That seems incredibly wasteful. You spend 6 hours in a car for 2.5 hours at the office. Just come to the office for a whole day once a week and stay home the other days,
kjksf 7y ago
Here's what this research tells me: demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. Current use is limited by cost and convenience. Self-driving car is likely to fix both so it'll lead to more use of transportation. This is a good thing. We're currently deprived and if things go well, we'll get more of what we want. The congestion problem is mostly overblown. First, maybe with rare exceptions like L.A., the traffic is only bad during rush hour, when people are going to work and getting back home. Other times there's plenty. Second, the way we drive currently is very inefficient. Just last weak I was walking in San Diego along a street at ~5:30 PM i.e. rush hour. I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person. Not to mention that ~40% cars were gigantic, because it looks that if people can afford gigantic cars, they'll buy them. And in US they can afford it. Robotaxis would fix those 2 issues. The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol but a utility operated by an organization focused on practicality and cost, like buses and trains. It's also very easy to use pricing to force people to use the available resources efficiently during congestion. Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people. If that pricing delta is not enough, increase the price of to $20 (vs $3) or to $50. Or provide commuting passes tho employers (kind of like Google buses) where a company pays a $100 to robotaxi company per month and the employee gets to use it for free for commute, but only in shared mode. The future with robotaxis is much brighter than those doomsday prediction of traffic.
- l3robot 7y ago
  Not also to mention something often oversight. An autonomous car can park far away from it's user, meaning we could drastically reduce de number of space taken by parking in the city. First, giving back this spaces to the people as green parks and services places. Second, lower one of the biggest problem in our current city: urban heat island.
  - amarshall 7y ago
    But then you’ll likely have a bunch of extra traffic created from the cars going to and from their owner to parking, rather than just to and from their destination. Or from the car just circling the block because the owner would rather not have to wait long for its return.
    - alasdair_ 7y ago
      The “circling the block” is something that Uber etc. already exacerbate. I think one solution would be to charge for each minute you are in a congested area to avoid having a whole bunch of empty cars clogging the streets.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        There's a big limit on how bad it can be with Uber though because each Uber is currently driven by an actual person. That person costs money and places a natural limit on how many unutilized Ubers there will be. With AVs, this limit no longer exists, and people will start using AVs for runs that currently are prohibitively expensive with care that require drivers.
    - jellicle 7y ago
      Right. You go to the opera, you order the car to drive around the block for two hours and then pick you up. Cost of gas is cheaper than parking and by definition, you're not affected by any traffic congestion caused as you're sitting watching your show. Sure, 1000 other people in the theater are also doing it, but that's not your problem. 30 minutes before the show is over, you order the car to wait in the "no stopping" zone in front of the theater for easy access. You exit the theater and find your car is tangled in a mess of traffic that takes 45 minutes to clear as most of the cars are double-parked and blocking traffic, waiting for their owners. For the duration of the show, no useful traffic has been able to move for a mile in any direction, as empty cars are just idling around and are content to wait, fully stopped. Tragedy of the commons.
modeless 7y ago
It has been obvious to me for a long time that AVs will not reduce traffic. Reducing the cost of driving will cause more driving to happen. While AVs will use the road slightly more efficiently, the increase in driving will more than make up for it. AVs will make traffic a whole lot more tolerable, though. And they will dramatically reduce parking needs, freeing up space for other uses.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It's a complete nobrainer. Right now the bulk of the cars are single occupant. That's because it is the occupants going places, not the cars. As soon as self-driving cars are a reality it will be the cars going places that get added to all the other traffic already there.
  - drcross 7y ago
    This is why I keep a keen eye on single occupancy vehicles. They will be the ultimate form of transportation and we haven't decided upon a good model design yet (think Renault twizy)
    - Jamwinner 7y ago
      I own a couple 2 seaters, and even that amount of reduced functionality with similar emissions seems dumb. This would only work if you did not value proximity to your friends and family.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Once AVs become commonplace it's entirely possible that the majority of the cars on the road will have zero occupants, either because they're running errands or doing the deadhead leg of an occupied trip. It's absurd to think that transit buses containing dozens of riders are going to be held up behind zero-occupancy vehicles. The roads are going to get much much worse.
    - akadruid1 7y ago
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
Isn’t this just Jevons Paradox applied to driving? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- semiotagonal 7y ago
  This reminds me of how my own behavior changed when Amazon Locker arrived. I could order what I wanted, and have it delivered up the street without having it stolen off of my porch! Now I'll order something off Amazon, then 30 minutes later think of something else I need, then 10 minutes after that get another item, and then I've got 3 separate shipments taking up 3 spaces in the lockers, because to me there's no cost to the lack of planning. When Amazon tells me the lockers are full, I become furious.
  - ars 7y ago
    I've had Amazon combine separate orders into a single box. If your orders are really 30 and 10 minutes apart, Amazon will ship them together if it can.
    - semiotagonal 7y ago
      That's weird, I don't think I've ever seen that happen. I'm constantly having multiple doors pop open at the locker. Although maybe it's possible they do it some of the time and I'm actually much worse about fragmenting my orders than I think :)
- m-i-l 7y ago
  Or the Lewis–Mogridge Position[0] which is that "traffic expands to meet the available road space", i.e. building more roads (thinking it will improve traffic congestion) usually ends up making the traffic congestion worse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_Position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_Positio...
Animats 7y ago
"every single retiree used the chauffeur to go to Napa for wine tastings" How did they pick their sample?
paulsutter 7y ago
Saved you a click. Please put this number in the title. > The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83 percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior.
rladd 7y ago
I think the conclusion is probably right, but the experiment seems problematic. If I was told that a chauffeur was waiting for me to tell them where to take me, I might feel a little obligated to keep them busy rather than just waiting around for me. So I might take more rides than I would have otherwise, out of some sense of politeness. A better experiment might be to give people an unlimited Lyft or Uber account for a week. It might also help to tell them that a randomly selected driver will be paid for any time they are not taking rides, so they don't feel like they will be helping someone out if they take more rides. I think that there would still be an increase in rides, but maybe not quite as large an increase.
ben509 7y ago
There's a solution to the congestion problem that works even without AVs: private ownership of roads and automated pricing. Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road. If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route and time to drive, people can make better decisions. And people living nearby should be able to collect nuisance fees from road operators by measuring traffic volume. The operators can build baffling to reduce the volume, or simply increase the cost of using that road to offset the fees paid. (And, of course, the operator has to pay to maintain the road, and it's a lot easier to sue a private entity if potholes damage your vehicle.) And if data on the cost of commuting is readily available, employers can be required to pay for it as part of a standard labor contract, and they can offer employees incentives to move, adjust schedules to minimize costs, work remotely, etc.
- uryga 7y ago
  > private ownership of roads and automated pricing i'd love to have a full tank of gas but not be able to drive somewhere because my card's maxed out! fun end-of-month times > Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road [EDIT: removed - misunderstood the quote] > If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route how is that a good thing? it sounds like a black mirror episode.
- balt_s 7y ago
  I would like to live in a world where people are good-faith coordinated enough to make this possible, but I think we don't live in anything like that world.
- mmanfrin 7y ago
  Privatizing roads is absolutely not a solution. People do not choose to drive congested roads, they already have traffic information available to them in the form of google maps. All your solution would do is make it prohibitively infeasible foe many to drive, cutting them off from jobs. A few at the top would see less traffic, but roads only for the 1% aren't really something we should be aiming for.
Shivetya 7y ago
Pretty much ignores the fact that once society adapts to having driver less cars they will lapse back into their standard habits and pattern on use fairly quickly. let alone ignore the fact that many services will pop up doing the driving for many different people across all hours of the day freeing many from own the vehicle in the first place. you might even have the modern day equivalent of time sharing where you pay to have priority access to a vehicle. the test was so bad as to be laughable, seriously, drawing such conclusions from such a small control set is only useful for proving something a select group wants to believe.
shkkmo 7y ago
It seems flagrantly obvious that congestion pricing is necessary to allow us to have the benefits of self-driving cars without shooting ourselves in the foot traffic wise. That being said, OF COURSE driving goes up when you tell someone: "here, have this luxury that you can't normally afford for free for JUST one week". The novelty factor alone will lead to unnecessary trips and over consumption. Not to mention the guilt factor of having a chauffeur sitting in your driveway doing nothing.
coding123 7y ago
Just a crazy aside, it seems like current policy as well as the potential ones in this thread seem to tax or affect poor more. For example: the way we tax road use is through gas - rich people in EVs don't pay this tax. Some people in this thread are suggesting to just make cars with self driving capability prohibitedly expensive, forcing them to rent an Uber instead of owning. Sounds just like our current housing market. Some suggestions are to charge for the mile and time of day... Again restrictions against poor from driving when rich people want to do so. Another suggestion is to have more private roads, presumably again owned by rich people, with little regard for the poor already paying rent on everything else.
zer00eyz 7y ago
The issue is that everyone is looking at the problems and no one is looking at the solutions. Congestion charges, and utilization taxes are going to be in our future (and we should have them now). Sure I can send my car to the store and have someone tuck the gallon of milk I need in the trunk but does utilization make me decline that use right now? Can I tell my car to go pick up the milk at 5am so its waiting for me when I wake up to pour in my coffee or cereal and have those charges be drastically lower? Do we deliver vehicles with "compartments" for commuting? Where I have my own, isolated, seat to take me to and from work with stops in between for other drop offs and pick ups? Is this a service people are willing to use (ridesharing to get in carpool lanes is already a thing in many metro areas). What happens when amazon/usps/fedex can send a truck with "lockers" on it to my neighborhood and I can "summon it" (last mile) when I'm available? Sure I have to walk to the curb to pick up my stuff, but it going to be safer than leaving it on my porch all day. Lower loss rates. It came to my neighborhood in the dead of night, and is driving a minimal distance during peak hours. Does an always connected world let us change the notion of "delivery". The idea that "3 people in your neighborhood are waiting on orders this evening, do you want us to bring your groceries then" is new. Now we are sharing the charges for congestion and use. It isn't a question of will there be problems its a question of what new solutions do we put in place and do they make our lives better. I suspect that the answer is yes, there is a lot to be gained with the technology.
- john_minsk 7y ago
  One more small? benefit: general population will be trained to think proactively and be more organized on these small tasks.
aaron695 7y ago
I feel like it's clown world. As driving becomes easier we will drive more. Yes. Yes. I see no reason why people won't spend 3 hours each way commuting and live in rural utopias. Like the suburbs but won't suck. When everything which has to be delivered, which is everything, becomes cheaper perhaps we can spend that on traffic taxes. This is not an issue for now. PHDs are now let's assume a lie and prove its not true?
awinter-py 7y ago
> Knowing how much gridlock and traffic those rideshare cars have added to the city, imagine six and a half times as much car driving as that is almost impossible. An 83% increase isn't 6.5x more than a 12% increase, it's 71% more = less than 2x Still bad but '6x greater increase' is the wrong way to describe this. (Also there's a grammar mistake in the sentence).
chadcmulligan 7y ago
I used chauffeured cars yesterday, I just shared them with other people. I went to the beach, and had no real plan, I thought I'll go here, clicked on my app and it told me where to go, usually walk a couple of hundred metres. I spent the day travelling and walking around cost about $20 and travelled a couple of hundred kilometres. I took my laptop and worked in between scenic spots. I was thinking about this yesterday, I prefer catching trains and trams to buses - because trains don't throw you around when they turn corners, because the tracks can't have sharp corners. I was thinking if buses were made to be a little bit nicer - something like tour coaches then car usage would go down. Self driving cars have a very real chance of becoming a nightmare scenario (and I used to think the future with them would be amazing), a world of roads everywhere always full of cars half of them empty going backwards and forwards all day every day. Do other places have an app available like this - https://translink.com.au https://translink.com.au ?, there's a phone version to. If more people used public transport then it would become better. The system is also tied into a card which you can just tap on to travel, so if you change buses etc the final charge is just the number of "zones" you go through, there are 5 zones in the local couple of hundred kilometres. One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams (and busways) have to include the cost of the rails. This distorts the relative costs and leads to suburbs created a long way from cities with ever increasing highways and highway costs.
- megablast 7y ago
  > One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams have to include the cost of the rails. Lots of costs aren't factored into cars. Cars in the USA kill 40,000 people every year and seriously injure or disable over 4 million. No one really cares about the deaths, unless it happens to someone you know, and then they still keep driving. But that has a huge financial cost as well. Think of all the extra hospitals, equipment, staff, vehicles required to look after those people. Then the pollution they cause is not costed, and that also kills people and makes them sicker. And that is just the start.
  - 7y ago
idoh 7y ago
An interesting take on the problem, but a week isn't enough time to really know. If I had a chauffeur for a week I'd use the heck out of it, just out of principle.
spodek 7y ago
> During just the single week people had chauffeurs for his study, he saw people already getting comfortable with their AV future. When the study ended, people begged him to keep the chauffeur longer and wondered how they could possibly go back to running their own errands again. This entitlement happened with flying. Try to suggest people fly less and they call it impossible.
- walshemj 7y ago
  That does sound like the upper classes saying no foreign holidays for the hoi polio - a return to wakes weeks.
randcraw 7y ago
IMHO, this study suffers from two big blunders. First, nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip? Making a new service free when the current service costs money is a poor way to assess how the novelty will change car use. A better study design would have estimated the cost per mile of future AV use, then charged participants accordingly. Second, no AV comes with a human who can run errands for you, like enter a grocery and push a cart around buying goods. At most, future AVs will only drive up and wait for a preordered purchase to be loaded aboard. If the study's AVs included any service more than moving passengers around, it crossed well outside the foreseeable use for AVs, especially short term. It's at least as likely that companies like Amazon will offer the same delivery service much more efficiently at lower cost to the customer. It sounds like the virtual AVs in this study delivered more than real AVs ever will.
- wbl 7y ago
  Do you pay Ford for every trip?
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    Paid Ford some $50,000+ up front (two SUVs), plus fuel & maintenance. Cars ain't free.
    - scribu 7y ago
      The study selected participants that already owned cars.
- Mattasher 7y ago
  Another major issue, beyond the comment in the article about how people may have shifted around usage temporarily to take advantage of the service, is the all-you-can eat effect. Compare how much you eat and drink your first few days at an all-inclusive resort versus how much you'd consume each day after a couple weeks there. The novelty of gorging wears off, and if you were paying gas and maintenance per trip that would happen especially fast. I'm certain lowering the cost (and opportunity cost) of driving will mean more driving, but the magnitude of the change can't be predicted from a short study.
WillPostForFood 7y ago
We are going to give you this great, free, novel thing, You can use it as much as you want, but for just 1 week. It’s a surprise people actually took advantage of this limited time free opportunity and used it a lot? No kidding. It is a garbage study, of course that’s the outcome.
diego 7y ago
The weakest part about the conclusions in this study is the assumption that regulation does not change. If the limitation of driving disappears and the roads become a tragedy of the commons, then regulation will have to step in to limit how much people drive. We already do this with tolls, car pool lanes, taxes, etc. You can't take it as a given that our society will not seek to reorganize itself around the new paradigm. It's like someone in 1990 saying "once content is on the internet piracy will be out control and nobody will make money with content ever again, check out this experiment we did."
paulorlando 7y ago
I like this approach. This post takes a look at the impact on systemic risk that AVs could have: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/autonomous-vehicles-scaling-risk/ https://unintendedconsequenc.es/autonomous-vehicles-scaling-.... Again not something that typical AV projections ever discuss.
Merrill 7y ago
Rather than use an AV for the entire trip, might AVs solve the problem of getting to/from mass transit? For example, your personal AV could get you from home to the station and return to your garage. After the train or bus ride, your employer's AV buses could pick up groups of employees and shuttle them to work. This might redefine what it means to be "close to mass transit" for both residents and employers.
kamakazizuru 7y ago
The study has a major flaw in that it ignores the grouping effect that makes self-driving cars & fleets completely different from chauffers. Shared usage will: - most definitely happen in the case of "errand" like rides. The request to "pick up my shopping from Target" will be clubbed with 5-10 other similar requests and delivered at the same time. - lead to single rides being a rarity, and at best a perk like "first / business class" - bigger cars on the road with more seats, driving autonomously vs the nightmare equivalent of everyone having a chauffeur
- Zenbit_UX 7y ago
  A well reasoned rebuttal but it only works if people renting or timesharing vehicles for just single jobs. If things remain in their current ownership model (I buy a car and keep it in my driveway when not in use) their study holds merit. The fleet prediction is indeed a game changer and should be prioritized over single ownership in order to curb VMT but it would be a large paradigm shift and those don't always go as planned.
- em-bee 7y ago
  that sounds like wishful thinking to me. coordinating with other people is hard. and if the ride is free, why bother. also people want to stay independent and not have to share. the option to share an uber or equivalent for example is already there. every time i used it the trip took longer than had i not shared. missed a train because of it once too. so i doubt that sharing will happen as much as you think
  - handoflixue 7y ago
    > coordinating with other people is hard. Only when you're driving around humans. When you're using automated cars to replace errands, it becomes a lot easier to coordinate a set of grocery pickups, laundry dropoffs, and so on. With concepts like Amazon Lockers in apartment complexes, you can pick up their laundry from one locker, deliver cleaned goods to another, all while they're at work.
    - 7y ago
nazgulnarsil 7y ago
This study (and the fact that you're reading it) tells you there is an underserved demand for studies that give rich people luxuries to normal people and then find negative effects. In the future people will be enormously wealthy, as we are enormously wealthy compared to our ancestors. Inequality will be massive because zero will remain zero while the ceiling gets ever higher. Find novel ways to complain about this and you will be treated to thunderous applause by those who don't want this future.
eherbrernejerh 7y ago
These are some interesting results. That said, fully self-driving cars almost certainly won't exist any time in the next 100 years anyway, so I don't think this will be an issue. By the time, if it ever happens, that fully self-driving technology is created, society will likely be so different from what it is now that the issues this article raises will no longer be valid. Fully self-driving cars require artificial general intelligence, so to me a bigger issue if they ever exist would be whether it is ethical, given that most likely in principle no objective test for sentience is possible, to use more-or-less human-level intelligences as slaves.
- john_minsk 7y ago
  Is it ethical nowadays to hire a driver?
kingludite 7y ago
Every time roads or cars got improved people used the extra time to live further from work. Its oddly similar to the way every time computers and networks got faster we used it to make development easier. Perhaps if we design a crappy car (like a phone is a crappy computer) we will see more efficient implementation. The sum of collective desires doesn't always make sense.
m0llusk 7y ago
Fix congestion by charging for use of the network. Automated cars make automated road use charges trivial. All this ignores the largest issue with vehicles which is that humans are lousy drivers who kill many people. Even if the roads get clogged automated vehicles could save many lives.
adrianmonk 7y ago
> For example, the chauffeur could bring the kids to soccer practice and back or drive a friend home and then return to the house. They could even pick up groceries and make a Target run to simulate a driverless car future where items could get bought online and loaded into your AV by a store employee before returning home. The survey measured the additional faux-SDC trips, but did it also measure the trips that did not need to happen as a result of this? Would the friend have taken an Uber home? Would the study participant have just driven their own kids to soccer practice or driven themselves to Target? Some of these trips probably would not have happened, but surely at least some of them would have happened, just in a different car or with the car owner doing the driving. They've already acknowledged the study is imperfect, but I think this is an important question to consider when interpreting the data. Another issue is that this study simulates what happens when one person has access to a SDC but all their friends do not. If all my friends have SDCs too, they won't usually need to borrow mine. The friend is likely to take use their own SDC to get to my place and ride home in it, so that wouldn't count against my SDC's ride total.

161 points by catbird 7y ago

Imagine a job where you work for 3h out of an autonomous office-furnished RV, have meetings and lunch for 2.5h and then work for 3h in the car again. You could live where land is really cheap! And you wouldn't need to sit in an open office. Better hope your mileage is good though.

abyssin 7y ago
Better hope there's no issue with the pollution caused by the energy needed for the additional commutes.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
That seems incredibly wasteful. You spend 6 hours in a car for 2.5 hours at the office. Just come to the office for a whole day once a week and stay home the other days,

kjksf 7y ago

Here's what this research tells me: demand for transportation is much higher than the current use of transportation. Current use is limited by cost and convenience. Self-driving car is likely to fix both so it'll lead to more use of transportation. This is a good thing. We're currently deprived and if things go well, we'll get more of what we want. The congestion problem is mostly overblown. First, maybe with rare exceptions like L.A., the traffic is only bad during rush hour, when people are going to work and getting back home. Other times there's plenty. Second, the way we drive currently is very inefficient. Just last weak I was walking in San Diego along a street at ~5:30 PM i.e. rush hour. I just eyeballed but ~80% cars were single person. Not to mention that ~40% cars were gigantic, because it looks that if people can afford gigantic cars, they'll buy them. And in US they can afford it. Robotaxis would fix those 2 issues. The cars would no longer be an expression of personality and a status symbol but a utility operated by an organization focused on practicality and cost, like buses and trains. It's also very easy to use pricing to force people to use the available resources efficiently during congestion. Let's say a ride is $10 if you drive in a car alone. $5 if you share with another person and $3 if you share it with 2+ people. If that pricing delta is not enough, increase the price of to $20 (vs $3) or to $50. Or provide commuting passes tho employers (kind of like Google buses) where a company pays a $100 to robotaxi company per month and the employee gets to use it for free for commute, but only in shared mode. The future with robotaxis is much brighter than those doomsday prediction of traffic.

l3robot 7y ago
Not also to mention something often oversight. An autonomous car can park far away from it's user, meaning we could drastically reduce de number of space taken by parking in the city. First, giving back this spaces to the people as green parks and services places. Second, lower one of the biggest problem in our current city: urban heat island.
- amarshall 7y ago
  But then you’ll likely have a bunch of extra traffic created from the cars going to and from their owner to parking, rather than just to and from their destination. Or from the car just circling the block because the owner would rather not have to wait long for its return.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    The “circling the block” is something that Uber etc. already exacerbate. I think one solution would be to charge for each minute you are in a congested area to avoid having a whole bunch of empty cars clogging the streets.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      There's a big limit on how bad it can be with Uber though because each Uber is currently driven by an actual person. That person costs money and places a natural limit on how many unutilized Ubers there will be. With AVs, this limit no longer exists, and people will start using AVs for runs that currently are prohibitively expensive with care that require drivers.
  - jellicle 7y ago
    Right. You go to the opera, you order the car to drive around the block for two hours and then pick you up. Cost of gas is cheaper than parking and by definition, you're not affected by any traffic congestion caused as you're sitting watching your show. Sure, 1000 other people in the theater are also doing it, but that's not your problem. 30 minutes before the show is over, you order the car to wait in the "no stopping" zone in front of the theater for easy access. You exit the theater and find your car is tangled in a mess of traffic that takes 45 minutes to clear as most of the cars are double-parked and blocking traffic, waiting for their owners. For the duration of the show, no useful traffic has been able to move for a mile in any direction, as empty cars are just idling around and are content to wait, fully stopped. Tragedy of the commons.

modeless 7y ago

It has been obvious to me for a long time that AVs will not reduce traffic. Reducing the cost of driving will cause more driving to happen. While AVs will use the road slightly more efficiently, the increase in driving will more than make up for it. AVs will make traffic a whole lot more tolerable, though. And they will dramatically reduce parking needs, freeing up space for other uses.

jacquesm 7y ago
It's a complete nobrainer. Right now the bulk of the cars are single occupant. That's because it is the occupants going places, not the cars. As soon as self-driving cars are a reality it will be the cars going places that get added to all the other traffic already there.
- drcross 7y ago
  This is why I keep a keen eye on single occupancy vehicles. They will be the ultimate form of transportation and we haven't decided upon a good model design yet (think Renault twizy)
  - Jamwinner 7y ago
    I own a couple 2 seaters, and even that amount of reduced functionality with similar emissions seems dumb. This would only work if you did not value proximity to your friends and family.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Once AVs become commonplace it's entirely possible that the majority of the cars on the road will have zero occupants, either because they're running errands or doing the deadhead leg of an occupied trip. It's absurd to think that transit buses containing dozens of riders are going to be held up behind zero-occupancy vehicles. The roads are going to get much much worse.
  - akadruid1 7y ago

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

Isn’t this just Jevons Paradox applied to driving? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

semiotagonal 7y ago
This reminds me of how my own behavior changed when Amazon Locker arrived. I could order what I wanted, and have it delivered up the street without having it stolen off of my porch! Now I'll order something off Amazon, then 30 minutes later think of something else I need, then 10 minutes after that get another item, and then I've got 3 separate shipments taking up 3 spaces in the lockers, because to me there's no cost to the lack of planning. When Amazon tells me the lockers are full, I become furious.
- ars 7y ago
  I've had Amazon combine separate orders into a single box. If your orders are really 30 and 10 minutes apart, Amazon will ship them together if it can.
  - semiotagonal 7y ago
    That's weird, I don't think I've ever seen that happen. I'm constantly having multiple doors pop open at the locker. Although maybe it's possible they do it some of the time and I'm actually much worse about fragmenting my orders than I think :)
m-i-l 7y ago
Or the Lewis–Mogridge Position[0] which is that "traffic expands to meet the available road space", i.e. building more roads (thinking it will improve traffic congestion) usually ends up making the traffic congestion worse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_Position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_Positio...

Animats 7y ago

"every single retiree used the chauffeur to go to Napa for wine tastings" How did they pick their sample?

paulsutter 7y ago

Saved you a click. Please put this number in the title. > The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83 percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior.

rladd 7y ago

I think the conclusion is probably right, but the experiment seems problematic. If I was told that a chauffeur was waiting for me to tell them where to take me, I might feel a little obligated to keep them busy rather than just waiting around for me. So I might take more rides than I would have otherwise, out of some sense of politeness. A better experiment might be to give people an unlimited Lyft or Uber account for a week. It might also help to tell them that a randomly selected driver will be paid for any time they are not taking rides, so they don't feel like they will be helping someone out if they take more rides. I think that there would still be an increase in rides, but maybe not quite as large an increase.

ben509 7y ago

There's a solution to the congestion problem that works even without AVs: private ownership of roads and automated pricing. Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road. If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route and time to drive, people can make better decisions. And people living nearby should be able to collect nuisance fees from road operators by measuring traffic volume. The operators can build baffling to reduce the volume, or simply increase the cost of using that road to offset the fees paid. (And, of course, the operator has to pay to maintain the road, and it's a lot easier to sue a private entity if potholes damage your vehicle.) And if data on the cost of commuting is readily available, employers can be required to pay for it as part of a standard labor contract, and they can offer employees incentives to move, adjust schedules to minimize costs, work remotely, etc.

uryga 7y ago
> private ownership of roads and automated pricing i'd love to have a full tank of gas but not be able to drive somewhere because my card's maxed out! fun end-of-month times > Right now, you don't really pay to use roads, you only pay a gas tax to drive on any road [EDIT: removed - misunderstood the quote] > If specific roads were all tolled, and your navigation app (or AV) can tell you the cheapest route how is that a good thing? it sounds like a black mirror episode.
balt_s 7y ago
I would like to live in a world where people are good-faith coordinated enough to make this possible, but I think we don't live in anything like that world.
mmanfrin 7y ago
Privatizing roads is absolutely not a solution. People do not choose to drive congested roads, they already have traffic information available to them in the form of google maps. All your solution would do is make it prohibitively infeasible foe many to drive, cutting them off from jobs. A few at the top would see less traffic, but roads only for the 1% aren't really something we should be aiming for.

Shivetya 7y ago

Pretty much ignores the fact that once society adapts to having driver less cars they will lapse back into their standard habits and pattern on use fairly quickly. let alone ignore the fact that many services will pop up doing the driving for many different people across all hours of the day freeing many from own the vehicle in the first place. you might even have the modern day equivalent of time sharing where you pay to have priority access to a vehicle. the test was so bad as to be laughable, seriously, drawing such conclusions from such a small control set is only useful for proving something a select group wants to believe.

shkkmo 7y ago

It seems flagrantly obvious that congestion pricing is necessary to allow us to have the benefits of self-driving cars without shooting ourselves in the foot traffic wise. That being said, OF COURSE driving goes up when you tell someone: "here, have this luxury that you can't normally afford for free for JUST one week". The novelty factor alone will lead to unnecessary trips and over consumption. Not to mention the guilt factor of having a chauffeur sitting in your driveway doing nothing.

coding123 7y ago

Just a crazy aside, it seems like current policy as well as the potential ones in this thread seem to tax or affect poor more. For example: the way we tax road use is through gas - rich people in EVs don't pay this tax. Some people in this thread are suggesting to just make cars with self driving capability prohibitedly expensive, forcing them to rent an Uber instead of owning. Sounds just like our current housing market. Some suggestions are to charge for the mile and time of day... Again restrictions against poor from driving when rich people want to do so. Another suggestion is to have more private roads, presumably again owned by rich people, with little regard for the poor already paying rent on everything else.

zer00eyz 7y ago

The issue is that everyone is looking at the problems and no one is looking at the solutions. Congestion charges, and utilization taxes are going to be in our future (and we should have them now). Sure I can send my car to the store and have someone tuck the gallon of milk I need in the trunk but does utilization make me decline that use right now? Can I tell my car to go pick up the milk at 5am so its waiting for me when I wake up to pour in my coffee or cereal and have those charges be drastically lower? Do we deliver vehicles with "compartments" for commuting? Where I have my own, isolated, seat to take me to and from work with stops in between for other drop offs and pick ups? Is this a service people are willing to use (ridesharing to get in carpool lanes is already a thing in many metro areas). What happens when amazon/usps/fedex can send a truck with "lockers" on it to my neighborhood and I can "summon it" (last mile) when I'm available? Sure I have to walk to the curb to pick up my stuff, but it going to be safer than leaving it on my porch all day. Lower loss rates. It came to my neighborhood in the dead of night, and is driving a minimal distance during peak hours. Does an always connected world let us change the notion of "delivery". The idea that "3 people in your neighborhood are waiting on orders this evening, do you want us to bring your groceries then" is new. Now we are sharing the charges for congestion and use. It isn't a question of will there be problems its a question of what new solutions do we put in place and do they make our lives better. I suspect that the answer is yes, there is a lot to be gained with the technology.

john_minsk 7y ago
One more small? benefit: general population will be trained to think proactively and be more organized on these small tasks.

aaron695 7y ago

I feel like it's clown world. As driving becomes easier we will drive more. Yes. Yes. I see no reason why people won't spend 3 hours each way commuting and live in rural utopias. Like the suburbs but won't suck. When everything which has to be delivered, which is everything, becomes cheaper perhaps we can spend that on traffic taxes. This is not an issue for now. PHDs are now let's assume a lie and prove its not true?

awinter-py 7y ago

> Knowing how much gridlock and traffic those rideshare cars have added to the city, imagine six and a half times as much car driving as that is almost impossible. An 83% increase isn't 6.5x more than a 12% increase, it's 71% more = less than 2x Still bad but '6x greater increase' is the wrong way to describe this. (Also there's a grammar mistake in the sentence).

chadcmulligan 7y ago

I used chauffeured cars yesterday, I just shared them with other people. I went to the beach, and had no real plan, I thought I'll go here, clicked on my app and it told me where to go, usually walk a couple of hundred metres. I spent the day travelling and walking around cost about $20 and travelled a couple of hundred kilometres. I took my laptop and worked in between scenic spots. I was thinking about this yesterday, I prefer catching trains and trams to buses - because trains don't throw you around when they turn corners, because the tracks can't have sharp corners. I was thinking if buses were made to be a little bit nicer - something like tour coaches then car usage would go down. Self driving cars have a very real chance of becoming a nightmare scenario (and I used to think the future with them would be amazing), a world of roads everywhere always full of cars half of them empty going backwards and forwards all day every day. Do other places have an app available like this - https://translink.com.au https://translink.com.au ?, there's a phone version to. If more people used public transport then it would become better. The system is also tied into a card which you can just tap on to travel, so if you change buses etc the final charge is just the number of "zones" you go through, there are 5 zones in the local couple of hundred kilometres. One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams (and busways) have to include the cost of the rails. This distorts the relative costs and leads to suburbs created a long way from cities with ever increasing highways and highway costs.

megablast 7y ago
> One of the real problems with cars is that the cost of highways and roads isn't factored into the travel, it comes from the bucket of government, whereas trains and trams have to include the cost of the rails. Lots of costs aren't factored into cars. Cars in the USA kill 40,000 people every year and seriously injure or disable over 4 million. No one really cares about the deaths, unless it happens to someone you know, and then they still keep driving. But that has a huge financial cost as well. Think of all the extra hospitals, equipment, staff, vehicles required to look after those people. Then the pollution they cause is not costed, and that also kills people and makes them sicker. And that is just the start.
- 7y ago

idoh 7y ago

An interesting take on the problem, but a week isn't enough time to really know. If I had a chauffeur for a week I'd use the heck out of it, just out of principle.

spodek 7y ago

> During just the single week people had chauffeurs for his study, he saw people already getting comfortable with their AV future. When the study ended, people begged him to keep the chauffeur longer and wondered how they could possibly go back to running their own errands again. This entitlement happened with flying. Try to suggest people fly less and they call it impossible.

walshemj 7y ago
That does sound like the upper classes saying no foreign holidays for the hoi polio - a return to wakes weeks.

randcraw 7y ago

IMHO, this study suffers from two big blunders. First, nobody is proposing that AV use will ever be FREE. Why didn't they charge a fee for every trip? Making a new service free when the current service costs money is a poor way to assess how the novelty will change car use. A better study design would have estimated the cost per mile of future AV use, then charged participants accordingly. Second, no AV comes with a human who can run errands for you, like enter a grocery and push a cart around buying goods. At most, future AVs will only drive up and wait for a preordered purchase to be loaded aboard. If the study's AVs included any service more than moving passengers around, it crossed well outside the foreseeable use for AVs, especially short term. It's at least as likely that companies like Amazon will offer the same delivery service much more efficiently at lower cost to the customer. It sounds like the virtual AVs in this study delivered more than real AVs ever will.

wbl 7y ago
Do you pay Ford for every trip?
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Paid Ford some $50,000+ up front (two SUVs), plus fuel & maintenance. Cars ain't free.
  - scribu 7y ago
    The study selected participants that already owned cars.
Mattasher 7y ago
Another major issue, beyond the comment in the article about how people may have shifted around usage temporarily to take advantage of the service, is the all-you-can eat effect. Compare how much you eat and drink your first few days at an all-inclusive resort versus how much you'd consume each day after a couple weeks there. The novelty of gorging wears off, and if you were paying gas and maintenance per trip that would happen especially fast. I'm certain lowering the cost (and opportunity cost) of driving will mean more driving, but the magnitude of the change can't be predicted from a short study.

WillPostForFood 7y ago

We are going to give you this great, free, novel thing, You can use it as much as you want, but for just 1 week. It’s a surprise people actually took advantage of this limited time free opportunity and used it a lot? No kidding. It is a garbage study, of course that’s the outcome.

diego 7y ago

The weakest part about the conclusions in this study is the assumption that regulation does not change. If the limitation of driving disappears and the roads become a tragedy of the commons, then regulation will have to step in to limit how much people drive. We already do this with tolls, car pool lanes, taxes, etc. You can't take it as a given that our society will not seek to reorganize itself around the new paradigm. It's like someone in 1990 saying "once content is on the internet piracy will be out control and nobody will make money with content ever again, check out this experiment we did."

paulorlando 7y ago

I like this approach. This post takes a look at the impact on systemic risk that AVs could have: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/autonomous-vehicles-scaling-risk/ https://unintendedconsequenc.es/autonomous-vehicles-scaling-.... Again not something that typical AV projections ever discuss.

Merrill 7y ago

Rather than use an AV for the entire trip, might AVs solve the problem of getting to/from mass transit? For example, your personal AV could get you from home to the station and return to your garage. After the train or bus ride, your employer's AV buses could pick up groups of employees and shuttle them to work. This might redefine what it means to be "close to mass transit" for both residents and employers.

kamakazizuru 7y ago

The study has a major flaw in that it ignores the grouping effect that makes self-driving cars & fleets completely different from chauffers. Shared usage will: - most definitely happen in the case of "errand" like rides. The request to "pick up my shopping from Target" will be clubbed with 5-10 other similar requests and delivered at the same time. - lead to single rides being a rarity, and at best a perk like "first / business class" - bigger cars on the road with more seats, driving autonomously vs the nightmare equivalent of everyone having a chauffeur

Zenbit_UX 7y ago
A well reasoned rebuttal but it only works if people renting or timesharing vehicles for just single jobs. If things remain in their current ownership model (I buy a car and keep it in my driveway when not in use) their study holds merit. The fleet prediction is indeed a game changer and should be prioritized over single ownership in order to curb VMT but it would be a large paradigm shift and those don't always go as planned.
em-bee 7y ago
that sounds like wishful thinking to me. coordinating with other people is hard. and if the ride is free, why bother. also people want to stay independent and not have to share. the option to share an uber or equivalent for example is already there. every time i used it the trip took longer than had i not shared. missed a train because of it once too. so i doubt that sharing will happen as much as you think
- handoflixue 7y ago
  > coordinating with other people is hard. Only when you're driving around humans. When you're using automated cars to replace errands, it becomes a lot easier to coordinate a set of grocery pickups, laundry dropoffs, and so on. With concepts like Amazon Lockers in apartment complexes, you can pick up their laundry from one locker, deliver cleaned goods to another, all while they're at work.
  - 7y ago

nazgulnarsil 7y ago

This study (and the fact that you're reading it) tells you there is an underserved demand for studies that give rich people luxuries to normal people and then find negative effects. In the future people will be enormously wealthy, as we are enormously wealthy compared to our ancestors. Inequality will be massive because zero will remain zero while the ceiling gets ever higher. Find novel ways to complain about this and you will be treated to thunderous applause by those who don't want this future.

eherbrernejerh 7y ago

These are some interesting results. That said, fully self-driving cars almost certainly won't exist any time in the next 100 years anyway, so I don't think this will be an issue. By the time, if it ever happens, that fully self-driving technology is created, society will likely be so different from what it is now that the issues this article raises will no longer be valid. Fully self-driving cars require artificial general intelligence, so to me a bigger issue if they ever exist would be whether it is ethical, given that most likely in principle no objective test for sentience is possible, to use more-or-less human-level intelligences as slaves.

john_minsk 7y ago
Is it ethical nowadays to hire a driver?

kingludite 7y ago

Every time roads or cars got improved people used the extra time to live further from work. Its oddly similar to the way every time computers and networks got faster we used it to make development easier. Perhaps if we design a crappy car (like a phone is a crappy computer) we will see more efficient implementation. The sum of collective desires doesn't always make sense.

m0llusk 7y ago

Fix congestion by charging for use of the network. Automated cars make automated road use charges trivial. All this ignores the largest issue with vehicles which is that humans are lousy drivers who kill many people. Even if the roads get clogged automated vehicles could save many lives.

adrianmonk 7y ago

> For example, the chauffeur could bring the kids to soccer practice and back or drive a friend home and then return to the house. They could even pick up groceries and make a Target run to simulate a driverless car future where items could get bought online and loaded into your AV by a store employee before returning home. The survey measured the additional faux-SDC trips, but did it also measure the trips that did not need to happen as a result of this? Would the friend have taken an Uber home? Would the study participant have just driven their own kids to soccer practice or driven themselves to Target? Some of these trips probably would not have happened, but surely at least some of them would have happened, just in a different car or with the car owner doing the driving. They've already acknowledged the study is imperfect, but I think this is an important question to consider when interpreting the data. Another issue is that this study simulates what happens when one person has access to a SDC but all their friends do not. If all my friends have SDCs too, they won't usually need to borrow mine. The friend is likely to take use their own SDC to get to my place and ride home in it, so that wouldn't count against my SDC's ride total.