Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

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> Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both).

If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount).

Self-driving cars can make car-pooling easier - it can be a hyperlocal public transport system. Pick up 4 people who are traveling from/to within a 2-mile radius with each other, and peak traffic will be 25% of what it is now (best case). It's even simpler considering that most people commute the same route everyday.

> If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount).

What does the self-driving car change in that case? Wouldn't that be just the same as ordinary carpooling that we can do today?

* More flexibility: currently a driver has to be first in, last out

* ability to add more vehicles on demand

* automation

Right now, I need to manually find someone who is carpooling. If there happens to be someone on my street that I know and is going to roughly the same place, that's fine. However, there are many trips which have overlapping segments that I'd never be able to find without an automated system.

For carpooling with my own car, that's really too much work to try and hunt down someone, figure out how cost sharing is going to work, ensure that our schedules are in sync often enough for it to work out, and so on.

With an automated system, it can just adapt to changing demands. Maybe some days schedules are too far out of sync, so it just sends dedicated cars. Maybe some days there's someone better to pool with.

You can already do this with systems like UberPool, but with self driving cars, you don't have to pay a dedicated driver, so it becomes even cheaper and more convenient.

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